Genocide: - DIIS

Klas-Göran Karlsson
However, this does not mean that there were no continuities. Under
changing denominations, a few “red” institutions were permanently connected
to the Soviet terror. In December 1917 the Bolsheviks organised a
security police, called Cheka, or “The Extraordinary Commission for combating
counter-revolution, speculation and sabotage”, to destroy internal
competitors to the newly conquered Bolshevik power position. The Cheka
was the fi rst in a long line of Soviet secret police organisations known to
the world by their acronyms GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB. They
had the main responsibility for the maintenance of internal order and the
prosecution and destruction of enemies of the Communist regime. Concentration
camps and revolutionary tribunals were simultaneously organised
during the fi rst Bolshevik years to support the efforts of the secret
police in combating “counter-revolutionary” tendencies. Even the newly
organised Red Army was used for the same purpose. This was especially
the case in the period of civil war between “red” and “white” armies that
lasted from 1918 to 1921.
Despite some fi ghting in Moscow the Bolshevik assumption of power was
a rather peaceful event. However the efforts of the new regime to preserve
its position of power in the years to come were all the more violent. The
breaking up of the leftist parliament in which the Bolshevik party failed
to get a majority of the votes was why the Red Terror was launched in
January 1918. In the following spring and summer, not only representatives
and supporters of the old regime but all those who did not directly
support the new men of power were harassed. Priests, teachers, scholars
and other professional groups, who were regarded as being too much in
sympathy with the old tsarist regime, were in serious trouble. In July the
tsar and his family were murdered in Yekaterinburg. Those who carried
through the execution were local Bolsheviks acting on Lenin’s personal
orders. Peasant unrest, a result of the regime’s policy of forced requisitions
of grain to relieve famine in the Russian cities, were consistently met with
brutal punishments. An attempted assassination of Lenin in August 1918
strengthened the conviction of the new regime that its position was threatened
and that the situation had to be met with hard repressive measures
against its enemies.
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