Introducing 

Prezi AI.

Your new presentation assistant.

Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.

Loading…
Transcript

The Red Terror

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918.

Red Terror was launched throughout Russia in order to maintain, and to later extend the Bolsheviks hold on power. Lenin used the Red Army under the command of Leon Trotsky in order to defeat the anti-Communist forces during the Russian Civil War.

The Red Terror was claimed to be introduced in reply to White Terror. The stated purpose of this campaign was struggle with counter-revolutionaries considered to be enemies of the people. Many Russian communists openly proclaimed that Red Terror was needed for extermination of entire social groups or former "ruling classes".

Consequences of this method

  • The execution of the Tsar and his family
  • One of the most significant victims of this period was the Tsar. Nicholas along with his family and servants, were shot on 17 July 1918 in Ekaterinburg in the Urals. Lenin and Sverdlov claimed that it had been carried out by the local soviet against their wishes, but the weight of the evidence now suggests that the order came from the centre.
  • Lenin did not wish to antagonise the Germans at this point so he probably wanted to suggest that it was nothing to do with him. Alexandra, the Tsar's wife, was German and ofcourse the Tsar was related to many powerful monarchs of Europe.
  • The Terror intensifies
  • When the Red Terror got underway, the change was one of scale and intensity. Execution, previously the exception, now became the rule. Prisoners in many cities were shot out of hand. Official records put the figure for deaths at the hands of the Cheka for the years 1918-20 at nearly 13,000, but estimates put the real figure nearer 300,000. The Cheka fanned the flames of the class warfare, as some Bolsheviks talked of wiping out the middle class completely.
  • But the real puprpose of the Red Terror was to terrify all hostile social groups. Its victims included large numbers of workers and peasants as well as princes and priests, prostitues, judges, merchants, traders, even children (who made up five percent of the population of Moscos prosons in 1920) - all guilty of 'bourgeois provocation' or counter-revolution. This problem was that no one was really sure who the counter-revolutionaries were.

Did this show the Bolsheviks were in control?

It may be assumed that because the Bolsheviks used terror ruthlessly they were firmly in control of the internal situation in the cities, especially Moscow and Petrograd. This was far from the case.

According to Robert Service, evidence from the Russian archives has confirmed that the situation between 1918 and 1920 was extremely chaotic and that Bolshevik control was limited.

By Oliver & Sam

"We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea [...] For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinoviev and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible."

– Announcement of the start of the Red Terror on 1 September 1918, to the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta

Learn more about creating dynamic, engaging presentations with Prezi