Civil war and terror
September 1918
The Red Terror is declared
Mass shooting stopped being something the Cheka did and became something the government ordered.
On 30 August 1918, Moisei Uritsky was assassinated in Petrograd and Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin in Moscow. The party answered with a decree. On 5 September Sovnarkom ordered the isolation of class enemies in concentration camps, the shooting of White Guards involved in plots, and the publication of the names of the executed. Petrovsky’s interior-affairs circular, a day or two earlier, had already told provinces to take hostages and to meet “the least movement” with mass shooting.
Martin Latsis then explained the method in the Cheka’s own paper: do not look for an individual crime; decide by class. Local Chekas had been killing since the spring. The decree nationalized the practice. White forces and peasant bands also killed prisoners and civilians in the same war.
Where to check it · Decree On Red Terror, 5 September 1918; Petrovsky circular; Latsis in Krasnyi Terror, 1 November 1918; George Leggett, The Cheka.