The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Felix Edmundovitch Dzershinsky was the all-powerful head of the Cheka-its teacher, prophet and hangman. He passed into history as a symbolic figure of the past and a warning to the future. For that reason his life deserves a closer examination. Before me are documents, written by Dzershinsky himself, describing his early years in prison. In 1898, as a young man of twenty, he wrote to his sister from his first exile in Nolinsk, North Russia:
“You knew me as a child, a youngster. But now I believe I am an adult with definite opinions. Life can destroy me only as a storm might break a hundred-year-old oak, but it will never change me. Life has set a course for me, and the current that has caught me will carry me further and further until I am consumed. That is, only the grave can stop my struggle.” [19]
These words contain the self-portrait of an unconscious inquisitor. The young man correctly foresaw his life’s progress- which ended with a heart attack at the age of forty-nine-he saw himself in battle and “in the grave.” In future it would not be difficult for him to see others-many thousands of them-in the grave.
Later, in a letter from Sedletz prison in Poland, in 1901, Dzershinsky cried out, “I cannot hate, or love, by halves. I must give my whole being, or nothing.” These words, too, reveal the passionate soul of the man, and it is natural for us to ask, when we read his letters, what motives guided this socialist. In his prison diary in an entry dated May 10, 1908, he gave a clear answer to this question, when he noted in connection with the tragic fate of an eighteen-year-old working girl held in the same prison:
“It’s a terrible life! And how many are there destined to such pitiful existence from childhood? How many people are there doomed never, not even in their dreams, to see true happiness and joy of living! Yet man has the capacity to feel and accept happiness. A handful of people have denied this to millions. Life would not be worth living for me if humanity were not illumined by the star of socialism, because the T cannot live unless it includes the world of reality and of mankind. Such is the individual ‘I.’ “
Several days earlier, on April 30, he had made an even more important entry in this diary:
“A small, but ideologically strong, handful of people will gather the masses around it, will provide them with what they lack, will give them new hope . . . the blood of innocent men will not have been spilled in vain; nor will the hunger and suffering of the masses, the wail of children and the despair of mothers, have been in vain.”
These touching passages contain it all: deep compassion for the masses, contempt for their helplessness and weakness, as well as a passionate desire to help them and avenge their sufferings. Dzershinsky is to become their avenger, but would he admit them to make decisions as to their own fate? Twice he speaks of a “handful of men"-one handful grabbing all the wealth of the world; the other “gathering the masses around it.” The historic battle is fought between commanding groups, while the people are only the object of this battle.
Over many years Dzershinsky lived in illegality, was held in prisons, in Siberian exile and at Katorga. His hot and impatient temper made him bear painfully all these periods of torment, collisions, disappointments. His soul, like a volcano, was brimful of forces that strained to erupt into revolution. What were these forces?
They were, first, a desire for a new life, “without oppressors and oppressed,” for a positive socialist structure; and second, a stormy force of protest, anger, fury against the old society. Who were the objects of such passionate fury? Dzershinsky was a Social-Democrat, though in a Bolshevik sense. He saw the coming revolution, therefore, as a bourgeois-capitalist revolution with the working class exerting a strong influence. Hence his enemies were all representatives of the czarist political regime, the landowner class and, in part, the manufacturers and industrialists. His cruel experiences in prisons and at hard labor (four years) intensified further his personal hatred for jailors and the czarist officials.
Late in 1917, he agreed with Lenin on the issue of an immediate socialist revolution. From then on the objects of his hatred, his enemies, came to include the capitalists as such, the bankers as such, all participants in the capitalist structure, all merchants, traders and “speculators.” Naturally, his opponents now also included the entire large group of moderate socialists who were in opposition to the Bolsheviks.
I do not know how it happened that Lenin entrusted him, of all people, with the organization of that agency to combat the counter-revolution which became bloodily famous as the “Extraordinary Commission,” the Cheka. On December 10, 1917, he was appointed its first chairman. But apparently this activity-strict surveillance and harsh persecution of the foe- gave Dzershinsky an opportunity to apply his talents, while other prominent Bolsheviks, who still lived by the traditions of the Russian liberation movement and who still remembered the tortures of czarist prisons, shrunk from this job.
As was his nature, Dzershinsky gave himself fully to his “work.” Despite his Marxist education, he substituted for the struggle against social classes and their institutions the direct war on the individual class enemy. In the heat of this war he saw before him not only the social nature of the foe, but also his physical being, his face and body; he hated the foe as a personal enemy. Therein lay the terrifying danger of Dzershinsky.
The very first weeks of the existence of the Cheka points up its perilous nature. It proved exceedingly difficult to get personnel together. Dzershinsky chose as his closest collaborators Latzis and G. Peters, whose names soon became symbols of fanatic cruelty (we shall hear below their explanations of the usefulness of terror). The party of the Left Social-Revolutionaries was hostile to the entire machinery and ‘’spirit” of the Cheka. They nevertheless considered it necessary to have their representatives on the Cheka Council so as to exercise their control. The men chosen were Alexandrovitch and the sailor Yemelianov, both morally strong, humanitarian socialists. Many were the times when they pleaded with their party to rescue them from that horrible Council. And Alexandrovitch paid with his life for his assignment: in July, 1918, he was shot by Dzershinsky himself.
But if at the “head” of the Cheka there were people who attempted in some way to justify their secret-police functions for the sake of the tasks of the revolution, the machinery of the Cheka itself could permit no such duality. That machinery required henchmen, men who would carry out the orders of their superiors without question and with any means. A fight was launched against the counter-revolution, against sabotage and against speculation. Chekists of the middle and lower strata were haphazardly chosen from semi-ideological and semi-adventurist elements: men strong in muscle, quick on the trigger and with the hand grenade. They had the right of entry into every house and institution, the right to question and intimidate, the right to ignore all rights of the individual.
But the All-Russian Cheka was not limited to activities in Petrograd. Branches, local Chekas, were opened in all cities and localities in the country. In the local Chekas it was even less possible to select honest and loyal people, and these filled even faster with men of unknown, dark antecedents, drawn in part from the former czarist secret police, the Okhrana. Tremendous power over the citizen was concentrated in their hands. Small wonder that very soon all Russia was groaning under the hideous, uncontrolled power of the Cheka. The institution which was to cleanse the atmosphere of the “counter-revolution” became itself the greatest perpetrator of bestial dishonesty and coercion.
At first Dzershinsky himself realized the dangers of the Cheka. I remember how once, toward the end of 1917, Dzershinsky came up to me during a break in the session of the Soviet Government. He did not like “justice,” including the People’s Commissariat of Justice. From the beginning he and Lenin had placed the Cheka in a position independent of the Commissariat of Justice, as a separate “Ministry of Police.” Hence the ever- strained relationship between the Cheka and myself.
Frowning in concentration, Dzershinsky started to talk to me about the advisability of placing provocateurs front the Cheka among the speculators in Petrograd who were trading in gold. He obviously sensed the falseness of the situation in which representatives of a revolutionary government would actively initiate speculation and thus help undermine the economy of the country. When I pointed this out to him, he nodded as in agreement, but countered, “How else shall we fight them?”
Maria Spiridonova recalled later (in her “Open Letter” to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party) how, at the beginning of his chairmanship of the Cheka, Dzershinsky used to return, his face “deadly white and in torment, after the shooting of only a few pillagers in Pctrograd.” Not without cause were there reliable rumors that he took refuge in narcotics to deaden his conscience which as yet instinctively revolted against the brutalities of the Cheka. He despised his political opponents, but for a while he trembled before inflicting physical torture on men.
Time passed and the conflicts in the October Revolution grew. The area of the revolution itself expanded, and with the expansion grew the number of persons against whom it became necessary to wage war. These were no longer only bourgeois or landowners; they now included the working people-proletarians and peasants-in whose name the revolution had been fought. Gradually, as the latter came to oppose the ruling party, they too became “class enemies,” to be viewed with the same bitterness as their predecessors. And as the number of opponents increased, so also grew the power of Dzershinsky and the Cheka, of his ambition to conquer, to suppress, to triumph. Writing to his wife on May 27, 1918, about his functions as chairman of the Cheka, he stated:
“I have been placed in a post on the firing line, and my decision is: to fight, to look squarely at the full danger of the threatening situation, and to be as pitiless as a loyal watchdog as l tear the enemy apart.” [20]
One must examine these words in the context of the situation of May, 1918, to understand the bloodshed and the violence even then invading the country of the revolution. It is difficult to estimate in mere figures how much, and to what extent, the souls and bodies of millions of the Russian people have been ravaged since then. Elsewhere in this book we have cited the terrible deeds of this regime of license and terror which began under the Cheka in 1918 and which continued through the years of the civil war (1918-1921). The historian of our days must remember that the whole system of permanent “government by terror"-by torture and murder of hostages, by slave-labor camps, purges and ‘trials'-which has become synonymous with the Bolshevik state, is but a continuation of the system introduced by the Cheka.
Dzershinsky and his colleagues issued, from their offices, orders by the thousands for the liquidation of people, the destruction of their meager properties and their family life. Who knows? Perhaps his hand shook in his moments of consciousness. Perhaps he sometimes remembered what he had written but ten years earlier in his prison diary about the “sufferings of the masses of the people, the wail of children and the despair of mothers.” But who profited by such thoughts when soon after he came into power his watchword changed to “Tear the enemy apart.”
That the Left Social-Revolutionary Party opposed with distrust and horror the activities of the Cheka is evidenced in the writings of G. Peters, who was present with Dzershinsky at the birth of this institution. He wrote in 1926:
“In the beginning the Soviet of People’s Commissars was composed of members of two parties, the Communists l Bolsheviks] and the Left Social-Revolutionaries. At that time the Commissariat of Justice was headed by the Left Social- Revolutionary Steinberg who applied the brake to every more or less determined step in the battle with the enemies of the Soviet power, and who attempted to subject the Cheka to his control. The Left Social-Revolutionaries exaggerated every blunder of the Cheka and fought against its rights.” [21]
Later the same Peters reported angrily:
“In the question of how to handle the arrested White Guardists sharp disagreements emerged within the Council of the Cheka between ourselves and the Left Social-Revolutionaries. At that time we had appointed a Commission to decide what punishment to mete out to the prisoners. But the disagreement was so complete that, despite the fact that the composition of the Commission was changed several times, we were unable to reach a unanimous decision-all because of the heft Social- Revolutionaries. They rejected the death penalty for these
former officers who had remained in the service of the Soviet power but who had dared to mutiny against it.”
After the final break between the Bolsheviks and the Left Social-Revolutionaries which occurred in July, 1918, the Cheka was reorganized in purely Bolshevik style. No longer was any control against terror imposed on the Cheka either from within or from without. And Peters could triumphantly report that “the apparatus of the Cheka is now perfectly steady. We are finished with the abnormal situation when we had to consider the opinions of the Left Social-Revolutionary members whose purpose was not the strengthening of the Soviet power but its disorganization.”
In the summer of 1918, Dzershinsky granted an interview to the representatives of the few non-Bolshevik newspapers still in existence at that time. They asked him if he did not consider it possible for the Cheka to make mistakes and commit acts of injustice against individuals.
“The Cheka is not a Court of law,” Dzershinsky replied. “The Cheka is-the defense of the Revolution, as is the Red Army. Just as the Red Army in the civil war cannot stop to consider whether it might hurt individuals, but must think only in terms of the triumph of the Revolution over the bourgeoisie, so the Cheka must protect the revolution and annihilate the enemy- even if its sword should by chance descend on the heads of the innocent.” (22 )
These words, morally disgusting and basically dishonest, were quoted blithely by Karl Radek-then the leading theoretician of bolshevism-in an article devoted to the memory of Dzershinsky. One wonders if he could have foreseen that, not many years later, he himself would be a prisoner of the organization he was extolling, and himself would feel the Cheka’s “sword by chance descend” on the heads of the innocent.
Like Radek, N. E. Bukharin, too, sang the praises of the revolutionary virtues of the Cheka ever more frequently as the years went by. When he was editor of Pravda he wrote that the Cheka was one of the most important institutions of the revolution; that it was not simply an organ of state and party, but that the entire party must identify itself with the Cheka; that every Bolshevik without exception should wear with pride the “honorable insignia of the Chekist.” Could he have guessed that he too would be a victim of this “sacred inquisition”; that he too would stand before a tribunal charged with crimes fabricated by this Cheka? That his principal accuser, Yagoda, Chairman of the Cheka, would in his turn stand before the same court as an enemy of the people and pay for it with his life? And that Yagoda’s deputy, Yezhov-the new chairman of the Cheka- would first drown country and Bolshevik Party in blood, and then would himself perish as an enemy of the people at the hands of that same Cheka? [23]
Dzershinsky’s friends liked to have it known, in their final analysis of his character, that pitilessness in the persecution of enemies was not his only trait, that he had a soul “filled with deepest love for mankind” (Radek). They reiterated his interest in children’s institutions and they called him the man with “the golden heart.” Perhaps this is true, because he did begin his socialist activity out of his pity for oppressed humanity. But this did not stop him from bringing irreparable sorrow to hundreds of thousands, and perhaps more. He worried about children? Yet he made orphans of thousands of children, widows of countless wives, whenever his orders killed their fathers and husbands.
Yet on one occasion I was to learn that former Katorga inmate Dzershinsky, even after his Cheka had embarked on its reign of terror, could not quite forget his own past. In 1920, five Left Social-Revolutionaries had escaped a Moscow prison in the middle of the day by peacefully disarming their guards. These young revolutionaries were soon recaptured, but their daring escape had caused delight even among Cheka officials. During an exchange of sharp words with Dzershinsky later, I recalled this case and he replied with a quick laugh, “Well, it’s our business to hold you, and your business to try and escape.” For one moment, and only one, his past had broken through to the surface.
Lenin, in 1921, suddenly appointed Dzershinsky People’s Commissar of Transport and, in 1924, President of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. But even when he took over the administration of national resources, Dzershinsky remained the “general guide” of the Cheka. His transfer to constructive” socialist work” did not change fundamentally his major task within the Bolshevik state. His own comrades viewed his position in this manner to the very end.
A story, told by Radek in 1926, proved this point:
“In 1921, during the war with Poland, as we were preparing to go to the front and help the Polish workers establish their Soviet state, Dzershinsky told me: ‘After victory, I shall take the People’s Commissariat of Education.’ The comrades, who were present during this conversation, laughed. Dzershinsky stiffened.”
Let us assume that Dzershinsky actually did pity the poor, and did dream of building a new life for them. But his dreams perished in the horror of his “battle” for this new life, and they were buried in the ocean of tears and despair he brought on humanity. He crushed people because he only pitied them; he did not love them. He was, and remained to his death, the man of ruthless pity.