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Since the first massacres
of Red prisoners by the Whites, the murders of Volodarsky and Uritsky
and the attempt against Lenin (in the summer of 1918), the custom
of arresting and, often, executing hostages had become generalized
and legal. Already the Cheka, which made mass arrests of suspects,
was tending to settle their fate independently, under formal control
of the Party, but in reality without anybody's knowledge. The Party
endeavoured to head it with incorruptible men like the former convict
Dzerzhinsky, a sincere idealist, ruthless but chivalrous, with the
emaciated profile of an Inquisitor: tall forehead, bony nose, untidy
goatee, and an expression of weariness and austerity. But the Party
had few men of this stamp and many Chekas. I believe that the formation
of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible
errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots,
blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence
indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of
day and admitting the right of defense, would have attained the same
efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to
revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?
Early Bolshevik Victor Serge in Memoirs of a Revolutionary |
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