Red Terror

Affected groups

Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists, members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and other political dissidents. Later, industrial workers who failed to meet production quotas were also targeted.

The first victims of the Terror were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). Over the months of the campaign, over 800 SR members were executed, while thousands more were driven into exile or detained in labor camps. In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the number of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over the 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. While the Socialist Revolutionaries were initially the primary targets of the terror, most of its direct victims were associated with the preceding regimes.

Peasants

The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. According to Orlando Figes, more than 1 million people deserted from the Red Army in 1918, around 2 million people deserted in 1919, and almost 4 million deserters escaped from the Red Army in 1921. According to Nicolas Werth, around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and up to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions. Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostage. Lenin's instructions prescribed:

After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly.

In September 1918, in just twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 brigands were arrested: 1,826 were executed and 2,230 were deported. A typical report from a Cheka department stated:

23 June 1919. 19h 30min. Telegram from Yaroslavl by battalion commander Frenkel, № 279, 22 June. The uprising of deserters in the Borovskaya and Petropavlovskaya volosts has been eliminated. During the liquidation, 23 armed deserters who offered resistance to our troops have been shot. In the southeastern part of the province, there is an unprecedented influx of deserters to the commissariats, which come with a request to enroll them in the ranks of the Red Army.

Estimates suggest that during the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1921, around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported and perhaps 15,000 executed. During the rebellion, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in the area) authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas.

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September 1921 (this number excludes those in several camps in regions that were in revolt, such as Tambov). Conditions in these camps led to high mortality rates, and "repeated massacres" took place. The Cheka at the Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river. Occasionally, entire prisons were "emptied" of inmates via mass shootings prior to abandoning a town to White forces.

Industrial workers

On 16 March 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. Hundreds of workers who went to a strike were arrested, of whom around 200 were executed without trial during the next few days. Numerous strikes took place in the spring of 1919 in cities of Tula, Oryol, Tver, Ivanovo, and Astrakhan. Starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privileges for Bolsheviks, freedom of the press, and free elections. The Cheka mercilessly suppressed all strikes, using arrests and executions.

In the city of Astrakhan, a revolt led by the White Guard broke out. In preparing for this revolt, the Whites managed to smuggle more than 3000 rifles and machine guns into the city. The leaders of the plot decided to act on the night 9–10 March 1919. The rebels were joined by wealthy peasants from the villages, which suppressed the Committees of the Poor, and committed massacres against rural activists. Eyewitnesses reported atrocities in villages such as Ivanchug, Chagan, and Karalat. In response, Soviet forces led by Kirov attempted to suppress the revolt and, together with the Committees of the Poor, restore Soviet power. The revolt in Astrakhan was brought under control by 10 March, and completely defeated by the 12th. More than 184 were sentenced to death, including monarchists, and representatives of the Kadets, Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, repeat offenders, and persons shown to have links with British and American intelligence services. The opposition media with political opponents like Chernov, and Melgunov, and others would later say that between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919.

However, strikes continued. Lenin had concerns about the tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region. On 29 January 1920, he sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov stating "I am surprised that you are putting up with this and do not punish sabotage with shooting; also the delay over the transfer here of locomotives is likewise manifest sabotage; please take the most resolute measures."

At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators used torture. At Odessa, the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Yekaterinoslav; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Oryol, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.

Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.

According to Edvard Radzinsky, "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body". During decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, "on an unheard of scale". The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander, the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the 'class struggle'".

Clergy

Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.

Number of deaths

There is no consensus among the Western historians on the number of deaths from the Red Terror. James Ryan writes that there were "at lowest estimates" "on average" 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922, and that the number of people shot during the initial period of the Red Terror is at least 10,000. Estimates for the whole period range from 50,000 executions to an upper of 140,000 to 200,000 people, plus an additional 400,000 killed in prisons or in suppressions of local rebellions.

According to Robert Conquest, a total of 140,000 people were shot in 1917–1922, but Jonathan D. Smele estimates they were considerably fewer, "perhaps less than half that many". According to others, the number of people shot by the Cheka in 1918–1922 is about 37,300 people, shot in 1918–1921 by the verdicts of the tribunals – 14,200, although executions and atrocities were not limited to the Cheka, having been organized by the Red Army as well. The lowest among the estimates "of those who died at the hands of the Soviet government" cited by Evan Mawdsley is a figure of 12,733 executed by the Cheka between 1917 and 1920 as estimated by Martin Latsis; Mawdsley writes that "Latsis's figures seem too low, and Conquest's too high, but one can only guess", implying the figures of 50,000 victims presented by William Henry Chamberlin and 140,000 victims presented by George Leggett to be more plausible. Ronald Hingley wrote that Chamberlin's estimate "must be nearer the truth" than "1,700,000, which appears to be a considerable exaggeration." According to historian W. Bruce Lincoln (1989), the best estimations for the number of executions in total put the number at about 100,000.

Some contemporary historians present figures exceeding a million victims: Dietrich Beyrau believes the number of victims of the Red Terror to be "up to 1.3 millions" compared to between 20,000 and 100,000 of the White Terror, while a Russian historian V. Erlikhman, whose estimates are cited by Jonathan D. Smele, presents the figure of 1,200,000 deaths caused by the Red Terror compared to 300,000 victims of the White Terror.

In 1924, Popular Socialist, Sergei Melgunov (1879–1956), published a detailed account on the Red Terror in Russia, where he cited Professor Charles Saroléa's counts of 1,766,188 executions. He questioned the accuracy of the figures, but endorsed Saroléa's "characterisation of terror in Russia", stating it "in general matches reality". Other sources have also characterized the widely circulated claim of 1,700,000 deaths to be a "wild exaggeration" and placed estimations closer to 50,000 over the three year Civil War period. British historian Ronald Hingley attributed the exaggerated claim of 1,700,000 to a quoted statement from White Army leader Anton Denikin.

Justification by Bolsheviks

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was justified in Soviet historiography as a wartime campaign against counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1922, targeting those who sided with the Whites (White Army). In his book, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, Trotsky also argued that the reign of terror began with the White Terror under the White Guard forces and the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror. Kautsky pleaded with Lenin against using violence as a form of terrorism because it was indiscriminate, intended to frighten the civilian population and included the taking and executing hostages: "Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all."

Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, stated in the newspaper Krasny Terror (Red Terror):

We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror

— Martin Latsis, Red Terror, no 1, Kazan, 1 November 1918, p. 2

Lenin in response mildly criticized Latsis' determination:

Political distrust means we must not put non-Soviet people in politically responsible posts. It means the Cheka must keep a sharp eye on members of classes, sections or groups that have leanings towards the white guards. (Though, incidentally, one need not go to the same absurd lengths as Comrade Latsis, one of our finest, tried and tested Communists, did in his Kazan magazine, Krasny Terror. He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule, but instead, he put it this way [on page 2 of the first issue of his magazine]: "Don't search [!!?] the records for evidence of whether his revolt against the Soviet was an armed or only a verbal one") ... Political distrust of the members of a bourgeois apparatus is legitimate and essential. But to refuse to use them in administration and construction would be the height of folly, fraught with untold harm to communism.

— Lenin, A Little Picture in Illustration of Big Problems (1918–1919)

The Red Terror was described succinctly from the Bolshevik point of view by Grigory Zinoviev in mid-September 1918:

To dispose of our enemies, we will have to create our own socialist terror. For this we will have to train 90 million of the 100 million Russians and have them all on our side. We having nothing to say to the other 10 million; we'll have to get rid of them.

— Grigory Zinoviev, 1918

From an opposite point of view to the Bolsheviks', in November 1918, Left SR leader Maria Spiridonova, while being in prison and awaiting trial, condemned the Red Terror in her Open Letter to the Central Executive of the Bolshevik party. She wrote:

Never in the most corrupt of Parliaments, never in the most venal papers of capitalist society has hatred of opponents reached such heights of cynicism as your hatred.

[…] These nightly murders of fettered, unarmed, helpless people, these secret shootings in the back, the unceremonious burial on the spot of bodies, robbed to the very shirt, not always quite dead, often still groaning, in a mass grave – what sort of Terrorism is this? This cannot be called Terrorism. In the course of Russian revolutionary history, the word Terrorism did not merely connote revenge and intimidation (which were the very last things in its mind). No, the foremost aims of Terrorism were to protest against tyranny, to awake a sense of value in the souls of the oppressed, to rouse the conscience of those who kept silence in the face of this submission. Moreover, the Terrorist nearly always accompanied his deed by a voluntary sacrifice of his own liberty or life. Only in this way, it seems to me, could the Terrorist acts of the revolutionaries be justified. But where are these elements to be found in the cowardly Cheka, in the unbelievable moral poverty of its leaders?

… So far the working classes have brought about the Revolution under the unblemished red flag, which was red with their own blood. Their moral authority and sanction lay in their sufferings for the highest ideal of humanity. Belief in Socialism is at the same time a belief in a nobler future for humanity – a belief in goodness, truth, and beauty, in the abolition of the use of all kinds of force, in the brotherhood of the world. And now you have damaged this belief, which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before, at its very roots.

— Maria Spiridonova Open Letter to the Central Executive of the Bolshevik Party, November 1918.

Interpretations by historians

Bolsheviks' intentions and external factors

Similarly to the debates around the such major problems as French Revolution and the Holocaust, there are debates in historiography between the historians who believe that the Red Terror was a product of the Bolsheviks' intentions and their ideology, and those who believe that the terror was determined by the external factors like the context the Russian Revolution took place in and the preceding Russian history of political violence. A middle position is that the historical conditions shaped not only the conditions 'external' to the Bolsheviks, but that their ideology and intentions were also historically determined.

Historians such as Stéphane Courtois (The Black Book of Communism) and Richard Pipes have argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support. Pipes is a representative of 'neo-traditionalist' historians who follow the 'totalitarian' or 'traditionalist' approach which dominated during the Cold War, especially its early years, and who assert that the Revolution was something imposed 'from above' by the revolutionaries with political guile and brute force, as opposed to the 'revisionists', who put an emphasis on the 'popular' nature of the Bolshevik Revolution. Although the Bolsheviks dominated among workers, soldiers and in their revolutionary soviets, they won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections for the Constituent Assembly held soon after the October Revolution, since they commanded much less support among the peasantry. The Constituent Assembly elections predated the split between the Right SRs, who had opposed the Bolsheviks, and the Left SRs, who were their coalition partners, consequentially many peasant votes intended for the latter went to the SRs. Massive strikes by Russian workers were "mercilessly" suppressed during the Red Terror.

According to Pipes, terror was inevitably justified by Lenin's belief that human lives were expendable in the cause of building the new order of communism. Pipes has quoted Marx's observation of the class struggles in 19th-century France: "The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world"; yet, Pipes noted that neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels encouraged mass murder.

Leszek Kołakowski wrote that while Bolsheviks (especially Lenin) were very much focused on the Marxian concept of revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat long before the October Revolution; Lenin's clearest definitions of dictatorship of proletariat were "unlimited power based on force and not on law," power that is "absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on violence" and "directest form of coercion" of the overthrown classes. In 1918, Lenin made a "furious reply" to his critics such as Karl Kautsky, who argued that Marxian notion of dictatorship of proletariat never meant the destruction of democracy, but on the contrary, that democratic institutions were a necessary condition of it, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918), accusing Kautsky of talking of democracy irrespectively of its class content and arguing that the working class may rule only by force. A direct theoretical and systematic argument in favor of organized terror in response to Kautsky's reservations was written by Trotsky in The Defence of Terrorism (1921). Trotsky wrote that "the revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat presupposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy" of the single party governing by a dictatorship and elimination of its opponents, that to reject state terrorism meant to reject socialism since "he who wills the end must end the means", dismissed the principle of the rights of the individual as "irrelevant nonsence" and, according to Kolakowski, implied that "rightness" of a historical movement or a state is determined by whether its use of violence is successful against its political enemies. Trotsky also introduced and provided ideological justification for many of the future features characterizing the Bolshevik system such as "militarization of labor" and concentration camps.

Eric Hobsbawm, despite his sympathy for the October Revolution and Communist movements, also recognized Lenin's beliefs, like his view of political struggle as a total war and a zero-sum game, as one of the reasons of the Red Terror and the mass violence carried out by the Bolsheviks, although he writes that "it was not so much the belief that a great end justifies all the means necessary to achieve it..., or even the belief that the sacrifices imposed on the present generation, however large, are as nothing to the benefits which will be reaped by the endless generations of the future", but "the application of the principle of total war to all times. Leninism, perhaps because of the powerful strain of voluntarism which made other Marxists distrust Lenin as a 'Blanquist' or 'Jacobin,' thought essentially in military terms, as his own admiration for Clausewitz would indicate, even if the entire vocabulary of Bolshevik politics did not bear witness to it."

Orlando Figes' view was that Red Terror was implicit, not so much in Marxism itself, but in the tumultuous violence of the Russian Revolution. He noted that there were a number of Bolsheviks, led by Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Mikhail Olminsky, who criticized the actions and warned that thanks to "Lenin's violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy," the Bolsheviks would be "forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means." Figes also asserts that the Red Terror "erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror. The main institutions of the Terror were all shaped, at least in part, in response to these pressures from below."

The Hungarian historian Tamás Krausz supports the view that terror was rather a result of objective processes, and notes that Lenin, as Trotsky wrote earlier, formed his more differentiated position regarding terror over a period of years. In the period of the First Russian Revolution, Lenin objected terror as a means of "expropriating private property", since the revolutionary forces were not at war with individuals, but with the system, and viewed terror only as a secondary tool of countering state violence in the moments of revolutionary upheaval, and in 1907, the Bolsheviks accepted a resolution which denounced terror and rejected it as a method in advance. Krausz writes that terror was not something rooted in revolutionary theory, but a result of a combination of Russian traditions of political violence with the cult of violence brought by World War I and the escalation of struggle into a civil war, in which both sides sought to annihilate each other, and in which the White Terror was emerging as a threat to the revolution prior to the Red Terror, what was manifested in the order to the White troops to "take no prisoners." In the sphere of ideas, the possible sources could be Bakunin's idea of a "collective Razin" embodied both in the popular rebellion and in the popular leader "at the head of the masses", a concept spread among Russian revolutionaries, and the Marxist concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'; Lenin also drew the idea of a necessity of terror from his reading of the histories of the French Revolution and American Civil War. Krausz, however, notes that these sources of influence could have taken significance only in the historical conditions of the "emergency situation".

Douglas Greene notes that at first, the Bolsheviks hoped not to resort to terror to carry out the revolution, citing Lenin's words shortly after the takeover: "Ours is not the French revolutionary terror which guillotined unarmed people, and I hope we shall not go so far." According to Greene, further self-identification of the Bolsheviks with the Jacobins became prominent among them as they found themselves in the situation of a civil war, foreign invasion, peasant uprisings, and economic collapse.

James Ryan claims that Lenin never advocated for the physical extermination of the entire bourgeoisie as a class, just the execution of those who were actively involved in opposing and undermining Bolshevik rule. He did intend to bring about "the overthrow and complete abolition of the bourgeoisie" through non-violent political and economic means, but he also noted that in reality the period of transition from capitalism to communism 'is a period of unprecedentedly violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms, and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoise)'.

Comparison of Red and White Terror

A number of historians, such as Pipes and Nicolas Werth (The Black Book of Communism), contrasted the Red and White Terrors, claiming that while Red Terror was a political strategy and a "revolutionary" means of reconstructing the world, ideological and instrumental, the White Terror was restorative, arbitrary and a temporary measure, mere "repressive violence" to re-establish a previous status quo. Robert Conquest was convinced that "unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities", while Werth wrote:

The Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were out of control, and taking measures not officially authorized by the military command that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime.

Such notion is refuted by Peter Holquist and Joshua Sanborn. Holquist wrote that "White violence may have been less centralized and systematic, but it did not lack ideological underpinnings. [...] It is hard to imagine that the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews by the anti-Soviet armies during the civil wars... could have occurred without some form of ideology – and particularly the virulent linkage drawn between Jews and Communists." According to Sanborn, the terror carried out by the Russian Imperial Army and the Whites was as 'revolutionary' as their Red counterpart:

...in the case of the Jews, we see not only the development of terror practices (like hostage-taking, decimation, mass retribution, mass deportation, rape, robbery, and sadistic, spectacularly cruel violence), but of the social intent. Most notably, efforts on the part of Ianushkevich’s Stavka to gather material on Jewish behavior in the army stressed that commanders were to gather this to prove all the “harm” that Jews posed to the army and to the nation. Given the tone and exclusionary fantasies of both prewar and wartime anti-Semitic discourse, we see in the Jewish terror a facet of White Terror that cannot simply be seen as a method of military dictatorship, a requirement of wartime emergency, or even the most brutal of counter-insurgency strategies. These were processes that were justified by the war atmosphere, but whose vision extended well into the post-war period. As a result, the White Terror, like the Imperial Army's Terror campaign from 1914–1917, was revolutionary in its Terror against Jews, and who knows, might have taken this kernel even further had they prevailed in the Civil War.

Historical significance

The Red Terror was significant because it was the first of numerous communist terror campaigns which were waged in Soviet Russia and many other countries. It also triggered the Russian Civil War according to historian Pipes. Menshevik Julius Martov wrote about the Red Terror:

The beast has licked hot human blood. The man-killing machine is brought into motion ... But blood breeds blood ... We witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war, the growing bestiality of men engaged in it.

The term "Red Terror" was later used in reference to other campaigns of violence which were waged by communist or communist-affiliated groups. Some other events which were also called "Red Terrors" include:

• Finnish Red Terror – executions and political violence carried out by the Finnish Reds during the 1918 Civil War in Finland.
• Hungarian Red Terror – executions of up to 590 people accused in counter-revolutionary activities against the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919.
• Red Terror in Bavaria – assassinations of 12 men in the Bavarian Soviet Republic by the Socialist and Communist revolutionaries during the German revolution of 1918–1919.
• Spanish Red Terror – assassinations and actions of violence carried out during the Spanish Civil War by Republican groups.
• Yugoslavian Red Terror – another name for the "Leftist errors", the period of political violence by the Yugoslav Partisans from 1941 to 1942 in Yugoslavia during its occupation by the Axis.
• Greek Red Terror – a campaign of repression which was waged in Greece by the communist organizations of the Greek resistance (during the Axis occupation of Greece which coincided with World War II) and the Greek Civil War (1943–49).
• Ethiopian Red Terror – a campaign of repression which was waged by the Derg during the rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
• Chinese Red Terror – a campaign of repression in Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution which is believed to have begun with the Red August of 1966. According to Mao Zedong himself: "Red terror ought to be our reply to these counter-revolutionaries. We must, especially in the war zones and in the border areas, deal immediately, swiftly with every kind of counter-revolutionary activity."

Bibliography and further reading

See also: Bibliography of the Russian Revolution and Civil War § Violence and terror

• Brovkin, Vladimir N. (1994). Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03278-5.
• Figes, Orlando (1998). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Penguin Books. ISBN 0670-859168.
• Gellately, Robert (2008). Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-3213-6.
• Graziosi, Andrea (2007). L'URSS di Lenin e Stalin. Storia dell'Unione Sovietica 1914–1945 (in Italian). Bologna: il Mulino. ISBN 978-88-15-13786-9.
• Leggett, George (1981). The Cheka: Lenin's political police. The All–Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter–Revolution and Sabotage, December 1917 to February 1922. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-822552-0.
• Lowe, Norman (2002). Mastering Twentieth Century Russian History. Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-333-96307-4.
• Mayer, Arno J. (2002). The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09015-3.
• Melgunov, Sergei Petrovich (2008) [1924]. Der rote Terror in Russland 1918–1923 (reprint of the 1924 Olga Diakow edition) (in German). Berlin: OEZ. ISBN 978-3-940452-47-4.
• Melgunov, Sergei Petrovich (November 1927). "The Record of the Red Terror". Current History. 27 (2): 198–205. doi:10.1525/curh.1927.27.2.198. JSTOR 45332605. S2CID 207926889.
• Melgunov, Sergei Petrovich (1925). The Red Terror in Russia. London & Toronto: Dent (reprinted in 1975 by Hyperion, Westport, CT. ISBN 0-88355-187-X).
• Pipes, Richard (2011). Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-78861-0.
• Ryan, James (2012). Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-81568-1.
• Smele, Jonathan D. (2015). "Red terror". Historical dictionary of the Russian civil wars, 1916–1926. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 932–934. ISBN 978-1-4422-5281-3.
• Steinberg, Isaac (1935). Spiridonova: Revolutionary Terrorist. London: Methuen.
• Trotsky, Leon (2017) [1920]. Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. Verso. ISBN 978-1-78663-343-9. See also text on marxists.org.
• Werth, Nicolas (1999). "A State against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union". The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. pp. 33–268. ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2.
• Werth, Nicolas; Bartosek, Karel; Panné, Jean-Louis; Margolin, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Courtois, Stéphane (1999). Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-07608-7.