Potyondi
01-14-2003, 03:55 AM
Steinburg: "What is the point of a 'People's Commissariat for Justice'? It would be more honest to have a 'People's Commissariat for Social Extermination. People would understand that more clearly.
Lenin: Excellent Idea. That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that!
-----
"The Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionary proletariats should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeoise justice, which is an instrument of the repressive classes. . . .Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything. . . . For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve - with a bullet to the head - we will not get anywhere at all."
- Lenin, Worker's Assembly, December 1917
-------
In addition to this new system for taking hostages, the Bolshevik leaders experimented in August 1918 with a tool of oppression that had made its first appearance in Russia during the war: the concentration camp. On 9 August Lenin sent a telegram to the Executive Committee of the province of Penza instructing them to intern "kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp."
A few days earlier both Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky had also called for the confinement of hostages in concentration camps. These concentration camps were simple internment camps in which, as a simple interim administrative measure and independently of any judicial process, "doubtful elements" were to be kept. As in every other country at this time, numerous camps for prisoners of war already existed in Russia.
First and foremost amonst the "doubtful elements" to be arrested were the leaders of opposition parties who were still at liberty. On 15 August 1918 Lenin and Dzerzhinsky jointly signed an order for the arrest of Yuri Martov, Fedor Dan, Aleksandr Portesov, and Mikhail Goldman, the principle leaders of the Menshevik Party, whose press had long been silenced and whose representatives had been hounded out of the soviets.
For the Bolshevik leaders, distinctions among types of opponents no longer existed, because, as they explained, civil wars have their own laws. "Civil War has no written laws," wrote Martin Latsis, one of Dzerzhinsky's principal collarborators, in Izvestiya on 23 August 1918.
Capitalist wars have a written constitution, but civil war has its own laws. . . . One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword. These are the laws that the bourgeoise itself drew up in the civil wars to oppress the proletariat. . . . We have yet to assimilate those rules sufficiently. Our own people are being killed by the hundreds of thousands, yet we carry out executions one by one after lengthy deliberations in commissions and courts. In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don't kill, you will die. So kill, if you don't want to be killed."
-------
Two assassination attempts on 30 August - one against M. S. Uritsky, the head of the Petrogrand Cheka, the other against Lenin - seemed to confirm the Bolshevik leaders' theory that a real conspiracy was threatening their existence. In fact it now appears that there was no link between the two events. The first was carried out in the well-established tradition of populist revolutionary terror, by a young student who wanted to avenge the death of an officer friend killed a few days earlier by the Petrograd Cheka. The second incident was long attributed to Fanny Kaplan, a militant socialist with anarchist and Socialist Revolutionary leanings. She was arrested immediantly and shot three days later without trial, but it now appears that there may have been a larger conspiracy against Lenin, which escaped detection at the time, in the Cheka itself. The Bolshevik government immediantly blamed both assassination attemps on "right Socialist revolutionaries, the servents of the French and English imperialism." The response was immediate: the next day, articles in the press and official declarations called for more terror. "Workers," said an article in Pravda (Truth) on 31 August, "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoise or be crushed by it. The corruption of the bourgeoise must be CLEANSED from our towns immediantly. Files will now be kept on all men concerned, and those who represent a danger to the revolutionary cause will be EXECUTED. . . . The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!"
On the same day Dzerzhinksy, and his assistant Jan Peters drafted an "Appeal to the Working Classes" in a similar vein: "The working classes must crush the hydra of the counterrevolution with MASSIVE terror! We must let the enemies of the working classes know that anyone caught in the possession of a firearm will be IMMEDIANTLY EXECUTED, and that anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediantly and sent to a CONCENTRATION CAMP!" Printed in Izvestiya on 3 September, this appeal was followed the next day by the publication of the instructions sent to N. Petrovksy, the people's commisar of internal affairs, to all the soviets.
Petrovsky complained that despite the "massive repressions" organized by enemies of the state against the working masses, the "Red Terror" was too slow in its effects.
"The time has come to put a stop to all this weakness and sentimentality. All the right Socialist Revolutionaries must be arrested immediantly. A great number of hostages must be taken among the officers and the bourgeoise. The slightest resistence must be greated with widespread executions. Provincial Executive Committees must lead the way here. The Chekas and the other organized militia must seek out and arrest suspects and immediantly execute all those found to be involved in counterrevolutionary practices. . . . Leaders of the Executive Committees must immediantly report any weakness of indecision on the part of the local soviets to the People's Commisssariat of Internal Affairs. No weakness or indecision can be tolerated during this period of mass terror."
This telegram, which marked the official start of the full-scale Red Terror gives the lie to Dzerzhinsky's and Peters' later claim that the Red Terror "was a general and spontaneous reaction of indignation by the masses to the attempted assassinations of 30 August 1918, and began without any initiative from the central organizations>"[/i] The truth was that the Red Terror was the natural outlet for the almost abstract hatred that most of the Bolshevik leaders felt toward their "oppressors," whom they wished to liquidate not on an individual basis, but as a class. In his memoirs the Menshevik leader Rafael Abramovich recalled a revealing conversation that he had in August 1917 with Dzerzhinksy, the future leader of the Cheka:
"Abramovich, do you remember Lasalle's speech about the essence of the Constitution?"
"Of course"
"He said that any Constitution is always determined by the relation between the social forces at work in a given country at the time in question. I wonder how this correlation between the political and the social might be changed?"
"Well, by the various processes of change that are at work in the fields of politics and economics at any time, by the emergence of new forms of economic growth, the rise of different social classes, all those things that you know perfectly well already, Felix.."
"Yes, but couldn't one change things much more radically than that? By forcing certian CLASSES into SUBMISSION, or BY EXTERMINATING THEM ALTOGETHER?"
This cold, caculating, and cynical cruelty, the logical result of an implacable class war pushed to its extreme, was shared by many Bolsheviks. Grigory Zinoview, one of the main leaders, declared in 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 have nothing to say about the other 10 millions; we'll have to GET RID OF THEM."
--------
11-8-18
Send to Penza To Comrades Kuraev, Bosh, Minkin and other Penza communists
Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volost's must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle "with the kulaks." We need to set an example.
You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. Publish their names.
Take away all of their grain.
Execute the hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks.
Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this.
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Use your toughest people for this.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/images.gif/ad3kula1.gif
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/images.gif/ad3kula2.gif
---------
Top Secret For members of the Politburo.
Please make no copies for any reason. Each member of the Politburo (incl. Comrade Kalinin) should comment directly on the document. Lenin.
In regard to the occurrence at Shuia, which is already slated for discussion by the Polituro, it is necessary right now to make a firm decision about a general plan of action in the present course. Because I doubt that I will be able to attend the Politburo meeting on March 20th in person, I will set down my thoughts in writing.
The event at Shuia should be connected with the announcement that the Russian News Agency [ROST] recently sent to the newspapers but that was not for publication, namely, the announcement that the Black Hundreds in Petrograd [Piter] were preparing to defy the decree on the removal of property of value from the churches. If this fact is compared with what the papers report about the attitude of the clergy to the decree on the removal of church property in addition to what we know about the illegal proclamation of Patriarch Tikhon, then it becomes perfectly clear that the Black Hundreds clergy, headed by its leader, with full deliberation is carrying out a plan at this very moment to destroy us decisively.
It is obvious that the most influential group of the Black Hundreds clergy conceived this plan in secret meetings and that it was accepted with sufficient resolution. The events in Shuia is only one manifestation and actualization of this general plan.
I think that here our opponent is making a huge strategic error by attempting to draw us into a decisive struggle now when it is especially hopeless and especially disadvantageous to him. For us, on the other hand, precisely at the present moment we are presented with an exceptionally favorable, even unique, opportunity when we can in 99 out of 100 chances utterly defeat our enemy with complete success and guarantee for ourselves the position we require for decades. Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of Black Hundreds clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force.
We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. This observation in particular is further strengthened because harsh measures against a reactionary clergy will be politically impractical, possibly even extremely dangerous as a result of the international situation in which we in Russia, in all probability, will find ourselves, or may find ourselves, after Genoa. Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i.e., the Socialist- Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites [Left Wing Cadet Party], to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades.
The campaign itself for carrying out this plan I envision in the following manner:
Only Comrade Kalinin should appear officially in regard to any measures taken--never and under no circumstance must Comrade Trotsky write anything for the press or in any other way appear before the public.
The telegram already issued in the name of the Politburo about the temporary suspension of removals must not be rescinded. It is useful for us because it gives our adversary the impression that we are vacillating, that he has succeeded in confusing us (our adversary, of course, will quickly find out about this secret telegram precisely because it is secret).
Send to Shuia one of the most energetic, clear-headed, and capable members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee [VTsIK] or some other representative of the central government (one is better than several), giving him verbal instructions through one of the members of the Politburo. The instructions must come down to this, that in Shuia he must arrest more if possible but not less than several dozen representatives of the local clergy, the local petty bourgeoisie, and the local bourgeoisie on suspicion of direct or indirect participation in the forcible resistance to the decree of the VTsIK on the removal of property of value from churches. Immediately upon completion of this task, he must return to Moscow and personally deliver a report to the full session of the Politburo or to two specially authorized members of the Politburo. On the basis of this report, the Politburo will give a detailed directive to the judicial authorities, also verbal, that the trial of the insurrectionists from Shuia, for opposing aid to the starving, should be carried out in utmost haste and should end not other than with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential and dangerous of the Black Hundreds in Shuia, and, if possible, not only in this city but even in Moscow and several other ecclesiastical centers.
I think that it is advisable for us not to touch Patriarch Tikhon himself, even though he undoubtedly headed this whole revolt of slave-holders. Concerning him, the State Political Administration [GPU] must be given a secret directive that precisely at this time all communications of this personage must be monitored and their contents disclosed in all possible accuracy and detail. Require Dzerzhinsky and Unshlikht personally to report to the Politburo about this weekly.
At the party congress arrange a secret meeting of all or almost all delegates to discuss this matter jointly with the chief workers of the GPU, the People's Commissariat of Justice [NKIu], and the Revolutionary Tribunal. At this meeting pass a secret resolution of the congress that the removal of property of value, especially from the very richest lauras, monasteries, and churches, must be carried out with ruthless resolution, leaving nothing in doubt, and in the very shortest time. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.
To attend to the quickest and most successful carrying out of these measures, there at the congress, i.e., at the secret meeting, appoint a special commission, the participation of Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Kalinin being required, without giving any publicity to this commission, with the purpose that the subordination to it of all operations would be provided for and carried out not in the name of the commission but as an all-soviet and all-party order. Appoint those who are especially responsible from among the best workers to carry out these measures in the wealthiest lauras, monasteries, and churches.
Lenin.
March 19, 1922.
I request that Comrade Molotov attempt to circulate this letter to the members of the Politburo by evening today (not making copies) and ask them to return it to the secretary immediately after reading it, with a succinct note regarding whether each member of the Politburo agrees in principle or if the letter arouses any differences of opinion.
Lenin.
A note in the hand of Comrade Molotov:
"Agreed. However, I propose to extend the campaign not to all gubernias and cities, but to those where indeed there are considerable possessions of value, accordingly concentrating the forces and attention of the party.
March 19. Molotov."
True copy: [illegible]
The original has been transferred to the Lenin Institute.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/ae.html
Lenin: Excellent Idea. That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that!
-----
"The Soviet regime has acted in the way that all revolutionary proletariats should act; it has made a clean break with bourgeoise justice, which is an instrument of the repressive classes. . . .Soldiers and workers must understand that no one will help them unless they help themselves. If the masses do not rise up spontaneously, none of this will lead to anything. . . . For as long as we fail to treat speculators the way they deserve - with a bullet to the head - we will not get anywhere at all."
- Lenin, Worker's Assembly, December 1917
-------
In addition to this new system for taking hostages, the Bolshevik leaders experimented in August 1918 with a tool of oppression that had made its first appearance in Russia during the war: the concentration camp. On 9 August Lenin sent a telegram to the Executive Committee of the province of Penza instructing them to intern "kulaks, priests, White Guards, and other doubtful elements in a concentration camp."
A few days earlier both Dzerzhinsky and Trotsky had also called for the confinement of hostages in concentration camps. These concentration camps were simple internment camps in which, as a simple interim administrative measure and independently of any judicial process, "doubtful elements" were to be kept. As in every other country at this time, numerous camps for prisoners of war already existed in Russia.
First and foremost amonst the "doubtful elements" to be arrested were the leaders of opposition parties who were still at liberty. On 15 August 1918 Lenin and Dzerzhinsky jointly signed an order for the arrest of Yuri Martov, Fedor Dan, Aleksandr Portesov, and Mikhail Goldman, the principle leaders of the Menshevik Party, whose press had long been silenced and whose representatives had been hounded out of the soviets.
For the Bolshevik leaders, distinctions among types of opponents no longer existed, because, as they explained, civil wars have their own laws. "Civil War has no written laws," wrote Martin Latsis, one of Dzerzhinsky's principal collarborators, in Izvestiya on 23 August 1918.
Capitalist wars have a written constitution, but civil war has its own laws. . . . One must not only destroy the active forces of the enemy, but also demonstrate that anyone who raises a hand in protest against class war will die by the sword. These are the laws that the bourgeoise itself drew up in the civil wars to oppress the proletariat. . . . We have yet to assimilate those rules sufficiently. Our own people are being killed by the hundreds of thousands, yet we carry out executions one by one after lengthy deliberations in commissions and courts. In a civil war, there should be no courts for the enemy. It is a fight to the death. If you don't kill, you will die. So kill, if you don't want to be killed."
-------
Two assassination attempts on 30 August - one against M. S. Uritsky, the head of the Petrogrand Cheka, the other against Lenin - seemed to confirm the Bolshevik leaders' theory that a real conspiracy was threatening their existence. In fact it now appears that there was no link between the two events. The first was carried out in the well-established tradition of populist revolutionary terror, by a young student who wanted to avenge the death of an officer friend killed a few days earlier by the Petrograd Cheka. The second incident was long attributed to Fanny Kaplan, a militant socialist with anarchist and Socialist Revolutionary leanings. She was arrested immediantly and shot three days later without trial, but it now appears that there may have been a larger conspiracy against Lenin, which escaped detection at the time, in the Cheka itself. The Bolshevik government immediantly blamed both assassination attemps on "right Socialist revolutionaries, the servents of the French and English imperialism." The response was immediate: the next day, articles in the press and official declarations called for more terror. "Workers," said an article in Pravda (Truth) on 31 August, "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoise or be crushed by it. The corruption of the bourgeoise must be CLEANSED from our towns immediantly. Files will now be kept on all men concerned, and those who represent a danger to the revolutionary cause will be EXECUTED. . . . The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!"
On the same day Dzerzhinksy, and his assistant Jan Peters drafted an "Appeal to the Working Classes" in a similar vein: "The working classes must crush the hydra of the counterrevolution with MASSIVE terror! We must let the enemies of the working classes know that anyone caught in the possession of a firearm will be IMMEDIANTLY EXECUTED, and that anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediantly and sent to a CONCENTRATION CAMP!" Printed in Izvestiya on 3 September, this appeal was followed the next day by the publication of the instructions sent to N. Petrovksy, the people's commisar of internal affairs, to all the soviets.
Petrovsky complained that despite the "massive repressions" organized by enemies of the state against the working masses, the "Red Terror" was too slow in its effects.
"The time has come to put a stop to all this weakness and sentimentality. All the right Socialist Revolutionaries must be arrested immediantly. A great number of hostages must be taken among the officers and the bourgeoise. The slightest resistence must be greated with widespread executions. Provincial Executive Committees must lead the way here. The Chekas and the other organized militia must seek out and arrest suspects and immediantly execute all those found to be involved in counterrevolutionary practices. . . . Leaders of the Executive Committees must immediantly report any weakness of indecision on the part of the local soviets to the People's Commisssariat of Internal Affairs. No weakness or indecision can be tolerated during this period of mass terror."
This telegram, which marked the official start of the full-scale Red Terror gives the lie to Dzerzhinsky's and Peters' later claim that the Red Terror "was a general and spontaneous reaction of indignation by the masses to the attempted assassinations of 30 August 1918, and began without any initiative from the central organizations>"[/i] The truth was that the Red Terror was the natural outlet for the almost abstract hatred that most of the Bolshevik leaders felt toward their "oppressors," whom they wished to liquidate not on an individual basis, but as a class. In his memoirs the Menshevik leader Rafael Abramovich recalled a revealing conversation that he had in August 1917 with Dzerzhinksy, the future leader of the Cheka:
"Abramovich, do you remember Lasalle's speech about the essence of the Constitution?"
"Of course"
"He said that any Constitution is always determined by the relation between the social forces at work in a given country at the time in question. I wonder how this correlation between the political and the social might be changed?"
"Well, by the various processes of change that are at work in the fields of politics and economics at any time, by the emergence of new forms of economic growth, the rise of different social classes, all those things that you know perfectly well already, Felix.."
"Yes, but couldn't one change things much more radically than that? By forcing certian CLASSES into SUBMISSION, or BY EXTERMINATING THEM ALTOGETHER?"
This cold, caculating, and cynical cruelty, the logical result of an implacable class war pushed to its extreme, was shared by many Bolsheviks. Grigory Zinoview, one of the main leaders, declared in 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 have nothing to say about the other 10 millions; we'll have to GET RID OF THEM."
--------
11-8-18
Send to Penza To Comrades Kuraev, Bosh, Minkin and other Penza communists
Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak volost's must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us our final decisive battle "with the kulaks." We need to set an example.
You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. Publish their names.
Take away all of their grain.
Execute the hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks.
Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this.
Yours, Lenin
P.S. Use your toughest people for this.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/images.gif/ad3kula1.gif
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/images.gif/ad3kula2.gif
---------
Top Secret For members of the Politburo.
Please make no copies for any reason. Each member of the Politburo (incl. Comrade Kalinin) should comment directly on the document. Lenin.
In regard to the occurrence at Shuia, which is already slated for discussion by the Polituro, it is necessary right now to make a firm decision about a general plan of action in the present course. Because I doubt that I will be able to attend the Politburo meeting on March 20th in person, I will set down my thoughts in writing.
The event at Shuia should be connected with the announcement that the Russian News Agency [ROST] recently sent to the newspapers but that was not for publication, namely, the announcement that the Black Hundreds in Petrograd [Piter] were preparing to defy the decree on the removal of property of value from the churches. If this fact is compared with what the papers report about the attitude of the clergy to the decree on the removal of church property in addition to what we know about the illegal proclamation of Patriarch Tikhon, then it becomes perfectly clear that the Black Hundreds clergy, headed by its leader, with full deliberation is carrying out a plan at this very moment to destroy us decisively.
It is obvious that the most influential group of the Black Hundreds clergy conceived this plan in secret meetings and that it was accepted with sufficient resolution. The events in Shuia is only one manifestation and actualization of this general plan.
I think that here our opponent is making a huge strategic error by attempting to draw us into a decisive struggle now when it is especially hopeless and especially disadvantageous to him. For us, on the other hand, precisely at the present moment we are presented with an exceptionally favorable, even unique, opportunity when we can in 99 out of 100 chances utterly defeat our enemy with complete success and guarantee for ourselves the position we require for decades. Now and only now, when people are being eaten in famine-stricken areas, and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most frenzied and ruthless energy and not hesitate to put down the least opposition. Now and only now, the vast majority of peasants will either be on our side, or at least will not be in a position to support to any decisive degree this handful of Black Hundreds clergy and reactionary urban petty bourgeoisie, who are willing and able to attempt to oppose this Soviet decree with a policy of force.
We must pursue the removal of church property by any means necessary in order to secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). Without this fund any government work in general, any economic build-up in particular, and any upholding of soviet principles in Genoa especially is completely unthinkable. In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary. But to do this successfully is possible only now. All considerations indicate that later on we will fail to do this, for no other time, besides that of desperate famine, will give us such a mood among the general mass of peasants that would ensure us the sympathy of this group, or, at least, would ensure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the struggle for the removal of church property unquestionably and completely will be on our side.
One clever writer on statecraft correctly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a well-known political goal to perform a series of brutal actions then it is necessary to do them in the most energetic manner and in the shortest time, because masses of people will not tolerate the protracted use of brutality. This observation in particular is further strengthened because harsh measures against a reactionary clergy will be politically impractical, possibly even extremely dangerous as a result of the international situation in which we in Russia, in all probability, will find ourselves, or may find ourselves, after Genoa. Now victory over the reactionary clergy is assured us completely. In addition, it will be more difficult for the major part of our foreign adversaries among the Russian emigres abroad, i.e., the Socialist- Revolutionaries and the Milyukovites [Left Wing Cadet Party], to fight against us if we, precisely at this time, precisely in connection with the famine, suppress the reactionary clergy with utmost haste and ruthlessness.
Therefore, I come to the indisputable conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades.
The campaign itself for carrying out this plan I envision in the following manner:
Only Comrade Kalinin should appear officially in regard to any measures taken--never and under no circumstance must Comrade Trotsky write anything for the press or in any other way appear before the public.
The telegram already issued in the name of the Politburo about the temporary suspension of removals must not be rescinded. It is useful for us because it gives our adversary the impression that we are vacillating, that he has succeeded in confusing us (our adversary, of course, will quickly find out about this secret telegram precisely because it is secret).
Send to Shuia one of the most energetic, clear-headed, and capable members of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee [VTsIK] or some other representative of the central government (one is better than several), giving him verbal instructions through one of the members of the Politburo. The instructions must come down to this, that in Shuia he must arrest more if possible but not less than several dozen representatives of the local clergy, the local petty bourgeoisie, and the local bourgeoisie on suspicion of direct or indirect participation in the forcible resistance to the decree of the VTsIK on the removal of property of value from churches. Immediately upon completion of this task, he must return to Moscow and personally deliver a report to the full session of the Politburo or to two specially authorized members of the Politburo. On the basis of this report, the Politburo will give a detailed directive to the judicial authorities, also verbal, that the trial of the insurrectionists from Shuia, for opposing aid to the starving, should be carried out in utmost haste and should end not other than with the shooting of the very largest number of the most influential and dangerous of the Black Hundreds in Shuia, and, if possible, not only in this city but even in Moscow and several other ecclesiastical centers.
I think that it is advisable for us not to touch Patriarch Tikhon himself, even though he undoubtedly headed this whole revolt of slave-holders. Concerning him, the State Political Administration [GPU] must be given a secret directive that precisely at this time all communications of this personage must be monitored and their contents disclosed in all possible accuracy and detail. Require Dzerzhinsky and Unshlikht personally to report to the Politburo about this weekly.
At the party congress arrange a secret meeting of all or almost all delegates to discuss this matter jointly with the chief workers of the GPU, the People's Commissariat of Justice [NKIu], and the Revolutionary Tribunal. At this meeting pass a secret resolution of the congress that the removal of property of value, especially from the very richest lauras, monasteries, and churches, must be carried out with ruthless resolution, leaving nothing in doubt, and in the very shortest time. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this "audience" must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.
To attend to the quickest and most successful carrying out of these measures, there at the congress, i.e., at the secret meeting, appoint a special commission, the participation of Comrade Trotsky and Comrade Kalinin being required, without giving any publicity to this commission, with the purpose that the subordination to it of all operations would be provided for and carried out not in the name of the commission but as an all-soviet and all-party order. Appoint those who are especially responsible from among the best workers to carry out these measures in the wealthiest lauras, monasteries, and churches.
Lenin.
March 19, 1922.
I request that Comrade Molotov attempt to circulate this letter to the members of the Politburo by evening today (not making copies) and ask them to return it to the secretary immediately after reading it, with a succinct note regarding whether each member of the Politburo agrees in principle or if the letter arouses any differences of opinion.
Lenin.
A note in the hand of Comrade Molotov:
"Agreed. However, I propose to extend the campaign not to all gubernias and cities, but to those where indeed there are considerable possessions of value, accordingly concentrating the forces and attention of the party.
March 19. Molotov."
True copy: [illegible]
The original has been transferred to the Lenin Institute.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/ae.html