20th December 1917: Establishment of the Cheka, the Russian Bolshevik secret police скачать в хорошем качестве

20th December 1917: Establishment of the Cheka, the Russian Bolshevik secret police

Established following a decree by Lenin on 19 December, the Cheka’s focus was on defending the revolution by removing internal threats to the communist regime. Lenin’s decree was purposefully vague, and this enabled the Cheka’s leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to recruit and direct his Chekist agents in whatever way he saw best. With virtually unlimited powers, the growing number of agents soon began rounding up anyone identified as an ‘enemy of the people’. Although often referred to as the Bolshevik secret police, the Chekists were easily identifiable from their long leather coats, and a number of their activities were reported in official Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia. The organisation’s name was derived from the Russian initials for its original full name – The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Hundreds of Cheka committees were formed across Russia, and these went on to arrest, torture or execute many thousands of dissidents, deserters and other enemies of the state. Known as the Red Terror, the Cheka’s campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression grew more fierce as the Russian Civil War progressed. Its activities included a number of atrocities using torture methods that respected historian Orlando Figes says were ‘matched only by the Spanish Inquisition’. Official Soviet figures placed the total number of Cheka victims at 12,733. However, in reality the figure is probably significantly higher. Some historians place the actual number of people killed by the Cheka at 200,000 or more.