Red Terror

This article is about the Red Terror in Russia. For other uses, see Red Terror (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Great Terror, Red Scare, or Red Purge.
Red Terror
Part of the Russian Civil War
Propaganda poster in Petrograd, 1918: "Death to the bourgeoisie and its lapdogs – Long live the Red Terror!!"[a]
Native name Красный террор (post-1918 orthography)
Красный терроръ (pre-1918 orthography)
DateAugust 1918 – February 1922
LocationSoviet Russia
MotivePolitical repression
TargetAnti-Bolshevik groups, clergy, rival socialists, counter-revolutionaries, peasants, and dissidents
Organized byCheka
DeathsEstimates range between 50,000 and 600,000[1][2][3]

The Red Terror (Russian: красный террор, romanized: krasnyy terror) was a campaign of political repression and executions in Soviet Russia carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It officially started in early September 1918 and lasted until 1922.[4][5] Arising after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky[6] in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution,[7] and sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power.[8]

More broadly, the term can be applied to Bolshevik political repression throughout the Russian Civil War (1917–1922).[9][10][11] Bolshevik leaders attempted to excuse the severe repression as a necessary response to the White Terror initiated in 1917.


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  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Lowe was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ McDaniel, James Frank (1976). Political Assassination and Mass Execution: Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia, 1878–1938. University of Michigan. p. 348.
  3. ^ Hingley, Ronald (2021). "7. The Cheka: 1917–1922". The Russian Secret Police: Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations 1565–1970. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-37135-2. By contrast, the figure of victims quoted by White Russian General Denikin for the years 1918–19 is 1,700,000, which appears to be a considerable exaggeration. W.H.Chamberlain's rough estimate of fifty thousand executed by Cheka during the Civil War must be nearer the truth.
  4. ^ Blakemore, Erin (2 September 2020). "How the Red Terror set a macabre course for the Soviet Union". National Geographic. Archived from the original on February 22, 2021. Retrieved 13 July 2021. The poet was just one of many victims of the Red Terror, a state-sponsored wave of violence that was decreed in Russia on September 5, 1918, and lasted until 1922.
  5. ^ Melgunov (1927), p. 202.
  6. ^ Liebman, Marcel (1975). Leninism under Lenin. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 313–314. ISBN 0224010727.
  7. ^ Wilde, Robert. 2019 February 20. "The Red Terror." ThoughtCo. Retrieved March 24, 2021.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Melgunov (1925).
  10. ^ Melgunov (1927).
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference BlackBook_chptr4 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).