Revolution and Terror 0198901100, 9780198901105

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Revolution and Terror

Revolution and Terror GR A E M E GI L L

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Graeme Gill 2024 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943839 ISBN 9780198901105 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Preface My interest in revolution and terror goes back many years, to my undergraduate student days at Monash University. At the time, I was particularly piqued by the observation that revolutions conducted in the name of high ideals had so often not only fallen well short of realizing those ideals, but had actually produced outcomes that had involved terrible suffering on the part of the general populace. But also curious was the fact that the new revolutionary elite was not immune from the terror that was a major cause of popular suffering. Reflected in the epigram ‘The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children’, those who conducted the revolution often found themselves overwhelmed by revolutionary violence. Looking at these outcomes of revolution, a focus on the origins of state terror in revolutionary regimes seemed an obvious course of study. Surprisingly, there has been little comparative analysis of the use of terror by revolutionary regimes, especially compared with the study of the way terror has been used in an attempt to overthrow regimes. This book seeks to fill this relative gap by explaining how the use of terror by regimes is related to the revolutions that brought those regimes about. It asks whether terror is an intrinsic, necessary, part of revolution, as many claim, or a purely conjunctural development. The emphasis in the book is strongly on the relationship between revolution and terror, not on describing the individual actions that constitute that terror. For those interested in this, many of the studies of individual cases of terror will provide such, often graphic, detail. The book owes much to many people. Its subject matter has been discussed with numerous friends and scholars across the globe, with their comments helping to shape the form and argument that follows. It would be invidious to single out individuals because so many have unknowingly contributed to it over a very extended time, with the enhanced risk of omitting someone. However, I would like to thank the two reviewers for their incisive comments. Although I have not taken all of their comments on board, they have greatly improved the manuscript. My greatest debt is to Heather, whose forbearance, love, and support over many decades has sustained me generally. Without her, life would have been much poorer. But also, Bethany and Audrey deserve a big thank you. They light up the house when they come in and turn bad moods into happy times. They are also living proof that there can be a better world.

Contents 1. Revolution and the Question of Terror

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2. The French Revolution

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3. The Russian Revolution

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4. The Chinese Revolution

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5. The Origins of Terror

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6. Revolutions Compared

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Bibliography Index

261 279

1 Revolution and the Question of Terror ‘The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.’¹ Attributed to the moderate French revolutionary P.V. Vergniaud in 1793 just before his execution by the Jacobins, this quotation refers to the way in which the Jacobins turned the Terror against some of their fellow revolutionaries. The same claim has been made of those other commonly-acknowledged ‘great revolutions’, the Russian of 1917, and the Chinese of 1949. In both cases, about a decade and a half after the revolutionary seizure of power, terror was unleashed by one section of the revolutionary elite on another. The implication of the claim is that there is something about revolution as a phenomenon that causes the new rulers to turn on themselves. However, this claim is contentious. Revolution is one of those phenomena that provoke heightened passion and significant polarization. For many, it is seen as an uplifting experience, a means for the oppressed to throw off their shackles and achieve the freedom that has long been denied them. For others it is seen as a catastrophe; perhaps conducted in the quest to achieve high ideals, but in the result leading to widespread hardship, dictatorship, and terror. For the latter, even when there were gains made (for example, in terms of greater equality), the costs were excessive. It is this latter view that provides the focus of this book, in particular the argument that terror is an inevitable result of revolution. This argument has been particularly associated with the way in which, following the seizure of power, the revolutionary elite split with part of it purging another part. Robespierre’s attack on his enemies within the French revolutionary elite in 1794, Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union in 1936–1938, and Mao’s cultural revolution in the late 1960s have all been seen as evidence of this. But most scholars have generally seen a much broader association between revolution and terror than

¹ Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965; originally published 1938), p. 121. The literal translation is actually ‘There was reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, might devour in turn each one of her children’, but the formulation cited here is the one most commonly used. For some examples of more recent uses of this formulation, see Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions. Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) and the endorsement by Ronald Grigor Suny on the cover of William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates. The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0001

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simply the latter’s effects on the revolutionary elite. Terror has widely been seen as being intrinsic to revolution. In the words of an historian of the French Revolution, ‘From the very beginning—from the summer of 1789—violence was the motor of the Revolution’. For one theorist of revolution, the use of terror against opponents was ‘the norm’ in revolutionary states, while two students of authoritarian rule declared, ‘[A]s revolution spread, the corpses continued to accumulate’.² It is the relationship between revolution and terror that this book seeks to understand. The above-cited views reflect two different conceptions of revolution: revolution as liberation (a normative project) and revolution as social upheaval and destruction (a violent process). The resultant highly contested nature of revolution as a concept has spawned a very large literature but one which, unsurprisingly, is characterized by significant differences of opinion and evaluation. There have been three main foci of this literature: what is revolution?; why does revolution come about?; and how does revolution unfold, sometimes seen in terms of the results of revolution. The defining of revolution has proved to be more contentious than defining many other terms in comparative and international politics. Main differences have turned on such issues as whether revolution must be rapid and short, or whether it can be prolonged, whether violence is an essential part, and whether social class must be a factor. Some adopt a restricted view of what constitutes revolution—for example, Martin Malia sees it as a purely European phenomenon that spread to other parts of the globe via European influence³ while Jack Goldstone limits revolution to those upheavals pursuing a vision of social justice⁴—while others have a more expansive view. Most have sought to define revolution by identifying particular features or characteristics said to be present in all revolutions, an approach criticized by George Lawson who argued that revolutions had neither ‘ascribed properties’ nor ‘fixed attributes’, but were ‘sequences of events that attain their significance as they are threaded together in and through time’.⁵ Lawson, in line with a number of other scholars in the twenty-first century, is attempting to move beyond seeing revolution as what he calls a ‘static entity’, instead referring to it as an ‘emergent process’. This ² Respectively Simon Schama, Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 589; George L. Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 31; and Sergei Guriev & Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators, The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 36. ³ Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives. Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). ⁴ Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 4. ⁵ Lawson (2019), p. 57.

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view focuses on the process of revolution rather than its outcome, on political activity (seen in terms of popular mobilization) rather than the results of political activity. But it is difficult to see how this focus on process as the means of defining revolution is useful in the absence of agreement about what we are looking for to denote a revolution, which assumes some sort of agreement about properties or attributes. How do we know an ‘emergent process’ is a revolution if we do not have an understanding of what is necessary for something to constitute a revolution? Furthermore, at base, the term ‘revolution’ implies (substantial) change; without the notion of change, ‘revolution’ is meaningless. Accordingly, it does not seem very sensible to see revolution in terms of political action without seeing the results of that action. But this means that we need another term to refer to popular mobilization that may lead to a revolutionary outcome. Charles Tilly has suggested one, ‘revolutionary situation’. For Tilly, a revolutionary situation existed when ‘two or more blocs make effective, incompatible claims to control the state, or to be the state’ (i.e. multiple claims to sovereignty), and ‘revolutionary outcomes’ occurred ‘with transfer of state power from those who held it before the start of multiple sovereignty to a new ruling coalition…’⁶ A revolutionary situation is therefore when popular mobilization threatens to bring about regime change, with revolution occurring when that change is achieved. A revolutionary situation with a revolutionary movement could exist, as in the Arab Spring,⁷ but if there was no substantial change politically, socially, or economically, there was no revolution. This distinction between revolutionary situation and revolution has a two-fold advantage: it avoids the logical difficulties involved in talking about ‘failed revolution’⁸, and it enables the definition of revolution to retain a reasonably tight focus, while also enabling us to appreciate the revolutionary possibilities evident in the pre-seizure of power period. One issue that has bedevilled definitions of revolution has been the political/social distinction. The heart of the issue is the dimension of change that would be expected of a revolution, but this has generally been reflected in the argument about class referred to briefly above. The argument that revolution must involve the replacement of one, ruling, class by a hitherto subordinate

⁶ Charles Tilly, European Revolutions 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 10 & 14. ⁷ George Lawson, more controversially, places the Pinochet military coup in Chile as a case of a revolutionary situation. Lawson (2019), pp. 115–116. ⁸ A ‘failed revolution’ presumably means an absence of significant change. But if there was no change, there was no revolution in the first place. The only time it may make sense to talk about ‘failed revolution’ is when potentially substantial change was introduced by a revolutionary regime but not implemented, or a revolutionary movement comes to power but does not go on to transform the society.

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class stems principally from Marx and is at the heart of most discussions of social revolution; a social revolution is when one class replaces another. This not only involves the displacement of the ruling personnel of the state, but the upward mobility of large numbers of people from the hitherto lower class and the reworking of the structures of economic and status-based power in the society. It was this combination of substantial change in the political sphere— replacement of ruling personnel and the reworking of political power and institutions—with social transformation that was said to be the hallmark of the ‘great’ revolutions.⁹ The distinction between political and social also meant that some analysts now distinguished between ‘political revolutions’ which simply involved the transformation of political power and those who wielded it but no major upheaval in the social structure from those where both political and social transformation occurred. There is also an economic dimension that could be relevant; economic revolution would involve the transformation of the economic structure and processes whereby the society operated. It may accompany the widespread social change that constitutes social revolution, but it could also occur without major social change. Not everybody accepts the political/social (and perhaps economic) distinction. One is Steve Pincus¹⁰ who argues that a revolution must involve transformation of the socio-economic orientation and political structures of a society. If any of these are missing, it is not a revolution. In contrast, Tilly argues that broad social change is not a necessary part of revolution, which he defines as ‘a forcible transfer of power over a state in the course of which at least two distinct blocs of contenders make incompatible claims to control the state, and some significant portion of the population subject to the state’s jurisdiction acquiesces in the claims of each bloc’. Furthermore, he declares that in revolution ‘no fundamental alteration of social structure need occur’.¹¹ However, if we think of these three dimensions—political, social, and economic—as analytically distinct even though in practice they are closely linked, and we accept that revolution must involve political change, meaning the overthrow of the leaders of the state and their replacement by new people, we can distinguish between different types of changes of regime: full revolutions where there was ⁹ This is Skocpol’s definition of a social revolution, when basic change in the social and political structure occur together. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 4–5. She added that these occur ‘through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role’. ¹⁰ Steve Pincus, 1688 The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 2. Also see Steven Pincus, ‘Rethinking Revolutions: A Neo-Tocquevillian Perspective’, Carles Boix & Susan C. Stokes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 397–415. ¹¹ Tilly (1993), pp. 8 & 15.

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political, social, and economic transformation such as the Russian and Chinese revolutions, revolutions where there was political and social change, but more limited real economic change such as the French revolution of 1789,¹² revolutions where there was political change and economic change but little social change such as the so-called ‘velvet’ or ‘negotiated revolutions’ of 1989, and those cases where there was only political change but neither of the other sorts of change such as most military coups and the reversal of such coups as in Portugal in 1974 and Spain 1975. These distinctions (along with that between revolutionary situation and revolution) also enable analysts to distinguish revolutions from such other phenomena as peasant revolts, grain riots, strikes, reform movements, coups d’etat, and civil wars,¹³ although it is important to recognize that all of these could be part of a particular revolution, and therefore they are not opposites to revolution. The emphasis on social transformation has another aspect, that of mass mobilization. One view holds that popular mobilization and involvement in the political struggle is the hallmark of revolution. The popular image of revolution is the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 or the capture of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917, and this undoubtedly captures one element of the scholarly notion of revolution. But to see such mobilization strictly in terms of classes is unnecessarily restrictive. Popular mobilization does usually have a class dimension; in many cases, it is undertaken by lower classes in opposition to upper or ruling classes. But such mobilization is in many instances cross-class, involving de facto class alliances between, for example in the Russian case, urban workers, and rural peasants. Or mobilization may be geographically constrained, so that while the lower classes in Paris may have mobilized, their equivalents in other cities remained more passive, meaning nationally the class was divided within itself. Or it could be ethnically-based. It would be better to conceive of such mobilization in broader terms, of the mass populace rather than necessarily a particular class. This does not assume that all of the people are mobilized or that they are active all of the time, but it does assume that revolution must involve a degree of popular mobilization; otherwise, political change is a coup. However, what about when a coup mounted without widespread popular support leads to a regime that then introduces wide-ranging social (and possibly economic) changes that would in their dimensions and nature constitute a social/economic revolution? This was the situation in, for example, Pinochet’s ¹² On this, see Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1934), pp. 131–137. ¹³ Goldstone (2014), pp. 4–9. Also see Lawson (2019), pp. 4–5.

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Chile where the military regime instituted neo-liberal reforms in the economy that transformed the way that economy worked. Such a development has sometimes been referred to as a ‘revolution from above’.¹⁴ What is crucial here is the combination of transformation in the political sphere (a new regime comes to power) and transformation in the social/economic. Without that political change, the later economic change if it did occur would not constitute a revolution in the classical sense (even though those changes might be revolutionary in their impact). This also confirms that whether a change is actually judged to be a revolution or not may only be able to be made some time after the event. So how to define revolution? Lawson¹⁵ says that most agree that revolutions ‘are rapid transformations, usually involving mass, violent action from below’. For Goldstone¹⁶ it is ‘the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions’. In Pincus’ view¹⁷ revolutions ‘must involve both a transformation of the socioeconomic orientation and of the political structures. That transformation must take place through a popular movement, and the transformation must involve a self-consciousness that a new era has begun’. Elements of these three definitions may usefully be put together. Revolution involves the transformation of political rule and social and/or economic structures, mass mobilization is a central force at least at times in the process, and it involves a sense of a new beginning through the realization of principles which are said to be at its heart. This conception excludes Lawson’s insistence on ‘rapid’ transformation because who is to say what is rapid? Both the English and Chinese revolutions could be said to have stretched over around 40 years—1640–1688 and 1911–1949. Goldstone’s insistence on ‘social justice’ means that only ‘progressive’ revolutions would be counted while Pincus’ insistence that transformation must occur ‘through a popular movement’ seems to underplay the central role that elites play in most revolutions. This definition also does not specify violence as an essential element of revolution,¹⁸ although it may be implicit in many instances in the mass mobilization that is seen as essential. ¹⁴ See the classic Ellen Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above. Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt and Peru (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978). ¹⁵ Lawson (2019), p. 54. ¹⁶ Goldstone (2014), p. 4. ¹⁷ Pincus (2007), p. 399. ¹⁸ This is in contrast to Peter Calvert who sees the ‘successful use of force’ as being what distinguishes revolution from such things as revolt, insurgency, and insurrection. Peter Calvert, ‘Terror in the Theory of Revolution’, Noel O’Sullivan, Terrorism, Ideology, and Revolution (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986), p. 28.

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Turning to the second focus of the literature, why does revolution come about, there have been four basic schools of thought.¹⁹ These schools actually overlap, in the sense that some authors can fit into more than one, and this means that although the schools will be presented here in terms that emphasize their differences, in fact the differences will appear exaggerated. The basic outline presented below follows Lawson, but with some adjustments, and the individual writers cited are illustrative rather than being comprehensive. The first school of thought may be called the ‘natural life cycle’ interpretation and is primarily historical in approach. The most important writer who has used this approach is Crane Brinton, but it is also evident in the work of, inter alia, George Pettee, and Bailey Stone.²⁰ Brinton’s work set a framework for the analysis of revolutions involving sequences that has endured, as shown by its continuation and elaboration in Bailey’s work more than 75 years later. What is characteristic of this is the emphasis upon political change, upon the overthrow of the state and its replacement by a new political structure staffed by new people. Following de Tocqueville’s maxim that the most dangerous time for a regime is when it begins to reform itself,²¹ these writers emphasize the way in which the ancien regime is in decline and seeks to introduce reforms in order to survive. They also acknowledge the emergence of an opposition group which challenges the rulers and, at least in part because of the weakness of the state, successfully displaces them. It is this weakness of the state, beset by crises, and then challenged by an opposition that is the crux of the explanation of why revolutions occur. A variation of this view is offered by an historian of the English revolution of 1688, Steve Pincus, who argues that revolution does not occur when the state is weak but when it has ‘embarked on ambitious state modernization programs’.²² This is similar to de Tocqueville’s argument. More recently Michael David-Fox²³ has argued that a life cycle analysis should be more expansive in the time period covered, and more ¹⁹ Lawson (2019), chs. 1 & 2 refers to these as ‘generations’. However, given that the literature does not fall neatly into temporal sequences, which seems to be implied by the term ‘generations’, I have preferred to use schools of thought. Beck and Ritter (2021) prefer ‘recurrent debates’. Colin J. Beck & Daniel P. Ritter, ‘Thinking Beyond Generations: On the Future of Revolution Theory’, Journal of Historical Sociology 34, 1, 2021, pp. 134–141. For a different categorization, see Malia (2006), pp. 302– 316, for a stimulating discussion, see Bailey Stone, The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited. A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Introduction. Also A.C. Cohan, Theories of Revolution. An Introduction (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975). ²⁰ Brinton (1965); George Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Harper and Bros., 1938); and Stone (2014). ²¹ This is a major thesis in Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2008; originally published 1852). ²² Pincus (2009), p. 33. Also see pp. 36–40 & 44–45. ²³ Michael David-Fox, ‘Toward a Life Cycle Analysis of the Russian Revolution’, Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 18, 4, 2017, pp. 741–783.

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sensitive to the interaction of structural, conjunctural, and cultural factors. Critical of aspects of the Brinton/Stone approach, he argues for an appreciation of greater complexity and longer time horizons in our understanding of revolution. The second school of thought sought to place the revolutionaries at the centre of the explanation. There were essentially three ways in which this was done. First, reflecting the emergence of social science and attempts to give it a scientific methodology, was the linking of revolution with ‘modernization’. In the 1960s and 1970s there was a significant focus on modernization, which was seen as the process whereby ‘under-developed’ or non-industrial societies underwent change designed to make them like the advanced industrial liberal democracies of the time. This was clearly a highly ideological view of what was happening in much of the non-European part of the globe. Theorists of revolution assumed that with modernization and the consequent massive structural changes experienced by a society, public expectations about increased opportunities (especially economic) rose, but these were often unrealized. Such unrealized expectations, it was argued, led people into rebellious or revolutionary activity. James Davies and Ted Robert Gurr were the principal writers in what has sometimes been called the social-psychological explanation.²⁴ However, this sort of voluntarist approach failed to show how the actions of dissatisfied individuals related to the broader historical and structural context of revolution or how it brought revolution about. Given that all societies had individuals whose expectations were unrealized, this approach was unable to explain why revolution occurred in some societies experiencing modernization and not in others. Other theorists have argued that there is actually no direct relationship between the pace of structural change of the sort assumed in modernization and revolution.²⁵ The second means whereby revolutionaries were put at the centre of the analysis is biographical, and may be seen in the work of people like Dmitri Volkogonov and Jerome Ch’en.²⁶ The chief intent of these sorts of works was not explanation of the revolutionary process but telling the story of the revolutionary leader’s life, but in doing so they did nevertheless contain explanations of the origins and course of the respective revolutions. But because they were concentrated upon one particular revolution, in these cases the Russian and Chinese, there was no

²⁴ James C. Davies, ‘Towards a Theory of Revolution’, American Sociological Review 27, 1, 1962, pp. 5–19 and Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). ²⁵ Charles Tilly, ‘Does Modernization Breed Revolution?’, Comparative Politics 5, 3, 1973, p. 432. ²⁶ Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin. Life and Legacy (London: Harper Collins, 1994) and Jerome Ch’en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

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generalization to revolutions as a phenomenon or any successful attempt at theorization.²⁷ The third way of emphasizing the role of revolutionaries is that of so-called ‘scripting revolution’.²⁸ This approach focuses on the way in which ‘revolutionary scripts’ of earlier revolutions may shape the course of later ones. The key is that revolutionaries are aware of earlier revolutions and how they have unfolded, and may model their behaviour (either positively or negatively) on how they believe their counterparts in earlier revolutions behaved. The idea of a ‘script’ being followed (or not) by revolutionaries links different revolutions across time and space, and accepts that revolutionaries may learn from what preceded them. This idea of conscious action is also consistent with the emphasis on the ideology or values of the revolutionaries in the work of Martin Malia.²⁹ The third school was a reaction against the essentially voluntarist nature of the second school. This was the structural school, and it may be seen in the work of Theda Skocpol and, in his earlier work, Jack Goldstone, although their most important progenitors were Barrington Moore and Karl Marx.³⁰ For Skocpol it was the structural location of the state between other states internationally and domestic political forces that was crucial in shaping the course of domestic events when international tension and conflict erupted. Goldstone argued that demographic changes re-shaped the social order, destabilizing established structures, and thereby creating a crisis to which elites had to respond. Moore’s focus was on the way in which peasants and nobles responded to the commercialization or lack of commercialization of agriculture, and the implications that had for the ancien regime. And Marx’s whole theory was based on the notion of class and how this was related to shifts in the underlying mode of production. Apart from the emphasis on the central role of macro-level structural factors in explaining revolutions, a major contribution made by some members of this group was to insert international factors into the process in a decisive way. While this had been present in some of the work of the first school, it had not been given the primacy that it gained under some

²⁷ There was an attempt to theorize about a revolutionary personality type, but this gained little scholarly traction. For example, see E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality. Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). ²⁸ Keith Michael Baker & Dan Edelstein (eds), Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). ²⁹ Malia (2006). ³⁰ See Skocpol (1979), Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). In Marx’s case, the class basis of his understanding of historical change, which involved a downgrading of the role of agency, constitutes a structural explanation.

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of the structuralists. A different type of structural argument was advanced by so-called ‘functionalists’ (or ‘structural functionalists’). This is exemplified by the work of Chalmers Johnson.³¹ Johnson’s theory is cast in highly abstract terms but what it amounts to is an argument that when there develops a significant discrepancy between social values and the environment, and the elite is unwilling or unable to engineer the changes to bring these back into harmony, revolution is likely to occur. The problem with Johnson’s view is that the level of abstraction, and associated vagueness and ambiguity, makes it virtually impossible to apply the theory in a way that would explain revolution. Despite a rich and stimulating literature, structural explanations generally were unable to explain both why revolutions could break out when structural conditions did not seem to be present, or why they did not occur when those conditions were in evidence, without introducing such voluntarist elements as human actors, ideology, and contingency into the explanation. The fourth school seeks to take a multi-causal approach, with the role of contingency important, and is reflected in the work of John Foran, Jack Goldstone in his later work, and George Lawson;³² the above-cited paper by David-Fox on revolutionary life cycles can also be seen to fit into this school. Revolutions were seen as, in Goldstone’s words, ‘complex emergent processes’. They stemmed from the shift of societies from a position of stability to one of instability where many aspects of the society have become ‘frayed’.³³ For example, according to Foran as summarized by Lawson, ‘third world’ revolutions ‘emerged from the intersection of five sequential conditions: dependent state development, which exacerbated social tensions; repressive, exclusionary, personalistic regimes, which polarized opposition; political cultures of resistance, which legitimized revolutionary opposition; an economic downturn, which acted as the “final straw” in radicalizing opposition; and a world systemic opening, which acted as a “let up” of external constraints’.³⁴ Central to this is recognition of influences stemming from outside the state, but in Lawson’s view, this should not be restricted only to other state actors.³⁵ In this view, state stability is always precarious and when it is thrown into question ³¹ In particular, see Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (London: University of London Press, 1968). ³² John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 4, 2001, pp. 139–187, Goldstone (2014), and Lawson (2019). ³³ Goldstone (2014), pp. 13 & 15. ³⁴ Lawson (2019), pp. 52–53. For a differing explanation of the essential factors leading to instability, see Goldstone (2014), pp. 13–19. ³⁵ Hence he prefers the term ‘inter-social’ to ‘international’. See the discussion in Lawson (2019), pp. 64–72.

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by a multitude of challenges, the door is opened to revolution. Lawson argued that a revolutionary situation was produced by ‘three critical configurations’: changes in inter-social relations, the vulnerability of regimes (especially those based on personalist rule) and a systemic crisis rooted in the conjuncture of political, (relative) economic and symbolic crises.³⁶ When such a revolutionary situation exists, its outcome will depend upon the ability of the state elite to maintain its own unity plus the loyalty of the coercive apparatus of the state, and the capacity of the opposition to create a cohesive revolutionary movement that can mobilize and unite diverse coalitions.³⁷ The combination of structural and voluntarist elements in this sort of approach holds the promise of a more rounded and robust explanation of revolution than we have had until now, but we are still awaiting the scholarship that would demonstrate this. There has been some debate about whether the fourth school has been superseded by a fifth one reflecting what are seen to be very different revolutions occurring mainly around the end of the Cold War compared to those preceding that development.³⁸ The chief differences identified are that while there have been many instances of substantial mass mobilization there has been little actual social transformation, post-Cold War revolutions have been ‘peaceful’, ‘negotiated’, ‘velvet’, or ‘unarmed’³⁹, and the international dimension has been much more important both in terms of waves of revolution, and of the international legitimation of revolutionary situations and their outcomes.⁴⁰ However, much of this literature focuses on the process of revolution, what we ³⁶ Lawson (2019), p. 199. ³⁷ Lawson (2019), p. 87. ³⁸ For example, see Jamie Allinson, ‘Counter-revolution as International Phenomenon: The Case of Egypt’, Review of International Studies 45, 2, 2019, pp. 320–344; Jamie Allinson, ‘A Fifth Generation of Revolution Theory’, Journal of Historical Sociology 32, 1, 2019, pp. 142–151; Benjamin Abrams, ‘A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory is Yet to Come’, Journal of Historical Sociology 32, 3, 2019, pp. 378–386; Beck & Ritter (2021), pp. 134–141; and Benjamin Abrams, ‘Toward a Regeneration of Revolutionary Theory’, Journal of Historical Sociology 34, 1, 2021, pp. 142–149. Actually, some of the claimed non-violent revolutions occurred during the late Cold War period, but they have become more prominent at and after the end of the Cold War. For a list of 35 such revolutions between 1978 and 2011, see Sharon Nepstad, Non-Violent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. xv. ³⁹ It is the unarmed nature of these that is said to be the chief difference with earlier types of revolution. Sharon Nepstad’s attempt to argue that they differed in terms of the weapons used—the non-violent were said to be characterized by non-cooperation, strikes, boycotts, the subversion of the loyalty of regime supporters, and the creation of cross-class coalitions to fight in the urban centres—is unconvincing. All of these could also be and were part of the repertoire of violent revolutions. Nepstad (2011), p. xviii. For a review of the study of non-violent resistance, see Sharon Erickson Nepstad, ‘Nonviolent Civil Resistance and Social Movements’, Sociology Compass 7, 7, 2013, pp. 590–598. ⁴⁰ For example, Colin J. Beck, ‘Reflections on the Revolutionary Wave in 2011’, Theory and Society 43, 2, 2014, pp. 197–223; Daniel Ritter, The Iron Cage of Liberalism: International Politics and Unarmed Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Daniel P. Ritter, ‘The (R)evolution is Dead, Long Live the (R)evolution!’, Contention 7, 2, 2019, pp. 100–107, and Nepstad (2011).

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have termed the revolutionary situation, and defines success solely in terms of the removal of the existing regime or ruler.⁴¹ This means that it includes discussions of ‘revolutions’ when there was no substantial change, as in the Arab Spring,⁴² and cases of political change that were either linked with significant economic but no social change, such as the ‘negotiated revolutions’ of 1989 in the former Eastern Europe, or with no change outside the political, like the ‘colour revolutions’. Not only are so-called ‘failed revolutions’ included in the field examined but, in the view of Colin Beck⁴³, so too could be such things as ‘electoral and pacted transitions’ and ‘non-violent mass protest’. This seems to mean that this approach to revolution could encapsulate all forms of regime change except perhaps the coup d’etat where the masses are rarely involved, a development that seems to rob ‘revolution’ of its analytical sharpness and much of its utility; is it really a revolution if the only change is that of the personnel at the top of the state? Turning to the third theme of the literature—how does revolution unfold?— the answer which set the parameters for debate for many decades stemmed from Brinton’s work. Brinton used the metaphor of a fever and a healthy body as a way of discussing revolution, but few have followed this lead. More importantly, he argued that revolutions went through stages, constituting a natural life cycle of revolution, in which power moved from the Right through the Centre to the Left. Initially for Brinton, a revolution was preceded by ‘prodromal symptoms’, involving the emergence of weaknesses in the economic and political structure of the regime, the loss of legitimacy of that regime among intellectuals, and the beginning of the development of a revolutionary opposition within a general context of class conflict. Four stages followed. First, the overthrow of the ancien regime and establishment of rule by ‘moderates’. Second, a coup d’etat bringing extremists to power. Third, the slip into a ‘reign of terror and virtue’ as the extremists unleash terror. And fourth, the thermidor when revolutionary excesses are rejected and society returns to a state of equilibrium, or health. In Brinton’s view, in the cases of the English, French, and Russian revolutions but not the American, this stage resulted in dictatorship. Others agreed that revolution usually ended in a powerful state—because of the extent of opposition, the new rulers had to develop a powerful state to defend the gains—and this often meant dictatorship. This general schema, ⁴¹ For an explicit statement of this, see Nepstad (2011), p. xiii. ⁴² For example see Allinson (2019) and Beck (2014). For recognition of the Egyptian case as one of a revolutionary situation rather than a revolution, see Neil Ketchley, Egypt in a Time of Revolution. Contentious Politics and the Arab Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 5. ⁴³ Colin J. Beck, ‘The Structure of Comparison in the Study of Revolution’, Sociological Theory 36, 2, 2018, p. 136.

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which was clearly based on his understanding of the French revolution, did come under some criticism, but was nevertheless accepted by many scholars as being generally accurate as a descriptor of what happened,⁴⁴ even if its applicability to some cases seemed forced; even Brinton recognized the problem the American Revolution posed for his sequenced explanation.⁴⁵ However, this general consensus is not shared by those adherents of the fourth school noted above. Seeing revolution as the result of multi-causal sequencing of events which will differ in possibly important ways from revolution to revolution, it follows that all revolutions will not share a single trajectory. Rather, the course they follow will be a function of the effect of this multi-causality and of the influence of contemporary factors at the time. Therefore, revolutions will have different anatomies⁴⁶—to use the term from Lawson’s book referred to earlier—rather than a single course. At one level this is a truism: no revolution will be a carbon copy of another one. All will differ in details, but they will all also have points of similarity, albeit often at a high level of generality. If they did not share some similarities, they could not be conceptualized as individual cases of a general phenomenon; they would be different phenomena. Theorists of the fourth school accept that there will be some shared characteristics while insisting on the existence of different paths of insurrection, repertoires of action, and revolutionary coalitions.⁴⁷ However, this is a matter of judgement, degree, and emphasis: is there one path with variations within it as Brinton seems to have accepted, or are there multiple paths of the same basic phenomenon as Lawson seems to argue? This remains an open question, but it does raise a question mark over the whole enterprise of theorizing revolution. Charles Tilly is certainly of this view, having noted: ‘a general theory specifying necessary and sufficient conditions, standard internal sequences or invariant consequences’ is inconceivable.⁴⁸ This book is concerned with the relationship between revolution and terror, and this is something that much of the literature on revolution does not address in a systematic fashion. Certainly, Brinton’s life cycle approach does acknowledge the importance of terror, seeing this as intrinsic to one of his stages, but much of the rest of the literature has not explored the role of terror systematically. Some of the definitions of revolution may have terror built into them in the sense that they envisage revolution as a violent process of revolt

⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸

For example, see the discussion in Stone (2014), pp. 2–5. Brinton (1965), pp. 22–24. These are comprised of different repertoires of action and different revolutionary coalitions. Lawson (2019), pp. 83–88. Tilly (1993), pp. 7–8.

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from below in which the rulers must be forced from power at the point of a bayonet (or pitchfork). Peter Calvert⁴⁹ sees ‘force’ and ‘violence’ as ‘characteristics’ of revolution, with the former seen principally in terms of attempts by the existing regime to defend itself against revolutionaries and the latter of mass-based action in the form of demonstrations and strikes. And this is the emphasis that much of the literature has taken: violence and terrorism perpetrated by the masses or by the revolutionaries prior to seizing power. This is clearly a very important issue, the degree to which the revolutionary seizure of power can occur without bloodshed resulting from terror. But that is not the question with which this book is concerned. The focus here is the state terror implemented by the revolutionaries following their seizure of power. Terror and terrorism have been the subject of investigation for many years, with the pace of this picking up substantially after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001. However, most of this attention has been directed towards non-state actors, to terrorist groups operating outside the international state system, like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and earlier the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Red Brigade, and IRA. These are not a focus of this study, which is on state terror, despite their twentyfirst century importance and that it could be argued that for a time ISIS acted like a state.⁵⁰ In comparison, little systematic attention has been devoted to state terror apart from studies of individual instances of this.⁵¹ Some definitions of terror even seem to exclude the notion of terror being performed by legitimate state actors.⁵² State terror involves the use of extreme force by the state against a particular target. The target may be quite specific, but it is just as likely to be expressed in expansive and vague terms. While the extent of the terror is usually expressed in terms of the numbers killed, this is not the only possible strand of terror activity. Arrest and incarceration in prisons or specially designed camps, torture, the seizure of property, prolonged interrogations, harassment, and psychic terrorism aimed at attacking and destabilizing enemies’ mental well-being, could all be part of a terror campaign. There could also be a public aspect. The most sensational form of this has usually been the show trials of major figures, but at lower levels public trials were also often ⁴⁹ Peter Calvert, A Study of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 15–28. ⁵⁰ On this see Matthew Dixon & George Lawson, ‘From Revolution and Terrorism to Revolutionary Terrorism: The Case of Militant Salafism’, International Affairs 98, 6, 2022, pp. 2119–2139. ⁵¹ For one summary of the field, see Tim Wilson, ‘State Terrorism’, Erica Chenoweth, Richard English, Andreas Gopes & Stathis Kalyvas (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 331–347. Also Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy & Scott Poynting (eds), Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). ⁵² For example, see some of the discussion in ‘Theories of Terrorism: A Symposium’, Sociological Theory 22, 1, 2004, pp. 1–105 and Joseph S. Tuman, Communicating Terror. The Rhetorical Dimensions of Terrorism (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), ch. 1. For one study that does devote some attention to state terror, but in this case in terms of the US ‘war on terror’, see Mark P. Worrell, Terror. Social, Political and Economic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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common. Arrests might take place at night—this was considered preferable by the arresting forces because this was when prospective victims were most likely to be at home and most vulnerable—but they could just as easily occur in daylight. The public aspect of terror was often as important as the act itself: while the act was designed to deal with revealed enemies, the public dimension was meant as a means of frightening off undeclared and potential future enemies, the ‘pour encourager des autres’ principle. Indeed, some argue that such inducement of fear (or terror) in people is the real essence of Terror as a strategy.⁵³ This is what is meant by terror in this book: violent action (physical or psychic, and usually accompanied by terrorist rhetoric) designed to induce fear in a particular constituency.⁵⁴ It may involve a sense of uncertainty about who will be caught up in it (that is, uncertainty about its boundaries), and this may reflect the fact that the various perpetrators of terror (including such people as central political leaders, regional officials, and local policemen) have different motives or interests in carrying it out. This is evident in the fact that while state terror is terror from above, it could also have an ascendant, or ‘from below’, aspect. Participation by ordinary people in such terror campaigns could be widespread. People could act as informers, as witnesses, and as participants in public trials, meetings, and humiliations. Unlike in the terror from below that often accompanied the actual seizure of power when people could act in arbitrary ways to seize property or punish enemies, under state terror they normally functioned within the broad bounds set down by those who were running the terror. According to Lawson, a ‘campaign of terror against …opponents is not a novel feature of revolutionary states; rather, it is the norm’.⁵⁵ Brinton identified seven variables to explain the ‘reign of terror and virtue’. He believed these could interact in various ways⁵⁶: 1) The ‘habit of violence’ inherited from the pre-revolutionary period. 2) The ‘pressure of foreign and civil war’. ⁵³ For a discussion that suggests this, see Raymond D. Duvall & Michael Stohl, ‘Governance by Terror’, Michael Stohl (ed), The Politics of Terrorism (New York: Marcel Decker Inc., 1988), pp. 234–240. Also see Calvert (1986), pp. 27 & 31. ⁵⁴ Terror is a form of violence. Violence may be defined as the use of force to cause death, injury or damage, and can be committed by individuals, groups or institutions. All instances of terror are acts of violence, but not all acts of violence—for example, murder, riots, military action—would necessarily be classed as terror. For positive affirmations of the value and efficacy of violence, see Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier Books, 1950; originally published 1908) and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967; originally published 1961). A more negative view is in Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London: Allen Lane, 1970). Jean-Paul Sartre also wrote extensively on this. For example, see his Introduction in Fanon (1967). ⁵⁵ Lawson (2019), p. 31. ⁵⁶ Brinton (1965), pp. 198–203.

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3) The newness of the machinery of centralized government which, given the lack of working experience, did not work well or efficiently. 4) A time of acute economic crisis. 5) Struggles between different groups, maybe classes, which take a particularly acute form during times of revolution. 6) The personal characteristics of the leaders, including ruthlessness and an uncompromising approach. 7) The religious faith of believers. They believe they are the ‘elect’, chosen to bring about the rule of ‘virtue’ on earth, and therefore any weapon is acceptable that will further that aim. This is a useful list, suggesting that terror does not stem from any single cause. But not all scholars are convinced by such an approach. There has been a line of argument strongly advanced by many scholars similar to the last of Brinton’s points. The quest for salvation, for the achievement of a ‘reign of virtue’, for the creation of a utopia in one form or another, is seen by many authors as the root cause of state terror. One argument is that the ideals are held to be so important that any cost is worth paying (usually by others) to achieve that goal. The quest for revolutionary salvation trumps all other considerations in the eyes of the revolutionaries and therefore the constraints that would ordinarily prevent the use of terrorist means fall away.⁵⁷ This is the view that terror is rooted in the sense of rightness of the cause, which is in turn related to the ideology in which the revolutionaries believed.⁵⁸ It is the primacy of the perceived salvationist and transcendent goal that is believed to give birth to terror. In Lawson’s words, referring to the views of two other scholars, ‘the submerging of revolutionary methods, tactics, and strategies behind ideals of salvation is the proximate cause of the campaigns of terror conducted by revolutionaries from Robespierre to Mao’.⁵⁹ The essence of this view as applied to the French revolution is that the revolutionaries had a utopian plan to remake society on the basis of reason but without any experience of power they had to rely on first principles, especially Rousseau whose idea of the general will saw political opposition and pluralism as ‘intrinsically pernicious and counter-revolutionary’. Thus, the violence of 1793–1794 was inherent in the ⁵⁷ Perhaps the most influential theorist to take this point of view was Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975; originally published 1963). ⁵⁸ For an example of this view, see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution 1899–1919 (London: Fontana Press, 1992), p. 790 & 793–794. For Pipes, terror was an ‘essential element of the regime’ and ‘an instrument of governance’. Pipes (1992), pp. 789 & 790. ⁵⁹ Lawson (2019), p. 12. He is referring to John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Allen & Unwin, 2007) and Martin Malia (2006).

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ideology of 1789 and therefore in the revolution itself. Authors associated with this school include Hippolyte Taine, Augustin Cochin, and François Furet.⁶⁰ Another argument is that revolutionary violence is itself cleansing and therapeutic; it is a way of wiping away the sins of the past and of injecting into the people the values that the revolutionaries hold. The cleansing virtue of revolutionary struggle means that terror becomes ‘an emancipatory force in its own right’.⁶¹ This view has been held by revolutionaries as diverse as Maximilien Robespierre in France and Mao Zedong in China, and this has been seen by some theorists as important in generating the terror. Another argument sees terror as intrinsic to or a ‘natural’ result of revolution as a process, as stemming from the revolutionary process itself. One interpretation of this is to see terror as a result of actions from the masses in the streets. Either, as in the French revolution, it is taken up under pressure placed by the mass populace on the rulers, or as in Russia it is an extension of the revolutionary activity of the masses themselves. Important in this latter regard is the spontaneous (meaning not ordered from above) seizure of property, and the killing of property holders and authority figures by sections of the mass population.⁶² Another interpretation was based on the assumption that a revolution always faces significant opposition and that the opposition, presumably along with the uninvolved, usually outweighs support for the new regime. The new rulers find themselves in a minority position and therefore must resort to terror to maintain themselves in power.⁶³ Many have emphasized the importance of the threat to the revolution from outside the country as a significant factor in the introduction of a policy of terror.⁶⁴ This view that sees terror as a rational response to challenges faced by the new regime has been called the contingency or circumstance school. This sees the Terror as a response to foreign invasion or the threat thereof and counterrevolution, rather than being inevitably or organically linked to revolution. It was a ‘rationally calculated option’ designed to be temporary and to meet

⁶⁰ Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2015), p. 2. For example, François Furet, ‘Terror’, François Furet & Mona Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 1989), pp. 137–150. Norman Hampson, ‘From Regeneration to Terror: the Ideology of the French Revolution’, O’Sullivan (1986), pp. 49–66. ⁶¹ Lawson (2019), p. 13. ⁶² For example, see Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), pp. 520–536. ⁶³ For this argument with regard to Russia, see Figes (1997), p. 630, where he says the terror was ‘implicit in the regime from the start’. Also see Chapter 5. ⁶⁴ See the discussion in Lawson (2019), pp. 32–39.

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immediate challenges. This view in regard to the French revolution is associated with Alphonse Aulard, Albert Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, and Michel Vovelle.⁶⁵ The contingency argument is, in principle, quite different from that which sees the terror as intrinsic to the revolution itself. The terror is seen as a conscious response to challenges rather than an organic result of the revolution itself or the ideology underpinning it. This distinction has been conceptualized by one theorist in terms of ‘irrationalist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ theories of the reign of terror.⁶⁶ In his comparative study of the French and Russian revolutionary terrors, Arno Mayer advances three hypotheses regarding terror:⁶⁷ 1) The primary cause and engine are contingent circumstances. Terror was an instrument to deal with the circumstances engendering the revolution, and internal and external opposition. 2) Ideology is a necessary prerequisite, cause, and engine of terror. It reflects the need to destroy the ancien regime and counter-revolutionary opposition, and radically regenerate man and society. 3) ‘Mind-set and psychological drives of supreme revolutionary actors who embrace a categorical ideological creed to further their arrogation of power.’ Opposition is exaggerated and it is assumed to be orchestrated. He sees these explanations as intertwining with one another. While the Terror was not an inevitable outcome of the Revolution, the conditions within which the Revolution unrolled, enabled and facilitated its development. There was significant real opposition to the Revolution and the revolutionary project was at times under significant threat, but the scale of this was exaggerated by the domination of the public sphere by conspiracy theories and rumours of threat and danger. This combination of real and assumed threat constituted the basis upon which the dichotomization of political forces both made sense and gained legitimacy. For example, he argues that in France, driven by this inchoate fear and influenced by the rhetoric of the revolutionary left, the Paris crowd surged on towards acceptance of the adoption of Terror as the desired modus operandi of the government, and they pressed this position on the Convention deputies. Many of those deputies were receptive to this, particularly among the Montagnards who sought to consolidate their emergent position ⁶⁵ Tackett (2015), p. 2. ⁶⁶ Mark N. Hagopian, The Phenomenon of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974), pp. 206–207. ⁶⁷ Arno J. Mayer, The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 96.

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of political dominance by eliminating their potential and real opponents. In this sense the realpolitik of the left within the revolutionary elite coincided with the fear of the masses to place terror on the order of the day. A weakness of the above arguments over the sources of state terror is the failure to distinguish between different types of that terror. All instances of terror are simply bundled into one. However, there are three different types of terror used by revolutionary regimes, each related to a different task: 1) Revolutionary terror⁶⁸ that is part of the process of consolidating power once it has been seized. This occurs around the time that power is seized but may extend on some time after the old regime has been overthrown at the centre as the new regime consolidates its control throughout the country. It usually does not include the actual power seizure⁶⁹ but is focused on the consolidation of the regime in power, principally through the combating of opposition. It is essentially defensive. 2) Transformational terror involved in the course of imposing revolutionary change on the society. With revolution involving attempts at the significant transformation of the political, economic, and social infrastructure of the ancien regime, success usually requires the application of force, violence, and terror both to implement the change and to overcome opposition to it. Its principal purpose is the transformation of society, and therefore is positive (as opposed to purely defensive), seeking to create a new society including a new revolutionary subject (the so-called ‘new man’). 3) Inverted terror when terror is turned on the revolutionary regime itself, usually in the form of an attack by one part of the regime on another. This is the terror that is behind Vergniaud’s statement cited above. In practice, inverted terror often coincides with the broader application of terror (either revolutionary or transformational) to people outside the regime. ⁶⁸ It may be objected, with some justification, that this term could be applied to all three types of terror outlined here. However, I have chosen to use it in a more restricted sense which ties it to the events that are seen in a common-sense way as constituting the heart of revolution, the seizure of power. Certainly, all three types of terror could be revolutionary in their effect. ⁶⁹ The actual seizure of power does not always involve the application of state terror by the new revolutionary regime because before the seizure takes place, it is not actually in power. However, in those cases like the Chinese revolution where the revolutionaries ruled over territory before achieving power at the national level, it makes sense to talk about the use of state power by the revolutionary regime during the seizure of power.

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While distinct conceptually, these three types of terror often overlap with the incidence of each type also including elements of one or both of the other types. This is particularly clear with regard to revolutionary and transformational terror in that the elimination of opposition, which is the key function of revolutionary terror, may be seen to contribute to transformation, while transformational terror usually also involves dealing with opposition. And at the time of terror inversion, perceived opposition outside the regime is usually caught up in the terror, meaning that inverted terror may be coincident with revolutionary and/or transformational terror. This means that these should be seen as different forms of terror rather than different temporal stages, and will become clear in the discussion of the individual cases below. These three types of terror can be seen in terms of their direction: the first two are cases of the regime directing the terror outward from itself while in the third, that terror is inverted, directed by a section of the regime against other sections of the regime internally, although terror could simultaneously be directed outside also. The different types of terror may have a different relationship to the revolution, and at least by recognizing their differences, we should be able to get a more rounded and satisfactory explanation of the relationship between revolution and terror. This typology of types of terror bears some similarity to the conceptualization of terror found in a structural-functional analysis of terror in communist systems.⁷⁰ While arguing that terror had ‘numerous causes and consequences’ and served ‘many functions and purposes’, Alexander Dallin and George Breslauer argued that there was ‘a basic pattern of regularities that is congruent with the typical process of development of communist systems’.⁷¹ They argued that there were three stages of development of communist systems, each characterized by a different relationship to terror. The first, take-over, stage was when power was seized and the new regime consolidated its position. Terror was used to eliminate real opposition and intimidate potential opposition. The second, mobilization, stage was when the regime sought to achieve major transformation of the society, principally through agricultural collectivization and industrialization. During this stage terror was used to control and eliminate opponents, and to further the task of engineering change. During this stage too terror was turned against regime insiders ⁷⁰ Alexander Dallin & George W. Breslauer, Political Terror in Communist Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). For the view that structural-functionalism, ‘with significant modifications’, is the best theory to explain terror, see Jonathan R. Adelman, ‘Conclusions’, Jonathan R. Adelman, Terror and Communist Politics. The Role of the Secret Police in Communist States (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), p. 274. ⁷¹ Dallin & Breslauer (1970), p. 103.

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(the Soviet Great Terror and the Chinese Cultural Revolution). A third stage was called the post-mobilization stage during which less reliance was placed on coercion and terror tended to become dysfunctional. Terror was thereby seen as performing particular functions at particular times. However, in order to make this argument, Dallin and Breslauer have lumped together what I see as two different types of terror—transformational and inverted—under the one label, ‘mobilization’. They have to do this because their argument is that terror performs different functions at different times, and that during the initial stages, such terror is ‘functional’; it is only in the third stage that it becomes ‘dysfunctional’, although they do acknowledge that there may be dysfunctional aspects earlier. If the distinction was made between transformational and inverted terror, and both were included as part of the ‘breakthrough’ achieved in the mobilization stage (which is what Dallin and Breslauer do), the clear association between functional terror and development stage proposed by Dallin and Breslauer would be significantly more complicated.⁷² An important clarification about the focus of this study is necessary here, and this concerns the nature of society following communist revolutions. Some have argued that the Soviet and Chinese regimes have ruled by terror for their whole lives.⁷³ The basis of this claim is that the rule of law did not apply, that the regimes’ rulers were not constrained by the law or by the constitution but could rule arbitrarily, and do essentially what they wished. This means that the environment within which the respective populations had to live was one of continuing uncertainty, vulnerability, and fear. For the proponents of this view, that situation within which the populace found itself constituted one of terror. However, while it is true that the respective regimes were not constrained by law, it is not clear that it is particularly useful to interpret this in terms of terror. There are two principal reasons for this. First, the argument that terror was an everyday feature of communist systems obscures the very real differences that existed between the conditions of everyday life when there was no terror campaign and those when major terror campaigns were underway. For example, life in the countryside was very different during the campaigns for agricultural collectivization than it was both before and after those campaigns. The application of terror to society through a campaign created a very different feel in that society to when such campaigns were not in ⁷² It should also be recognized that Dallin and Breslauer at one point come close to arguing that terror stems from the resistance that naturally emerges to the utopian vision to which communists are committed. Dallin & Breslauer (1970), p. 57. ⁷³ For example, this assumption seems to underpin Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek & Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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existence. Seeing terror as an everyday feature obscures this difference. Second, it is not true that when not bound by formal rules the regime always operated in an arbitrary fashion. Over time, norms and patterns of governing developed that engendered a sense of predictability and normality that was very different from the situation that prevailed during the extraordinary terror campaigns. Certainly, such patterns of ruling and the public expectations that stemmed from them developed over time and therefore may have been more secure later in the regime’s life than earlier, but it also means that the populace did not live every day in fear of a rampant, arbitrary state, as was the case for at least some of them during the terror campaigns. This does not mean that the communist states were law-governed or operated in the regularized way that many non-communist states usually did. Rather, it is to say that terror was an extraordinary phenomenon, not an everyday event. Similarly excluded from this analysis are claimed cases of genocide. In both the Soviet Union and China claims have been made about the way in which these regimes pursued policies designed to inflict genocide on, respectively, Ukrainians, and on Tibetans and Uighurs. This has not been dealt with here as a particular form of terror (although the Ukrainian case is discussed in terms of transformational terror) both because of the lack of agreement about whether state actions constitute genocide in these cases and, more importantly, because of the way in which genocide has been shown to result from a variety of sorts of situation, including revolution.⁷⁴ The principal focus in this book is on the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions. The French and Russian revolutions are, following Brinton, often considered along with the English and American revolutions, and often known as the ‘great’ revolutions, although some question the inclusion of the English and American revolutions; others have a different set.⁷⁵ However, the argument about the relationship between revolution and terror essentially stemmed from discussions of the French Revolution, and was then applied to the subsequent Russian and Chinese revolutions. Given this genealogy and the fact that this book is about the relationship between revolution and terror, it makes sense to concentrate attention upon these revolutions. But it has been about the Russian revolution, and in particular Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, ⁷⁴ Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil. A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). ⁷⁵ For example, the Czech ‘Hussite’, Turkish ‘national’ and Chinese ‘communist’ revolutions are included in Jaroslav Krejci, Great Revolutions Compared. The Search for a Theory (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983). Brinton’s work was published in its original form before the Chinese revolution of 1949. Pincus (2009) believes the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England was more important than that of 1640.

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that recent contemporary comment has primarily focused in arguing the sort of link between terror and revolution implied in ‘the revolution eats its children’ epigram, and therefore the Russian case is treated in more detail than the French or Chinese in the following analysis. The role of terror in each of these revolutions will be analysed in detail, and the reasons for it compared. The study will also look briefly at the question of whether the experience of terror in these great revolutions remains relevant to the new forms of revolution emerging in the post-Cold War world. Chapter 2 outlines the shape of state terror in the French Revolution, covering the 1789–1794 period. Chapters 3 and 4 do a similar analysis of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the former from 1917 until the end of the 1930s and the latter from the end of the 1920s until around 1970. Chapter 5 explains the origins of the different types of terror in the three countries, seeking to highlight similarities and differences. Chapter 6 compares the three revolutions in terms of their experience of terror, and looks at the generalizability of the lessons from the great revolutions for contemporary times.

2 The French Revolution The French Revolution is widely seen as, along with the American, being historically of great significance because of the way it is seen to have ushered in democracy as an acceptable form of government. It did this not because of the political institutions that characterized it—after all, it degenerated into a military dictatorship under Napoleon—but because of the principles it espoused through the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But it was also significant in another, less happy way. In the words of Hugh Gough, ‘For the first time in history terror was used in the name of popular sovereignty, in the name of the people, to kill opponents of democracy’.¹ It is this terrorist aspect of the revolution that is the focus here, and which defines the relevant period of our analysis, 1789–1794. In France the revolutionary shift of power was into a broadly-based assembly within which a smaller group, the Jacobins, were ultimately but temporarily able to seize control and implement the Terror. However, this did not lead to the stabilization of power, something not achieved until Napoleon took over at the end of the century. While revolutionary and transformational terror were both evident virtually from the outset, inverted terror became important only after the Jacobins had established their dominance. On 5 September 1793, under pressure from the sans-culottes, the National Convention declared terror ‘the order of the day’, although it did not follow this declaration up with an actual decree. Nevertheless, this effectively made terror official government policy. This was not the first time since the opening of the revolution that terror had been evident in the way that the revolution unrolled. Much of the course of the revolution involved terror and there was a process whereby the accumulation of this over time created the momentum whereby the adoption of terror as official policy seemed a logical development. In the words of David Andress, ‘The process of the emergence of “the Terror” is a process of the gradual acceptance that extraordinary measures were needed for institutional survival, the steady implementation of more extreme versions of such measures, and the gathering implosion of revolutionary political culture ¹ Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3.

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0002

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under the weight of their consequences’.² The policy of terror was therefore not an abrupt change of course but the culmination of the progressive increase in the level of confrontation with opposition.³ Underpinning this was a prerevolutionary tradition of spontaneous popular violence, such as rural protests and food riots in the cities, which not only continued through the revolution but expanded in scope and political significance. This gradualness and continuity is one factor in the absence of clear sequencing between revolutionary, transformational, and inverted terror; they overlapped considerably.

Revolutionary and Transformational Terror The opening passages of the French revolution involved relatively little violence. The economic crisis faced by the French state in the late 1780s, brought on by participation in the wars of the eighteenth century including the American war of independence, but reflective of much deeper problems with the domestic financial basis of the state, encouraged King Louis XVI, after exploring a number of other options, to convene the traditional assembly, the Estates General. This had last met in 1614 and must have seemed to Louis and his advisers as a safe way of locking society in behind a resolution of this crisis. In its traditional form, the Estates General had comprised three houses, one each for men of the first estate (clergy), the second estate (nobles), and the third estate (all others), each voting separately on issues. However, when the Estates General convened on 5 May 1789, the deputies elected to the third estate, which in December 1788 had been doubled in size (thereby bringing them to the same size as the first two estates combined), refused to operate along traditional lines. They tried to persuade the other two estates to meet and vote in common. When this was unsuccessful, they declared themselves a National Assembly (on 17 June), invited the other two orders to join them, and three days later vowed not to disband until they had provided France with a constitution (the ‘Tennis Court Oath’). At the end of June at the king’s urging, the other two estates reluctantly joined the new Assembly; both the king and the members of these two estates were persuaded in part by the mobilization of citizens in Paris in support of the Assembly. However, in late June and early July troops had been ordered to Paris and Versailles by the king, a ² David Andress, ‘The Course of the Terror, 1793–94’, Peter McPhee (ed), A Companion to the French Revolution (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), p. 295. ³ This has persuaded two authors to argue against use of the term ‘the Terror’ (with the definite article and capital T) for the period after 5 September 1793. Michel Biard & Marisa Linton, Terror. The French Revolution and Its Demons (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), esp. pp. 1–7.

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development that was interpreted as being a prelude to a royal crackdown. This fuelled further popular mobilization, which soon became violent, reflected most spectacularly in the storming of the central prison, the Bastille, on 14 July. In response, the king backed down, recognized the National Assembly’s authority, and ordered the withdrawal of the troops.⁴ The National Assembly (which soon began to call itself the National Constituent Assembly), and its lineal descendants the Legislative Assembly (from 1 October 1791) and the National Convention (from 21 September 1792), became a major vehicle of the revolution.⁵ Although the clubs that emerged in Paris and the mass populace, especially the sans-culottes in Paris (these are discussed below), were both significant shapers of revolutionary events at different times, the legislation through which the revolution advanced emanated from these assemblies, usually following substantial discussion, although after September 1793 the Convention’s principal executive organ the Committee of Public Safety was the real driver. As a result, the revolution had a decidedly legalistic tone. This does not mean that violence and terror were not present for much of the time, but that much of the state terror that did occur actually had a formal legal basis. Furthermore, what the actions of the Legislative Assembly constituted was the, over time, transfer of power and authority away from the crown into this organ of popular sovereignty. So the initial revolutionary passage of power effectively occurred in part through parliamentary forms. Until late 1792 there were essentially four power centres of the revolution in Paris: 1) The successive assemblies. The Legislative Assembly and National Convention were elected on a wide but not universal franchise, and comprised mainly people from the middle class, with few representatives of the nobility or the working or peasant classes. 2) Clubs. Deputies in the Assembly and Convention were generally members of one of the clubs that grew up in Paris early in the revolution— Jacobins, Girondins, Feuillants, Cordeliers (see below)—and these acted as important venues within which deputies could discuss issues and generate support. The Jacobin Club, ultimately the most significant of the clubs, was an important radicalizing influence. Within the ⁴ The king had been informed by military commanders that they could not guarantee the loyalty of the troops if they were called upon to fire on the demonstrators. William Doyle, The French Revolution. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 42. ⁵ For the composition of these assemblies, see Colin Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (Harlowe: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1990), pp. 167–168.

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Convention the deputies were organized into three broad factions, the Montagnards (mainly Jacobins), the Girondins, and the Plain or Swamp (Marais). 3) The king, his court, and associated nobles. Until his arrest in mid-1792 effectively removed him as an actor, the king struggled to maintain the power he believed was vested in his office. Although from September 1791 he publicly accepted a future as a constitutional monarch, he continued to harbour aspirations to restore absolutism, or something closer to it than was envisaged by other political actors. His power lay in the traditional prestige of the office, his constitutional power to appoint ministers and to sign (or not) decrees of the Assembly, and his believed links with foreign forces. He ceased to be an autonomous actor from August 1792. 4) The Paris streets. The ordinary populace, soon known generally as sansculottes, had long exercised influence in French politics through its ability to take to the streets over a variety of issues, chiefly food supply. This capacity to mount demonstrations, riots and even undertake what were in effect uprisings was enhanced during the revolution by the way in which control over the main administrative organs of the capital—the Paris Commune and the individual sections (or administrative divisions) of the city—fell into their hands. This provided for a greater degree of organization and coordination than had been possible before. During the revolution they were a significant political actor, both through direct action like demonstrations and riots, and by placing pressure upon the assemblies. Instances of the intervention in elite politics of the mobilized masses came to be called ‘revolutionary journées’. The dynamic among these four was central to the course of the revolution up until late 1792, and among the first (and its executive organs), second, and the fourth after that date. The first episode that threatened major violence followed immediately on the heels of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the so-called ‘Great Fear’.⁶ In part stimulated by the opening of the prison that resulted from the attack on the Bastille and building on fears of hunger as a result of the 1788–1789 weather,⁷ this was a sense of fear gripping the countryside that brigands were on the loose seeking to destroy crops and pillage local communities. ⁶ On this see Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789. Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (New York: Schocken Books, 1973). ⁷ Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2015), pp. 52–53.

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In some places people fled into the forest at the reported approach of such bands, in others they established self-defence units to protect themselves, even though in fact there appeared to be no such bands in existence. The power of rumour, which was to be of continuing importance throughout the revolutionary period, thereby showed itself to be an important factor shaping events. But although there were no bands attacking peasant communities or their crops, there were groups of vagrants and armed peasants active in attacking what they saw as symbols of feudal power, including the estates of some of the nobility. The object of such attacks, the symbols of feudal power, reflects the widespread conviction that the feudal duties and obligations that many of the peasants still bore were particularly unfair and onerous; it was also rumoured that the (non-existent) attacks on the peasantry were provoked by aristocrats with the aim of either seizing the peasants’ food stocks or sowing disorganization in the revolution.⁸ Although in the words of one scholar there was ‘little indiscriminate destruction or looting, except where lords offered resistance’⁹, there seems to have been little personal violence¹⁰ and the situation in most towns remained relatively quiet, but fear both of revolutionary upheaval and of personal danger spread throughout rural areas. This waned by the end of August 1789 both because of the increased demands of fieldwork for the bringing in of the harvest and because the National Assembly (which was dominated by property-owners but not possessors of feudal rights) formally decided to abolish feudalism in all of its aspects (the so-called ‘August decrees’). Despite its short duration, the Great Fear highlighted the potential threat to the established way of life that the Revolution constituted, the potency of rumour, and conspiracy theories, and for the decision-makers in Paris it reinforced the potential danger they believed to lie in unbridled popular mobilization. Popular mobilization was central to the revolutionary process from the outset as reflected graphically in the fall of the Bastille. As noted above, the royal attempt to cow the Third Estate and possibly crush the nascent National Assembly through the calling up of troops in mid-1789 was blunted by the popular rising that culminated in the seizure of the Bastille.¹¹ The power of popular mobilization was again dramatically illustrated in October 1789. The

⁸ David Andress, The Terror. The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), pp. 27–28; Tackett (2015), pp. 58–59. ⁹ William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 115. ¹⁰ Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789–1799 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 57–58. ¹¹ On this see Donald Sutherland, ‘Urban Crowds, Riot, Utopia, and Massacres, 1789–92’, McPhee (2013), pp. 232–237.

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king had been reluctant to accept either the anti-feudal measures (see below) or the principles of a new constitution enshrining a constitutional (and therefore restricted) monarchy adopted by the National Assembly. In early October there were reports of the arrival of new military forces at Versailles where the king was located. In response thousands of Parisian women marched to Versailles, invaded the palace and the hall where the Assembly met, and demanded that the king move to Paris. This he did, followed by the Assembly. The streets were clearly exercising their potential muscle and, not only the king, but many deputies were wary of it. This was reflected in the Assembly’s enactment on 21 October 1789 of martial law against tumults, and their restriction in the constitution of political rights to substantial taxpayers. However, some of the more radical deputies, such as Jean-François-Marie Goupilleau and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, saw such mobilization in a more positive light. One, Gilbert Romme, even argued that violence could have a role in revolutionary transformation and that terror could be a necessary part of this,¹² but this view was not at this stage widespread. Most deputies remained wary of the streets. As noted above, in the response to the attacks on feudal remnants in the countryside, the National Assembly decreed the abolition of all feudal rights and obligations.¹³ Motivated by the fear that the country was in danger of collapsing into anarchy, the deputies passed a series of sweeping measures that both transformed France and swept away many of the feudal struts of the old monarchical system. Feudal dues were abolished and many of the privileges enjoyed by the old nobility were revoked, including the venality of offices. Free justice and the equality of taxation were decreed, and the tithes whereby the clergy had been supported were abolished. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen enshrining revolutionary liberal principles was adopted on 26 August 1789, and preparations were set in train to establish a constitutional monarchy, to be dominated by substantial men of property, through the writing of a new constitution. This was, however, accompanied by a commitment to repay all the debts of the absolute monarchy as well as compensation to those who lost out as a result of the revolution (such as the holders of venal offices), something that in the event could not be sustained by the national treasury. They sought to resolve this financial conundrum in November in part by nationalizing Church land; this was also aimed at breaking the economic power of the Church. This land was to be sold to support an issue of state bonds (assignats) which would be used to redeem the debts incurred. ¹² Tackett (2015), p. 68. ¹³ On the rural revolution, see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 118–128.

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In what was seen by many as a continuing attack on the Church, in the middle of 1790 the Assembly decreed the reorganization of the Church, including the transformation of the clergy into paid employees of the state (the so-called Civil Constitution of the Clergy) and the reduction of the Pope to a purely symbolic role. In November 1790 the Assembly imposed an oath of obedience to the state on the clergy, with any refusing to give this oath (so-called ‘refractories’ or ‘non-jurors’) forbidden to exercise any religious functions; some half of the priests, including almost all of the bishops, refused to take this oath,¹⁴ while in spring 1791 when the Pope denounced the changes made to the Church and the seizure of Church property, including Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin (two regions within France that had been under Vatican control for four centuries), many of those who had given the oath retracted their action. They were supported in this by substantial parts of the population, especially in the west, northeast and south of the country. By early 1792 refractories were widely distrusted as potential counter-revolutionary traitors, and in August were given 15 days to leave France on pain of arrest and deportation to Guyana. The immediate result of this assault on the Church was the outbreak of violence in many parts of the country, usually on a local level as supporters of the new measures and those who disagreed attacked one another, and the respective clergymen. But there was also a more fundamental effect of the assault on the Church. This was the crystallization of a clear line of division running through the country that was not class based.¹⁵ The Revolution was clearly something that was directed against the interests of the upper levels of society, the king, nobility, and those around the court, while purporting to represent the interests of the vast mass of ordinary citizens. This class division was complicated by the dispute over religion, which saw the rallying around the issue of the Church by all of the emergent counter-revolutionary forces— pro-monarchists, many of the aristocracy and elements of the military and clergy—and gave them an issue that was not one of immediate self-interest. It therefore gave to the anti-revolution side a principled basis upon which to oppose the Revolution, and one that could be used to seek to mobilize popular support in the way that a defence of traditional hierarchy and privilege could not. But what this also did, and which was crucial for the unrolling of the terror, was to construct a framework whereby national loyalty became coterminous with support for the Revolution; those who opposed the Revolution ¹⁴ Andress (2005), p. 31. ¹⁵ One student of the revolution has referred to the imposition of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as the moment that ‘fatally fractured the Revolution’, McPhee (2002), p. 76.

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were showing their loyalty to a foreign monarch (the Pope) and were therefore traitors to France. Patriots should take the sacrament from ‘constitutional’ priests (those who had taken the oath of loyalty), while those who were ministered to by refractories were thereby categorized as opposed to the Revolution. This marked the symbolic coalescence of the country and the Revolution, and injected national patriotism into the heart of the revolutionary process. This is what enabled the opposition ultimately to come to be termed ‘enemies of the people’.¹⁶ This fusing of the Revolution and the nation gained strength in mid-1791. In June, spurred by popular mobilization outside the palace, the king and his family fled towards the border,¹⁷ hoping to join the anti-revolutionary forces organizing around the émigrés that were gathering there. Although he was stopped at Varennes and returned to Paris, his action brought a number of things into sharp relief. First, before fleeing Paris he had penned a letter in which he denounced the Revolution and renounced all of the undertakings he had hitherto given. The spectre of secret domestic enemies, saying one thing but believing another, was thereby given substance, and henceforth the level of belief in fear of conspiracies escalated.¹⁸ Second, his action fuelled the drive among some (including the Paris populace) for the replacement of the monarchy by a republic. Most of the deputies to the Assembly rejected this, but the radical Cordelier Club mounted a petition to bring about a republic. Crowds gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris to resist the reinstatement of the king and to sign this petition. The National Assembly, which had agreed to maintain the king as part of a shift to a constitutional monarchy, declared the meeting illegal and the National Guard was sent to disperse the crowd. The crowd was fired on by the National Guard, resulting in the ‘Champ de Mars massacre’ (17 July 1791). Third, the violence unleashed on the crowd at the Champ de Mars was sanctioned by the patriotic majority in the National Assembly, the first-time overt state-sponsored violence was used against the citizenry by the revolutionary regime. Over the following months repressive action—martial law, arbitrary arrests, increased press surveillance—against republicans was maintained in what has been called a dry run for the Terror.¹⁹ Fourth, a recognition that increased change was necessary to consolidate revolutionary gains ¹⁶ Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right. Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 251. ¹⁷ This was stimulated by the king’s reluctance to take the sacrament from constitutional priests. Doyle (2001), p. 47. ¹⁸ Timothy Tackett, ‘Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792’, American Historical Review 105, 3, 2000, pp. 691–713. ¹⁹ Tackett (2015), pp. 117–119.

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and that this would involve higher levels of conflict as counter-revolution became widespread. Fifth, the king’s intention in his flight to Varennes was to join up with forces gathering at the border organized by his brothers and other émigrés with the aim of overthrowing the Revolution and restoring the ancien regime. Following the failure of the king’s flight, thousands of army officers deserted from the French army and joined the émigré conspirators, hoping to return home at the head of armies that would overthrow the Revolution. The role the émigrés hoped to play, with the assistance of foreign powers, seemed to symbolize the danger posed to the Revolution by these elements of the old regime, and the increased vulnerability of France in the face of hostile powers who those émigrés (especially the king’s two brothers, Artois and Provence) had been trying to mobilize into the struggle. The fear of cooperation and unity between these internal opponents and those outside was acute, and strengthened the fear of internal hidden enemies, those who publicly supported the revolution but secretly opposed it. Sixth, the king’s flight was interpreted by other European monarchs as evidence that the Revolution posed a threat to the institution of the monarchy itself. This was given a concrete form by the Pillnitz Declaration of 27 August 1791 in which the Habsburg Emperor and the King of Prussia threatened invasion.²⁰ The threat of foreign intervention loomed while fears about hidden enemies domestically highlighted by the king’s flight escalated. This difficult situation was exacerbated in the eyes of the deputies, who were the real decision-makers at this time, by the pressure that they were coming under from the streets, pressure that was only enhanced by the ‘Champ de Mars massacre’. The masses in the streets of the capital were an active and autonomous actor throughout the revolution. They were mobilized by speakers from among the deputies, but they also acted of their own volition, under the urging of leaders that emerged from their ranks and came to dominate the administrative organs of the capital, the Commune, and the sections (respectively the municipal and local governments). Called from mid-1792 the sans-culottes, they were crucial at various times of the revolutionary process. Some of them attended meetings of the successive assemblies, either sitting in the galleries from where they could watch proceedings or surrounding the building so that deputies had to pass through their ranks to gain entry and exit from the meeting, with implicit threat the message of their presence. They had been responsible for the attack on the Bastille in July 1789. ²⁰ The two monarchs had been induced to issue this by the French king’s two brothers, who were in the emigration, Artois, and Provence.

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On 5–6 October 1789, women had marched to Versailles and forced both the king and the Assembly to move to Paris, in April 1791 crowds prevented the king from leaving the city for his holiday residence, and in mid-1791 they were loud in their calls for an end to the monarchy, resulting in the ‘Champ de Mars massacre’. Marches, riots, and demonstrations were common, and these always involved increased pressure on the deputies, inevitably for them to move in a more radical direction than they would otherwise have done. This continuing mobilization made the deputies feel under pressure; while they acknowledged that the support of the populace was crucial to the Revolution’s gains, and especially in isolating the émigrés, they were also cognisant of how their own power was dependent upon the continued support of the people. By the autumn of 1791, most Assembly deputies were members of one of the clubs that had sprung up essentially to organize those deputies of common views.²¹ The Jacobins (or Societies of the Friends of the Constitution)²² originally met in May 1789, over time developed a large number of provincial affiliates, and became a major radical force of the revolution.²³ The Feuillants broke away from the Jacobins in July 1791 over the latter’s support for a republic but their support for a constitutional monarchy (and the secret negotiations members of the club conducted with the king) rendered them increasingly irrelevant and the club closed in August 1792. The Girondins (in 1791–1792, more commonly known as Brissotins) were also originally part of the Jacobins, formally splitting from that club in autumn 1792 and leaving it (the Jacobins) dominated by militants.²⁴ The Girondins were increasingly outflanked on the left until by the end of 1792, they had effectively become the right wing of the National Convention. The Cordeliers, founded in May 1790 and led by Georges Danton and Jean-Paul Marat, had in its membership radical activists, journalists, and municipal politicians, and took up an ultra-radical position in ²¹ For useful articles on the clubs, see François Furet & Mona Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 1989). ²² Later renamed Friends of Liberty and Equality. For a study of the Jacobin Club, see Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror. Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and the trilogy by Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution. The First Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution. The Middle Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution 1793–1795 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). ²³ For an argument about stages in the development of the Jacobins, see Linton (2013), pp. 6–8. For the limits of the network, see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 145–146. On the strengthening of the Jacobin position in the National Assembly, see Bailey Stone, The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited. A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 221–229. ²⁴ Kennedy (1988), p. 297. He refers to Robespierre, Bentabole, Chabot, Collot d’Herbois, BillaudVarenne, Tallien, and Merlin de Thionville as militants.

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1793 before being closed in spring 1794. The clubs were really debating societies where members discussed and worked out issues, usually before entering the Assembly, but they lacked discipline and were not like modern political parties. The clubs, and individual deputies, differed on key issues, with factionalism rife among the deputies.²⁵ In the second half of 1791, with the increasing sense of danger from foreign opponents of the Revolution, pro-war sentiment gained strength among the deputies. The Brissotins/Girondins were supporters of this, seeing the French Revolution in an international context as having the responsibility to spread the freedom and equality for which it stood to the other oppressed peoples of Europe. This was one reason foreign monarchs saw the Revolution to be a potential challenge to their continuing rule. For some other deputies, foreign war may have been seen as a way of dampening down popular mobilization; war as a means of getting people to rally around the flag and forget internal grievances is a tried and tested strategy. The king too looked favourably on war, seeing it as a potential way of mobilizing foreign support to overthrow the revolution and restore his power, and probably with this in mind in March 1792 he appointed a Girondin-led ministry headed by Charles Dumouriez.²⁶ In any event, and despite the reservations about the capacity of the French army by some people including Maximilien Robespierre, on 20 April 1792 war was declared on Austria and two months later, Prussia declared war on France; in February–March 1793 war was declared on Britain, Spain, and Holland. The danger that had been seen to be posed by émigré and international opposition before now became manifest as open conflict broke out. War cemented the fusion between the Revolution and the nation; the survival of the Revolution depended upon victory in the war. In this way, critics of what had been achieved domestically were now automatically cast as traitors, a re-categorization that clearly facilitated resort to terror. Three effects flowed from the outbreak of war. First, it placed increased and continuing pressure on the Revolution, especially at those times of military setback when the possibility of defeat by foreign forces raised the spectre of the reversal of the Revolution and conquest of France. Second, it heightened the search for internal enemies who might sabotage the war effort and turned the enemies of the Revolution into traitors (also see below). Girondin speakers at the time noted the way war would enable the identification of ²⁵ On this see Tackett (2015), pp. 146–159. ²⁶ On the nature of the cabinet, see Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2001; originally published 1962), pp. 218–220. For a list of ministers in the different ministries over the life of the Revolution, see Jones (1990), pp. 78–81.

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traitors who could then be executed,²⁷ a line of argument perilously close to a rejection of all right of criticism. Third, it embittered relations between Robespierre’s supporters in the Jacobin Club and the Girondins who were ardent supporters of the war.²⁸ Robespierre argued that the real danger to the Revolution lay within France and that waging external war could only strengthen such fifth column forces. The bitterness of this dispute poisoned relations within the revolutionary elite, thereby contributing to the instability of that group, and laid the foundations for the later inversion of terror. The outbreak of war also revitalized popular revolution while at the same time giving increased hope to the opponents of revolution that the Revolution might be defeated. At the same time that pro-war sentiment had been rising among the deputies, many also believed that the best way of dampening down popular mobilization was through a combination of repressive measures and the stabilization of politics that it was believed a new constitution would bring. Accordingly, a new constitution was introduced in September 1791, providing for a constitutional monarchy. The king accepted the constitution, probably as a holding operation until the hoped for foreign assistance arrived.²⁹ New elections were held in September 1791 for a new Legislative Assembly to replace the National Constituent Assembly that had completed its task of writing the constitution.³⁰ The elections seemed to give a strong position in the new body to the Feuillants.³¹ But in practice the elections changed little. The increasing suspicion of internal enemies was reflected in the November 1791 establishment of a new surveillance committee in the Legislative Assembly to examine crimes that threatened ‘harm to the nation’ (‘lese-nation’), a conception with a very broad notion of political treason,³² in January 1792 the death penalty was introduced for treason, and the following month émigré property was nationalized. Widespread protests against food shortages unrolled in the first three months of 1792, and early defeats by the Austrian forces increased the temperature, including exacerbating conflict between factions

²⁷ Gough (2010), p. 21. ²⁸ On the debates about this in the Jacobin Club, see Kennedy (1988), pp. 126–127. ²⁹ Andress (2005), pp. 58–59. ³⁰ For a summary of the September 1791 Constitution, see Jones (1990), pp. 66–69. On some issues surrounding the Constitution, see Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 11. The king accepted this Constitution, although given his weakened position following his flight to Varennes, he had little choice. ³¹ According to Kennedy (1988), p. 231, there were 130 Paris Jacobins, 236 Feuillants, and 350 from the ‘Centre’ in the newly-elected Assembly. ³² Andress (2005), p. 61.

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in the Legislative Assembly (especially between the Jacobins and Girondins³³) because it became apparent to many that those who had been most anxious for war seemed unable to wage it successfully; Robespierre continually attacked the Girondins in the Assembly for their responsibility for and conduct of the war, and widespread nepotism in government. The war also did little to dampen popular activity. As the military situation on the frontier continued to deteriorate, rumours circulated about the way in which French defeats were being engineered by the king and his émigré and domestic supporters, thereby stimulating increasing anti-monarchical sentiment in the streets and increased organization among the militant section of the Paris population, the sans-culottes.³⁴ Despite his reinstatement as constitutional monarch following his flight to Varennes,³⁵ the king’s obvious duplicity and treachery towards the Revolution was evident to both the crowds in the Paris streets and the more radical deputies. In December 1791 he had vetoed two decrees of the Assembly, one against émigrés and the other introducing the loyalty oath for priests. When war had broken out with Austria, given Louis’ familial connection to Austria—his wife, Marie Antoinette, was the sister of the Austrian monarch (the Holy Roman Emperor)—there was widespread suspicion that he may have encouraged the war in order to bring an end to the Revolution. On 13 June, the king sacked the Girondin ministers he had appointed three months earlier. A week later a popular demonstration by the sans-culottes against the sacking spilled over into the royal palace, the Tuileries. Almost three weeks later on 10 August, reinforced by armed detachments from some of the provinces, (so-called fédérés) the sans-culottes rose again; invading the palace and coming into conflict with the Swiss Guards who were defending it. This was the bloodiest day of the revolution so far, with some 800 Swiss guards and 376 of the protesters killed.³⁶ The sans-culottes stormed the royal palace, leading to the king being taken into detention by the Assembly, which now suspended the monarchy and agreed to convene a new Convention to draft a republican constitution. The following month (2–6 September) with rumours that the Prussians were approaching Paris, the populace carried out massacres in the prisons (the so-called ‘September massacres’), responding to the fear that newlyreleased prisoners would engage in treachery and would go on a rampage;

³³ Tackett (2015), p. 174. ³⁴ On the problematic nature of the term, see Linton (2013), pp. 65 fn. 60 & 105–106. ³⁵ Perhaps because he was seen as a symbol of stability in the face of popular restiveness. McPhee (2002), p. 90. ³⁶ Gough (2010), p. 22.

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fear of criminal elements and the fifth column counter-revolution coalesced. Some 1,400 were killed, usually beaten to death with at best a cursory hearing by ad hoc tribunals.³⁷ The power of the streets reflected in the peak levels of riot and insurrection in summer 1792 also projected putative competitors to the Legislative Assembly onto the scene in the form of the Paris Commune and the sections of the capital; from November 1791 when Jérome Pétion de Villeneuve became Mayor of Paris, the Jacobins notionally controlled the administration of the city.³⁸ Popular mobilization had also forced the Assembly to move against the king and it had ensured that the government would take no action to suppress the prison massacres. Even French military victories in September could not quell the revolutionary turbulence. This was the most striking illustration yet for the deputies of the dangers of popular mobilization. Now the question of the king had to be resolved. The ‘September massacres’ widened differences within the revolutionary elite; Robespierre had encouraged the popular action, the Girondins had opposed it, thereby effectively sidelining themselves, undermining the support they had enjoyed in the Paris streets (which shifted decisively to the more radical Jacobins³⁹), and rendering themselves vulnerable to expulsion from the Convention, which was ultimately to come about in mid-1793. Popular agitation and violence continued for some weeks, but what was clear was that the monarchy was at an end.⁴⁰ On 22 September 1792 France was declared a republic and the royal family was taken into custody. However, the revolutionaries were undecided about what should be done with the king. Most accepted that he was guilty of treason, and although the Montagnards (see below) believed he should be executed without trial because the people had already judged him to be guilty, most deputies favoured holding a trial, although some Girondins argued that he could not be tried because his person was inviolable.⁴¹ A trial was held⁴² in the newly-elected National Convention in December–January, with the death sentence being passed on 16 January and confirmed two days later. In a major public act of revolutionary terror by the state, the king was sent to the guillotine on 21 January 1793. The queen, ³⁷ Doyle (2001), p. 51. ³⁸ Andress (2005), p. 61. ³⁹ George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 102–103. ⁴⁰ On the role of popular mobilization, including forces from the provinces, in the fall of the king, see Sutherland (2013), pp. 238–243. ⁴¹ They also called, unsuccessfully, for the judgement on the king to be referred to a national referendum. ⁴² On the trial, see Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution. Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974) and Barry M. Shapiro, ‘The Case Against the King, 1789–93’, McPhee (2013), pp. 107–120.

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Marie Antoinette, was tried and sent to the guillotine nine months later on 16 October 1793. The killing of the king was probably inevitable, in the sense that the Revolution would never feel secure while the former monarch lived. Regardless of whether he actively led the opposition to the revolution, he was symbolic of it. And while it may be true that his death did not start the terror because it was not immediately followed by a wave of other executions, and because his case was clearly considered exceptional,⁴³ the execution of such a high status figure could be seen to have been the breaching of an unspoken injunction: if the head of state could be killed for the ‘public good’, there seemed little rationale for denying this punishment to others lower on the social or political ladder. This was soon realized in the abolition of the principle of deputies’ inviolability. The principle that deputies should be inviolable from arrest or prosecution had been asserted by Mirabeau on 23 June 1789 as a defence against the absolute monarchy, and was confirmed in the Constitution of 1791. The principle came under pressure in December 1792 when the Girondins sought unsuccessfully to have a member of the Montagnards who was a cousin of the king exiled, but they were more successful in April 1793 when they persuaded the Convention to decree that it could indict any deputy suspected of collusion with the enemy ‘regardless of the inviolability of a representative’.⁴⁴ With the principle of inviolability thereby compromised, all deputies were rendered potentially vulnerable. This was a crucial step in the inversion of terror against the political elite, something the Girondins had made possible and were to be significantly affected by. The fate of the king also illustrated one other aspect of the Revolution: his fate was decided, not by the revolutionary leadership alone, or by the sans-culottes. It was the result of interaction between the two: of revolution from below and revolution from above. This interaction, reflecting a sort of dual power, was crucial throughout the Revolution. The king’s execution may have removed the chief symbol of royal power from the scene, but it did not lessen tensions in Paris. The early defeats at the hands of the Austrians were blamed on domestic scapegoats, both linked to the court and separate from it. In May 1792 all foreigners in Paris had been placed under surveillance and a measure was passed allowing the deportation of any refractory priest denounced by 20 citizens. And in an effort to avoid a coup, the king’s special bodyguard was disbanded, and it was decided to send all regular troops in and around Paris to the front, to be replaced by troops sent in from ⁴³ Gough (2010), p. 25. ⁴⁴ Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 97 & 102–104.

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the provinces (called the fédérés). On 17 August an extraordinary tribunal was established to try political crimes, and four days later the guillotine claimed its first political victim.⁴⁵ This was an important step in the development of revolutionary terror. Paranoia prevailed in Paris; the Assembly was in disarray following the popular offensive against the Tuileries and power had devolved in the city to the Paris Commune, large numbers of ‘traitors’ were arrested, and fear rose when news arrived at the end of August that the Prussians had invaded French territory and were thought to be on the way to Paris. And in August the leading general the Marquis de Lafayette defected to the Austrians. Within this context, the demise of the king appears inevitable. The introduction of the republic on 22 September 1792 and the killing of the king on 21 January 1793 strengthened opposition to the Revolution. On the part of domestic opponents (including the émigrés) these symbolized recognition that compromise with the Revolution was impossible. The destruction of this central pillar of the ancien regime was a sort of crossing of the Rubicon whereby all realized that there was no going back. The whole future of France seemed to be up for grabs, and therefore no weapons in the struggle should be ruled out. The king’s demise also weakened the Girondins by demonstrating the limits of their power, and in the Convention opened the way for the members of the Plain/Swamp (see below) to move in the direction of more hardline positions. Furthermore, the levels of violence in mid-1792 and the despatch of the king lowered the threshold of acceptable violence. The king’s execution also reverberated internationally, and in the face of increased hostility (and French battle-field success from September to March), war was declared on the British, Dutch, and Spanish in February and March 1793, followed by setbacks on the battlefield as the Austrians and Prussians pressed their attacks. At this time a mass levee of recruits for the army was announced, something that had significant consequences in the Vendée region in the west of the country (see below), and a series of emergency measures were introduced. These created the framework for inverted terror. The killing of the king was a major step in the consolidation in power of the revolutionary regime because it represented the decisive rejection of monarchy as a potential way forward and the removal of a potentially potent symbol of counter-revolution. As such, it was a decisive, public act of terror that could be classed as both revolutionary and transformational. Up until this time there had been only limited application of state terror. The continuing measures against the Church and the refractory clergy, and the ‘Champ ⁴⁵ Doyle (1989), p. 190.

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de Mars massacre’ were both major instances of state violence, although the second was paradoxically directed against some of the Revolution’s more radical supporters. The former was both revolutionary and transformational, directed against a major opponent of the regime and at the same time significantly changing the political, economic, and ideological structure of the society. Most acts of terror were actually undertaken by the populace rather than state organs, and although much of this was spontaneous in the sense of not being directed by the authorities, the radicalization of politics in the Assembly/Convention (as well as instances when it was deemed to be not radical enough) did act as a significant stimulus to popular mobilization. However, the state played a more direct role in the terror from this point on.

Inverted Terror The groundwork for the inversion of the terror beginning in 1793 was laid late in 1792 to early 1793. At this time the Convention, driven by the Montagnards and reacting to the crisis and panic stemming from widespread popular mobilization—including food riots in Paris, and riots and demonstrations elsewhere (especially in the Vendée) over military conscription—introduced a series of measures that would underpin the future Terror:⁴⁶ • 2 October 1792: Creation of the Committee for General Security⁴⁷ with vaguely defined police powers. It was effectively an executive organ of the Convention, although after September 1793 it was overshadowed by the Committee of Public Safety. It comprised between 10 and 20 members. • 4 December 1792: Application of the death penalty to anyone supporting the restoration of the monarchy or any other form of political arrangement detrimental to the sovereignty of the people. Twelve days later the same penalty was applied to those who sought to destroy the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. • 21 February 1793: Amalgamation of volunteer and line regiments in the army, thereby injecting into the army elements from the streets that were believed to be more loyal to the Revolution. ⁴⁶ Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution. A Statistical Interpretation (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1966, originally published 1935), pp. 13–18 lists some of these. I have added some that he does not mention here. ⁴⁷ For details of this and the Committee of Public Safety, and the relationship between them, see Jones (1990), pp. 88–95.

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• 10 March 1793: Establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal to try counter-revolutionaries. It had been preceded by the ‘Tribunal of August 17’ established with Robespierre’s sponsorship in August 1792 and was to try political (i.e. counter-revolutionary) cases without appeal and immediate execution of the guilty.⁴⁸ From 29 October 1793 proceedings could be restricted to three days duration, and proceedings were further streamlined by the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794; see below). However, in practice, up until the Law of 22 Prairial, it generally respected judicial forms; before this Law it acquitted around half of the accused brought before it, and even after that Law (until the Law was overturned on 1 August 1794 as part of the Thermidor) nearly a quarter of the accused were acquitted.⁴⁹ • 10 March 1793: The sending of representatives-on-mission to the provinces and armies became a systematic practice; it had formerly been done on an ad hoc basis. The representatives were Convention deputies (just under half were Montagnards, although this proportion was much greater between autumn 1793 and summer 1794, the time of the Terror) with extensive powers ostensibly to act as intermediaries between the centre and the localities/armies. In practice they tended to be instruments of the centre, and some were important in the application of mass repression in the areas to which they were sent. Around 900 missions occurred between 1793 and 1795.⁵⁰ • 19 March 1793: Outlaw of rebels, meaning that those found guilty of being rebels were to be executed within 24 hours of sentence. This was said to apply to ‘leaders and instigators of revolts and riots, local authorities, priests, former nobles, and their agents and servants’.⁵¹ The law meant that rebels were ‘outside the law’ (hors la loi) and therefore not protected by it and were therefore subject to any punishment. This was the basis of the legal concept ‘enemy of the human race’ that was applied during the Revolution.⁵² Specifically provoked by the revolt in the Vendée, this decree resulted in more executions than all the other legislation combined. • 21 March 1793: Establishment of ‘Surveillance Committees’ throughout the country to keep under surveillance foreigners (including French

⁴⁸ Tackett (2015), p. 203. ⁴⁹ Biard & Linton (2021), p. 91. ⁵⁰ Biard & Linton (2021), p. 87. ⁵¹ Greer (1966), p. 15. ⁵² Edelstein (2009), pp. 147–158.

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•

• • • •

•

citizens travelling outside their home districts) and those suspected of potential treason, and to issue Civic Certificates, a sort of validation of revolutionary credentials necessary for all public officials and anyone moving around the country. A central Surveillance Committee had been created on 25 November 1791. 28 March 1793: The penalty for emigration was to be banishment and confiscation of property. Returned émigrés and their accomplices were to be executed. As of 18 March 1793, refractory clergy (including those who had returned from abroad) had been considered émigrés. 29 March 1793: The penalty for seditious language, talk and writing was to be death. 1 April 1793: Deputies’ inviolability from arrest was abolished (as discussed above). 4 April 1793: The definition of treason, for which the penalty was death, was expanded. 6 April 1793: Creation of the Committee of Public Safety within which governmental authority would effectively be concentrated although in principle this body remained answerable to the Convention. This actually involved the renaming and change in personnel of the Committee of General Defence that had been established on 1 January 1793 to help direct the war effort. It was initially headed by Danton and comprised 9 members but this was soon increased to 12 (later reduced to 11) members directly elected by the Convention. It had several hundred employees to handle its business which included the adoption of decisions that had the force of law, of regulations facilitating the application of laws, oversight of representatives-on-mission, and decisions regarding suspected oppositionists. It effectively became the leading executive body of the Convention and the principal driver of the Terror from September 1793 (its remit was expanded in October and December 1793), and was to be a major instrument in Robespierre’s hands. 26 July 1793: Hoarding was made a capital offence, although in April 1794 this was replaced by a series of graded penalties.

These measures, and the Terror that rested upon them, were not just the creation of the Jacobins; many non-Jacobin deputies in the Convention supported them. All sides in the Convention voted for measures that would support terror. The heightened sense of crisis in early 1793 propelled the growing polarization between the Jacobins (whose deputies in the Convention were referred to as Montagnards or ‘mountain men’ from the high benches they occupied in

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the chamber, although later also denoting purity associated culturally with the mountains and contrasting with the allusions associated with the ‘Swamp’⁵³) and the Girondins. The creation of the National Convention in September 1792 had produced neither a stable majority within the chamber nor a resolution of the tension either among the deputies or between the deputies and the streets. According to one scholar⁵⁴ the Montagnards and Girondins in the Convention ‘were ill-defined entities, fairly solid at their cores but ragged around the edges’. The Convention was therefore effectively divided into three groups: the Jacobins/Montagnards on the left, the Girondins on the right, and in the middle a group of deputies unaffiliated with either known as the Plain or Swamp. Montagnards/Jacobins and their supporters are estimated to have constituted 40.4%, Girondins and their supporters 23.7%, and the Plain/Swamp 33.4% of all deputies.⁵⁵ While none of these groups could control the Convention, the Montagnards were usually able to attract sufficient support from among the Plain/Swamp to have their proposals adopted. Following the purge of the Girondins in mid-1793 (see below), the shift of deputies from the Plain/Swamp towards the Montagnards meant that they were best placed in the Convention to govern.⁵⁶ Within the Convention, the existing differences among the deputies, which had been present from the beginning, were exacerbated by the crisis situation and led to poisonous exchanges; from April 1793 Robespierre frequently referred to treason and treachery at the centre of government, meaning in the ranks of the Girondins,⁵⁷ while the latter accused Robespierre and his supporters of a range of crimes including the desire to establish a dictatorship and complicity in the September massacres, and subsequent unrest. Both the level and the heat (in terms of the violence of the language) of disagreement escalated, with any sense of residual revolutionary unity destroyed. In that same month, reflecting their more conservative stance, the Girondins engineered the arraignment of the radical Jean-Paul Marat before the Revolutionary Tribunal on a charge of responsibility for the September massacres.⁵⁸ Unlike the Girondins, the Montagnards realized that, given the power distribution

⁵³ Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution. Violence and Nature in French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 106. The assumed purity of the mountain in nature was mobilized by the Jacobins/Montagnards to buttress their claims to higher virtue. The traditional, biblical view of the mountain as the site where the law was brought down to the people also resonated here. ⁵⁴ Kennedy (1988), p. 292. ⁵⁵ Jones (1990), p. 168, citing the work of Alison Patrick. ⁵⁶ Linton (2013), p. 139. ⁵⁷ Andress (2005), p. 119–128 and Linton (2013), pp. 138–161. ⁵⁸ A doctor, radical journalist active in the Commune, and a favourite of the sans-culottes, Marat was acquitted.

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within Paris, the Convention (and therefore they) were not in a position to be able consistently to act contrary to the views emanating from the streets. This is reflected in the way that in mid-1793 under pressure of economic circumstances and sans-culotte pressure for both price controls and guaranteed food supply, the Jacobins’ established commitment to private property and laissezfaire became secondary to their support for substantial state intervention in economic matters. Their support for an enhanced government role⁵⁹ was a result of the dire economic situation and sans-culotte pressure in response to that situation and was relatively short-lived. Their inherent radicalism was thus enhanced, and their distance from the Girondins thereby increased. One scholar has noted that Montagnards and Girondins were both republicans who believed in popular sovereignty, the sanctity of private property, a limited role for the state in economic affairs, they were anti-clerical, and neither hesitated to use violence when they felt it necessary. Where they differed was the Montagnard support for popular revolution and Girondin opposition to it.⁶⁰ In particular, the Girondins opposed the increasing power of the sans-culottes whose anti-Girondin attitude had been hardened by the recent military defeats and the April 1793 defection of the Girondin General Dumouriez who had been leading the French army in the northeast and had earlier led the government appointed (and dismissed) by the king. His defection strengthened fears about anti-Revolution treason and conspiracy (including the hoary old one of conspiring to bring about artificial food shortages), and Girondin involvement in this. The sans-culottes mobilized in opposition to the Girondins on 31 May⁶¹ and pressured the Convention to arrest the Girondin deputies. On 2 June 1793, 29 Girondin deputies were arrested,⁶² a development which consolidated Montagnard leadership in the Convention, fuelled the Federalist revolt (see below), and marked the inversion of terror. The trial of the Girondins in October 1793 was the first trial of a revolutionary faction and was less about proving their guilt than about providing a means of putting them to death, and ‘to make the case look vaguely credible’;⁶³ the aim was ⁵⁹ For example, see on the Maximum and laws on property seizure, Biard & Linton (2012), pp. 149–152. ⁶⁰ Richard T. Bienvenu (ed), The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 12. He cites the work of Alfred Cobban. This is consistent with the view that what distinguished Montagnard from Girondin was the choices they made rather than policy. Biard & Linton (2021), p. 101. For a discussion of issues on which Montagnards and Girondins differed, see Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York: Harper & Row, 1934), pp. 112–116. ⁶¹ Delegates from the Commune and some of the sections of Paris had originally approached the Convention demanding the expulsion of 22 Girondin deputies they accused of treason on 15 April 1793. ⁶² Linton (2013), pp. 168–173. On pressures in the streets for popular insurrection, a purge of Girondins from the Convention and for price controls, see Rudé (1959), pp. 119–122. ⁶³ Linton (2013), p. 177; for the trial, see pp. 176–184.

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to destroy the faction for the ‘public good’. The political elite was further destabilized when, on 13 July, the radical journalist and Convention member Jean-Paul Marat, who the Girondins had earlier sought to put on trial for his responsibility for the ‘September Massacres’, was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin-sympathizer from Caen.⁶⁴ His assassination heightened both the deputies’ sense of personal vulnerability and the suspicion of widespread treachery as the line between opposition and treason blurred earlier now disappeared; for the sans-culottes even moderation now came to be seen as treason.⁶⁵ Fear and ‘general systematic suspicion’ became ‘abstract, omnipresent, and all-enveloping’.⁶⁶ This sense of crisis was exacerbated by the surrender of Toulon to the British on 27 August 1793, and by revolts in the Vendée and the so-called Federalist revolt, both of which were met by revolutionary terror. The Vendée region in the west of France had erupted into open rebellion in March–April 1793, something widely seen by Republicans as representative of internal counter-revolution. The immediate cause was the attempt to conscript young men into the army in line with the mass levee announced in February.⁶⁷ This was, in part, a class revolt by the peasant population against those local bourgeois town dwellers who were seeking to implement the conscription measure. These bourgeois were the same people who, because they were often members of the National Guard, were not themselves subject to conscription, had imposed the measures regarding refractory priests, and who had themselves bought up much of the Church land that had been seized. The attempt to conscript local youth exacerbated the local tension coming from the earlier measures against the priests and the killing of the king. The ⁶⁴ Marat was not the first deputy to be assassinated. Louis Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau was assassinated on 20 January 1793. ⁶⁵ Bienvenu (1968), p. 19. ⁶⁶ Furet, ‘Terror’, Furet & Ozouf (1989), pp. 137–138. ⁶⁷ Biard & Linton (2021), p. 133 give the following description of its causes: ‘In reality, the “Vendée War” stemmed from a series of factors that were also to be found in several other departments, but which came together in this location to start a fire of singular intensity and, above all, great endurance: the parish priests as socio-cultural intermediaries and the vigour of the opposition to the “intruders” who replaced the refractory priests from 1791; rural hostility towards the urban bourgeoisies at the time when the new administrative divisions of 1790 were being set up; frustrations arising from the sale of “national goods” (in the district of Cholet, traders appropriated some 40 per cent, farmers about 9 per cent); disappointments arising from the distribution of taxes and in the Vendée department accentuated the imbalance of the fiscal pressure between the bocage (terrain of small fields with high hedges and woodland characteristic of the region) and the “plain” (region in the south); social differences in the peasantry (in the bocage about 20 per cent were day labourers, against 80 per cent in the “plain”); labour conflicts in the dispersed manufacturing areas opposing rural weavers and urban bourgeois (as in Mauges); the question of maintaining order in the countryside where the urban National Guard intervened against the rural population from 1791 onwards; and lastly, and most obviously, the major role played by determined resistance to the requisitioning of men in March 1793.’ On the importance of the war for stimulating such unrest, see Stone (2014), pp. 321–324. War fostered state centralization as manifested in the armed levee.

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rebels—calling themselves the Catholic and Royal Army—mounted a guerrilla war and although they were substantially defeated by the end of the year, low level resistance dragged on for some years. Suppression of the revolt was brutal, spurred on by rhetoric of destruction and extermination from the Convention as widespread revolutionary terror unrolled. Large-scale torture and executions (including mass drownings in the Loire, the so-called ‘noyages’), destruction of farms and houses, slaughter of livestock and the cutting down of trees were all common as terror was used in an attempt to crush all opposition;⁶⁸ within the first weeks of the conflict, on 19 March 1793 as noted above, the Convention had decreed that armed rebels were to be executed within 24 hours of capture. It has been described as ‘a war of atrocity and counter-atrocity’.⁶⁹ The Federalist revolt broke out in the middle of 1793⁷⁰, sparked by the purge of the Girondins but more fundamentally as a response to the apparent increasing domination of politics by the Paris radicals and to their perceived representatives, the so-called representatives-on-mission. As noted above, the representatives-on-mission were members of the Convention sent from Paris to regional cities and the armies beginning in March 1793 with extensive powers to combat counter-revolution and support the war effort. These representatives often used harsh, and in some cases terrorist, measures to attempt to bring localities into line, often operating on their own initiative and outside the control of Paris.⁷¹ Major revolts broke out especially in Caen, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux, and given the war-time conditions, were considered treason by the centre. Troops were despatched from the centre and the country brought back under control. Some 14,000 were sentenced to death by special tribunals over autumn and winter, most by the guillotine. Again, revolutionary terror tactics were used as a means of blunting this revolt and consolidating central control as, like at the end of the Vendée revolt, punitive detachments exacted violent revenge against perceived former rebels.⁷² ⁶⁸ François Furet, ‘Vendée’, Furet & Ozouf (1989), pp. 165–176. For the suggestion that this was a common menu of repression of revolts at that time both elsewhere in Europe and in the colonies, see Biard & Linton (2021), p. 134. They say (p. 135) that the conflict was ‘brutalized but not terrorized’. ⁶⁹ Andress (2005), p. 162. For an excellent short explanation of the terrorist nature of the conflict, see Donald Sutherland, ‘The Vendée: Unique or Emblematic?’, Keith Michael Baker (ed), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Volume 4. The Terror (Kidlington: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1994), 99–114. ⁷⁰ On the instances of rebellion, and especially Lyon, see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 73–78. Also see Bill Edmonds, ‘“Federalism” and Urban Revolt in France in 1793’, The Journal of Modern History 55, 1, 1983, pp. 22–53. ⁷¹ For a regional study of this, see Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror. The Example of Javogues and the Loire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). ⁷² Andress (2013), p. 304.

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With the external threat still pressing and the evidence of domestic counterrevolution in the open form of the Vendée and Federalist revolts, and more secretive in the assumed ranks of royalist traitors among certain sections of the population, terror increasingly came to be seen as the answer to the problems. In June 1793 the National Convention adopted a new state constitution⁷³ but immediately suspended it because of the crisis situation and continued to rule by fiat. On 26 July the Convention voted for the death penalty for hoarders. Under sans-culotte pressure,⁷⁴ on 5 September, the Convention declared (but did not actually adopt a formal law or decree) terror to be ‘the order of the day’; although not all Montagnards supported it, there was sufficient support elsewhere in the chamber to carry it.⁷⁵ Twelve days later on 17 September 1793 the Convention adopted the Law of Suspects discussed below. Also set in train was a network of denunciation and surveillance, with arresting authorities effectively given the power to decide who was a suspect and should be arrested. The Convention also imposed price controls on basic commodities (‘the general maximum’). From September, terror became centrally-organized and was for the first time official government policy. The Terror beginning in September 1793 and lasting until mid-1794 when Robespierre was executed was different from the other sorts of terror not simply in terms of the categories of terror enunciated in this book, but in that it was officially announced by the national authorities in the form of the Convention declaration, and it was meant to include among its victims members of the revolutionary elite. In the words of one scholar, ‘under the Terror the government deployed institutionalized violence and decreed the mass execution of political opponents’.⁷⁶ Important in this was the Law of Suspects. Through the vagueness of its terminology, this law cast suspicion far and wide in a very ambiguous fashion that could apply to almost anyone. Subject to arrest were those who ‘in popular assemblies, interrupt the energy of the people with artificial discourses, tumultuous shouts, even whispers; those more prudent individuals who speak mysteriously about the republic’s misfortunes; those who do not attend public meetings and try to excuse their absence by saying they do not know how to speak.⁷⁷ Only those who were vociferously and openly

⁷³ For a summary, see Jones (1990), pp. 70–71. ⁷⁴ There was much resentment of food hoarders and general enemies of the Republic. Furet, ‘Terror’, Furet & Ozouf (1989), p. 137; Tackett (2015), pp. 295–303; Bienvenu (1968), pp. 17–18. The proposal to make terror ‘the order of the day’ went through the Jacobin Club on 30 August. Jacques Guilhaumou, ‘Fragments of a Discourse on Denunciation (1789–1794)’, Baker (1994), p. 147. ⁷⁵ Tackett (2015), p. 304. On the debate leading up to this, see Andress (2005), pp. 205–209. ⁷⁶ Colin Jones, ‘Did Emotions Cause the Terror?’, The New York Review of Books 22 June 2017, p. 38. ⁷⁷ Cited in Caroline Weber, ‘Much More than a Man’, London Review of Books 24 March 2022, p. 23.

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supportive of the Revolution in word and deed could be free of suspicion. The Law provided for the incarceration of ex-nobles including women and children unless they could prove their commitment to the Republic, anyone who had expressed opposition to the Revolution, and anyone unable to justify their conduct or means of support to one of the Surveillance Committees or to whom one of those committees had refused to issue a Civic Certificate, a document now essential for public business or travel. Also on the list were any public servants who had been dismissed from their posts and anyone placed on the list of émigrés.⁷⁸ This list included the established, classic, enemies of the Revolution, but it also embraced political opponents of the dominant Jacobins, including Feuillants and Girondins, but it was so vague and expansive that it could cover almost anyone; the scope for arbitrary arrest and the settling of personal scores was immense. The Revolution was beginning to cut down its own. People were punished for who they were perceived to be rather than what they did; with the definition of counter-revolution as failing to show ‘sufficient’ support for the Revolution, people’s thoughts became the touchstone of revolutionary violence. This sort of Manichean division into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and framed in the way the excerpt above does, would have seemed particularly threatening to many deputies because it potentially placed in the hands of Robespierre and his supporters the ability to judge their loyalty, and given that suspects were to be arrested and tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, potentially to condemn them to death. The effect of the law was almost immediate. According to Andress, ‘Within weeks, tens of thousands had been rounded up, rising to hundreds of thousands over the coming months’,⁷⁹ with many arrested on the basis of spurious charges and suspicions. Surveillance Committees (sometimes known as ‘revolutionary committees’ in Paris) had been established in all communities by order of the Convention in March 1793, although precursors had existed in some areas from mid-1792.⁸⁰ Their initial role was to monitor the conduct and behaviour of outsiders, but over time and especially during the official Terror, this expanded considerably. Driven in Paris by sans-culottes, they became prime instruments against dissent, gathering denunciations,⁸¹ drawing up lists of ‘suspects’ and proceeding with their arrest. They were responsible for awarding Civic ⁷⁸ Andress (2005), pp. 211–212. On the development of the law and its nature, see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 70–73. ⁷⁹ Andress (2013), p. 299. ⁸⁰ Jones (1990), pp. 122–124. ⁸¹ On denunciations generally see Colin Lucas, ‘The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution’, Sheila Fitzpatrick & Robert Gellately (eds), Accusatory Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 22–39.

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Certificates, introduced in February 1793 attesting to the bearer’s patriotism and necessary for the conduct of daily life. The Paris Commune in midSeptember laid out a series of vaguely-worded principles on the basis of which the certificates could be refused.⁸² These effectively amounted to a demand that anyone who did not publicly and ostentatiously show their support for the Revolution (such as failure to attend meetings) should be denied such a certificate. The machinery of the Terror mainly comprised institutions that pre-dated the September declaration and that developed over time, including being re-worked for the new situation.⁸³ It was the result of a series of emergency measures introduced over a period of time (with many listed above) in response to the changing circumstances of foreign war, civil war, and popular pressure rather than a coherent decision, and the term ‘the Terror’ was not used at the time.⁸⁴ A state of emergency was invoked involving suspension of the constitution and establishment of a ‘Revolutionary Government’ to stay in place ‘until peacetime’ was proclaimed on 10 October 1793. It rested on SaintJust’s notion of the sovereign will of the French people, whose will was the source of all justice and therefore stood above all positive laws; the unlimited power of the people underpinned a government without limits. The Revolutionary Government retained the Convention as its primary official organ but under what is often seen as the constitution for that Government, the highly centralizing law of 14 Frimaire (4 December 1793), executive power was vested in the Committee of Public Safety, which was responsible for authorizing all the major initiatives of the Terror and was the major site for the organization of repression.⁸⁵ The district and commune councils, who were the authorities at lower levels and effectively pushed the representatives-on-mission to the side towards the end of 1793, were forbidden from altering the law, and therefore decrees of the Committee, in any way and had to report to the centre every ten days. In addition, districts and communes were assigned a ‘national agent’ who was to report independently to the centre. The Surveillance Committees continued to function, now reporting to the Committee of General Security. The Committee for General Security had been established in October 1792 and was responsible for internal security, although it increasingly came to overlap with the Committee of Public Safety as the remit of the latter expanded, leading ⁸² Examples will be found in Andress (2005), p. 212. ⁸³ For the classic study, see R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled. The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, originally published 1941), esp. ch. III. ⁸⁴ McPhee (2002), pp. 165–166. The term ‘the system of terror’ was first used the day after Robespierre’s execution, and it was a term with distinctly negative overtones. McPhee (2002), p. 222. ⁸⁵ On the Committees of Public Safety and General Security see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 86–88.

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to tensions between the two⁸⁶ that were to be ultimately instrumental in the fall of Robespierre. The Revolutionary Tribunal was established in March 1793 to adjudicate on enemies of the Revolution, with from June 1794 (22 Prairial) its only sentence being death, although in the provinces many such cases were sent to more ad hoc tribunals.⁸⁷ The Revolutionary Tribunal treated political leaders and deputies that came before it differently compared with others. In most cases of non-deputies, the accused were able to mount a defence, with overall a little over half of those brought before the Tribunal sentenced to death, although this figure did rise to three out of four after the adoption of the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794). In contrast, none of the deputies who went before the Tribunal in Year II (22 September 1793 to 21 September 1794) and almost no other prominent political figure escaped death.⁸⁸ A series of show trials of formerly prominent revolutionaries (including 20 Girondin leaders) was held in Paris in October-November 1793 as the Jacobins settled scores with some of their critics. Increasingly now disagreement and difference were taken as evidence of treachery and betrayal. Mutual recrimination and suspicion were rife. In September 1793 the Convention also authorized ‘revolutionary armies’ of ‘citizen soldiers’ to suppress counter-revolution, enforce revolutionary law and public safety, and force food supplies from the peasants in order to feed the cities.⁸⁹ Described as ‘roaming, uncoordinated, self-righteous, often vindictive, sometimes criminal’,⁹⁰ these spread terror across the countryside in late 1793. In the Committee of Public Safety, which acted as the effective executive until the end of the Terror, following the reshuffle of its personnel and the replacement of the more moderate Danton by Robespierre⁹¹ as the effective leader in the middle of 1793, there were five members adjudged from the ‘left’ (Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Prieur de la Marne, and Jean Bon SaintAndre), two from the ‘ultra-left’ (Billaud-Varenne and Collot-d’Herbois), and four from the ‘right’ (Thuriot until 20 September 1793, Lindet, Carnot, and Prieur de la Cote-d’Or).⁹² The Committee was characterized by fragile unity, and frequently came into conflict with the Committee for General Security. ⁸⁶ On these differences, see Tackett (2015), pp. 335–339. ⁸⁷ On their important role in the provinces, see Lucas (1973), ch. ix. ⁸⁸ Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 54 & 117–118. Also Andress (2013), p. 301. ⁸⁹ They had limited practical effect. Biard & Linton (2021), p. 89. ⁹⁰ Andress (2013), p. 299. ⁹¹ See the biography by Peter McPhee, Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). ⁹² Jones (1990), pp. 89–91. A twelfth member, Herault de Sechelles was a moderate leftist and was executed in April 1794. On their individual areas of responsibility, see Brinton (1934), pp. 121–122.

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Its power was expansive. On 28 July 1793 it was given the right to issue arrest warrants against suspects and on 14 September 1793 it nominated membership of the Committee for General Security, thereby clearly establishing its primacy. Subsequently all other officers of the state were placed under its authority. Its dominance was confirmed in the Law of 14 Frimaire (4 December 1793, see below), and by decisions empowering it to replace dismissed officials with its own nominees (13 March 1794/23 Ventose), the abolition of government ministries (1 April 1794/12 Germinal), and the establishment of a new bureau of general policy under its direction (16 April 1794/27 Germinal), thereby rivalling the police powers of the Committee for General Security. In the period leading into the Terror and throughout its duration, the left wing of the revolutionary elite in the form of the members of this committee dominated politics and constituted the ‘central core’ of the Revolutionary Government.⁹³ And it was this section of the elite that was most responsive to both the mood of the Paris streets and the intellectual themes running through the Revolution as a whole (see Chapter 5). One significant aspect of the Terror was the ‘dechristianization’ movement that had begun earlier in terms of the change in the status of the Church and of the clergy, and the nationalization of Church lands, and was given new impetus in November 1793, initially by representatives-on-mission who saw religion to be the basis of counter-revolution. Under the slogan of the ‘cult of reason’, this was a drive by radicals (but never officially authorized by the Committee of Public Safety) to attack and abolish the practices of, and belief in, Catholicism; churches were closed across the country. Attacks on clergy, both physical and in terms of what they were allowed to do, escalated in many areas, while in May–June 1794 Robespierre promoted the Cult of the Supreme Being. This was a semi-religious endeavour to encourage popular moral worship of a divinity and involved festivals to a series of virtues with the intention of displacing traditional religion. The Cult was designed to give guidance to people so they could act appropriately, and follow the rules of nature, which would make the quest for obedience through terror superfluous.⁹⁴ It was meant to resolve the question of how virtue may be preserved in the absence of laws.⁹⁵ But given the prominent part Robespierre played in it, it was widely seen by his critics as simply a means for promoting his personal power and authority. ⁹³ Rudé (1959), p. 128. ⁹⁴ Edelstein (2009), pp. 220–221. ⁹⁵ Edelstein (2009), pp. 231–249.

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The Law of 14 Frimaire (4 December 1793)⁹⁶ significantly tightened central controls over the Terror: the representatives-on-mission and local authorities were brought under the Committee of Public Safety, which was also made the focus of governmental power; only the police remained formally outside its control, under the Committee for General Security. But it was also around this time that public dissent from its course began to appear within the revolutionary elite, where divisions continued to widen. Differences emerged between the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee for General Security over questions of both policy and relative jurisdiction, while arguments were also common within the former body.⁹⁷ By early 1794, some Convention deputies had begun to argue for an end to the Terror. This stemmed in part from a change in circumstances towards the end of 1793: battlefield victories in the war against the Austrians, the retreat of the British from Toulon, and the defeat of both the Vendée and the Federalist revolts eased the crisis atmosphere and meant that it was easier to portray the terror as a temporary, if at the time necessary, interlude. This conviction of the need for a more moderate course was shared by the so-called ‘Indulgents’ led by Danton and Desmoulins. In contrast to this view was that of the Hébertists or ‘Ultra-revolutionaries’, followers of the journalist Jacques Hébert who had been a deputy municipal prosecutor and a leader of radical politics in the capital, who called for enhanced terror, and ultimately for popular insurrection and the overthrow of the Committee of Public Safety. Across this difference spread charges of corruption of various individuals involved. In the face of this disagreement and of continuing discontent among the sans-culottes because of food supply issues, in March and April 1794 the Robespierre-led Committee of Public Safety turned against the ‘factions’ and moved against the Hébertists, and Danton and his supporters.⁹⁸ Robespierre linked ‘virtue’ with terror and cast action against these groups in terms of ‘patriots’ (his supporters) on the one hand, and ‘enemies of the people’ (Hébertists and Indulgents) on the other. This Manichean division involved an expanded notion of suspects, a widening crackdown on dissent and disagreement, and increased arrests. Robespierre opposed the more moderate course because for him, Terror was not just about winning the war but founding a revolutionary government and creating a new society. This is also where he came to differ from many in the Convention, for ⁹⁶ Jones (1990), pp. 96–98. ⁹⁷ Gough (2010), pp. 98–100. ⁹⁸ On the emergence of the Hébertists and the Dantonists in the Jacobin Club, see Linton (2013), pp. 192–196. On the splits and debates leading to the move against these groups, see Linton (2013), ch. 8. Robespierre had initially had some sympathy for the Indulgents’ position. Gough (2010), p. 59. Also Brinton (1934), pp. 138–141.

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whom winning the war was the purpose of the Terror. The Hébertists and Indulgents were arrested, tried in political trials and executed. By spring 1794 all types of anti-Republican feeling had been proscribed. The laws of Ventose and Prairial had, in the words of one scholar, ‘made blanket definitions of all counter-revolutionary crimes which were again made to include the slightest articulation of regret for the old regime or of hostility, even indifference, to the new’.⁹⁹ However, this did not end the disunity at the top. In spring 1794 Robespierre sought to consolidate his quest for a ‘Republic of Virtue’ symbolized by the Cult of the Supreme Being, by directing the Terror against those who were deemed to be corrupt and to fall short of the standard of virtue that he espoused. In seeking his Republic of Virtue, Robespierre initiated, in the words of one scholar, ‘a new phase in the Terror, when people would die for their potential as much as for specific crimes, and sometimes merely for their failure to match some ideal moral standard’.¹⁰⁰ There was no distinction between dissent and treason,¹⁰¹ and the quest for virtue drove Robespierre’s support for the Terror. This is the period sometimes called the ‘Great Terror’. All political trials were now channelled through the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal.¹⁰² The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794)¹⁰³ which had been forced through the Convention by Robespierre and his allies without consulting the other members of the Committee of Public Safety, streamlined the mechanisms of trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal with all judicial safeguards for innocence removed; witnesses and defending counsel were done away with, the prosecutor was no longer permitted to dismiss cases for lack of evidence, and suspects could be bundled together to be found guilty of involvement in conspiracies that were fictitious, and the verdict had to be either death or acquittal. It also criminalized such things as spreading false news, slandering patriotism, and questioning the purity of the revolutionary government, and its wording hinted that Convention deputies could be indicted without prior discussion in the Convention. The rate of executions accelerated. The notion of ‘enemies of the people’, first used by Robespierre in November 1791,¹⁰⁴ became common and was defined so vaguely by the Law of 22 Prairial that anyone ⁹⁹ Greer (1966), p. 19. ¹⁰⁰ Doyle (1989), p. 274. ¹⁰¹ In his speech of 23 Ventose (13 March 1794), Saint-Just declared that opposition to the revolutionary order was evil, insurrection was now counter-revolution, and opposition and division, a crime. Palmer (2017/1941), pp. 289–290. ¹⁰² For the number of victims of the Tribunal through 1793, see McPhee (2002), p. 122. ¹⁰³ An earlier decision in May 1794 had centralized the work of this body by giving the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal jurisdiction over all counter-revolutionary offences throughout the Republic. ¹⁰⁴ McPhee (2012), p. 116.

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could be thus accused. The conception of what constituted guilt expanded; even to express hesitations about the use of Terror was sufficient to condemn someone. Although Robespierre was at the peak of his personal power, he remained dependent upon the support of the Convention, but many members of that body came to fear that the Terror might come to be directed against them, just as it had been wielded against the Girondins, Hébertists, and others. And as indicated above, many saw the Terror as instrumental to winning the war, not creating a Republic of Virtue. Increasingly as summer wore on, various factions in Paris began to distrust and fear Robespierre. With his high-minded notion of virtue as the touchstone for survival, many within the elite feared that they might not be seen to measure up and might therefore be subjected to purge,¹⁰⁵ especially following Robespierre’s direct threat to turn the terror against unnamed members of the Convention on 8 Thermidor (26 July 1794).¹⁰⁶ Robespierre and some of his closest colleagues became increasingly isolated as factional conflict escalated.¹⁰⁷ On 27 July (9 Thermidor) Convention deputies acted, formally outlawing Robespierre and his colleagues (which meant there was no need for a trial), and having them arrested.¹⁰⁸ Three days later they were executed. The members of the Convention had moved against Robespierre less because they opposed the Terror than because Robespierre had threatened to purge the Convention of ‘suspect’ deputies, and thereby potentially threatened them individually; they pre-empted the use of inverted terror against themselves. The coup that removed Robespierre marked the start of the dismantling of the Terror although it did not stop the arrests and killings, which continued for some time. The Convention adopted a proposal that 25% of the Committee of Public Safety should retire every month and be ineligible for immediate re-election, a measure that was soon extended to all of the Convention’s committees. The Law of 22 Prairial was repealed on 1 August 1794, and on 10 August the membership of the Revolutionary Tribunal was purged. The Convention deprived the Committee of Public Safety of its superintending role in government, and the next day the surveillance committees were reduced ¹⁰⁵ According to one study, almost a third of deputies were arrested between 1792 and October 1795 (when the Convention was dissolved), and 61 were executed; a further 16 committed suicide, mainly to avoid execution. Biard & Linton (2021), p. 118. ¹⁰⁶ McPhee (2012), pp. 204–216. ¹⁰⁷ Doyle (1989), pp. 277–281. On plotting against him following Danton’s death, see Tackett (2015), pp. 334–339. On factional conflict since the end of 1793, see Andress (2005), pp. 251–276 & 323–344. ¹⁰⁸ As well as Robespierre, arrested were his brother, Saint-Just, Couthon, and Lebas. On Robespierre’s end, see Colin Lucas, The Fall of Robespierre. 24 hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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in number by 75% and were rendered less important by the injunction that counter-revolutionary intent had to be proved to secure a conviction. Within a month of Robespierre’s fall, the Revolutionary Government and the institutions of terror had been dismantled. In addition, the main supports of the Terror, the Jacobin Club, and the main vehicles for the organization of the streets, the Paris sections (the administrative districts of the capital that had been largely in sans-culottes hands) were respectively closed and purged of radicals. So-called ‘White Terror’ was now directed against the radicals. Attacks on radicals continued well into 1795 and popular risings occurred in April, May and October 1795 but were put down, leading at the end of that year to a new Directory government. While the final dénouement of the Revolution may not have occurred until Napoleon made himself Emperor, the Terror effectively ended in mid-1794, while in the words of one student: ‘When the Thermidoreans killed Robespierre, they killed the revolution’.¹⁰⁹ The number of victims of the Terror is uncertain. According to Andress, by summer 1794 some 300,000 were detained, while Doyle gives a figure of up to 500,000.¹¹⁰ The number of deaths was much lower. Greer puts it at around 17,000¹¹¹ but this does not include executions without trial or deaths during imprisonment. Taking these into account, in the words of one scholar, ‘A total of at least 40,000 deaths does not seem unlikely’.¹¹² Taking the highest figures given here (500,000 and 40,000), the death rate would have been about 8% of the total victims; on the lower figures, 5.7%. Some of the arrested were given lighter penalties (incarceration, fines) and some were acquitted at trial. The overwhelming majority of victims were ordinary people; over two thirds of those officially condemned were ordinary citizens, and although both nobles (9%) and clergy (7%) were over-represented compared with their share of the populace, they were a distinct minority of the Terror’s victims.¹¹³ Among the first victims of inverted terror were the so-called enragés (including the former priest and Cordelier Jacques Roux), a grouping of radicals who had been influential in driving the agenda leftwards but who were seen by the Montagnards to be standing in the way of stabilizing their rule at the centre. There were some high-profile victims: the former queen Marie Antoinette died by the guillotine on 16 October 1793 while a number of Girondins were executed ¹⁰⁹ Bienvenu (1968), p. 3. ¹¹⁰ Respectively Andress (2005), pp. 212–213 and Doyle (1989), p. 258. Tackett (2015), p. 330 cites a figure of ‘at least’ 300,000, Greer around 500,000. Greer (1966/1935), p. 27. Also see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 137–143. ¹¹¹ Greer (1966), p. 26. ¹¹² Tackett (2015), p. 330. ¹¹³ Doyle (1989), p. 259; Greer (1966), p. 108.

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a fortnight later. Leading radicals Danton, some of the Hébertists and finally Robespierre himself all succumbed; but most victims were ordinary people, reflecting the co-existence of inverted and revolutionary terror. Some areas were almost untouched by the Terror, while its levels in Paris were exceeded by some places elsewhere in the country; most victims were in the regions affected by revolts and civil war.¹¹⁴ Reflecting this, a significant number of revolutionary acts of terror were carried out by representatives-on-mission in autumn 1793, acting autonomously from Paris.¹¹⁵ But the Terror does need to be kept in proportion. While coercion and intimidation were central to the government’s rule, despite the rhetoric the Terror was limited; in the words of one scholar, they ‘did not embark on wholesale extermination of everyone opposed to them’.¹¹⁶ Inverted terror was specifically directed at the revolutionary leaders, while many of the acts of revolutionary and transformational terror, especially those committed by the representatives-on-mission, repelled some of the Jacobin leaders, including Robespierre.¹¹⁷ The Terror also differed from the terrorist activities of earlier. In the pre-spring 1793–1794 terror, formal procedures were generally followed in the Revolutionary Tribunals; a case was actually heard, evidence was produced, and a decision made, with in some cases the accused being acquitted. However, in the inverted Terror generally no such procedures were followed. These were characterized in Linton’s terms not by any rules of justice, but by ‘vague allegations of duplicity, ambition, and conspiracy, given a merciless edge by the mutual fears of the protagonists’.¹¹⁸ Most of those killed died by the guillotine. In the early period of the Terror executions occurred in a central square of Paris (most cases were in the Place de la Revolution, now Place

¹¹⁴ Greer (1966), pp. 21–22, 38, 40–42, & 53–69. According to Doyle (1989) p. 257, 42% of death sentences occurred in the three departments affected by the Vendée rebellion. For a study that argues that what is important for explaining regional differences in levels and patterns of terror is recognition that in each region terror was a function of the interaction of representatives-on-mission, local leaders (both groups could include radical and moderate individuals), and the prevailing situation in the particular region, including for example, established conflicts and antagonisms, the strength of the Church and commitment to it, and the balance of forces in local politics, see Alan Forrest, ‘The Local Politics of Repression’, Baker (1994), pp. 81–98. This general view is supported by the study of the Loire department by Lucas (1973). On regional differences see Biard & Linton (2021), pp. 138–141 & 185. On the role of clubs in shaping the Terror in their regions, see Lucas (1973), ch. iv. On the differences between regions being a function of the different personalities involved (representatives-on-mission, leaders of local organs) and varying local conditions, see Lucas (1973), pp. 387–388. According to Kennedy (2000), p. 3, members of the provincial Jacobin clubs ‘who had opposed the [Federalist] revolt were likely to be terrorists; those who had favoured it were often victims” For a short statistical summary of the Terror, see Jones (1990), pp. 115–121. ¹¹⁵ For the central role of the representatives-on-mission, see Lucas (1973), ch. x. ¹¹⁶ Linton (2013), p. 230. ¹¹⁷ Linton (2013), p. 230. ¹¹⁸ Linton (2013), p. 287.

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de la Concorde but some other central locations were sometimes used), but as the Terror wore on this moved to the suburbs and, in the latter days of the Terror usually operated within the walls of the prisons.¹¹⁹ The perceived salutary effect of public executions was subordinated to the concern for efficiency. According to a leading scholar of the Terror,¹²⁰ ‘it is necessary to see beyond the scaffolds, to remember the three hundred thousand declared suspects, the hundred thousand political prisoners, the degradation of judicial process, the spying and tale-bearing and denunciation, the distrust of friends and selfrighteous ruthlessness towards foes, the moralized debasement of common human relations’. This is clearly correct in that the Terror was a multi-faceted phenomenon and shows that the effect of all types of terror and its victims went far beyond the crude death toll.

¹¹⁹ Brian Singer, ‘Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion’, Ferenc Feher (ed), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 162. ¹²⁰ Palmer (2017), pp. 305–306.

3 The Russian Revolution In Russia the actual seizure of power was accompanied by little violence on the part of the revolutionary parties but there was widespread and escalating mass violence in both the cities and the countryside. Terror as government policy did not become a feature of the revolutionary process until after the October seizure of power, but in the February–October period terrorist-style activity did occur. This means that the first type of terror, revolutionary terror, became apparent only in the consolidation phase of the power seizure.

Revolutionary Violence: The Red Terror The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March for both himself and his son, followed almost immediately by the rejection of the throne by his brother Mikhail, and the subsequent arrest of the tsar and his family, meant the end of the monarchy in Russia. His abdication was forced on a reluctant tsar by the erosion of support for his continuance in office. Popular mobilization in the capital Petrograd against both the war and the privations that it caused was instrumental in the undermining of support among some of his ministers and, crucially, among the generals.¹ The removal of the tsar left power shared uneasily in the capital between two bodies, a committee formed out of the State Duma (the quasi-advisory legislative organ established at the time of the 1905 revolution) and the popularly-elected Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. The Duma committee soon transformed itself into the Provisional Government, a body that went through another four membership reconstitutions until it was overthrown in October. It was not democratic, but over time its mainly liberal constitution was eroded by the entry of some socialist figures into the government; indeed, from May it was headed by the (nominal) member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Alexander Kerensky. The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was transformed over time to include representatives of the soldiers and peasants. It was closely in touch with the mood of the factories in ¹ The best study of the February Revolution remains Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981).

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0003

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the capital, and as the months passed and that mood became more radical, this was reflected in the tenor of discussion in the Soviet and in the positions that body adopted on the issues of the day. Into this dynamic of a Soviet that was becoming increasingly radicalized and a Provisional Government that argued that it was not empowered to make any major changes in response to popular demands entered the political parties. The most consequential of these proved to be the Bolsheviks, situated on the extreme left flank of the revolutionary movement.² Although the Bolsheviks were far from being the monolithically united and disciplined party of myth,³ they were led by a dynamic leader who was ultimately able to persuade them to seize power in October, albeit not without significant dissent among the leading group. It was this party which best read (and contributed to) the radicalizing popular mood and was ultimately willing to use that mood to buttress its seizure of power. The radicalization of the popular mood both in the capital and outside it was one side of the upsurge of popular activity during February–October, and it was in this that spontaneous terrorist-style actions occurred. In the capital and other major industrial centres factory workers were mobilized onto the streets at frequent intervals.⁴ Demonstrations and strikes occurred spontaneously, but were also organized by trade unions, factory committees, political parties, and soviets throughout the year. More seriously, in the sense that it involved major structural change to the established property infrastructure, workers also engaged in the widespread assertion of workers’ control in the factories. In practice this involved denial of the ownership and management rights traditionally exercised by factory owners and managers and their replacement by workers’ committees. This was rarely a peaceful process; workers frequently took the opportunity to vent their grievances on their former overseers, with such people often being assaulted, or even killed. But there was also a general move among workers and other sections of the urban lower classes to reject privilege and what could popularly be characterized as ‘bourgeois’. The seizure

² Bolshevik positions on issues were generally much more radical than the other political parties, although anarchist figures were often even more extreme than the Bolsheviks. ³ On this see Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution 1917–1923. A Study in Organisational Change (London: Macmillan, 1979). ⁴ On worker activism see S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd. Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers in the Russian Revolution February 1917–June 1918 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018) and The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power. From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984), Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution. A Study in Mass Mobilization (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976).

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of apartments and moving of multiple families into them that became common after October began before then as those less privileged took advantage of the breakdown in law and order to seize for themselves things they had formerly been denied. Mass anarchic violence was widespread. This sort of class warfare reflected in the expropriation of the property of the privileged, what one scholar has termed a ‘plebeian war on privilege’,⁵ was promoted by Bolshevik rhetoric and encouraged by radical politicians. Such developments added to the rising levels of crime in the cities as the traditional order broke down.⁶ Outside the capital the breakdown in law and order resulted in further ‘excesses’. In the villages⁷ peasants overthrew the established system of land relations and seized the land currently held by non-peasant owners and, in some cases, by richer peasants too. This often involved violence, as nonpeasant owners who resisted (and often those who did not resist too) were treated roughly and even killed. Manor houses and much of their associated equipment and furnishings were destroyed as in some areas the peasants went on a spree of looting and destruction. Even in those cases where there was not a high level of violence, traditional owners were usually not left in control of their property as the established structures of ownership relations and authority were swept away. Old scores were settled in the context of the spontaneous chernyi peredel (black repartition). One factor helping to radicalize the villages was the return to them of soldiers deserting from the army and returning to the countryside to share in the spoils of the land redistribution. Deserting soldiers often killed any officers who tried to stop them, while even in cases when officers did not resist (and even sought to accompany their men), they were often beaten up or killed.⁸ Following the Bolshevik seizure of power at the end of October, the popular assault on the ‘exploiters’, the burzhoi, was continued, sustained not only by the material gains the participants hoped to make, but also by encouragement ⁵ Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London: Pimlico, 1996), p. 522. ⁶ On crime, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution. Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2017). ⁷ On peasant activism, see Graeme J. Gill, Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979), Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War. The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Aaron B. Retish, Russia’s Peasants in Revolution and Civil War. Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Keep (1976). ⁸ On the soldiers, see Allen K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt, March–April 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) and The End of the Russian Imperial Army. Volume II: The Road to Soviet Power and Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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from the new Bolshevik government. Despite some concerns within the party about the escalating social disorder and the implications this could have for the consolidation of their rule, Bolshevik early housing policy involved the expropriation of apartments and houses from ‘bourgeois’ Russians and the transformation of them into housing for the ‘proletariat’. This occurred against the backdrop of a constant refrain from Bolshevik leaders about the need for unrelenting struggle against the bourgeoisie who would use every means at their disposal to destroy ‘the revolution’. In response to this, the Bolsheviks called for the use of all weapons to overcome this threat; for example a Sovnarkom (i.e. government) decree of 21 February 1918 entitled ‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger’ called for the shooting ‘on the spot of…enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators’.⁹ This terminology highlights the way that the Bolsheviks conceived of counterrevolutionary opposition as being rooted in the social processes inherited from the old regime, and by calling for the immediate execution of those categories of people, effectively licensed terror without explicitly using the word; this was certainly the way many in the Cheka interpreted it.¹⁰ And as early as 28 November 1917 Lenin used the term ‘enemies of the people’¹¹ to refer to opponents. There was, therefore, a generalized air of threat and menace conjured up by Russia’s new rulers, a sense that was given practical reality by the outlawing of most political parties, the closure of much of the press, and the first public trials of opponents in December 1917.¹² It was in this context that the Cheka was created. ⁹ V.I. Lenin, ‘Sotsialisticheskoe Otechestvo v Opasnosti!’, Pol’noe Sobranie Sochinenii [henceforth PSS] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1979–1983) vol.35, pp. 357–358. The decree was actually in response to the German renewal of their advance into Russia, undertaken to bring extra pressure to bear on the Soviet negotiators at the Brest Litovsk peace treaty negotiations. ¹⁰ Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Breaking Eggs, Making Omelets: Violence and Terror in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1918–1922’, Red Flag Unfurled. History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017), p. 274. ¹¹ V.I. Lenin, ‘Dekret ob areste vozhdei grazhdanskoi voiny protiv revolyutsii’, PSS, vol. 35, p. 126. This was specifically in relation to the arrest of the leaders of the Kadet party. This formulation had been used in the Military Revolutionary Committee on 28 October (OS) and in a 13 November (OS) proclamation by the same body. Nicolas Werth, ‘A State against its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union’, Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karol Bartosek & Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 54–55. Lenin had also used the term, relating it back to the French Jacobins, in June 1917. V.I. Lenin, ‘O vragakh naroda’, PSS vol.32, pp. 306–307. ¹² Matthew Rendle, ‘Revolutionary Tribunals and the Origins of Terror in Early Soviet Russia’, Historical Research 84, 226, 2011, pp. 698–699 & pp. 706–709. Also Adele Lindenmeyr, ‘The First Soviet Political Trial: Countess Sofia Panina before the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal’, The Russian Review 60, 4, 2001, pp. 505–525. On the important propaganda significance of public trials, see Richard Stites, ‘Trial as Theatre in the Russian Revolution’, Theatre Research International 23, 1, 1998, pp. 7–13; Julie A. Cassidy, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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The Cheka was not the first organ established to deal with counterrevolution, profiteering, speculation, sabotage, and other ‘political’ crimes.¹³ This was the revolutionary tribunals, named after their French predecessor, designed to administer ‘revolutionary justice’, and established on 24 November 1917. Although their proceedings were not characterized by adherence to standardized procedures or strict principles of legality, in practice they were far more moderate in the penalties they applied than many Bolsheviks thought appropriate at the time; the first death penalty issued by a tribunal did not occur until June 1918 when Aleksei Shchastny was convicted by the highest revolutionary tribunal of fostering discontent among the sailors under his command in order to raise a revolt against the authorities.¹⁴ Many of those brought before the tribunals were either freed or given token sentences despite evidence of their opposition to the regime.¹⁵ Many Bolsheviks were critical of the apparent leniency of the tribunals, and although they were not abolished until October 1922, despite efforts to prevent their loss of power¹⁶ they were quickly superseded by the Cheka as the main weapon against opposition. On 7 December 1917, the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Vecheka, usually referred to as Cheka) was formally established as a commission attached to the government (Sovnarkom). It replaced an earlier temporary organ¹⁷ and was the foundation body for the security service that lasted until the USSR ended in 1991. This means that, in contrast to France, from the outset a special organization was created purely to deal with the question of political subversion. As its name suggests, this was initially seen as an ‘extraordinary’ organ, suggesting both a limited lifespan and the exercise of powers outside the ordinary operations of government. In March 1918 it was decided to establish a network of Chekas in the provinces, with these formally attached to local soviets, although within a short space of time they became answerable to the central Cheka rather than the local legislative authorities. An integrated arm for combating opposition was thereby established throughout the country, even if throughout this early period, communications between centre and regions were somewhat ¹³ This is discussed in Rendle (2011), pp. 694–721 and Matthew Rendle, ‘Defining the “Political” Crime: Revolutionary Tribunals in Early Soviet Russia’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 9, 2013, pp. 1771–1788. ¹⁴ Rendle (2011), pp. 713–714. Also Alexander Rabinowitch, ‘The Shchastny File: Trotsky and the Case of the Hero of the Baltic Fleet’, The Russian Review 58, 4, 1999, pp. 615–634. ¹⁵ For some statistics, see Rendle (2011), pp. 714–715. ¹⁶ On this see Rendle (2011), pp. 716–720. ¹⁷ This too had been called a Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage and had been created on 21 November by the Military Revolutionary Committee, which had been the vehicle the Bolsheviks had used to seize power. On the creation and early history of the Cheka, see George Leggett, The Cheka. Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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haphazard. The Cheka was originally conceived as an administrative organ with no judicial and strictly limited punitive powers, but this soon changed as its competence expanded; importantly the day after ‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger’ decree, the Cheka took upon itself the power to dispense summary justice.¹⁸ However, according to the main historian of the Cheka, that body administered no explicitly political executions until July 1918,¹⁹ although action was taken against such perceived enemies as food hoarders, ‘bandits’, striking workers and, in the countryside, kulaks. Atrocities were committed during the first six months of 1918, but they seem to have been more the result of ‘uncontrolled excesses’ carried out by local groups against perceived enemies than any consistent pattern of Cheka activity.²⁰ Bolshevik violence was more rhetorical than actual until around the middle of 1918, illustrated by the way in which the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Lenin in January 1918 stimulated calls for ‘red terror’, but these were not immediately taken up.²¹ The change towards a more active and directly political role on the part of the Cheka came about as a result of two related developments: the increased perception of the danger of opposition, and the implementation of the policy of so-called War Communism. The increased perception of a threat of opposition arose from domestic and external sources. In spring 1918 elections to city soviets revealed a significant shift of support away from the Bolsheviks to other socialist parties, especially the Mensheviks and SRs, reflecting the apparent erosion of Bolshevik support among the urban working class.²² The Left Socialist Revolutionaries (LSR), who had initially been in coalition with the Bolsheviks, mounted a rising in Moscow in July 1918 and although this was swiftly put down, a similar rising led by (former SR) Boris Savinkov in Yaroslavl proved more difficult to suppress. In addition, two leading Bolshevik officials in Petrograd were assassinated, Moisei Volodarskii on 20 June and Moisei Uritsky on 30 August, and on the same day as Uritsky was killed Lenin was shot in an unsuccessful attempted assassination. This took place against a background of heightened military pressure from domestic and foreign forces. Many tsarist military officers had remained in Russia following ¹⁸ Leggett (1981), p. 58. ¹⁹ Leggett (1981), pp. 58–59. According to Werth (1999), p. 64, in April 1918 the Cheka did take action against anarchists, who they described as ‘bandits’. ²⁰ Werth (1999), pp. 60–61. ²¹ James Ryan, Lenin’s Terror. The Ideological Origins of early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 92. ²² On this see Vladimir N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks After October. Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), ch. 5. On the situation in Petrograd see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), ch. 8.

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the Bolshevik seizure of power, and many of them rallied to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Don Cossacks revolted in spring 1918 in the Volga region and in Siberia anti-Bolshevik regimes were formed in June 1918. Such domestic opposition seemed to be reinforced by external actors. Czech forces which had been returning home via Siberia in May turned on the Bolsheviks and began to make their way towards Moscow. British forces had penetrated the Caucasus region and (in April) Vladivostok while, more worryingly, the small British contingent that had been established at Murmansk since March was reinforced in June, and clashes soon followed.²³ The effect of the Allied incursions was reinforced by the activities of various secret agents in Moscow and Petrograd— the most renowned were Sidney Reilly and Bruce Lockhart but they were not alone—who were working to undermine the Bolshevik authorities.²⁴ The Bolsheviks felt they were under siege from outside Russia as well as attack from within, and although the scale of that opposition may have been exaggerated, it was nevertheless real and perceived as such. War Communism began in May–June 1918 and lasted until March 1921. It involved the nationalization of industry, the forced requisition of grain and other agricultural products, food rationing, the strict regulation of the production, distribution and exchange of goods, the militarization of labour, and a monopoly on foreign trade.²⁵ While there has been some debate over whether War Communism was an ideologically-driven attempt to introduce communism or an attempt to control the war-time economy the better to conduct the struggle against enemies, it seems clear that it was a more ad hoc response to danger driven by ideological conceptions than a realistic attempt to build communism (although some within the party did see it in this light). The accompanying ‘red terror’ therefore remained of the first, revolutionary, type rather than that designed to facilitate transformation. But importantly for our purposes, War Communism involved policies that were bound to be both unpopular and likely to lead to an upsurge in popular activism. Workers reacted to the increased discipline to which they were subjected through strike activity and demonstrations²⁶ while the peasants opposed the forcible

²³ The activities of foreign troops are surveyed in what remains the best study of the civil war, Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987). ²⁴ For a survey, see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars. Bolshevik Russia and the West (London: Macmillan, 2011). ²⁵ On War Communism see Silvana Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918– 1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). ²⁶ On worker opposition, see Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2011), pp. 54–65; Sergei Pavliuchenkov, ‘Workers’ Protest Movement Against War Communism’, Vladimir N. Brovkin (ed), The Bolsheviks in Russian Society. The Revolution and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 141–153.

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collection of grain through widespread insurrections.²⁷ The opposition manifested through such popular activity struck particularly forcefully for the Bolsheviks because it confirmed the suspicion that many of them had that hidden enemies lurked within society and that it was the ability of these people to mislead workers and peasants that was the source of this popular unrest. And these hidden enemies were perhaps more dangerous than those wearing the uniforms of foreign powers (see below). In response to these challenges, the regime declared the introduction of Red Terror. On the evening of 30 August, the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets (VTsIK, formally the standing body of the legislature) blamed the attacks earlier in the day on Uritsky and Lenin on the Right Socialist Revolutionaries (RSRs) (who were said to be acting in the name of the British and French) and called for ‘merciless mass terror’; on 2 September it adopted a resolution calling for ‘mass red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents’.²⁸ On 5 September²⁹ 1918 the government declared ‘that in the present situation, the protection of the rear by terror is an urgent necessity…it is necessary to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps. All those involved in White Guard organizations, plots and revolts are to be shot. The names of all those shot and the reason for their execution should be published’.³⁰ This decision was made amid rhetoric from Bolshevik leaders that was unrestrained in their approach to the use of terrorist methods. In the words of Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky, ‘We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated—terror being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions. Our task is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. Such enemies are our political adversaries, as well as all bandits, rogues, speculators, and other criminals who undermine the foundations of socialist authority.’³¹ On 9 August Lenin had sent a message to officials in Nizhnii Novgorod which said in part ‘Clearly a Whiteguardist rising is brewing in Nizhnii. You must exert every effort, form a troika of dictators (you, Markin, and another), instantly ²⁷ On these see Oliver H. Radkey, The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia. A Study of the Green Movement in the Tambov Region 1920 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976); Erik C. Landis, Bandits and Partisans. The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Figes (1989). ²⁸ Respectively Leggett (1981), p. 108 and S.P. Mel’gunov, Krasnyi Terror v Rossii (New York: Brandy, 1979, originally published 1924), p. 41. ²⁹ Paradoxically the same date that terror was put on the order of the day in the French Revolution. ³⁰ ‘Postanovlenie soveta narodnykh komissarov “O Krasnom Terrore”’, Partiya v Period Inostrannoi Voennoi Interventsii i Grazhdanskoi Voiny (1918–1920 gody). Dokumenty i Materialy (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1962), p. 70. An English translation will be found in Martin McCauley (ed), The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917–1921. Documents (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 186. ³¹ Cited in Leggett (1981), p. 68. This dates from early June 1918.

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introduce mass terror, shoot and transport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex-officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted….You must act at full stretch: mass searches. Executions for possession of weapons. Mass deportations of Mensheviks and unreliable elements’.³² Twelve days after the Sovnarkom decision, Dzerzhinsky authorized the Cheka to resolve all cases of counter-revolution alone, thereby giving that organization the go ahead to investigate, arrest, try, sentence, and carry out that sentence.³³ This sort of rhetoric about the use of terror methods was consistent with the militarization of both the regime generally and the language that leading speakers used at this time.³⁴ Reflected in the pressures for increased centralization and unity and in the growing intolerance for opposition, and illustrated by the drive for the application of military discipline to labour in 1920, the public presentation of the situation by Bolshevik speakers was generally cast in military terms. The references to contemporary problems in terms of ‘fronts’ (separate from military activities in the civil war) and ‘struggles’ and the party as a ‘fighting’ organization were typical of the sorts of verbal constructions that reflected this militarized environment. The symbolic adoption of military-style uniforms by many party members, a fashion preference that was maintained for many years after the civil war, is another reflection of this. The decision of 5 September and the following comments make it quite clear that mass terror was to be adopted as official policy. Three other things should be noted. First, the decision unambiguously made the Cheka the chief weapon to be used in the fight against opposition. As noted above the Cheka superseded the revolutionary tribunals, but they were not the only body involved in terror activities. Red Army detachments, troops for the internal defence of the Republic, special detachments and food supply brigades were all active, and there was also much spontaneous grassroots terror, often precipitated by preexisting feuds and disputes.³⁵ Second, the target of the terror was very wide indeed, including explicit political opponents of the regime (note the mention of Whiteguardists, meaning perceived supporters of the old regime, and Mensheviks) as well as those whose actions which, while perhaps not motivated by explicit political beliefs, were interpreted as hostile to the regime; examples include bandits, rogues, speculators, prostitutes, and grain hoarders. ³² V.I. Lenin, ‘G.F. Fedorovu’, Lenin, PSS vol. 50, p. 142. ³³ There were to be a few exceptions subject to special instructions. Leggett (1981), p. 110. ³⁴ Militarization is a theme running through a number of the essays in Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War. Explorations in Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). ³⁵ Liudmila G. Novikova, ‘Russia’s Red Revolutionary and White Terror, 1917–1921: A Provincial Perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 9, 2013, pp. 1755–1770.

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The object of the terror was the class enemy, leading to the principle clearly enunciated that class identity rather than actual guilt was central. In the words of Cheka official Martyn Latsis from November 1918, ‘We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused. In this lies the significance and essence of the Red Terror’.³⁶ Opposition was thus generalized into class identity, and this rather than actual actions became the touchstone of Cheka repression. Third, during the period of the terror, the Cheka operated independently with virtually no constraint or control from Sovnarkom, to which it was formally responsible, or the party. The first ‘political’ victims of the Cheka were 13 Left SR insurgents executed on 7 July 1918, and although the organization was involved in other cases of arrest and execution in the following months, including the killing of over 500 hostages in Petrograd announced on 3 September,³⁷ the level of activity rose following the 5 September decision; according to one scholar, within eight weeks of the 5 September decision, between 8,000 and 15,000 executions had occurred.³⁸ The total number of people caught up in the Red Terror is unknown.³⁹ Official Soviet sources claim only about 13,000 killed in the Red Terror 1918–1920, while Western historians’ estimates have ranged from 50,000 to 140,000.⁴⁰ Early in its course, figures of those arrested or executed were often published⁴¹ as a disincentive to others who might consider taking up opposition to the regime, but as it wore on official records (such as they were) were dwarfed by the number of cases that were not accurately recorded. Many of those killed were mutilated first; noses, ears and genitals ³⁶ These words were in the Cheka’s journal Krasnyi terror 1 November 1918, cited in Leggett (1981), p. 114. Latsis would become the head of the Ukrainian Cheka in April 1919. ³⁷ The hostages were often people taken into custody in an attempt to dissuade others from attacking Soviet officials. Many early victims in Petrograd had (in a shadow of Paris) been in prison for some months before being killed. Rabinowitch (2007), p. 332. An ‘Order on Hostages’ had been issued by People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, G.I. Petrovskii on 4 September 1918. Leggett (1981), p. 111. Also Suny (2017), pp. 278–279. ³⁸ Jonathan D. Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars. Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst & Company, 2015), p. 192. ³⁹ For one discussion see Arno J. Mayer, The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 310. For some disaggregated figures by region and time, see Mel’gunov (1979), pp. 43–87. ⁴⁰ Suny (2017), p. 294. The numbers caught up in the White Terror are just as elusive. On the different victims targeted by the Reds and Whites, see Suny (2017), pp. 289–294. ⁴¹ For some of these see Leggett (1981), pp. 111–113. For some other figures see Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory. A History of the Russian Civil War (London: Sphere Books Ltd, 1989), pp. 159–161.

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could be cut off, eyes poked out, and people were burnt alive, buried alive, or frozen to death. The range of people caught up in the Red Terror was extensive. As well as those who took up arms against the Bolsheviks and were unlucky enough to fall into Cheka hands, victims included former government officials, members of the tsarist nobility (with the tsar and his family, who were killed on 16 July 1918, the most obvious), members of other political parties, priests, conspirators, businessmen, striking workers⁴², peasants (almost always described as rich but often opposing conscription rather than the food requisitioning), hoarders and speculators, and even soldiers whose performance was deemed deficient. Collective groups like the Cossacks who were considered to be inveterately counter-revolutionary also suffered under the Terror; many inhabitants of the Cossack lands were killed, deported to other parts of the country, or mobilized to work in nearby mines.⁴³ And it was the Cheka along with the Red Army that was central to the suppression of worker unrest in the towns and the vast number of peasant risings that occurred at this time; virtual peasant armies emerged in Ukraine, Voronezh, Saratov, Samara, Penza, and Tambov.⁴⁴ With the conception of who was a counter-revolutionary so vague, the lack of a clear impartial process of trial⁴⁵ and the brutalization of life driven by the civil war, the Terror swept across Russia catching up many innocent people in its torrent. Opposition to the terror emerged inside the party leadership around the end of 1918, including by Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Karl Radek, David Ryazanov, and Mikhail Ol’minskii.⁴⁶ The criticism was not to the principle of the use of terror, but to how it was being implemented, particularly the way in which it was embracing members of the proletariat and peasantry, and to the seeming lack of controls over the Cheka. At this time Lenin too talked about some moderation while also continuing to support the use of terrorist actions against certain enemies,⁴⁷ and while there may have been some reining in of Cheka activity at this time, terror continued to be used. ⁴² On the suppression of worker discontent see Werth (1999), pp. 85–89. On the suppression of unrest behind the front lines of the civil war, see Werth (1999), chs. 4 & 5. ⁴³ On the Cossacks, see Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 2002), ch. 6 and Werth (1999), pp. 98–102. ⁴⁴ On the risings see Werth (1999), chs. 4 & 5. Also Jorg Baberowski, Scorched Earth. Stalin’s Reign of Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 56. ⁴⁵ On local courts being used to try to dampen down such violence, see Aaron B. Retish, ‘Controlling Revolution: Understandings of Violence through the rural Soviet Courts, 1917–1923’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 9, 2013, pp. 1789–1806. ⁴⁶ Ryan (2012), p. 120. For a different take, see James Ryan, ‘The Sacralization of Violence: Bolshevik Justifications for Violence and Terror during the Civil War’, Slavic Review 74, 4, 2015, pp. 808–831. ⁴⁷ Ryan (2012), p. 117.

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With heightened military danger from White forces and continuing peasant unrest in the countryside notionally controlled by the Reds, terror remained an important weapon of the infant Soviet state through to the end of civil war hostilities in 1920. Although the replacement of War Communism by the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921 ultimately eased the tension in the countryside, this was not an immediate effect, and the Cheka and Red Army remained active in putting down opposition, wreaking vengeance on former Whites, and consolidating Bolshevik rule. Particularly important in this, especially symbolically, was the suppression of the rising by the Kronstadt sailors in February–March 1921.⁴⁸ These had been solid Bolshevik supporters in 1917, and their rising a mere four years later was a significant blow to the morale of many in the party. The rising was put down with brutal force, with many executions and the incarceration of many in the new camps.⁴⁹ Following the introduction of the NEP, increased pressure was placed on both the remaining socialist parties, especially the SRs and Mensheviks, and on the Orthodox Church, with people from both categories being subjected to show trials. Policy towards the Church in particular was harsh, including not just action against priests and believers, but also the seizure of much Church property. An important innovation under the Terror was the introduction of forced labour camps and concentration camps.⁵⁰ Both were run by the Cheka. The forced labour camps were an offshoot of the compulsory labour mobilization that was part of War Communism and were designed to ensure that workers who had infringed labour regulations were punished while continuing to contribute to the Soviet economy. This relatively narrow source of inmates was soon widened to include counter-revolutionary elements and others deemed unacceptable. By late 1920 there were 84 forced labour camps spread over 43 provinces and containing almost 50,000 inmates.⁵¹ Concentration camps were originally for the imprisonment of potentially dangerous class enemies, but like the forced labour camps their remit soon expanded to other types of prisoners as well; these were the holding places for many of the hostages the Cheka took notionally against White Guard atrocities. The earliest reference to concentration camps seems to have been a 9 August 1918 telegram by Lenin⁵² ⁴⁸ As well as local issues for the sailors, the rising was provoked by the government firing on striking workers in Petrograd. ⁴⁹ Ryan (2012), pp. 171–172. ⁵⁰ These are discussed in Leggett (1981), pp. 178–182. ⁵¹ Leggett (1981), p. 178. This figure includes 24,400 civil war prisoners. ⁵² Lenin, ‘Telegramma penzenskomu gubispolkomu’, PSS vol.50, pp. 143–144. Trotsky had ordered the establishment of concentration camps on 8 August 1918 following the fall of Kazan to the Czech

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and they were mentioned in the 5 September decision introducing the Terror. Numbers of prisoners are uncertain, but there was said to be more than 70,000 in September 1921 not counting those in regions that had been in revolt against Soviet power, like Tambov.⁵³ Randomness was a major quality of the Red Terror. In part, as Orlando Figes notes,⁵⁴ this was a function of the vagueness of the notion of counterrevolutionary. It could cover everyone from the tsarist officer leading troops against the Bolsheviks through priests, large industrialists, shop owners to striking workers and peasants. But it also reflects the lack of tight controls the centre exercised over its regional subordinates. Even had there been clear guidelines about who should be repressed, local officials exercised wide personal discretion with little restraint coming from above. Many local Bolshevik party organizations called for red or mass terror even before September 1918,⁵⁵ but others seem to have been less enthusiastic in taking this up. The randomness, and therefore unpredictability, added to the fear it generated. There is also the question of whether the famine that enveloped significant parts of the country in 1921–1922 should be counted as part of the Terror. Some 10–14 million people died as a result of famine in the cities in 1918–1920 (largely a result of the disruption caused by the war, revolution and civil war) and in the countryside in 1921–1922.⁵⁶ The difficulties that stemmed from the inclement weather experienced in 1920–1921 when poor weather and a poor harvest in 1920 gave way to drought in 1921 were clearly exacerbated by the effects of the state’s attempt to requisition grain from the peasant producers and by the extended conflict in these grain-growing areas stimulated mainly by that policy. Even when that policy was reversed in March 1921, peasants remained wary of the state and its need to collect grain. But even given this reluctance, major responsibility for this famine rests with reduced production; the 1920 harvest was only about 60% of the pre-war level and the 1921 harvest legion. Cited in Mayer (2000), pp. 283–284. In July 1918 a local report from Yaroslavl referred to the organizers of the insurgency there being sent to a concentration camp. Cited in Smith (2011), p. 69. On the early history of the camps, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag. A History of the Soviet Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2003), chs. 1–2. There developed a tension in the purpose of the camps among the reeducation of prisoners, the mobilization and exploitation of them as forced labour in the economy, and punishment. ⁵³ Werth (1999), p. 80. ⁵⁴ Figes (1996), p. 642. ⁵⁵ For some examples from July, see Smith (2011), pp. 67–68. In January 1918, in the wake of the first unsuccessful assassination attempt on Lenin, the Petrograd Bolsheviks had called for ‘mass red terror’. Cited in Smith (2011), p. 81. The same document referred to ‘enemies of the people’. ⁵⁶ R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. 5. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 403.

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was even smaller.⁵⁷ There is no evidence that the authorities sought explicitly to engineer famine to break peasant resistance, although it is clear that the central authorities, although aware of the pending danger of famine, not only did not lessen the effort at food requisition but actually called for a stepping up of efforts at requisition.⁵⁸ So the Bolsheviks did not set out to engineer famine, but when it approached they did not take steps that might have ameliorated its effects. In this sense, the famine may be seen partly as a disastrous but unintended consequence of the Terror and resulting resistance.

Transformational Terror: Agricultural Collectivization and Dekulakization It was within the general context of the growing economic problems with NEP, the perception of the potency of hidden class enemies throughout the country and a history of factional conflict turning in part on these issues (see Chapter 5), that forced pace industrialization and agricultural collectivization took place, with the latter being characterized by activity that could be classed as terror. It is upon collectivization that we will focus. There had always been significant reservations about NEP within party ranks, and from the middle of the decade these became politically more salient. A shift was evident at the XIV Congress in 1925 when it was argued that henceforth industrial development should be the first priority as the proletariat built socialism in the USSR, but that this needed to be accompanied by a weakening of the kulaks in the villages.⁵⁹ Two years later the XV Congress consolidated this shift by pressing for higher levels of industrialization and for the collectivization of agriculture,⁶⁰ although there was no indication of how the tempo and level of these was to be accelerated in coming years. The congress also decided on the creation of the First Five Year Plan. Although it was said that collectivization was to rest on ‘continued peasant cooperation’, the simultaneous adoption of the principle of increased pressure and restrictions on the kulaks should have warned party leaders that such cooperation might be hard to achieve, even if the so-called alliance with the poor and middle peasants had actually existed. ⁵⁷ Davies and Wheatcroft (2009), p. 404. This is according to Soviet data. ⁵⁸ Werth (1999), p. 121. ⁵⁹ ‘Po otchetu Tsentral’nogo Komiteta’, XIV s’ezd Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b). 18–31 Dekabrya 1925g. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1926), pp. 956–964. ⁶⁰ ‘Po otchetu Tsentral’nogo Komiteta’, Pyatnadtsatyi s’ezd VKP(b). Dekabr’ 1927 Goda. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1961), pp. 1429–1434. For the directives on the establishment of the First Five Year Plan, see pp. 1441–1454.

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These decisions came at a time of growing crisis in agriculture. Grain prices reached a peak in 1925–1926 and then declined sharply. However, when grain prices fell, chiefly due to low prices set by the state in order to maximize capital reserves to fund industrialization (and in the context of the war scare which encouraged hoarding) and the price of industrial goods rose, in 1927 producers began to hold back grain from the market in the hope of pushing prices up again resulting in a procurements crisis in winter 1927–1928. This led to the influx into the countryside of tens of thousands of party members to extract grain from the peasants chiefly using threats and force. Procurement brigades closed down local markets and prevented grain being delivered to private dealers, conducted house to house searches, arrested ‘kulaks’ and hoarders, confiscated grain, horses and equipment, and encouraged poor peasants to inform on their neighbours. The failure to deliver grain to the state became a political crime. This application of force contributed to the procurement crisis of 1928–1929 as peasants responded to this attack by trying to withdraw from the market.⁶¹ The effect of this was exacerbated by the spring crop failures in the main producing areas of Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus, which contributed to the authorities’ over-estimation of the size of grain reserves in the country. This in turn made the procurement figures appear even worse than they were by encouraging exaggerated views of how much grain was potentially available. The resulting shortages placed at risk the regime’s export plans and thereby capital funding required for industrialization, while in the cities it heightened party concern about the reliability of the urban proletariat, many of whom were recent arrivals from the villages. This came at the time when Stalin and those around him began to push for an increased tempo of industrial development, linking this not only to the notion of ‘socialism in one country’, but to Soviet defence needs amidst ‘capitalist encirclement’. While the objective reasons for the shortfall in procurement—crop failures, war fears, rational peasant reactions to the market situation—were known within the leading ranks of the regime, many at the centre including Stalin emphasized the political factor: kulaks, private traders and lazy local officials were at the root of the procurement crisis, with the kulaks conducting a ‘grain strike’, while there was also concern within the upper levels of the party that, in the event of war, the peasants would turn against the Soviet state.⁶² ⁶¹ For a good discussion of this see M. Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. A Study of Collectivization (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968), ch. 9. ⁶² This is discussed in Olga Velikanova, ‘The First Stalin Mass Operation (1927)’, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 40, 1, 2013, pp. 64–89.

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Stalin supported the use of coercion against them.⁶³ In early 1928, the regime resorted to ‘extraordinary’ (or ‘administrative’) measures to increase the quantities of grain being extracted from the countryside (a so-called ‘tribute’ from the villages to industrialization),⁶⁴ while in May the Central Committee (CC) issued an appeal to local party organizations calling on them in response to the grain supply difficulties to intensify ‘socialist construction’ in the countryside; only on such a basis could the liquidation of the kulaks be brought about.⁶⁵ This was the first official call for the liquidation of the kulaks, and it was explicit that this should be achieved through the reconstruction of the economy in the countryside and the consequent elimination of the economic basis upon which they rested. However, given the resort to ‘extraordinary measures’ and the consequent increased state pressure on the producers and the continuing shortages in supply as peasants again responded by withholding their grain and to the existence since mid-1927 of the use of such methods in the villages, it was almost inevitable that the use of ‘extraordinary’ or ‘administrative’ methods would expand. This was made even more likely by the fact that the identification of who was a ‘kulak’ was inherently political, defined by politics rather than socio-economic standing, since there was no agreement about the levels of wealth characteristic of this group. The Marxist division between poor, middle and rich peasants may have been neat theoretically, but it was of little use on the ground; the inability clearly to distinguish between these groups meant that coercive measures could not be focused on one particular group, but tended to affect all sections of the peasantry. The response was widespread peasant resistance with the result being called a ‘war’ by some scholars.⁶⁶ Initially administrative measures were seen principally in terms of the application of the penal code to those whose actions were deemed to be prejudicial to the state’s acquisition of the grain it needed, action which was increasingly seen as ‘counter-revolutionary’. What constituted counter-revolution was formally expanded in May 1928 and was to be combated through arrest, confinement, or forced labour, and the partial or wholesale confiscation of ⁶³ See the documents reprinted in Lynne Viola, V.P. Danilov, N.A. Ivnitskii & Denis Kozlov (eds), The War Against the Peasantry 1927–1930. Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 45–47 & 55–56. Coercive measures had actually been in train against such groups since September 1927. Viola et al (2005), p. 20. ⁶⁴ Roberta T. Manning, ‘The Rise and Fall of “the Extraordinary Measures,” January–June, 1928: Toward a Reexamination of the Onset of the Stalin Revolution’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1504, January 2001. ⁶⁵ E.H. Carr & R.W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy. 1. 1926–1929 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 73. ⁶⁶ Viola et al (2005).

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property. State procurement agents went into the villages and requisitioned grain from the producers, theoretically leaving them sufficient for subsistence and for next season’s planting. Under the exceptional measures this often involved house-to-house searches, the confiscation of grain, the threat (and implementation) of fines, arrest and prison, expulsion from the peasant community (the mir) and the cooperative (thereby making it impossible to buy goods), individual tax levies, land seizure, and extortion; by mid-1928 starvation was already present in some parts of Ukraine.⁶⁷ The security police, the OGPU, were involved in the application of these measures; they had been involved in the campaign against ‘anti-Soviet elements’ since mid-1927 and throughout the 1920s their extra-judicial powers had been expanded.⁶⁸ There were abuses right from the outset: wrongful arrests, beatings, excessive requisitioning and the closure of markets were common. Widespread peasant opposition occurred; in 1928 the OGPU reported 1,027 incidents of ‘terror’ and 709 mass disturbances.⁶⁹ The party leadership was not solidly united behind this hard line, with the Right Opposition in particular critical of it, but Stalin and his supporters were adamant about the need for such a policy.⁷⁰ With procurement levels still unsatisfactory towards the end of 1928, at the end of November the leadership called for the tempo of procurement to be increased while in January 1929 the Politburo called for ‘maximum haste in the repression of kulak terrorists’.⁷¹ It was in 1929 that the assault on the peasantry escalated with forced grain requisitioning ‘sliding’⁷² into wholesale agricultural collectivization. In the middle of 1929 in the face of continuing procurement difficulties the so-called Ural-Siberian Method (URM) of grain collection was formally adopted, although it had been in use in Siberia and the Urals since March. Formally the essence of this was for village assemblies to endorse the grain requisition target imposed on their village (by local authorities or procurement

⁶⁷ Olga Bertelsen, ‘Starvation and Violence amid the Soviet Politics of Silence 1928–1929’, Genocide Studies International 11, 1, 2018, p. 48. ⁶⁸ Velikanova (2013), pp. 74–79. The trigger for this was terrorist explosions by a monarchist group in Moscow and Leningrad in June 1927. Velikanova (2013), p. 71. ⁶⁹ Viola et al (2005), p. 62. Also see Bertelsen (2018), p. 51 for figures from Ukraine. ⁷⁰ See his speech at the July 1928 CC plenum, in which he referred to the need to exact ‘tribute’ from the peasants in order to finance Soviet industrial development. I.V. Stalin, ‘Ob Industrializatsii i Khlebnoi Probleme’, I.V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1951) vol.11, pp. 157–187. Part of this speech and Bukharin’s response are reproduced in Viola et al (2005), pp. 97–112. ⁷¹ Viola et al (2005), p. 68. ⁷² This is Moshe Lewin’s term. Moshe Lewin, ‘The Immediate Background of Soviet Collectivization’, Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System. Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 110.

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officials; this was the so-called contract system whereby entire villages were made responsible for the delivery of a specified amount of grain) and then special commissions composed of poor and middle peasants were to assign quotas to individual village households, with the largest amounts to come from the kulak households. Individual households that did not meet their quota could be fined five times the amount of grain owed and, on not paying, committed to a year of forced labour; members of households refusing to meet their obligations could be confined for up to two years, exiled from the locality, have their property confiscated, and be barred from the cooperative. In August and September, central pressures for heightened procurement levels increased, including active repressive measures by the OGPU. In early October execution of kulaks who organized terrorist acts was sanctioned. In early November, the OGPU reported 15,536 people had been arrested for ‘economic’ crimes and 12,808 for ‘counter-revolutionary’ crimes, most occurring in the principal grain procurement regions.⁷³ This combination of URM and heightened repression resulted in increased central grain procurement, a development that persuaded those around Stalin of the effectiveness of such administrative methods in the countryside. But enhanced coercion produced strong peasant resistance; for 1929 the OGPU reported 9,903 incidents of ‘terror’ and 1,307 cases of mass disturbances.⁷⁴ The collectivization of agriculture had begun following the XV Congress in 1927, but it proceeded at a relatively modest pace until it was picked up in the middle of 1929, in part in response to the difficulties in procuring adequate grain; by August there was talk of ‘mass collectivization’, and by October the percentage of households in collective farms had reached 7.5%.⁷⁵ Stalin publicly interpreted the recent expansion of the collective sector of agriculture as reflecting the enthusiastic support of the middle peasants, and on this basis the November 1929 CC plenum declared wholesale collectivization to be the immediate task.⁷⁶ Although publicly it was declared that the countryside ⁷³ Viola et al (2005), p. 121. ⁷⁴ Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin. Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 102 & 135. This is the best study of peasant resistance. For some figures see Andrea Graziosi, ‘The uses of hunger. Stalin’s solution of the peasant and national questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933’, Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk & Andrew G. Newby (eds), Famines in European History. The Last Great European Famines Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 230. ⁷⁵ R.W. Davies, The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. 1. The Socialist Offensive. The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture, 1929–1930 (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 442. For some regional figures and its general tempo, see p. 203; also Lewin (1968), p. 427. For a general discussion, see Lewin (1968), ch. 15. ⁷⁶ For the proceedings of this plenum, see V.P. Danilov et al (eds), Kak Lomali NEP. Stenogrammy Plenumov TsK VKP(b) 1928–1929gg. Tom 5. Plenum TsK VKP(b) 10-17 Noyabrya 1929g (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Materik, 2000). He had actually called in January 1928 for an expanded unrolling of collective

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was moving spontaneously into socialism, many at the centre were aware that coercion had been instrumental in the levels of collectivization achieved up to that point. With the defeat of the Right Opposition finally in November, the question of collectivization itself seemed no longer problematic, but there were differences at the top over the appropriate tempo. This was evident in the work of the Politburo commission established following the November plenum to chart the course of collectivization. This body produced a draft decree which, inter alia, foreshadowed the completion of wholesale collectivization within five years (two to three years or ‘possibly even sooner’ in the main producing areas), counselled against the socialization of domestic life (such as the introduction of creches and attacks on the Church), and abjured the use of force.⁷⁷ Following the intervention of Stalin, this draft was reworked into the decree issued by the CC on 5 January 1930.⁷⁸ This was much less detailed, but it dramatically shortened the timetable for collectivization: the most important grain growing regions were to be fully collectivized by autumn 1930 or spring 1931 at the latest, and the remaining producing regions a year later, all of this to be achieved through cooperation with the poor and middle peasants. This was a breakneck pace, and yet no guidance was given to people on the ground about how this should be achieved. Furthermore, by talking about this as a stage towards the creation of communes, the decision gave some legitimacy to the development in some parts of the country of an effort to bring about the complete socialization of everyday life. The speed and the extent of collectivization implicit in this document was unprecedented, and its framers must have known that they could not hope to achieve it without the use of substantial coercion. Such coercion was evident on the ground in the villages. Local officials and city-dwellers mobilized into the countryside realized that in the absence of clear instructions about how to collectivize or what form of collective should be adopted—the commune where all property was socialized, the artel where fields were held and worked collectively but peasant households retained their individual economies (i.e. some land, a cow, and other animals for household purposes), or the toz where only land and major agricultural agriculture in the form of the creation of state and collective farms as a means of preventing the continuing sabotage of grain procurement by the kulaks. I.V. Stalin, ‘O Khlebozagotovkakh i Perspektivakh Razvitiya Sel’skogo Khozyaistva’, Sochineniya, vol.11, pp. 4–5. ⁷⁷ Viola et al (2005), pp. 181–188. ⁷⁸ ‘Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) o Tempe Kollektivizatsii i Merakh Pomoshchi Gosudarstva Kolkhoznomu Stroitel’stvu’, Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza v Rezolyutsiyakh i Resheniyakh S’ezdov, Konferentsii i Plenumov ts.k.(1898–1986) [hence forth KPSS v rez] (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1983–1987), vol.5, pp. 72–75. For a translation see Viola et al (2005), pp. 201–204.

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equipment were socialized⁷⁹—career prospects were likely to be enhanced by their support for rapid and the more extreme forms of collectivization. This enthusiasm from lower- level officials (but not from the wide ranks of the peasantry) was particularly important in the breakneck pace of collectivization in January and February 1930. Intimidation, threats, and coercion, including the threat to be classed as a kulak and then sent into exile, appears to have been the normal modus operandi.⁸⁰ Violence was also implicit in the change in policy flagged by Stalin in a speech in December 1929.⁸¹ He talked about the shift of ‘the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class’, about a ‘determined offensive against the kulaks’, to ‘break their resistance’, to ‘smash’ them and ‘strike them so hard as to prevent them from rising to their feet again’. While these comments are framed within a discussion of restructuring socialist relations in the countryside, which could be consistent with destruction of the class simply through the elimination of private property, the violence of the language added to the immediate past history of the use of coercion in the villages could easily be interpreted as a call for the physical destruction of the kulaks. The fact that the OGPU played a major part in implementing the dekulakization policy⁸² reflects the coercive essence at the policy’s heart. Many party leaders and officials at local levels acted on their own initiative in what they took to be the spirit of the dekulakization campaign without waiting for central instructions about how this was to be conducted; cases of dekulakization were reported from the latter part of 1929,⁸³ although instructions were not issued until the end of January–early February 1930. These identified three categories of kulak. First, those kulaks who were seen as part of the ‘counter-revolutionary kulak aktiv’ were to have their heads of households ⁷⁹ Only in Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with success’ article (see below) was it made clear that the artel was the desired form. ⁸⁰ For descriptions of some of the methods used, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), ch. 2. ⁸¹ I.V. Stalin, ‘K Voprosam Agrarnoi Politiki v SSSR’, Sochineniya vol.12, pp. 141–172. The quotations are from pp. 166–170. Also see his 21 January article ‘K Voprosu o Politike Likvidatsii Kulachestva, Kak Klassa’, pp. 178–183. On the dekulakization campaign, see Davies (1980), pp. 228–252; for some figures on the numbers affected, see Davies (1980), pp. 247–248 & 447. ⁸² On this see Viola et al (2005), ch. 5 and Lynne Viola, ‘The Role of the OGPU in Dekulakization, Mass Deportations, and Special Resettlement in 1930’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1406, January 2000. So too did workers, red armymen, and officials mobilized from the cities. On the workers see Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland. Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). ⁸³ Fitzpatrick (1994), p. 44.

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arrested and sent to concentration camps (those who had organized terrorist attacks and counter-revolutionary activities or participated in insurrection were to be executed) and their families sent into exile. This was to apply to up to 60,000 households throughout the USSR. Second were remaining elements of the ‘kulak aktiv’, especially the wealthiest kulaks and semi-landowners, who had been less active in their opposition to Soviet power but were nevertheless arch-exploiters in the village, a total of up to 150,000 households. With their families, they were to be exiled to other parts of the Soviet Union, taking with them the most essential domestic goods, some productive equipment, some food, and up to 500 rubles. The third, the remaining kulaks, were to be settled outside the collective farm but within the district’s borders where they could be used as a workforce in things like forestry or road construction. In all cases expropriated means of production and property were to be transferred to the collective farm. The first two categories were to be under the jurisdiction of the OGPU, the third of local soviet and party organs.⁸⁴ But these central instructions continued to be overwhelmed by actions on the ground as local authorities acted against those they called ‘kulaks’ regardless of their socio-economic position; poor and middle peasants and the families of Red Army servicemen (who were explicitly to be excluded from the process) often had their property seized and were themselves exiled, while generally opposition to collectivization was enough to see one labelled a kulak. The process was meant to be coordinated at the district level by a troika (local party first secretary, chair of the soviet executive committee, and local OGPU head) and carried out locally by brigades or commissions staffed by local activists and often members mobilized from the cities. Central control figures for the numbers to be dekulakized were greatly exceeded in some areas; by 1 October 1930, 283,717 people had been arrested under category 1 while incomplete figures for the total number of death sentences approved by the OGPU for 1930 was 18,966.⁸⁵ In December 1930 it was claimed that 203,681 kulak families had been dekulakized but not exiled, and 337,563 families had suffered some form of dekulakization.⁸⁶ The central authorities were ⁸⁴ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), pp. 20–21 and Viola et al (2005), pp. 209–211. OGPU instructions had an expanded definition of category 1 kulaks: it included ‘active Whiteguards, former bandits, former White officers, emigrants who had returned to the USSR, and “active members of church councils and of religious and sectarian societies and groups”, as well as “the richest peasants, usurers, speculators and former landowners”.’ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 21. For instructions from Sovnarkom dating from May 1929 about how a kulak was to be identified, see Lewin (1968), p. 490. On dekulakization generally, see Lewin (1968), ch. 17. ⁸⁵ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 22. There were many deaths that were more spontaneous and therefore not given official approval. ⁸⁶ Respectively Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 24 and Viola et al (2005), p. 323.

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inundated with complaints about ‘excesses’ committed by those charged with carrying out the policy;⁸⁷ arbitrary arrest, seizure of property (including personal items like jewellery and clothing), despatch into exile, beatings and murder were common while activists often considered seized items to be their own property. Dekulakization soon turned into an action against any perceived opposition in the countryside. And there was significant opposition to worry the authorities. Many kulaks fled, often into the cities (thereby creating more worries for the authorities because of the potential infection effect they could have), destruction of their property was common as they sought to pass as poor or middle peasants, and in many places armed resistance developed, sometimes stimulated as much by the simultaneous campaign against the Church as by collectivization and dekulakization.⁸⁸ Nevertheless, formal collectivization levels rocketed up, driven in part by dekulakization and by the propensity of officials on the ground to seek to outdo both the targets set by the centre and one another.⁸⁹ However, the levels of peasant resistance posed a major threat to continued Soviet control of the countryside and to the forthcoming spring sowing campaign. This led the authorities temporarily to retreat. Stalin’s ‘Dizzy with success’ article of 2 March 1930⁹⁰ blamed ‘excesses’ in the collectivization campaign (but not dekulakization) on lower-level officials who had become dizzy from the successes that were being achieved. The result on the ground was a significant decline in the level of collectivization; on 1 March there was said to be 57.2% of all households in collective farms and by 1 May this had fallen to 28.0% with lower figures in many areas.⁹¹ While many of these collectives had been purely on paper, these figures do mark a significant process of decollectivization. This retreat was also marked by a surge in peasant rebellion; in 1930 the OGPU recorded 13,754 rural mass disturbances

⁸⁷ These were usually specially organized detachments including representatives of the local authorities (soviet and/or party), poor peasants, workers mobilized from the cities (such as the 25000ers), and members of the militia, GPU, and/or military. For an interesting discussion of violence at this time, see Tracy McDonald, ‘The Process of Collectivisation Violence’, Europe-Asia Studies 65, 9, 2013, pp. 1827–1847. ⁸⁸ On levels and types of peasant opposition, see Davies (1980), pp. 255–261, Viola (1996), and Fitzpatrick (1994). On the anti-religious campaign, see Fitzpatrick (1994), pp. 59–62. ⁸⁹ Davies (1980), pp. 213–219. ⁹⁰ I.V. Stalin, ‘Golovokruzhenie ot Uspekhov. K Voprosam Kolkhoznogo Dvizheniya’, Sochineniya vol.12, pp. 191–199. For the corresponding CC decision, see ‘O Bor’be s Iskrivleniyami Partlinii V Kolkhoznom Dvizhenii’, KPSS v Rez…, vol.5, pp. 101–104. For the general policy shift towards moderation in the second half of February, see Davies (1980), pp. 261–268. For reaction to this article within the party see Davies (1980), ch. 7. ⁹¹ Davies (1980), pp. 442–443. For slightly different figures, see Viola et al (2005), p. 264. On local officials’ negative response to Stalin’s article and the CC decision, see Viola (1987), pp. 123–132.

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involving some 2.5 million peasants and a further 13,794 ‘terrorist acts’.⁹² This opposition declined in the summer, perhaps reflecting a false sense of victory with the dismantling of so many of the collective farms but also the vigour with which these risings had been suppressed. When, following the good 1930 harvest,⁹³ collectivization resumed in September 1930, the resistance was significantly less; the peasantry was exhausted by food shortages and repression, traditional village leaders and institutions had been destroyed, and collectivization may now have seemed an inevitability.⁹⁴ In addition, the process of collectivization as it was revived now took a much more orderly fashion although it was still accomplished through the sorts of pressures that had been used in the first two months of the year. In December 1930 there was a call for 80% of households to be collectivized, and the elimination of the kulaks to be completed in the main grain-growing areas, 50% in the remaining grain areas, 20–25% in the grain-growing parts of the grain deficient regions and 50% cotton and sugar beet areas by the end of 1931. No fewer than 50% of all peasant households were to be collectivized by the end of 1931.⁹⁵ By the end of the year 63.7% of households in the USSR were said to have been collectivized, but the proportion in the main graingrowing areas was significantly higher.⁹⁶ While the tempo of collectivization was not as great as it had been in the first two months of 1930, it was still very high and, in contrast to the earlier period, this time when households joined the collective farm they tended to remain in it. As before, reliance was had upon the efforts of industrial workers and officials, now supplemented by peasants already in collectives, visiting villages and persuading reluctant peasants to enter the new collectives. The sorts of pressures used earlier were again in evidence to induce peasants to enter the collectives: harsh taxation regimes and levies were imposed on individual peasants, smaller land areas and poorer quality land was allocated to individual private households compared with collective, seizure of seed grain, threats, and actual physical violence. Most serious ⁹² Viola et al (2005), pp. 320–323. For some figures on peasant oppositional action and their repression, see Werth (1999), pp. 149–150. ⁹³ However industrial performance lagged in the last half of 1930. Davies (1980), pp. 372–373. ⁹⁴ For some details see Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), pp. 14–16 and Viola (1996). ⁹⁵ ‘O Narodnokhozyaistvennom Plane na 1931 Goda’, KPSS v Rez… (1984), vol.5, pp. 233–234. ⁹⁶ Results for those areas that were identified as needing to have 80% collectivized were as follows: Ukraine 69.2%, North Caucasus 81.6%, Lower Volga 82.9%, and Middle Volga 82.6%. Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 488. The total number of households collectivized increased over successive years (as at 1 July) as follows: 1933 66.1%, 1934 (1 January) 71.4%, 1935 89.1%, 1936 90.5%, 1937 90.3%, 1938 93.5%, 1939 95.6%. A distinction was made between Ukraine (Steppe) and Ukraine (Wooded steppe) with the former in the first (80%) category and the second in the second (50%) category. R.W. Davies with Oleg V. Khlevnyuk & Stephen G. Wheatcroft., The Industrialization of Soviet Russia. 6. The Years of Progress: The Soviet Economy, 1934–1936 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 435.

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was to be categorized as a ‘kulak’, which meant being sent into exile; none were allowed to remain in the vicinity of their home villages as had been the case with category 3 kulaks earlier. This second phase of collectivization in 1931 was accompanied by a second phase of dekulakization with the definition of a kulak being even more vague and ambiguous than it had been in 1930. Those deemed to have had counter-revolutionary pasts, or to have engaged in independent economic activity (such as trading)⁹⁷ or to simply be recalcitrant could be classed as kulaks. In February 1931, the Politburo instructed the OGPU to establish 1,000 kulak settlements each to house 200-300 families, mainly in Kazakhstan. This was modified in March by the decision that 150,000 households (later reduced to 110,000) were to be exiled in 1931. In April, it was decided that the administration and servicing of the settlements was to be in the hands of the OGPU⁹⁸ which, in conjunction with village authorities, was also responsible for the dispossession and deportation of the kulaks. The despatch of these people to areas that had not been prepared for such an influx meant that conditions in the settlements were dire. Insufficient food and (satisfactory) clothing, inadequate housing, lack of facilities (including medical and those needed for work), and the spread of disease not only made life a misery but resulted in large-scale deaths. During this second drive of dekulakization some 268,000 households were exiled, giving a total for 1930–1931 of 381,000 households, or 1,803,392 people.⁹⁹ Many of these were fed into the expanding network of labour camps located in the north of the country and in Siberia.¹⁰⁰ Accompanying collectivization and reflecting the transformational nature of the terror at this time was a renewed drive against religion. Large numbers of churches were closed, and religious leaders and priests arrested, exiled, or deported. Church property including bells were seized and believers subjected to vigorous anti-religious propaganda. By 1936 only 28% of the prerevolutionary number of Orthodox churches remained functioning and 32% of mosques; the number of registered priests was only 16% of the 1914 total.¹⁰¹ State violence against the countryside did not cease with the completion of collectivization ‘in the main’ accomplished by the second drive in 1931. The

⁹⁷ The prohibition on such activity was also applied in the cities where those who had been involved in the private sector of the economy during NEP were driven out of business, labelled ‘alien elements’, and stripped of their civil rights. ⁹⁸ On these measures see Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), pp. 33–34. ⁹⁹ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 46 and Viola et al (2005), p. 275. The 1.8 million figure does not include category 3 kulaks. ¹⁰⁰ On the camps and conditions of deportation and in the camps, see Werth (1999), pp. 150–158. ¹⁰¹ Werth (1999), pp. 173–174.

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peasants’ attitude to surrendering grain did not automatically change upon entry into the collective or state farms. They were still animated by the need to both ensure that they had enough to feed their families and to sow for the next season, and although the structure of the collective farm in theory brought them under tighter control, their traditional concerns were not assuaged by the view of collective farm leaders as officials of the state rather than representatives of the village. Nor did those individual peasants who had not entered the collective but continued to operate in the agricultural sector have any compelling reason to change their traditional attitudes. Accordingly, the state collection of grain remained fraught, especially given the poor harvests in 1931 and 1932 that underpinned the famine of 1932–1933. With less grain harvested but the state intent on expanding the amount of grain it collected in order to finance industrialization, a high level of pressure and coercion was inevitable. Relying on the established accepted explanation for shortfalls in grain collection, that it reflected the activities of opposition in the villages, the use of force to extract the supplies they wanted seemed to the centre to be a rational response: if insufficient grain was being handed over because of opposition to Soviet power, the crushing of that opposition appeared to be the answer to the shortfall. The use of coercion was therefore a widespread feature of grain collection over these years. And dekulakization was still in progress at the end of 1932–1933 with a wave of arrests and exile in early 1933 brought to an end in May of that year.¹⁰² Collectivization and dekulakization were not the only causes of suffering in the countryside in the early 1930s; famine also ravaged parts of the country. Poor harvests and food shortages had occurred in the mid-1920s, but this built into a crescendo from late in the decade into 1933. The late 1927 crisis in state grain collection that had been the trigger for the shift towards collectivization created an urban food shortage which the government tried to meet through the introduction of rationing. By early 1932 some 38 million people were meant to receive food through this rationing system,¹⁰³ but supply was unreliable and for some groups of the population the level of the ration they were to receive was reduced. Despite the government’s attempt to shield urban workers from the effects of the 1932–1933 rural famine (urban inhabitants suffered less than rural ones in this famine), the urban death toll continued to mount until the 1933 harvest, which was double the normal level in many of the major growing areas. Famine also took hold in Kazakhstan in 1931, reflecting an earlier decline in livestock numbers and a bad harvest ¹⁰² On the repression and its ending at this time, see Fitzpatrick (1994), pp. 76–79. ¹⁰³ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 406.

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in 1931 in the northern growing area of the republic. The final death toll in Kazakhstan is unknown, but it probably exceeded one million.¹⁰⁴ But the most important famine was that of 1932-33 in the major grain producing areas. This famine was most severe in Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, and the Lower and Central Volga regions, with significantly higher than normal death rates also in the Central Black Earth region. Serious food difficulties also occurred in other parts of the country. The number of deaths from famine has been very contentious, but Bob Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft have argued that it falls somewhere in the range 4.6 and 8.5 million; their estimate is 5.7 million.¹⁰⁵ Even the lowest of these numbers is frighteningly high. Most deaths, around 53%,¹⁰⁶ occurred in Ukraine, and most were peasants. The famine has been one of the most contentious topics in the historiography of the Soviet Union. Some have argued that it was artificially engineered by the Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, to break the opposition of the countryside to Soviet power. Others argue that it was specifically directed at Ukraine, pointing to the higher casualty rates there—the death toll in Ukraine was almost 2.5 times that in the Russian republic—in order to break its perceived opposition to Moscow.¹⁰⁷ This argument has even given rise to the general use of the Ukrainian word Holodomor for the famine. The essence of these positions is that the famine was man-made and intentional, that there was sufficient grain available to feed the population, but Stalin and his colleagues deliberately withheld it from that population.¹⁰⁸ If correct, this would mean that the famine could be classed as an instance of the direct and intentional application of terroristic tactics to the peasantry. So why did the famine take place? According to Davies and Wheatcroft,¹⁰⁹ the chief cause of the famine was the significant decline in production levels and in the amount retained in the ¹⁰⁴ See the discussion in Davies and Wheatcroft (2009), pp. 408–409. ¹⁰⁵ Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 415. Robert Conquest estimated a death toll of seven million from the 1932–1933 famine and a further 6.5 million from dekulakization. Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 306. ¹⁰⁶ Calculated from figures in Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 415. ¹⁰⁷ This line of argument has been taken up particularly by Ukrainian scholars, but it has been made most forcefully in Anne Applebaum, Red Famine. Stalin’s War on Ukraine (London: Allen Lane, 2017). The first full length major work in English that seemed to make the intentionalist argument was Conquest (1986). However, he later abjured this position, saying that he did not think that ‘Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first—thus consciously abetting it’. Cited in Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 441. ¹⁰⁸ For a good discussion of this see Andrea Graziosi, ‘The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27, 1/4, 2004–2005, pp. 97–115. Also see Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 57–59. ¹⁰⁹ For their discussion see R.W. Davies & S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Soviet Famine of 1932–33 and the Crisis in Agriculture’, Stephen G. Wheatcroft (ed), Challenging Traditional Views of Russian History

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countryside. They suggest that poor harvests in 1931 and 1932 meant that the level of grain production fell from 73 million tons in 1927–1928 to 62.6 million in 1932–1933, while that retained in the countryside fell from 65 million tons to 47.2 million tons. In their words, ‘the absolute lack of food was the background to the famine’. They further argue that the ‘fundamental cause of the deterioration of agriculture in 1928–1933 was the unremitting state pressure on rural resources’.¹¹⁰ But did this reflect a basic desire to punish the peasants (or Ukraine)? What is clear is that investment in industry increased substantially over this period as the state sought to develop its industrial base as quickly as possible, and this was funded in part through grain exports. Fundamental to those exports was perceived to be ensuring that the source of the grain, the farming community, was under direct state control; this was the argument about the danger of kulaks holding the state to ransom.¹¹¹ Collectivization and dekulakization were therefore seen as essential to the course of industrial development to which the Soviet leadership was committed. This drive to expand state control of the countryside and the grain it produced facilitated the policy of requisitioning that drove the famine, especially when those leaders overestimated the size of the harvest and therefore imposed unrealistic collection targets pulling more grain from the countryside than it could afford. This they did in 1931 and 1932.¹¹² Furthermore, state policy in the form of collectivization significantly disrupted agricultural production, not only by destroying the basis upon which productive private agriculture had rested (for example, the abandonment of rational crop rotation practices) but also by encouraging some producers to sabotage state policy; the destruction of newlyclaimed state property, the killing of peasants and of animals was widespread. The destruction of livestock and therefore the reduction of draught capacity in the farms, was also important, and a development hastened by the shortage of fodder owing to the level of state requisitions, and this could not be compensated quickly by the increased provision of tractors. But also important were weather conditions. In 1931–1932 the weather was particularly poor in terms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 69–91, and Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), pp. 431–441. On calculation of the size of the harvest, see pp. 442–447. ¹¹⁰ Davies & Wheatcroft (2002), p. 434. ¹¹¹ This was consistent with the March 1933 redefinition of a kulak as any peasant unable or unwilling to fulfil his labour and procurement responsibilities to the state. Graziosi (2015), p. 244. ¹¹² Davies & Wheatcroft (2009), p. 435. On the centre reducing targets for collection in mid-1932mid-1933 as a result of calls from below for a slackening of the tempo of grain collection, see Davies & Wheatcroft (2002), pp. 80–82. For a simple explanation of the difficulty the centre had in establishing the level of the harvest (and also how much could be taken from the peasants), see Fitzpatrick (1994), pp. 70–71. This was because of the difficulty in getting accurate information given the propensity of both peasants and lower-level officials to under-estimate the harvest when reporting up the chain. Also see R.W. Davies, M.B. Tauger & S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932–1933’, Slavic Review 54, 3, 1995, pp. 642–657.

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of producing a good harvest and although it improved in 1933, it was still not as good as the long-term average. It is hard to escape the view that the famine was in part a result of the policies pursued by the state. These policies did not set out to create a famine (so in that sense the famine was not intentional), nor only to punish the peasants, but to facilitate what was seen as the larger goal, the creation of the industrial base for a socialist society. This also involved the consolidation of Soviet control in the countryside, something deemed essential for regime stability and which of necessity involved bringing the peasants under control. But, once the famine had been created, state policy exacerbated its impact. Physical pressure continued to be exerted on the peasants by state representatives.¹¹³ Extensive controls were placed on movement to prevent areas being flooded by refugees from the famine-hit regions,¹¹⁴ thereby effectively locking people into those famine-ravaged areas, and high penalties imposed on those ‘enemies of the people’ who stole from the collective farm.¹¹⁵ The regime, as much as it could, kept the famine secret, refusing for a long time publicly to acknowledge that there were real problems in the countryside that could have been addressed in part by external assistance.¹¹⁶ When news of the famine did leak out, they refused all international offers of assistance in dealing with it. And in response to the famine, the centre released only limited and clearly inadequate supplies of grain for food, fodder or sowing the future crop or to offset the famine conditions, although reserve stocks were significantly lower than the centre had either sought or scholars have often assumed them to be.¹¹⁷ And in 1933 the regime continued to export grain to generate the funds for industrialization despite the plight of so many of the peasants. So, while the Soviet leadership did not intentionally set out to foster a famine, once it developed, they did not concentrate on measures to ameliorate its effect. And this is consistent with an intention to use the famine once it had emerged as a weapon to break resistance in the countryside and, given that much of this peasant resistance had taken place in Ukraine, to break Ukrainian resistance as well. Consistent with this view of the instrumental use of the famine to break putative Ukrainian

¹¹³ In April 1933 the writer Mikhail Sholokhov reported some of the methods used to Stalin. These included beatings, people left naked outside to freeze, feigned executions, torture with red hot irons and suffocation. Cited in Graziosi (2015), p. 246. ¹¹⁴ On the introduction of the internal passport system at the end of 1932, see Graziosi (2015), p. 243. On the passport system, see Albert Baiburin, The Soviet Passport. The History, Nature and Uses of the Internal Passport in the USSR (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). ¹¹⁵ This was the law of 7 August 1932, purportedly written by Stalin. ¹¹⁶ On the general importance of secrecy and its role in state policy, including the exercise of violence on the population, see Bertelsen (2018), pp. 38–67. ¹¹⁷ See the discussion in Davies & Wheatcroft (2002), pp. 83–87. On reserves see Davies, Tauger & Wheatcroft (1995).

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resistance to the centre is the fact that at this time the centre embarked on a major effort at ‘de-ukrainization’, at replacing ethnic Ukrainian cadres by other ethnicities (especially Russians), subordinating Ukrainian language and culture to the Russian, and seeking to submerge Ukrainian identity into a Soviet identity.¹¹⁸ However this policy was not restricted to Ukraine but reflects the reversal of the policy of ‘indigenization’ that had been applied in all of the nonethnic Russian areas from the early 1920s, although developments in Ukraine had been particularly important in discrediting this policy in the eyes of Stalin and others in Moscow.¹¹⁹ Similar to what was done in Ukraine was done in the other non-Russian areas at this time, although it may have been conducted more vigorously in Ukraine than elsewhere.¹²⁰ But this reflected more the instrumental use of the famine to break down national identity than an original intention driving the famine. The centre sought to emasculate Ukraine rather than eradicate the Ukrainian nation.¹²¹ It is impossible to have accurate figures on the number who suffered as a result of collectivization, dekulakization and the famine. One scholar has reported that some 1.8 million people were deported of whom ‘hundreds of thousands’ died as a result, and around 6 million deaths by hunger.¹²² According to Graziosi,¹²³ between 1930 and 1933 some 2.25 million people were deported not counting those who were displaced but remained within their own regions. The toll of suffering was enormous. Whatever the final figure, it is difficult not to see the transformation thereby achieved as not the result at least in part of the widespread application of state terror.

Inverted Terror: The Great Terror The Great Terror is the title of the book by Robert Conquest that was mainly responsible for setting the frame within which the purges (although this word was not used for these events in the Soviet Union at the time) of 1936–1938 ¹¹⁸ For details of this see Graziosi (2015), pp. 248–251. ¹¹⁹ On this see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), esp. ch. 7. For a study of the nature of the perceived Ukrainian challenge that led to this reversal of policy, see James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation. National Communism in Soviet Ukraine 1918–1933 (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1983). ¹²⁰ According to Martin (2001), p. 307 ‘by late 1933 the nationalities terror [illustrated by deukrainization] extended all the way to the non-grain producing regions of Central Asia … (the) nationalities terror … continued for over a year after the grain requisitions terror was halted (in May 1933).’ ¹²¹ These are the words of Graziosi (2015), p. 252. ¹²² Werth (1999), pp. 146 & 151–157 (on deportations). ¹²³ Graziosi (2015), p. 235. For some figures on deaths, see Graziosi (2015), p. 245.

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have generally been understood.¹²⁴ While this was not the first scholarly study of the events of these years,¹²⁵ it was the most important in establishing what became the prevailing interpretation of these events. That basic narrative saw the period 1933–1939 as possessing an essential unity characterized by escalating tension and purging activity and that this process was driven by Stalin. Stalin used the assassination of Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov in December 1934 as an excuse for a mounting campaign of terror culminating in the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks in 1937–1938. The Terror was seen as a single, coherent operation. While scholars have differed over whether the Kirov assassination or the first Moscow show trial of August 1936 was the beginning of the Terror (with in the latter case the Kirov killing seen as the precursor), most saw it as a single phenomenon. The opening of the Soviet archives has enabled a more finely-grained analysis, and it is now clear that there were two basic elements of the Terror: an attack upon the elite symbolized by the three Moscow show trials but including the arrest and often execution of larger numbers of party members, state officials and the military leadership, which begins immediately following the Kirov assassination; and the mass operations beginning in mid-1937 in which particular segments of the population were targeted, where most of the arrests and executions took place and which, unlike the trials, were not widely publicized. In principle these two elements were separate, but in practice they were intertwined, respectively inverted terror and revolutionary-transformational terror. Both had their roots in earlier developments in the party and society more broadly. Turning first to the inverted terror involving purge of the elite, it is useful to look briefly at the history of purges in the party after 1917. There were two types of processes for screening party members. Initially purging was seen as an essentially bureaucratic process involving the perusal of party documents in the sense of checking that they were bona fide, and that the holder of such documents was eligible and worthy to remain a party member. This first form of purge was usually called a ’verification’ (proverka) or ‘exchange’ (obmen) of party cards and was almost a continual process in one part of the party

¹²⁴ Robert Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). During the 1970s some additional material was added, with a new edition appearing in 1990: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). According to Conquest (p. viii), in the 1990 edition new material has been added but the essential argument from 1968 remains unchanged. In his words, ‘while the new material extends our knowledge, it confirms the soundness of the account given in The Great Terror’. It is the revised 1990 edition that will be used in the following analysis. ¹²⁵ For example, Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1956) and F. Beck & W. Godin, Russian Purge and The Extraction of Confession (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1951). It was also dealt with in more general studies of Soviet history by leading scholars like Merle Fainsod and John A. Armstrong.

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or another throughout the 1920s, chiefly reflecting the uncertainties about the reliability of the party’s operating regime and the nature of the society in which it existed. The second type of screening process was the chistka, the cleansing or purge, which was a campaign directed at expelling from the party those elements deemed unworthy of membership. There was no distinct line between these two sorts of operations, and both could lead to the removal of people from the party. However, while the checking was seen as a normal part of bureaucratic procedure,¹²⁶ the chistka was generally seen as an extraordinary campaign. In neither case were those found deficient put to death; these were not blood purges. The first purge was launched in the middle of 1921,¹²⁷ dragging on in some areas into 1922, and was conducted by the Central Control Commission. While all communists were to have their credentials, records and reputations checked, a special focus was to be on those elements that were ‘socially alien’ from socialism, particularly those of bourgeois, white collar or intelligentsia origin, former members of other parties, former tsarist officials and kulaks. Around a quarter of the total membership was purged, mainly for passivity, careerism, failing to carry out party instructions, drunkenness, corruption, religious practice, and joining the party with counter-revolutionary aims.¹²⁸ The chistka was not officially directed against opposition elements inside the party; this had been explicitly forbidden in the CC instruction launching the purge. However, it is probable that in practice some oppositionists were caught up in the purge, but the removal of this sort of opposition was not one of its purposes. Concern about the nature of recent party members was at its heart, consistent with the continuing worry about petty bourgeois infection. Another chistka was launched in 1929–1930, also to be implemented by the Central Control Commission, and this too was concerned about the quality of party membership and the elimination of undesirable forms of activity. Formally it was said to be directed against ‘all non-communist, corrupt, alien, bureaucratized self-seeking elements and hangers-on who take a functionary’s view of their duties’. This decision was more explicit further on: to be removed from the party were ‘all elements that are alien to the party, that constitute ¹²⁶ Although there were specific campaigns for re-registration in 1919 and 1920 and for a party census in 1921 and 1926–1927. For one discussion of the nature of the party purge, see J.Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 3. ¹²⁷ ‘Ob Ochistke Partii’, KPSS v Rez…(1983), vol. 2, pp. 438–443. ¹²⁸ See the summary of the purge in T.H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917– 1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 96–100.

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a danger to its successes and that are indifferent to its struggle…incurable bureaucrats and hangers-on, those who are in league with the class enemy and are helping him, those who are cut off from the party by virtue of economic and personal aggrandizement, anti-semites and covert adherents of religious cults…covert trotskyites, adherents of Myasnikov, and Democratic Centralists, and adherents of other anti-party groups…’¹²⁹ Given the prevailing view of the danger posed by the potential infection of the party by petty bourgeois influence from society at large, the first citation above could be taken to include opposition groups in the party. But there could be no ambiguity given the second citation; opposition within the party reflected in the reference to ‘antiparty groups’ and the explicit naming of some shows that an explicit intent of the purge was to target opposition within the party. The link was drawn explicitly between external conditions, internal opposition, and the cleansing of party ranks. Given the expulsion of leading figures including Trotsky and Zinoviev in 1927, this should not be surprising. While some 11% of members were expelled,¹³⁰ the numbers expelled explicitly for oppositional activity are unknown. But what is clear is that this set a precedent whereby the chistka could be used against opposition, with the penalty remaining expulsion from the party. This was also the case with the 1933–1934 chistka. The official instruction¹³¹ from April 1933 identified six categories of members who should be purged: 1) Class alien and hostile elements who enter the party by deceitful means and seek to demoralize its ranks; 2) Double-dealers who deceive the party and under false declarations of loyalty seek to undermine its policy; 3) Violators of party and state iron discipline who fail to carry out the decisions of party and government and who discredit those decisions by questioning their practicality; 4) Degenerates merged with bourgeois elements who do not seek to combat class enemies, kulaks, self-seekers, loafers, thieves and plunderers of public property; ¹²⁹ This was a decision of the XVI Conference of the party in April 1929. ‘O Chistke i Proverke Chlenov i Kandidatov VKP(b)’, KPSS v rez… (1984), 4, pp. 484–491. The quotations are from pp. 489 and 490. ¹³⁰ Rigby (1968), pp. 178–179. This figure was later reduced by re-admissions subject to rehabilitation to 8%. ¹³¹ ‘O Chistke Partii’, KPSS v Rez… (1985), 6, pp. 45–50. The list is on pp. 46–47. For a discussion of this chistka, see Getty (1985), pp. 49–57.

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5) Careerists, self-seekers and bureaucratized elements who exploit their official position for their own aims and are isolated from the masses and their demands; 6) Moral degenerates whose behaviour discredits the party. As with the earlier cases, these categories are vague and elastic, but could encapsulate everything from poor performance to political opposition, with the latter implicit in categories 1) and 2); in 1928 many former Zinoviev supporters recanted and had been re-admitted to the party (as were Zinoviev and Kamenev) and this provided material for the charge of double-dealing and being two-faced. The main thrust of the chistka as reflected in these categories seems to be against deficient performance in the collectivization and dekulakization campaigns (categories 3 to 5 seem particularly relevant here), and the main blows did fall on rural cadres rather than those working in the cities, and upon relatively recent party entrants.¹³² The chistka was run by newly established purge commissions under a specially created Central Purge Commission rather than the Central Control Commission; however half of the membership of the Central Purge Commission were also members of the Central Control Commission. Some 22% of the party was expelled.¹³³ This chistka ran into the campaign for the Verification of Party Documents beginning in mid-1935. In May 1935, the CC declared¹³⁴ that poor administration of party records, in particular entry procedures, had enabled ‘enemies’ to penetrate the party and even rise to high ranks, and that accordingly all members’ documents were to be ‘verified’. Formally the campaign had a tripartite aim: to weed out people who were no longer party members, to update party records, and to ensure that individual members’ documents were in order. However, there was also another explicit purpose: to discover ‘enemies with party cards in their pockets’.¹³⁵ As a review in September 1935 stated,¹³⁶ ‘the verification is helping the party to purge its ranks of crooks, kulaks, whiteguardists, counterrevolutionary Trotskyists and Zinovievists, double-dealers and other enemy elements’. Conducted by local party secretaries, the verification led to the expulsion of 9% of those checked, with most being for things like moral turpitude, embezzlement, hiding class origins or discrepancies in ¹³² See the discussion in Rigby (1968), pp. 205. ¹³³ This is the figure given by Rigby (1968), p. 204. According to Getty (1985), p. 56, 18.5% were expelled. ¹³⁴ As summarized in Getty (1985), pp. 60–63. ¹³⁵ In contrast to this interpretation, J. Arch Getty argues that the verification was only about rectifying the chaos that existed in party record-keeping, but he does show how, in the course of the operation, enemies were unmasked. Getty (1985), pp. 58–67. ¹³⁶ Cited in Rigby (1968), p. 207.

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their documents, not for political opposition.¹³⁷ However, the centre was not happy with the results of the verification, and therefore it was announced in December 1935 that an Exchange of Party Cards would take place in 1936.¹³⁸ While initially flagged as aimed at getting rid of ‘passive’ rather than ‘hostile’ elements, by April 1936 it was being said that it was aimed at purifying party ranks of hostile and alien elements.¹³⁹ Like the verification, this was to be conducted by local party secretaries, but also like the verification, its results were found to be wanting by the centre. Both of these campaigns highlighted deficient performance on the part of those same party officials Stalin had found wanting in his 1930 ‘Dizzy with success’ article. While the precise focus of different waves of registration, verification and chistka may have differed, in all cases two essential categories were present. The first was those who did not merit membership of the party because of their performance. They may have been violators of party discipline, self-seeking careerists, passive or morally corrupt, but they were not explicitly seen as political opposition. The second were those described as class alien, counterrevolutionary or hostile. These were seen as political opposition, frequently reflected in the charge that they were supporters of some form of anti-party line, and usually described as ‘trotskyists’. The distinction between these two categories is not as clear cut as it may appear; violation of party discipline could include involvement in factional activity, which was the charge usually levelled against oppositionist elements (the second category). And it is by no means clear that individuals engaged in oppositional activity were not purged on other grounds, such as personal dissoluteness. Punishment involved expulsion, censure, reprimand, or reprimand with a note in the member’s official file. All could be appealed against, and in many cases the appeal was upheld. This explicit emphasis on house-cleaning in the party took place alongside and intersected with another theme during the 1930s, the search for enemies more generally. The decade began with the sense of being surrounded by hostile elements. While by the end of 1932 it was clear that the peasants had been defeated, the process of collectivization was seen as something that had been much more of a close-run thing than the rhetoric at the forthcoming ‘congress of victors’ in January 1934 suggested. The famine showed that the situation ¹³⁷ Only 2.8% were officially expelled for Trotskyist-Zinovievist opposition. Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin. The Social Dynamics of Repression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 63–65. ¹³⁸ ‘Itogi Proverki Partiinykh Dokumentov’, KPSS v Rez… (1985), vol. 6, pp. 295–304. The reference to passive rather than hostile is on p. 300. ¹³⁹ Cited in Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 409.

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in the countryside remained uncertain while the memory of violent peasant opposition and rebellion and of widespread strike activity in the cities emphasized to the leadership the weakness of their social base. This was reinforced by the perception that professional groups necessary to economic development were hostile, reflected in the trials of engineers in the late 1920s-early 1930s. Yet within this threatening environment the party leadership was not sure how reliable the apparatus upon which it chiefly relied to run the country, the party, was. In March 1930 Stalin had already pointed the finger at deficiencies in the performance of regional officials, although he attributed this to mismanagement rather than opposition, and it is clear from the 1929–1930 and 1933 chistkas, the 1935 Verification and 1936 Exchange that concern about the reliability of regional party leaders remained potent prior to the 1936–1938 terror. It is clear from archival sources that Stalin was a major driver of the Terror later in the decade,¹⁴⁰ but in doing so he needed the support of the other leaders at the top of the political structure. He could neither have done it himself, nor was he in a position to simply take major decisions confident in the assumption that the others would always go along. Both Stalin and the other notables at the top of the political hierarchy would have felt endangered by this combination of a sense of pervasive hostility and uncertain bureaucratic reliability. They may also have felt imperilled by the emergence of yet more direct opposition within party ranks. In 1932 the so-called ‘Ryutin Platform’, entitled ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship’, was a searing indictment of Stalin and his leadership and a call for his removal.¹⁴¹ The same year from exile Trotsky was trying to organize an opposition grouping that, if successfully created, could mobilize potential supporters inside the party. Also in 1932, a third opposition group was identified: the so-called ‘Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev’ group.¹⁴² What was different about this ‘group’ was that some of its members came from the upper reaches of the party; Eismont was people’s commissar for supply in the RSFSR (Russia) while Smirnov was a candidate member of the Orgburo. None of these groups posed a real threat to the party leadership or to Stalin; indeed, it is not even clear that the Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev group ¹⁴⁰ See the discussion in J. Arch Getty & Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror. Stalin and the SelfDestruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). ¹⁴¹ On Ryutin see Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 52–61. For the decision of the Committee for Party Control on the Ryutin group, see ‘O Dele Tak Nazyvaemogo “Soyuza Marksistov-Lenintsev”’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS 6, 1989, pp. 103–115. ¹⁴² Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 75–101. Also Charters Wynn, ‘The “Right Opposition” and the “Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev Affair”’, Paul R. Gregory & Norman Naimark (eds), The Lost Politburo Transcripts. From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 97–117.

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was actually organized in any substantive sense.¹⁴³ However, in light of the criticisms of regional leaders by Stalin in 1930 and later that year the criticism of Stalin and his leadership represented by the so-called Syrtsov-Lominadze affair when two members of the CC were critical in this way,¹⁴⁴ the fear that opposition was rising in the party and could pose a real threat to the leadership was palpable. The claimed vote against Stalin at the XVII Congress when some deputies are reported to have voted against his re-election is consistent with the existence of such a feeling within the party.¹⁴⁵ The 1933–1934 chistka and subsequent Verification and Exchange should be seen in this light. These may have taken the form of regularized screenings of party membership, but the search for enemies outside the party now permeated those processes; the notion of ‘enemies with a party card in their pockets’ easily turned maladministration into ‘wrecking’, passivity into opposition. Important in this process were two things. First, in July 1934, overcoming significant opposition from other policing agencies and the Commissariat of Justice, the OGPU (henceforth known as the NKVD) assumed control over all aspects of policing and penal policy.¹⁴⁶ Second, the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov and the central leadership’s response to this.¹⁴⁷ Kirov was killed by a lone assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, but the circumstances surrounding this—in particular how he gained access to Kirov while in possession of a revolver—were suspicious, leading some to claim that the assassination had been ordered by Stalin, despite the lack of evidence for this. The response to the assassination was immediate, with Stalin drafting a law of 1 December 1934 which instructed the police and courts to try cases of terrorism without delay, with no requirement that the accused have legal representation, to reject appeals, and to carry out the death sentence immediately upon conviction.¹⁴⁸ This established a legal basis upon which the future ¹⁴³ Action against them was taken because of apparent loose talk about removing Stalin at a social gathering. Smirnov was apparently not even present when the discussion took place but was close to Eismont. ¹⁴⁴ On this see Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘Stalin, Syrtsov, Lominadze: Preparations for the “Second Great Breakthrough”’, Gregory & Naimark (2008), pp. 78–97 and R.W. Davies, ‘The Syrtsov-Lominadze Affair’, Soviet Studies 33, 1, 1981, pp. 29–50. ¹⁴⁵ The existence and dimensions of such a challenge remain in dispute. See the discussion in Matthew E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 611–618. ¹⁴⁶ Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police. Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), pp. 149–157. Specifically on the police, see David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism. Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). ¹⁴⁷ On this see Lenoe (2010); Getty & Naumov (1999), ch. 4; Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999). ¹⁴⁸ Lenoe (2010), p. 252.

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repressions of 1936–1938 could be carried out. At the same time, the regime accused the former oppositionists Zinoviev and Kamenev of moral responsibility for the assassination. Nikolaev and some of Zinoviev’s former associates were arrested, tried (in the case of the so-called ‘Leningrad Centre’) and shot, and in the middle of December Zinoviev and Kamenev were re-arrested. They were put on trial in the middle of January 1935 as part of the so-called ‘Moscow Centre’ and convicted of ‘moral complicity”;’ no evidence was found of any organizational role in the assassination, but it was said that their opposition had created an environment which incited others to undertake terrorist acts. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison and Kamenev to five.¹⁴⁹ Arrests also spread to others deemed to be oppositionists, principally in Leningrad; the Leningrad NKVD was also purged ostensibly for enabling the assassination to occur.¹⁵⁰ On 18 January 1935 the CC issued a letter containing the lessons learnt from the Kirov assassination.¹⁵¹ The letter declared that the ‘Zinoviev antiSoviet group’ had been completely destroyed but that both the Leningrad and Moscow centres had shared a ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievist platform’, thereby extending culpability for Kirov’s murder beyond its original limits to the supporters of Trotsky. The group was declared to have been a genuine counterrevolutionary threat, in essence ‘a White Guard organization in disguise’ that hid its opposition under the guise of being faithful party members who were involved in double-dealing masked by their party membership; they were twofaced ‘Judas betrayers with party cards in their pockets’ and they needed to be ‘unmasked’. Such double-dealing was the way anti-party elements conducted their struggle against the party. Previously opposition had been accused of objectively and unconsciously serving the class enemy, but now they were accused of doing so consciously: the letter referred to their links with the Latvian consul, who was ‘an agent of the German-fascist interventionists’. The letter thereby explicitly linked external opposition to two-faced oppositionists inside the party, and further argued that such activity was enabled by the laxness of officials. It thereby laid the basis for the Verification’s search for enemies with party cards in their pockets and the involvement of the NKVD in the conduct of that Verification (over the opposition of many regional party leaders who feared that this would render the conduct of the process out of their hands). So, although the Kirov assassination was not mentioned in the Verification (indeed, the Verification was proposed before the assassination ¹⁴⁹ On working up the case against the Zinovievists and the trial itself, see Lenoe (2010), chs. 8 & 9. ¹⁵⁰ Getty & Naumov (1999), p. 146. ¹⁵¹ It is reprinted in Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 147–150.

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occurred), the focus in that campaign on hidden enemies in the party was consistent with the reaction to Kirov’s death. By the end of March 1935, 11,702 people had been arrested in Leningrad on terrorism-related charges.¹⁵² Following Kirov’s assassination public rhetoric saw increasing emphasis on concepts like double-dealers, hidden enemies, wreckers, Trotskyists, spies, diversionists, masking and unmasking, and the re-emergence of the term ‘enemy of the people’. This had been used by Lenin in 1918, but it became much more common after Stalin used it in his address to the February– March 1937 CC plenum.¹⁵³ The advantage of the term was its vagueness and all-encompassing nature, and it was therefore well suited to the mass operations that were to start in 1937. It also partly displaced class as the touchstone of opposition, reflecting the claimed elimination of hostile classes with the official achievement of socialism in 1936. The general significance of these sorts of terms is that they dehumanized people. They created categories that encapsulated people and enabled their individual qualities and deeds to disappear: if someone was an enemy of the people, precisely why this was so did not really matter. Language therefore facilitated the identification of ever-widening conspiracies. In 1935, contrary to what might have been expected, the total number of arrests by the NKVD fell, but the level of those arrests for political reasons rose and there was an increased focus on the former political opposition.¹⁵⁴ Many members of the former Left Opposition were arrested and, as a result of vigorous interrogation, implicated ever-widening circles of alleged perpetrators. It was in this atmosphere that the above-noted Verification of party documents was begun. Then in the middle of the year a new conspiracy was announced, the so-called ‘Kremlin affair’ which, unlike earlier cases, cast doubt on high officials like Avel Yenukidze who had always supported Stalin. This turn against those with no history of opposing Stalin may have been occasioned by the fact that Kirov’s killer Nikolaev was both a party member and a member of the working class; he was seen as solid evidence of the presence of enemies in the party’s ranks and potentially at high levels of the party. The implication was of the increased vulnerability of party leaders, including Stalin. However, Yenukidze’s relatively mild treatment (he was expelled from the party but readmitted a year later) may suggest some uncertainty and vacillation among the party leadership.¹⁵⁵ At the same time, in June a CC plenum firmed up the ¹⁵² ¹⁵³ ¹⁵⁴ ¹⁵⁵

Lenoe (2010), p. 456. See the discussion of the term in Goldman (2011), pp. 73–79. Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 156–157. Goldman (2007), pp. 63–65.

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expansion of the scope of the killers of Kirov to include Trotsky and instead of simply moral complicity, now accused Zinoviev and Kamenev of direct organization of the assassination.¹⁵⁶ With the centre increasingly unhappy about the course Verification was taking and the blaming of that principally upon regional leaders for lack of vigilance, the ramping up of rhetoric about enemies, and the early 1936 increased level of persecution of ‘Trotskyists’, Stalin re-opened the Kirov investigation. In doing so, he was effectively re-opening something that the 18 January 1935 letter seemed to have declared closed by saying Kirov’s assassins had been destroyed. A new case was now worked up, reflected in the June 1936 CC plenum and the announcement of a new trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev. In the words of two scholars, this constituted the announcement of ‘the beginning of organized terror against former members of the opposition’.¹⁵⁷ The essence of the case was contained in a CC letter dated 29 July 1936.¹⁵⁸ The letter accused the ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievist Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’ of planning terrorist cells in the army to seize power in the event of war and to kill the Soviet leaders (although interestingly Molotov was not one of those identified).¹⁵⁹ The letter involved important leads for the future construction of the myth of conspiracy.¹⁶⁰ It gave this an international dimension by referring to the plotters’ links with the German fascist security service and the Comintern, linked the plotters to former Rightists in the party by saying Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov and Mikhail Tomsky (the former Right Opposition leaders) would be invited to join the post-Stalin government, and cast a shadow over the military by naming two officers (commanders Schmidt and Kuz’michev) as the putative assassins of Voroshilov, as well as the explicit mention of terror cells in the military. The letter also accused local party organizations of failure to unmask hidden terrorists during the Verification, thereby adding to the criticism of regional party leaders, and urged party members to expose ¹⁵⁶ This charge was made in the speech by CC secretary and head of the Party Control Commission, Nikolai Yezhov. See Getty & Naumov, pp. 160–179. ¹⁵⁷ Getty & Naumov (1999), p. 242. ¹⁵⁸ There is an excerpt in Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 250–255. The excerpt omits reference to the Rightists and to the military connection with Voroshilov. The complete version is ‘Zakrytoe Pis’mo TsK VKP(b) “O Terroristicheskoi Deyatel’nosti Trotskistko-Zinov’evskogo Kontrrevolyutsionnogo Bloka”’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS 8, 1989, pp. 100–115. ¹⁵⁹ On claims about the place of Ryutin and the ‘Ryutin Platform’ in the three show trials in linking the current defendants to terror, see William A. Clark, ‘The Ryutin Affair and the “Terrorism” Narrative of The Purges’, Russian History 42, 4, 2015, pp. 377–424. ¹⁶⁰ On the importance of conspiracy, see Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, ‘The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s’, J. Arch Getty & Roberta T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror. New Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 99–115; and Iain Lauchlan, ‘Chekist Mentalité and the Origins of the Great Terror’, James Harris (ed), The Anatomy of Terror. Political Violence Under Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 15.

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enemies hiding within party ranks. The first of the three Moscow show trials, that of the ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievist Terrorist Centre’, was held in August 1936 with Zinoviev and Kamenev the chief defendants.¹⁶¹ All the accused were found guilty of terrorism, specifically conspiring to murder Stalin and other leaders, and allying with fascist Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet government. All were sentenced to death. What the trial did was to reinforce an image of opposition rooted in the party’s history: former left oppositionists who had taken the path of terror, who worked for Trotsky and were linked with foreign powers. It thereby projected the image of double-dealers who served foreign masters. The trial, which was highly scripted to produce the desired outcome, also suggested links between the ‘Trotskyists’ and elements in the bureaucracy, both state and party, and the Rightists. Here was an implicit threat both to state bureaucrats and the regional party officials who had already been blamed for the deficient conduct of the Verification, and an intimation of the future importance of Trotskyism as a factor in subsequent trials. The prominence given to double-dealers in the trial encouraged party committees to review their membership records in order to identify former oppositionists or people with problematic pasts, including those with foreign connections. On 26 September 1936, at Stalin’s insistence, the current head of the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who had been building up his position in that organization for some years. Three days later a Politburo resolution declared that while the ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievist scoundrels’ had formerly been considered ‘as the leading political and organizational detachment of the international bourgeoisie’, they must ‘now be considered foreign agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers representing the fascist bourgeoisie of Europe’. This reflects a change in emphasis from class enemies to enemies of the state.¹⁶² The Politburo resolution also called for action against not only those who had already been arrested and whose investigation had been completed, but also those currently under investigation and those who had been exiled earlier. This meant a double jeopardy for many of those who had already been punished. Moves were now made against these groups amidst a shift in public rhetoric away from the danger posed by assassins to that of ‘wrecking’ in the

¹⁶¹ On the trial see Conquest (1990), pp. 80–108; Karl Schlogel, Moscow, 1937 (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), ch. 4. ¹⁶² This seems to have occurred between the 29 July 1936 letter and the opening of the first show trial on 15 August 1936; the former referred to the defendants as a ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’, the latter as a ‘terrorist centre’. The resolution is reprinted in Getty & Naumov (1999), p. 273.

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economy.¹⁶³ In late 1936 there were widespread arrests of economic officials, with nearly one thousand mainly low-level employees of economic commissariats under arrest by the beginning of 1937.¹⁶⁴ Also arrested was Georgii Pyatakov, well-known former Trotskyist and first deputy people’s commissar of heavy industry. At the same time there were attacks on Bukharin (at the December 1936 CC plenum), but no action was taken against him. On 23–30 January 1937 the second Moscow show trial was held, that of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre’.¹⁶⁵ The chief defendants were Georgii Pyatakov, Karl Radek and Grigorii Sokolnikov who, along with 14 others, were charged with industrial wrecking at the behest of Trotsky, attempted assassination of the Soviet leadership and espionage for Germany and Japan with the aim of overthrowing the Soviet regime. All were found guilty; thirteen were sentenced to death and four (including Radek and Sokolnikov) were sentenced to prison terms. The trial stimulated an emphasis in public rhetoric on the link between internal political opposition, foreign intelligence activity, and various non-Russian national groups in the USSR (thereby laying the groundwork for the mass operations against national groups). It also suggested that dangerous double-dealers were to be found not only among former oppositionists but among prominent party members holding responsible positions. Furthermore, the emphasis on wrecking and sabotage in order to facilitate regime change and the re-introduction of capitalism cast the Soviet populace as a whole as victims. This was an attempt to mobilize that populace into the active search for enemies, including through criticism of local leaders. The acknowledgement that there could be hidden enemies in responsible positions in the party stimulated a review of officials in the period leading up to the February–March 1937 CC plenum.¹⁶⁶ This review identified two groups of people: those who had been dismissed from their party posts, expelled from the party and arrested, and those who had not been arrested but whose past was in some way problematic (such as former support for oppositionists). Most of those who had not hitherto been arrested were now taken into custody. What the review did was to give substance to the claim arising from the second ¹⁶³ The September 1936 mine explosion in Kemerovo and its attribution to wreckers fuelled this rhetoric. Goldman (2007), pp. 95–109. ¹⁶⁴ Getty & Naumov (1999), p. 282. This included the assault on Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s people in the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, leading to his suicide in February 1937. ¹⁶⁵ For a discussion of the trial, see Conquest (1990), pp. 147–167; Schlogel (2012), ch. 8. ¹⁶⁶ On the review see Oleg Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, David L. Hoffman (ed), Stalinism. The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 88–89 and Wladislaw Hedeler, ‘Ezhov’s Scenario for the Great Terror and the Falsified Record of the Third Moscow Show Trial’, Barry McLoughlin & Kevin McDermott (eds), Stalin’s Terror. High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 37–38.

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show trial that there were double-dealers who remained in the party. It also highlighted the large number of former party members who, logically, could be seen as potential enemies; indeed, in some workplaces, former party members actually outnumbered party members. This fed into the alarm given voice at the February–March plenum about the strength of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in the country. The beginning of 1937 had also seen open attacks on two regional party officials, Pavel Postyshev and Boris Sheboldaev. Both were clearly being used as representatives of regional officials as a group, although they were being described as careless rather than enemies, meaning they had enabled hidden enemies to operate under them rather than being enemies themselves. The criticism of regional officials at the February–March 1937 CC plenum¹⁶⁷ took mainly this form while the language used about enemies was more violent, but following the plenum this distinction effectively disappeared. The plenum built upon the Kemerovo and January trials to maintain the attack on industrial wreckers, including those with party cards in their pockets; the link between Trotskyists, foreign espionage, sabotage, and industrial wrecking was clearly articulated. This was particularly important in stimulating an enhanced grassroots campaign to unmask such enemies discussed below. The focus on hidden enemies was also reflected in another main theme of the plenum, democratization. There was an emphasis at the plenum on competitive secret ballot elections in the party (this followed the new state Constitution introduced in 1936 which provided for secret ballot elections to the state legislatures). This was in part to apply pressure to party leaders whose performance at the regional level and below had been held to be unsatisfactory. Criticism of the results of the Verification and Exchange were only the most recent evidence of this. Democratization, and in particular criticism from below and competitive secret ballot elections, were seen as a means of breaking up the control by local cliques (so-called ‘family groups’) that enabled unsatisfactory leaders to retain their positions. This encouragement from above to criticize local party leaders added to the enthusiasm with which this was taken up, fuelled the discovery of yet more enemies in the party. When party elections were held in May, regional secretaries generally survived while most of the casualties occurred at the local and district levels. From the perspective of the central leadership, this was an unsatisfactory result: ¹⁶⁷ On the plenum see Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 364–433; Goldman (2007), pp. 109–130; and Schlogel (2012), ch. 11. For the impact at regional party levels, see James Harris, The Great Urals. Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 5. Also Getty (1985).

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those leaders whose performance had been under criticism since at least 1930 had once again been able to blunt a central attack upon them because of the institutional power they wielded within the regions they ran. But regional officials were concerned not only about this challenge fostered from above but also from what they saw as a potential danger from below. The formal elimination of restrictions on ‘former people’ associated with the introduction of the new non-discriminatory state Constitution adopted in December 1936 encouraged many people who finished their periods of exile, such as former kulaks, traders, and religious functionaries, to seek to return to their places of origin and regain their places in society. These were seen to constitute a significant danger, especially by regional leaders who had to manage this situation, and they were vociferous in their calls for action against such elements. The abolition of civic restrictions seemed to open the door to all who had a grudge against the Soviet regime to play a role in political life. There had been many losers from the upheavals of the last two decades, and it was said that in some institutions there were more ex-party members than there were members, so they could potentially exercise decisive influence. Against this background, Stalin’s and Yezhov’s calls at the February–March plenum for enhanced struggle against enemies struck a chord. The plenum also saw Bukharin and former prime minister Rykov come under intense criticism (they were subsequently arrested) and the purge of the security apparatus attendant upon Nikolai Yezhov’s replacement of Genrikh Yagoda, who was arrested in April 1937.¹⁶⁸ In May 1937 senior army officers were arrested and charged with treason in a move that decimated the leadership of the armed forces. This was part of the opening of the floodgates as henceforth arrests enveloped ‘anyone suspected of present or potential disloyalty to the ruling Stalin group’.¹⁶⁹ Officials and leading cadres at all levels, including CC members, regional party leaders (most were removed) and government leaders, were arrested and a majority executed, a wave of terror that encouraged denunciation as people widely sought to protect themselves by demonstrating excessive zeal in uncovering hidden enemies.¹⁷⁰ Most of those caught up in this had never been involved in ¹⁶⁸ From October 1936 to June 1938 7,298 NKVD officers were arrested. Hedeler (2003), p. 54. On the consolidation of Yezhov’s position and the re-organization of the NKVD, see Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police. NKVD Politics 1936–39 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), ch. 3. ¹⁶⁹ Getty & Naumov (1999), p. 447. ¹⁷⁰ Denunciation was particularly insidious and widespread as people sought to defend themselves by unmasking others as hidden enemies. On attempts to create a new identity, which underpinned the notion of hidden identities, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). On ‘masking’ and ‘unmasking’ see Wendy Z. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy. Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 55–60. Also, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of

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oppositional activities. This was the so-called ‘Yezhovshchina’. There were two interacting dynamics in the Yezhovshchina: one at the grassroots level where popular denunciation and purging occurred mainly in the workplace, and another the so-called ‘mass operations’ undertaken by the NKVD and driven from above by centrally-set quotas and targets discussed below. Meetings in the workplace organized by the local communist party organization had been a feature of Soviet life since the revolution. This was a major venue for party organizers to undertake political education, propaganda and agitation work among the workers. These local party committees were the repository of the biographies that party members were compelled to complete in which they outlined their past. Given the complicated nature of the last two decades (and especially the civil war and the presence of such widespread political conflict in the party during the 1920s), many people sanitized their biographies to cover up problematic aspects of their past.¹⁷¹ Shop and factory meetings were also held regularly for non-party members whose biographies were retained in the workplace personnel sections. After the first show trial (August 1936), there was increased pressure on such local bodies to use their membership records to identify and expose enemies, but until the Pyatakov trial and its focus on wrecking (January 1937), there was little mass enthusiasm for this. However, while the charges from the initial trial may have seemed remote to most workers, given the poor safety records in Soviet factories, the notion of ‘wrecking’ had more immediacy; industrial accidents could be explained by the action of hidden enemies. Over 1937 and into 1938, these meetings became dominated by the search for enemies; in Wendy Goldman’s words, ‘By 1938, party organizations in the factories were occupied almost exclusively with uncovering “enemies and their supporters”’.¹⁷² The focus of the meetings quickly became people’s denunciations of other individuals, either because they were perceived to be wreckers or because there was something about their background that was deemed to be objectionable. If in principle the notion of wrecking was clear (even if in practice it was often very Denunciation of the 1930s’, Sheila Fitzpatrick & Robert Gellately (eds), Accusatory Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 85–120. On a particularly egregious case, see Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik. The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005). On people using denunciation to distinguish themselves from the “guilty”, see Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Victim Talk: Defense Testimony and Denunciation Under Stalin’, Law and Social Enquiry 24, 3, 1999, pp. 637–654. ¹⁷¹ On individuals’ creation of their identities, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 2006). ¹⁷² Goldman (2011), p. 252. On the meetings see Goldman (2007) and (2011) and Schlogel (2012), pp. 424–432. For a discussion of similar sorts of developments in a university, see Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions. Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

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difficult to see), examination of a person’s background could be much more problematic. People presented personal ‘declarations’ to the meeting either accusing someone else of something or outlining their own personal history in a way that might absolve them of suspicion. These declarations were examined in the meeting.¹⁷³ In the atmosphere prevailing, a range of personal contacts or experiences made someone vulnerable: time spent abroad or in White territory during the civil war; having family abroad; correspondence with people abroad; relatives who had been members of proscribed social categories (such as kulaks, clergy, traders, businessmen, landowners); people known who had been arrested; contact with anyone formerly involved in oppositional activity; and involvement in such activity oneself.¹⁷⁴ Every denunciation had to be investigated, otherwise meeting leaders left themselves open to charges of failing to unmask an enemy; there were no penalties for false denunciations or denunciations without evidence, but there could be costs for failing to denounce. Each investigation of a person threw up other contacts to be investigated, so the circle widened such that in some places, ultimately there may have been no member of the meeting who was not touched. Increasingly people denounced others as a form of self-defence, while this was also used as a weapon against managers and supervisors against whom workers may have had a grudge. Meetings could lead to expulsion from the party¹⁷⁵ or loss of employment, which usually meant also loss of housing and social benefits; arrest was also frequently the result. This process lasted through 1937–1938, and at least there was in many cases a form of record-keeping associated with it; meetings usually kept protocols and minutes, so there was a record of what transpired. This was not the case with the mass operations. Mass operations (revolutionary-transformational terror) began in the middle of 1937 and comprised two types of operation: against ‘social’ or ‘kulak’ elements, and against national groups. Both involved the arrest followed by the incarceration or execution of large numbers of members of the ordinary population. If the Terror had thus far embraced principally the elite

¹⁷³ This process had been common in the party and was usually discussed in terms of criticism/selfcriticism with individuals encouraged to confess their mistakes, indulge in self-criticism, and accept criticism from others. For one study of this, see J. Arch Getty, ‘Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–38’, The Russian Review 58, 1, 1999, pp. 49–70. ¹⁷⁴ Goldman (2007), p. 208. ¹⁷⁵ Formally party members could not be arrested until they were expelled from the party. For a discussion of this in the 1920s, including the principle that Politburo authorization was needed for the arrest of a senior party member see Gill (1990), pp. 189–190. During 1937 6% of party members were expelled, with higher levels in the second half of the year than the first: 97,000 cf 20,500. Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘Party and NKVD: Power Relationships in the Years of the Great Terror’, McLoughlin & McDermott (2003), p. 26.

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(broadly defined), it now took on a mass character as different categories of the population were purged, and revolutionary-transformational terror came to co-exist with inverted terror. The use of categories of targets had been the usual practice in Soviet policing since the 1920s.¹⁷⁶ In the 1920s and early 1930s there was a strong emphasis upon ‘social order’ and preventing ‘social disorder’ by identifying and expelling from the body politic (usually by sending into either exile or the camps) those ‘socially harmful elements’ seen as the source of such potential disorder.¹⁷⁷ The aim was not to terrorize the population as a whole but to remove dangerous segments from it. The definition of these elements was broad and vague but included kulaks and former kulaks, criminals and socially marginal or undesirable groups. Attempts to neutralize these groups involved treating them collectively and through extrajudicial means; once identified they were rounded up and expelled from their districts, sometimes sent into the camps but on other occasions simply exiled to another part of the country. They did not appear in the courts and their collective treatment meant that individual records of them are generally lacking. This modus operandi, mass campaigns, collective identification, and extrajudicial treatment, all conducted under the rubric of ‘class struggle’ or ‘class war’, continued into the 1930s. In the first half of the 1930s, for example, there were campaigns against hooligans in the railways, ‘superfluous’ people in the cities (reacting to the mass influx at the time of collectivization), against passport violators following the introduction of internal passports in December 1932,¹⁷⁸ against juvenile delinquents and the homeless, speculators, and a variety of more locally-focused campaigns;¹⁷⁹ according to Paul Hagenloh, from 1935 to early 1937 there were ‘unrelenting purges’ of ‘socially harmful elements’ which sent ‘several hundred thousand people’ to the Gulag.¹⁸⁰ Those people who were said to represent a ‘social danger’ had not necessarily committed any offence; many were picked up because their identity suggested the potential to commit hostile acts. This involved a shift of criminal activity into the sphere of political activity, thereby rendering such groups subject to the authority of the political (OGPU/NKVD) rather than the civil police. This shift was underpinned

¹⁷⁶ For discussion of this, see the arguments in Hagenloh (2009) and Shearer (2009). ¹⁷⁷ For a discussion of this, see Hagenloh (2009), chs. 1–4 and Shearer (2009), chs. 1–8. On such ‘excisionary’ violence being common policy in both Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in other countries, see David L. Hoffman, ‘The Conceptual and Practical Origins of Soviet State Violence’, Harris (2013), pp. 90–97. ¹⁷⁸ The introduction of passports provided the means for categorizing the population and thereby creating a social taxonomy of it that constituted a conceptual base for later category-driven repression. ¹⁷⁹ Shearer (2009), ch. 6; Hagenloh (2009), chs. 3 & 4. ¹⁸⁰ Hagenloh (2009), p. 197.

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by the formal announcement that socialism had been achieved in the 1936 Constitution. The social operation, which was essentially an extension of this earlier practice, was set in motion by a 3 July 1937 Politburo instruction to local authorities calling for the immediate arrest of all former kulaks and criminals, their trial before local troikas (usually composed of the local NKVD head, party secretary and procurator of the region) with the most hostile to be shot and the less active but still hostile to be sent to prison or labour camps. This was operationalized by Order 00447 of 30 July which expanded the categories of people to be purged and set quotas for the different regions. The quotas were usually exceeded in practice; according to the central directive, 259,450 people were to be arrested and 72,950 shot, although these figure are incomplete for the whole country because some regions are not included in them.¹⁸¹ The groups identified included kulaks and former kulaks, members of terrorist, insurrectionary and bandit bands, members of anti-Soviet parties and other anti-Soviet elements, former opponents, sectarians, and criminals. This catalogue of groups was later expanded, most importantly through Order 00485 to include national groups (like Germans and Poles) living in the USSR and 00486 embracing the wives of those arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes. Ultimately all sections of society were drawn into this net because the criteria for identification of potential victims were so vague, judgement was left up to local officers (troikas were empowered to charge, decide, sentence and carry out that sentence with no effective oversight; lists sent to Moscow were often signed without even being read¹⁸²) and the unrelenting pressure of increasing quotas and targets (driven up both by the centre and the regions) caused in many cases people to be picked up simply to meet that target. Under pressure of the increasing number of arrests, provision for trial by the troikas was overwhelmed. People were arbitrarily categorized into groups, adjudged to be guilty without any serious consideration of their cases, and either executed or sent to the camps;¹⁸³ group arrests and falsification of charges was ¹⁸¹ For the instruction and Order see Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 470–471 and 473–480. The quotas were based on information sent from the regions and were subject to revision, with regional leaders requesting increases in their quotas. For some differing figures see Khlevnyuk (2003), p. 92 and Paul R. Gregory, Terror by Quota. State Security from Lenin to Stalin (An Archival Study) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 189. ¹⁸² On how the lists were composed, see Marc Jansen & Nikita Petrov, ‘Mass Terror and the Court: The Military Collegium of the USSR’, Europe-Asia Studies 58, 4, 2006, pp. 591–593. ¹⁸³ On the mass operations, see Hagenloh (2009) and Shearer (2009). For the mechanics of how a mass sweep, in this case of Poles, was conducted, see Nikita Petrov & Arsenii Roginskii, ‘The “Polish Operation” of the NKVD, 1937–8’, McLoughlin & McDermott (2003), pp. 153–172 and more generally Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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common. Although at one level the Terror was centralized—it was driven by decisions made in Moscow—there was significant room for local initiative, and enthusiasm usually ensured that central expectations were exceeded.¹⁸⁴ The national operations involved the identification of various ethnic groups—Germans, Poles, Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Latvians, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Afghani—as well as émigrés and foreign communists seen as threats.¹⁸⁵ The so-called national operations against these groups operated under their own particular orders (for example, Order 00439 of 29 July 1937 and the ‘German operation’, 00483 of 20 August 1937 and the ‘Polish operation’) and were generally conducted like those operations against other socially-defined groups under Order 00447: members of the target group were rounded up by NKVD forces, a short-lived pro-forma hearing of the charges against them may be held by a troika, and the sentence immediately carried out, be it execution or physical displacement. Those national groups located near international borders, like Koreans and Poles, were particularly vulnerable, and whole communities were picked up and relocated, often to Kazakhstan. The sweeps of these national groups were never in practice restricted to those nationalities; frequently if those on the ground driving the operation believed their efforts were falling short of what was expected in terms of victims, they would pick up anybody they found regardless of nationality and include those people in the operation. The death toll was higher in the national than in the social operation.¹⁸⁶ Although the methodology of the mass operations represents a continuation of that of the campaigns earlier in the decade, this latter outburst of terror differs from the earlier in terms both of scale and violence. The numbers caught up are much larger than earlier, and the proportion of deaths among the victims was much higher, in part reflecting the imperative stemming from the numbers arrested and the need to avoid the system of incarceration from becoming overwhelmed. The Yezhovshchina represents the culmination of a process that had been underway for some time, the merging of public order considerations with those of state security. Of course, at least since the late 1920s public order had never been only about social peace and stability; ¹⁸⁴ On the important role of regional authorities in shaping Order 00447 and how it was carried out, see Michael Ellman, ‘Regional Influences on the Formulation and Implementation of NKVD Order 00447’, Europe-Asia Studies 62, p. 6, 2010, pp. 915–931. ¹⁸⁵ For a brief chronology, see Barry McLoughlin, ‘Mass Operations of the NKVD, 1937–8: A Survey’, McLoughlin & McDermott (2003), p. 123. Operations under Order 00447 were dominant in the second half of 1937, national operations in 1938. On the Comintern and its involvement, see William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). ¹⁸⁶ McLoughlin (2003), pp. 140–141.

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the struggle against the kulaks was seen in terms of defeating enemies of the regime. But with 1937 this emphasis on the threat to the state posed by ‘enemies of the people’ became overwhelming. Over 1938 the Terror seemed to become less expansive. The January CC plenum criticized mass expulsions, with such expulsions ceasing and, for the first time since 1933, new party members were recruited and some formerly expelled were re-admitted. The criticism at the plenum was mainly directed at the regional party leaders, who were now accused of opposition rather than maladministration.¹⁸⁷ However the Terror continued, with central targets for the regions increased and high-level officials continuing to be removed, including among the military. The third Moscow show trial was held in March 1938, of the so-called ‘Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists’.¹⁸⁸ The principal defendants were Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, and included 13 others, mainly former people’s commissars or state officials; they were mainly people who had opposed forced collectivization and Stalin’s dominance of the party. This trial sought to tie together a global conspiracy against the USSR with a wide array of underground groups inside the Soviet Union, principally the former Right Opposition with the Trotskyists, and accused them of wanting to assassinate the leaders, sabotage the economy, conduct espionage for Japan, Germany and Poland, and if they were to come to power, to cede parts of the USSR to foreign powers. All were found guilty and executed. The wide array of groups brought into this net showed the opposition as unprincipled, brought together only by hatred of the Soviet order. The greater prominence of foreign powers in the trial provided a rationale for the mass national operations underway at this time. The supposed wrecking activities also helped to explain the economic difficulties currently being experienced. Arrests and executions continued throughout 1938 and into 1939, although at a lower level than 1937.¹⁸⁹ In February 1939, former prominent party figures Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, Robert Eikhe (all arrested in summer 1938) and Postyshev along with others were executed.¹⁹⁰ The Terror effectively came to a conclusion at the end of 1938 with the November replacement of Yezhov by Lavrenty Beria and formal measures to bring the NKVD under tighter party control, including a purge of some 22% of its general operative staff.¹⁹¹ ¹⁸⁷ Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 493–497. ¹⁸⁸ Discussed in Conquest (1990), ch. 12; Schlogel (2012), ch. 36. ¹⁸⁹ Although Conquest (1990), p. 434 argues that the mass purge climaxed in the first half of 1938 and then declined. ¹⁹⁰ Conquest (1990), p. 435. ¹⁹¹ On these measures, see Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 529–543. During 1939, at least 7372 staff members of the NKVD were dismissed, of whom 937 were arrested. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, ‘Archives of

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The revolutionary and transformational terror of the mass operations differed from the inverted terror of the purge of party and state elites. The purge of the party was more individualized in the sense that a ritualized process of denunciation, arrest, interrogation and (for the elite) trial was often followed, with documentation produced to justify decisions made. This was not always the case, but it was much more common here than it was in the mass operations of the Yezhovshchina when it was common for people to be taken, immediately sentenced and shot.¹⁹² Also there was little popular or rank-andfile involvement in the mass operations, which were simply carried out by the NKVD. These are important differences, but it does not mean that the two were not closely linked. Essentially, the same concern, that of threat of enemies, impelled both inverted and revolutionary-transformational terror and the categories used to describe the enemies were basically the same (with some elaboration to provide for party membership, such as ‘enemies with party cards in their pockets’ could only apply to party members). But just as they differed, both the elite purge and the mass operations developed out of established procedures within the Soviet system. The chistka in one form or another was a common procedure within the party to keep a check on the quality of party membership. Similarly mass operations were a common mechanism of policing society, used in the decade and a half before the Great Terror to maintain control. But although those components of the Great Terror grew out of established procedures, they differed from those earlier procedures in one crucial respect: the prominence of direct execution in the penalties applied to those caught up in these operations. The chistka was not a blood purge in the style of 1936–1938, and the mass policing operations of earlier years were not characterized by anything like the level of deaths of the mass operations of 1937–1938. In the latter cases, death by execution was the usual outcome; in the former this was rare. The question of how many people were victims of the Terror has been very contentious.¹⁹³ It is impossible to know exactly because although the Soviet authorities were inveterate record-keepers, the Terror’s decentralized nature and, at least at the local level, its often somewhat ad hoc character, exact

the Terror. Developments in the Historiography of Stalin’s Purges’, Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 22, 2, 2021, p. 381. ¹⁹² This point is made by Shearer (2009), pp. 286–287. On the essentially pro forma nature of the ‘judicial’ process, see Jansen & Petrov (2006), pp. 589–602. ¹⁹³ For a list of more than 20 contributions to this debate (and more could be added), see Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 26–27. For summary figures offered by different authors, see Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45’, Europe-Asia Studies 48, 8, 1996, pp. 1319–1353.

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calculation is impossible. This is the same for the figures emanating from the security archive where the NKVD records, which is the basis for many of the figures below, do not count the prisoners in transit at the time and underestimate the levels of arrests, executions and incarcerations, but we do not know by how much. Since the opening of the archives, there has been general agreement on the following numbers:¹⁹⁴ • • • • • • • • •

Arrests 1937: 779,056 (for counter-revolutionary crimes) Arrests 1938: 593,326 (for counter-revolutionary crimes) Executions 1937: 353,074 Executions 1938: 328, 618 Gulag population 1937: 1,230,846 (includes camps, labour colonies and prisons) Gulag population 1938: 1,906,678 (includes camps, labour colonies and prisons) Gulag population 1939: 2,022,976 (includes camps, labour colonies and prisons) Died while incarcerated 1937: no figures Died while incarcerated 1938: 115,026

These figures are generally believed to be incomplete, but when it comes to estimating the totals, scholars have varied very widely. In doing so, scholars do not always use the same categories, making comparison of their figures difficult. Robert Conquest has generally been at the high end of the range in estimating casualties. The figures he arrived at in 1968 in the first edition of his book and reprinted in the 1990 book (with some amendments—noted) are as follows:¹⁹⁵ • • • • •

Arrests 1937–1938: about seven million (in 1990, implies eight million) Executed: about one million (in 1990, could be 1.5 million) Died in camps: about two million In prison, late 1938: about one million In camps, late 1938: about eight million (in 1990, could be seven million)

¹⁹⁴ These are taken from Rosefielde (2010), pp. 58 & 66 and Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 527–528. For a graph showing annual sentences 1921–1953, with a huge spike in 1937, see Gregory (2009), p. 15. Oleg Khlevniuk cites slightly different figures for the period from October 1936 until November 1938: 1,700,000 arrested, 1,500,000 convicted including 740,000 sentenced to death. Khlevniuk (2021), p. 378. ¹⁹⁵ Conquest (1990), pp. 485–486.

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J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov have accepted and reprinted the figures from the archives, but have also extrapolated in a number of regards:¹⁹⁶ • Total detained population in ‘period of the Great Purges’: 3.5 million • Deaths owing to repression in the 1930s: 1.5 million These figures are substantially below those proposed by Conquest. Stephen Wheatcroft has argued that the regime was ‘responsible for about a million purposive killings, and through its criminal neglect and irresponsibility it was probably responsible for the premature deaths of about another two million more victims amongst the repressed population’.¹⁹⁷ Figures from a study prepared for Khrushchev in the early 1960s reported that during 1937 and 1938, about 1,575,000 people were arrested by the NKVD (87% on political grounds), of whom some 1,345,000 or 85.4% received a sentence of some sort, of whom 681,692 or 51% were executed; a further 1,473,424 died in the camps, in prison or in exile.¹⁹⁸ The number of executions matches that from the archives noted above while the figures of arrests in the archives figures is close to that cited by Werth for those sentenced. He also cites figures for those who died in the camps of around 25,000 in 1937 and 90,000 in 1938.¹⁹⁹ While it is impossible to arrive at a definitive conclusion, Conquest’s figures for arrests and the numbers in the camps appear to be too high, but those for the killings are not widely variant from the figures arrived at based on extrapolation from the archives and careful analysis of population statistics undertaken by Wheatcroft.²⁰⁰ Even accepting these lower estimates, the level of repression and suffering resulting from the Terror was incredibly high. The number of those formally arrested and then shot during the Great Terror probably exceeded that of each of the earlier bouts of terror, during the civil war and collectivization.²⁰¹ Death rates are even more difficult to compute, but solely in terms of the decisions made by the security services, a greater proportion appear to have been sentenced to death in the Great Terror than during ¹⁹⁶ The figures cited here come from Getty & Naumov (1999), pp. 492, 527–528 & 589. ¹⁹⁷ Wheatcroft (1996), p. 1334. He defines the ‘repressed population’ as those ‘in the camps, colonies, prisons, exile, in transit and in the POW camps for Germans’, so his figures cover a longer period than simply the Great Terror. They do not, however, include the victims of the famine of the early 1930s. ¹⁹⁸ Werth (1999), p. 190; Goldman (2007), pp. 1–2. From 1934–1940 some 3,750,000 people sentenced for criminal and political offences passed through the camps. According to Goldman (2007), p. 5, another approximately 1,000,000 people were arrested for political and non-political crimes by forces other than the NKVD. ¹⁹⁹ For a discussion of the numbers in the camps, see Werth (1999), pp. 204–207. ²⁰⁰ For example, see S.G. Wheatcroft, ‘Towards a Thorough Analysis of Soviet Forced Labour Statistics’, Soviet Studies XXXV, 2, 1983, pp. 223–237. ²⁰¹ This is certainly the view of Gregory (2009), pp. 16–17.

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the previous two bouts of terror. However, given that we cannot judge how many people were killed in the Red Terror because of its association with military activities nor how many people died as a result of the conditions they had to endure during collectivization and dekulakization (and therefore not as a result of specific formal decisions), this judgement is almost certainly contestable.

4 The Chinese Revolution The Chinese Revolution is unlike the other two great revolutions in an important way relevant to the question of terror: the future revolutionary regime controlled large areas of territory before the new national revolutionary state was formally established in October 1949. This means that if we are to understand the use of terror once the new regime had been established nationally, its actions prior to that need to be taken into account. This relates to the question of the duration of the revolution, which differs substantially from the French and Russian. While the French may be said to have lasted for around half a dozen years from 1789 and the Russian from February to October 1917 (or perhaps to 1921), the Chinese does not have the same clarity about its start and end points. This is because of both the number of different events that could be said to have been the beginning of the revolution, and because of the nature of the different stages of historical development in China in the first half of the twentieth century. The revolution could be said to have begun in October 1911 when a revolution led by Sun Yatsen overthrew the ruling Qing dynasty and instituted a new Chinese republic. Or perhaps 1921 should be seen as the beginning, that is the year in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which was to be the main vehicle of revolution and to come to power in 1949 was founded. Or 1927 when the united front between the CCP and the nationalist Guomindang (GMD) party collapsed in the face of an attack by the latter upon the former, enabling the CCP to embark more freely on its revolutionary course. Or 1935 when the main part of the CCP fled its base area in Jiangxi and embarked on the fabled ‘Long March’ leading to its establishment of a Soviet area in Yan’an in Shaanxi province. Or mid-1937 when the ‘War of Resistance’ against Japan broke out, and a second united front between the CCP and GMD was established. Or 1945–1946 when the second united front between the CCP and the GMD broke down following victory over Japan in the ‘War of Resistance’. A case can be made for all of these dates. But relevant also is the nature of the different periods reflected in this catalogue of dates.

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0004

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Revolutionary and Transformational Terror, pre-1949 The nationalist revolution of 1911 ushered in a period of national disunity as warlords came to dominate in the Chinese regions. It was not until the mid1920s that the nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek was able to exert its authority across parts of southern China and sought to project it into the north that the prospect of national political unity appeared possible (although it was not to occur until 1949). Ten years after the 1911 revolution the CCP was founded. From the outset there were differences among communist leaders about the course the party should follow, but in this early period under the direct and close influence of Stalin and the Soviet leadership, they sought to further their revolutionary aims through the united front with the GMD, and a focus upon the urban proletariat rather than the peasants. The united front also meant that there was a need to moderate their revolutionary enthusiasm, something that caused tension within the party.¹ When the united front collapsed in 1927, the party initially split with the bulk of the official leadership remaining underground in Shanghai (until January 1933 when it moved to Ruijin in Jiangxi province) while another section, ultimately led by Mao Zedong, decamped to establish base areas initially in the Jinggang mountains (this is where Mao went; other base areas were created on the Hubei-HenanAnhui and Zhejiang-Fujian borders, at Lake Hung in Hubei and in Guangxi), and then in 1930 in southern Jiangxi province.² This enabled Mao to begin to implement a revolutionary strategy that was focused on the peasants rather than urban workers that was ultimately to bring the communists to power. This period was also important because it was the first time that the communists were actually in charge of a geographical area and had to rule it in the form of a proto-statelet, the Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government with its capital in Ruijin. During their time in Jiangxi, the communists were under frequent attack by the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, which ultimately led to their departure on the Long March beginning in late 1934. The Long March was significant not just because it enabled the communist forces to escape from the encircling troops of Chiang Kai-shek, but because it witnessed a strengthening of Mao’s position in the leadership of the party ¹ For a stimulating analysis of this period which, despite its age, remains a classic, see Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961, originally published 1938). ² The initial Chinese Soviet was actually in Hai-Lu-Feng in Guangdong. Led by P’eng P’ai, it lasted only four months, and was marked by vigorous repression of ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘China: A Long March into Night’, Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek & Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 470–471.

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at Zunyi in January 1935³ and brought them to north China where a series of base areas were established. The most important was at Yan’an in Shaanxi province where Mao established the party leadership. Hostilities continued sporadically with the GMD and with other forces in northern China until the end of 1936 (the Xian incident) which led to the creation of a second united front between the CCP and GMD and in mid-1937 the outbreak of the ‘War of Resistance’ against Japan. With the arrival of the communists in northern China and the creation of a series of base areas (some of which were to be actually behind Japanese lines in the coming war), the CCP once again found itself in the position of ruling over proto-statelets. By 1945 there were 19 communist base areas, mostly in northern China, with some 90 million peasants under their rule.⁴ While the leaders in these various base areas formally recognized the authority of the party leadership in Yan’an, in effect they enjoyed significant autonomy from Yan’an, in part because many of them found themselves under heavy pressure from the Japanese forces. This period of the united front was seen as effectively a period of national war as CCP and GMD forces enjoyed an uneasy cooperation to fight against the Japanese invaders. This cooperation came to an end following the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 when civil war broke out, leading to the communist victory and the establishment of control over the whole of mainland China. The different phases of this history were characterized by different dynamics of politics and of revolution. The key here is the presence or absence of the united front arrangement. This was seen by many in the party as requiring the moderation of revolutionary plans so as not to upset that coalition arrangement. What gave this particular importance was the fact that for much of the time after 1930 the communists ruled over geographical areas containing in most cases millions of people. A perceived need to moderate revolutionary enthusiasm therefore translated directly into policy questions with real life implications for large numbers of people in a way that was not the case in either France or Russia before national power was achieved. Terror was a central part of the conduct of military operations in China. The Japanese military used terror as a weapon in the attempt to cow the population and prevent opposition from emerging within it. The widespread ³ On the Zunyi Conference and what it meant for Mao’s leadership, see Benjamin Yang, ‘The Zunyi Conference as One Step in Mao’s Rise to Power: A Survey of Historical Studies of the Chinese Communist Party’, The China Quarterly 106, 1986, pp. 235–271, and the critical piece by Thomas Kampen, ‘The Zunyi Conference and Further Steps in Mao’s Rise to Power’, The China Quarterly 117, 1989, pp. 118–134. For the documents, see Jerome Ch’en, ‘Resolutions of the Zunyi Conference’, The China Quarterly 40, 1969, pp. 1–38. ⁴ Lucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), p. 150.

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murder and abuse of civilians in the infamous Nanjing Massacre of December 1937–January 1938 is perhaps the best-known instance of this, but it was also reflected in the ‘Three Alls’ policy—‘kill all, burn all, loot all’—begun in spring 1941 in northern China,⁵ and had been in evidence since the initial Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, although it was more widespread after 1937. The open use of terror was therefore a conscious military tactic by Japanese forces and seems to have been used indiscriminately on the Chinese population at large. Terror was also used by CCP and GMD forces,⁶ but usually in a more restricted and targeted fashion. When the forces of either side entered a village, sympathizers of the other side (be they the Japanese, communists, or nationalists) were direct targets and were often killed.⁷ Sometimes broader atrocities occurred against the general population by the troops,⁸ with killing, rape, torture, and property seizure or destruction common. It is impossible to quantify the level of such practices, but it was clearly a product of the military conflict and occurred during both the War of Resistance and the civil war. Once the party had established base areas initially in the south and then in the northern part of China, it had to take on responsibility for ruling those areas. Revolutionary and transformational terror were often coterminous in these regions. In each of the base areas an administrative structure was established, of varying levels of sophistication, in order to govern the region. In doing so, given party ideology one might have expected the administration to have followed a class-based strategy, with repression being the hallmark of its relationship with the rich peasantry and landlords, and a more favourably disposed attitude towards the poor peasants, and indeed in some places and at times this was the case; for example, in the Jinggang mountains the policy of terror and assassination that had prevailed in the mid-1920s when the party was concentrated in the cities was now directed against landlords and ⁵ Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945. The Struggle for Survival (London: Penguin, 2013) p. 292. More generally see Kathleen Hartford, ‘Repression and Communist Success: The Case of Jin-Cha-Ji, 1938–1943’, Kathleen Hartford & Steven M. Goldstein (eds), Single Sparks. China’s Rural Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 92–127. ⁶ It could also be used against one’s own side. For example, between 2000 and 3000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives in Mao’s suppression of a rebellion at Fut’ien in early 1930. Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 152; Jerome Ch’en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 164–165 and Alexander V. Pantsov with Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 239–245. For an account of the civil war that provides limited detail on this, see Frank Diko¨tter, The Tragedy of Liberation. A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945–1957 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), chs. 1 & 2. ⁷ Bianco (1971), p. 153. ⁸ For reports of such events carried out by anti-communist forces, see Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1961, originally published 1938), pp. 331–339. For the argument that the GMD was often cruel and oppressive towards the peasants, exploiting and terrorising them, see Bianco (1971), pp. 187–188.

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opponents in the villages, along with expropriations and compulsory levies.⁹ However, overall the policy was more nuanced as the communist authorities sought to balance the desire for social revolution with the perceived need to broaden the coalition against the Japanese and, subsequently, the GMD.¹⁰ This is well reflected in the changing attitude towards land reform.¹¹ There was no single pattern of land reform across all of the base areas in the sense that the details of when and how this was conducted were shaped largely by vulnerability to attack by either the GMD or the Japanese, and local conditions; for example, relations between peasants and landlords could differ between regions,¹² and where there was poor land and few landlords, as in parts of northern China, there was less scope for radical land reform than in those more productive areas where landlordism had been well developed.¹³ Nevertheless, as a generalization one can argue that radical land reform involving the forceful confiscation and redistribution of land was common during the Jiangxi Soviet period,¹⁴ the late 1930s, and after 1945, while during the antiJapanese war, rent and interest reduction, and tax reform were more common than confiscatory policies.¹⁵ The more moderate policies involved measures to decrease rent and interest levels while leaving the land essentially in the hands of those who held it, even if they were landlords or rich peasants.¹⁶ For ⁹ Schram (1966), pp. 130–131. According to one study, in Jiangxi in 1927–1931, excluding war dead, 186,000 perished as a result of the use of terror against these groups. Margolin (1999), p. 472. ¹⁰ This reflects the scholarly debate about the nature of peasant support for the communists: was it nationalist opposition to the Japanese, or support for communist plans for social revolution. The principal proponent of the nationalism argument was Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962). For various opposing approaches based on class, see Donald Gillin, ‘“Peasant Nationalism” in the History of Chinese Communism’, Journal of Asian Studies XXIII, 2, 1964, pp. 269–289 and Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1971. ¹¹ For a general discussion of the land question, see Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2007), esp. chs. 8 & 9. Also see Philip C.C. Huang, ‘Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution. Representational and Objective Realities from the Land Reform to the Cultural Revolution’, Modern China 21, 1, 1995, pp. 105–143. On the difficulty of scholars establishing the dimensions of landholding at this time, see Joseph W. Esherick, ‘Number Games. A Note on Land Distribution in Prerevolutionary China’, Modern China 7, 4, 1981, pp. 387–411. ¹² On the complex relations that could exist between landlords and their tenants, see Ralph Thaxton, ‘Tenants in Revolution the Tenacity of Traditional Morality’, Modern China 1, 3, 1975, pp. 323–358. On the complexity of social categories in the villages, see Philip C.C. Huang, ‘Analyzing the TwentiethCentury Chinese Countryside Revolutionaries versus Western Scholarship’, Modern China 1, 2, 1975, pp. 132–160. ¹³ On shaping policy appropriate to local conditions, see Mitter (2013), p. 192. ¹⁴ For the land law of the Jiangxi Soviet and discussion of it, see Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz & John K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (New York: Atheneum, 1966), pp. 218 & 224–226. ¹⁵ Mark Selden, ‘Yan’an Communism Reconsidered’, Modern China 21, 1, 1995, p. 22. ¹⁶ On this occurring in the north-west in those regions vulnerable to the GMD, see Mark Selden, ‘The Guerrilla Movement in Northwest China: The Origins of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region (Part II)’, The China Quarterly 29, 1967, pp. 72–73.

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example, from around the end of 1939 in the Chin-Ch’a-Chi base area the land program was called ‘struggle within unity’ and sought to keep the landlords allied with the resistance movement by emphasizing rent reductions with a guarantee that the rents would actually be paid in full to the landlords, and the latter would not be physically attacked.¹⁷ Under both moderate and radical policies, some equalization of status in the villages occurred, with that process being more developed under radical land reform than the more restricted fiscal measures. Radical land reform was revolutionary, reliance upon fiscal measures more a reworking of established administrative structures and techniques. Radical land reform involved at its most extreme the confiscation of the land of landlords and rich peasants, and its distribution to the poor peasants, with the landlords and rich peasants usually receiving no compensation for their loss. Sometimes they might be allowed to have the same amount of land as the other peasants,¹⁸ although this usually involved them receiving land of worse quality than they had held initially, while in Jiangxi landlords’ land was seized while the rich peasants retained a right to land, albeit inferior in quality to what they had held before.¹⁹ The process of seizure and redistribution (and also discussions about rent and interest reduction) often involved ‘struggle meetings’ where peasants were called together for public criticism of landlords and rich peasants; for example in Wuxiang county in the Taihang Base Area between October 1939 and March 1940 there were 700 such struggle meetings at which more than 80 landlords were physically attacked and died.²⁰ In Liaoxian county in the Taihang Base Area, the introduction of radical land reform in October 1939 was said to involve the ‘extermination’ of landlords and rich

¹⁷ William C. Dorris, ‘Peasant Mobilization in North China and the Origins of Yenan Communism’, The China Quarterly 68, 1976, pp. 697–719. For this sort of moderate program being implemented in an area under acute Japanese pressure, the Yangzi delta region, see Chang Liu, ‘Making Revolution in Jiangnan: Communists and the Yangzi Delta Countryside, 1927–1945’, Modern China 29, 1, 2003, pp. 284–312. ¹⁸ On rich peasants being allowed to receive land when it was redistributed, see the Politburo statement of 25 December 1935 which called for the moderation of land reform in light of the united front, see Mark Selden, China in Revolution: Yenan Way Revisited (New York: Routledge, 2016, 2nd ed.), p. 79. At least in the Taihang Base Area when confiscation was ended in 1940, much confiscated land was returned to the original owners and for the rest of the war against Japan rent and interest reduction were used to promote reform. David S.G. Goodman, Social and Political Change in Revolutionary China. The Taihang Base Area in the War of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 22 & 192. ¹⁹ This reflected Mao’s policy of attempting not to alienate the rich peasants. Isaacs (1961), p. 342. Also see Schram (1966), p. 151. ²⁰ David S.G. Goodman, ‘Reinterpreting the Sino-Japanese War: 1939–1940, Peasant Mobilisation and the Road to the PRC’, Journal of Contemporary China 22, 79, 2013, pp. 180–181. For Yan’an in 1935 and the 1940–1941 rent reduction campaign, see Selden (2016), pp. 68 & 183–187.

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peasants,²¹ while earlier in Jiangxi in June 1933 Mao had launched a ‘land verification movement’ to verify whether the land redistribution launched earlier had been properly implemented. This involved struggle meetings checking the class identity of all in the area and thereby uncovering hidden class enemies, with the counter-revolutionary elements thus discovered repressed or shot.²² Even in those cases where there were no deaths, such meetings could be psychologically exacting, even amounting to what may be called psychic terror. Land reform seems to have been generally more radical and violent from 1946 than it was before that date; early instructions suggested a more gradual approach tailored to local conditions.²³ As the conflict shifted from being against the Japanese to the GMD, class conflict was again seen to be appropriate in the villages on the basis of the assumption that in such a conflict, the poor peasants would support the communists while the rich peasants and landlords would favour the GMD. In the second half of 1945 policy shifted in a radical direction with a move from the focus on rent and interest reduction to that of land redistribution, with the May Fourth (1946) directive calling for the distribution of landlords’ land to poor and landless peasants. Part of this was a campaign of ‘settling accounts’ whereby landlords had to confront village meetings where they were accused of ‘crimes’ and forced to pay ‘compensation’.²⁴ Although this constituted a shift towards land equalization, it fell far short of that goal, in part because landlords were permitted to retain a larger area than the standard holding and there were various ways in which a landlord could avoid involvement in the redistribution process.²⁵ Furthermore, many poor peasants gained little from the policy. Accordingly policy was radicalized further in September 1947 with the introduction of a new land law.²⁶ Under this, landlords lost the right to their land which was to be distributed equally to all the rural population (including landlords) except ‘traitors’, and rich peasants’ ‘surplus property’ was to be requisitioned and redistributed. ²¹ Goodman (2000), p. 188. ²² Schram (1966), pp. 166–167. ²³ Schram (1966), p. 242. ²⁴ On such ‘bitterness meetings’ as a precursor to the ‘struggle’ and ‘criticism’ meetings of later, see Margolin (1999), pp. 478–479. He cites a figure of between two and five million dead and four-six million in labour camps. ²⁵ See the discussion in Tanaka Kyoko, ‘Mao and Liu in the 1947 Land Reform: Allies or Disputants?’, The China Quarterly 75, 1978, pp. 568–569. ²⁶ For the text of the party’s program which constituted the land law adopted on 10 October 1947 see William Hinton, Fanshen. A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 727–731. For the course of developments in one village, see Joseph W. Esherick, ‘Revolution in a Feudal Fortress: Yangjiagou, Mizhi County, Shaanxi, 1937–1948’, Modern China 24, 4, 1998, pp. 339–377.

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Land owned by ancestral shrines, temples, monasteries, schools, and other organizations was also seized, and all debts cancelled. This process was to be managed through struggle meetings, which often involved significant levels of violence and the killing of innocent people as well as those who opposed such land redistribution. This is reflected in the complaints about ‘leftist excesses’ in 1948–1949. Part of this was also the drive to replace the traditional leadership in the villages, which had tended to be dominated by landlords and rich peasants, with younger people from among the ranks of the poor peasants and party cadres. This too was usually achieved through the medium of public meetings. This sort of process in which peasants were called on to voice their opinions and criticize others was a perfect arena for the venting of traditional grievances and long-held grudges, and the satisfaction of these does seem to have been a common characteristic of the mobilization of the peasantry at this time. In the period 1946–1949 it was common for such land redistributions in individual villages to occur in waves, with the whole process being repeated perhaps a year or eighteen months after it had seemingly been completed. And on each iteration, as the investigation of people’s pasts expanded, increasing numbers seem to have fallen into one of the categories deemed unworthy of sharing in the bounty of land reform.²⁷ During this process ‘excesses’ and ‘abuses’ were common, and these were also usually addressed through public criticism meetings.²⁸ In the words of one scholar, ‘What had begun as a program of land redistribution ended as revolutionary terror in which China’s traditional rural elite was destroyed.’²⁹ According to another, ‘For those on the wrong side of land revolution, the process was terrifying and regularly fatal’.³⁰ Land reform was not completed by the time the communists took over state power in October 1949; it was a task to which they returned in the 1950s.³¹ While land reform of its nature created opposition, the perennial enemy of revolutionaries was ill-defined ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and defence against ²⁷ On these waves, see Hinton (1966), Parts III–VII. ²⁸ Hinton (1966), chs. 23–24 & 36–39. For criticism of party cadres for such abuses in the 1947–1948 rectification, see Fangchun Li, ‘Mass Democracy, Class Struggle, and Remolding the Party and Government during the Land Reform Movement in North China’, Modern China 38, 4, 2012, pp. 411–445. ²⁹ Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 432. ³⁰ Hans Van de Ven, China at War. Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China 1937–1952 (London: Profile Books, 2017), p. 243. ³¹ According to one study, about 25% of China experienced land reform in 1946–1948 and the rest in 1949–1952. Ben Stavis, ‘China and the Comparative Analysis of Land Reform’, Modern China 4, 1, 1978, p. 73.

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them was a constant concern of the communists. The definition of who was a counter-revolutionary depended upon the stage of the revolution. In the Jiangxi Soviet period, all class enemies (landlords, bourgeoisie) and anyone who did not sympathize with the communist party leadership were classed as counter-revolutionaries. In the United Front period 1935–1944, this category encompassed all military enemies, principally the Japanese aggressors, and Chinese traitors and spies. In the civil war period 1945–1949, there was a reversion to the formulation of the Jiangxi Soviet period: all class enemies and non-supporters, but also war criminals and traitors.³² Counter-revolutionaries were generally subjected to a mass trial rather than one in a courtroom, a process which achieved the aim not just of sentencing them but also of both humiliating them and presenting them as an educative example for the people.³³ Although especially during the United Front period some leniency was sometimes shown, those convicted were usually killed, imprisoned, or sent into hard labour along with confiscation of property where relevant.³⁴ Prior to the seizure of power in October 1949, in those areas under communist control revolutionary terror was therefore also transformational, directed at both the elimination of opposition and the transformation of the politico-socioeconomic structure in the villages. The upper echelons of that structure were assumed by their nature to be counter-revolutionary, so the confiscation of their property represented not just the application of transformational terror bringing about socio-economic change, but also revolutionary terror designed to eliminate enemies of the revolution. Turning to relations in the party, the leadership remained contested until around 1945. Mao had strengthened his leadership credentials in 1935 at Zunyi, but his leadership was not consolidated and unchallenged until the end of the rectification movement of 1942–1944 in Yan’an. Therefore throughout this period the question of handling opposition within the party was an issue. Physical violence was not generally used to resolve questions of leadership despite the militarized atmosphere in which the party existed. For the first fifteen years of the party’s life, until the Long March effectively broke the hold the Comintern had over the party’s leadership, the Soviet leadership, and especially Stalin working through the Executive Committee of the Comintern,

³² Patricia E. Griffin, The Chinese Communist Treatment of Counterrevolutionaries, 1924–1949 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 72 & 99. ³³ On the nature of mass trials, see Griffin (1976), pp. 88–92. ³⁴ On the growth of labour camps, especially after the Japanese surrender, see Frank Diko¨tter, ‘The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950’, The China Quarterly 175, 2003, pp. 803–817. For post-1949, see Margolin (1993), pp. 497–513.

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effectively shaped the leadership of the CCP.³⁵ When leadership changes were brought about, it was usually through formal votes of party bodies directed by the local Comintern representative. Even when Mao became Chairman of the Politburo and thereby established his supremacy over the pro-Moscow ‘returned student faction’ led by Wang Ming at the Zunyi conference in January 1935, it was through the regular party procedures that the decision was formalized. Once the deep factionalism of the 1920s had been overcome and Mao’s leadership had been established, the communists looked to a more regularized way of handling diversity of opinion within the party. This saw the emergence of ‘rectification’, a method of dealing with dissident views in principle without recourse to physical violence or terror.³⁶ The principle behind rectification was educational, an attempt to teach errant individuals about the error of their ways through a process of education, study, and criticism and self-criticism. The process of criticism and self-criticism involved an investigation of the person’s past, and therefore included their class identity. Rectification could include mass involvement, with the criticism and selfcriticism sessions being held publicly (in which case the educational purpose applied more widely than to just the person undergoing rectification), but it could also be a more restricted affair. Rectification campaigns occurred in 1942–1944 and 1947–1948. The former was particularly important because of the prominence among the educational materials that had to be studied of works by Mao, thereby consolidating his position as leader and ideological authority of the movement.³⁷ The 1942–1944 movement was a response to the increasingly diverse nature of party membership and was to involve, in Mark Selden’s words, ‘[A]ll cadres, particularly those accused of serious errors, were subjected to “struggle” under conditions of intense psychological stress’.³⁸ Officially directed against ‘subjectivism, sectarianism and party formalism’, it was meant not only to correct the views of those who were mistaken but also to identify and expel agents provocateurs, traitors and counter-revolutionary ³⁵ On the role of the Comintern, see E.H. Carr, The Twilight of Comintern, 1930–1935 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), ch. 16; Conrad Brandt, Stalin’s Failure in China 1924–1927 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966); and Isaacs (1961). For a first-hand account, see Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932–1939 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982). ³⁶ The best study of rectification is Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China. Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1993). ³⁷ For documents to be studied, see Boyd Compton, Mao’s China. Party Reform Documents, 1942–44 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, originally published 1952). Also see Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘The Origins of Rectification: Inner-Party Purges and Education before Liberation’, The China Quarterly 65, 1976, pp. 15–53. Of the 21 documents reproduced by Compton, seven were written by Mao; one was written by Stalin. ³⁸ Selden (2016), p. 155.

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elements. These latter groups were to be picked up in the anti-traitor campaign beginning in 1943, in which GMD agents were targeted, although rich peasants and landlords were often caught up in this as well.³⁹ Although Mao had said that ‘no one must be killed and only a few arrested’,⁴⁰ as the focus increasingly turned to finding counter-revolutionaries, the process came to involve coercion, including torture, to extract confessions, and executions.⁴¹ The number expelled from the party or otherwise repressed is unknown.⁴² The 1947–1948 rectification was associated with land reform and driven by an expressed concern on the part of the leadership about serious leftist mistakes, or excesses, in land reform.⁴³ The target of this campaign was lower-level cadres, those accused of committing the excesses about which the leadership complained, and in conjunction with this, impure class origins. There was greater coercion used in this campaign than in its predecessor, with many cadres admitting to false charges under the pressure that was imposed both by party cadres and by members of the populace who took part in this campaign in contrast to 1942–1944. Again the number purged or otherwise repressed is unclear, but Fred Teiwes suggests that it was probably ‘substantial’. The greater role played by the masses in 1947–1948 than in 1942–1944 reflects the respective targets of the two campaigns. The earlier one was directed at the different views held by people in leading party positions (which is why by emphasizing the centrality of Mao’s thinking in the documents to be studied the campaign consolidated his position of leadership) while the later was about the implementation of policy at the grassroots. Put crudely, rectification of the party elite was not at the time a matter for the masses, but the rectification of rank-and-file cadres was. The term ‘terror’ cannot unambiguously be ascribed to the rectification campaigns, but aspects of those campaigns could sit on the border of such a description. They did involve the extensive use of physical coercion and death even if their basic thrust was meant to be educative and thought- changing. But even this could involve intense psychological pressure on those being rectified, particularly if this was conducted in open public meetings. When conducted not in a public forum, rectification was similar to the regular Soviet purges of the 1920s and early 1930s (which could also be psychologically ³⁹ Esherick (1998), p. 359. Also see Peter J. Seybolt, ‘Terror and Conformity: Counterespionage Campaigns, Rectification, and Mass Movements, 1942–1943’, Modern China 12, 1, 1986, pp. 39–73. ⁴⁰ Van de Ven (2017), p. 149. ⁴¹ Teiwes (1976), p. 27 and Van de Ven ((2017), p. 152. ⁴² Teiwes (1976), pp. 29–30. For an argument that gives an important role in the application of force in the rectification movement to the chief of security Kang Sheng, see Mitter (2013), pp. 292–297. ⁴³ See the discussion in Teiwes (1976), pp. 32–49.

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testing), but when conducted in open struggle meetings they clearly gained a different dimension. Thus prior to 1949 it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the different categories of terror. Land reform involved both the elimination of opposition and the transformation of the socio-economic status quo, and therefore both revolutionary and transformational terror. While rectification was about the consolidation of power, mainly within the party, it was also transformational in its aim of bringing about changes in individuals’ values.

Revolutionary Terror: The Consolidation of Power The early years, 1949–1953/4 saw the regime seeking to consolidate itself in power across the whole country, with the southwest only being captured from GMD remnants in 1950. Consolidation involved not only creation of an administrative network loyal to the new rulers of China, but dealing with those who were believed to oppose the Communists. The attempt to deal with these groups was combined with an effort to mobilize the populace into regime-sponsored activity, thereby hopefully promoting the development of popular commitment to the new order. This was to be achieved primarily through popular involvement in a series of overlapping campaigns. Land reform had been virtually completed in the north of the country by the end of 1949 but lasted through the early years of the 1950s in the centre and south of China. This was directed primarily at landlords but, after October 1950, rich peasants were also targeted, and lasted into early 1953. This was accompanied by a number of other campaigns aimed at specific categories of enemies. The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries was directed against those thus labelled and lasted from 1951 to 1953. The Three Antis Campaign (1951–1952) was directed against corrupt bureaucrats and the Five Antis Campaign (1952–1953) against capitalists and private entrepreneurs. Intellectuals and the education sector were the targets of a Thought Reform Campaign in 1950–1951. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 there was also a popular campaign to support the war effort. With the exception of the Korean War campaign, all of the others involved elements of terrorist action. They cannot be attributed to the war, even if this gave a sharper focus to the search for enemies that lay at the heart of these campaigns, but were part of the new regime’s attempts to consolidate its position which, given the nationalists’ escape to Taiwan and American entry into the Korean War, may have seemed less secure than they would have liked. Indeed one scholar has

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argued that at this time ‘ideologically driven campaigns did ultimately exhaust and terrorize the population at large’.⁴⁴ Land reform in the old, liberated areas in the north and northeast was basically completed by the end of 1949 but had yet to make much progress in much of the centre and south of the country. Reflecting the earlier experience, there was debate about the treatment that should be accorded to rich peasants and landlords, with a more moderate view initially prevailing. It was assumed that with the whole country coming under communist control, opposition elements would see the hopelessness of continued opposition and come to terms with the authorities, so that a punitive program was not necessary.⁴⁵ This view was reflected in the Agrarian Reform Law of 30 June 1950 which allowed rich peasants to retain their property and land, and landlords to retain that land which they worked personally. However, with the outbreak of the Korean War and the heightened search for domestic enemies that that encouraged, the policy was radicalized, and a harder line adopted towards the rich peasants. There was increased focus on class struggle, and the confiscation and redistribution of landlords’ land and productive property. The program sped up from mid-1951. As with pre-liberation land reform, a basic aim remained the destruction of traditional power relations in the villages. This was to be achieved through leadership of the reform campaign by work teams coming from outside the village who sought to identify local leaders from among the poor peasantry, and to mobilize the other peasants against the local landlords. The chief mechanism for this was the organization of struggle or accusation meetings at which landlords were criticized and humiliated, with many subsequently being executed and their property seized. The numbers who suffered are uncertain— Fred Teiwes estimates one to two million executed while Ju¨rgen Domes puts the figure at five million dead⁴⁶—in part because of the way the different campaigns overlapped and because many of the categories of targets were elastic and ambiguous. It is clear that not only landlords, but rich peasants suffered; the setting of quotas from above for the percentage of those in each village to be categorized as rich peasants or landlords guaranteed that this

⁴⁴ Julia Strauss, ‘Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early PRC: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949–1956’, The China Quarterly 188, 2006, p. 894. Emphasis in original. ⁴⁵ Ezra Vogel, ‘Land Reform in Kwangtung 1951–1953: Central Control and Localism’, The China Quarterly 38, 1969, p. 32. The focus on terror is paramount in Diko¨tter (2013). ⁴⁶ Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘The establishment and consolidation of the new regime, 1949–1957’, Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China. Sixty Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 36 and Ju¨rgen Domes, The Internal Politics of China 1949–1972 (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1973), p. 38.

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would be the case. There was some reticence on the part of local cadres in some cases (many were linked with the targets of these campaigns, others disagreed with aspects of the policy) and peasants, especially among the latter over the state’s assertion of a grain monopoly once the land reform had been implemented.⁴⁷ The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries (CSC) occurred at roughly the same time as land reform in the centre and south of the country, but it occurred mainly in the cities. In contrast to land reform, the CSC was led mainly by the regular party-state organs, but similar to the land reform, this proceeded through struggle and accusation meetings to punishment, and often execution, of members of the target group.⁴⁸ Like the land reform, this began with a more moderate conception than it was to finally adopt. It began from the recognition that there were unknown numbers of people in China who had supported the GMD and opposed the communists, and the new regime felt it had to come to terms with them. Initially in early 1950 the approach to such GMD remnants and ‘hostile forces’ was to encourage former members of the GMD and its auxiliary organs to register with the authorities, on the promise that those who did so would be treated leniently. However, the balance of thinking within the leadership over whether to pursue a lenient or a hard-line policy towards former foes was tipped by entry into the Korean War, resulting in the so-called ‘double ten’ (10 October) directive calling for the large-scale suppression of counter-revolutionaries; the emphasis was on destroying enemies. Mass mobilization and involvement through widespread publicity and participation in public struggle and accusation meetings, including the denunciation and direct criticism of individuals, was meant not only to educate the population but to compensate for the lack of detailed knowledge by the regime of the actual situation on the ground throughout large parts of the country. In early 1950 ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ were deemed to include (even if only attempted but not successful): collaboration with imperialism; agitating, enticing, and bribing government officials; arming rebellious forces and militias; rallying and arming rebellious mobs; participating in espionage

⁴⁷ Huaiyin Li, ‘The First Encounter: Peasant Resistance to State Control of Grain in East China in the Mid-1950s’, The China Quarterly 185, 2006, pp. 145–162. On cadres, see Vogel (1969), pp. 45 & 51–56. ⁴⁸ On the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries, see Julia C. Strauss, ‘Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950–1953’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, 1, 2002, pp. 80–105 and Yang Kuisong, ‘Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries’, The China Quarterly 193, 2008, pp. 102–121.

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organizations; organizing or using feudal sects for counter-revolutionary purposes; looting and sabotaging public property; murder by poison; forging public documents and certificates; inciting the masses to oppose the government or split among themselves; fabricating and distributing rumours; illegally crossing international borders; escaping from prison; and harbouring counter-revolutionary criminals.⁴⁹ This list was soon expanded to include ‘local tyrants’, bullies, bandits, traitors, and leaders of local organizations including churches and secret societies. Many of these categories were vague, fluid, and elastic, contributing both to the arbitrariness of the campaign and to its size. This ambiguity was paralleled by conflicting messages coming from the leadership. The harder line in evidence from October 1950 was reflected in the calls at that time for cadres not to be afraid of executions at the same time as authorities were emphasizing the need to avoid creating a frightening or excessive atmosphere. By the middle of 1951 concern had shifted to ‘leftist’ errors with calls to limit executions to 10–20% of those whose crimes merited death, with all death penalties to be reviewed and confirmed at the provincial level.⁵⁰ Attempts were made to specify different punishments for different crimes, but there was never real clarity about this, and there was continued tension between pressures for bureaucratic control from above, and mobilization from below. Although clear quotas do not appear to have been issued, Mao did at times urge both increased and more limited killings, citing round figures as some sort of indication of what he thought.⁵¹ In this confusing atmosphere it should not be surprising that cadres sought to protect themselves, and many saw this in terms of avoidance of the charge of being too passive. Systematic mass arrests and executions expanded after March 1951,⁵² becoming more indiscriminate, with many cases fabricated, and many innocent people suffering. The numbers involved are uncertain, but one scholar puts the number of those executed at between 800,000 and two million.⁵³ However, the number affected was much larger with many accused being either incarcerated or placed under house arrest, while the relatives and friends of all of those accused also came under suspicion. According to Julia Strauss, the casualties of land reform in the countryside and the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries in the cities ‘probably ranged between a low estimate of one million and a high estimate of upwards of five million either sentenced ⁴⁹ Yang (2008), p. 109. ⁵⁰ Strauss (2002), pp. 82 & 90. ⁵¹ For example, see Diko¨tter (2013), pp. 87–88. ⁵² Yang (2008), pp. 111–112. ⁵³ Strauss (2002), p. 89. Fred Teiwes cites a figure of one to two million. Teiwes (2011), p. 36. Further scattered figures are in Margolin (1999), p. 483.

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to death by the state or spontaneously killed in the highly emotionally charged atmosphere of public accusation meetings’.⁵⁴ While land reform and the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries involved many deaths, target groups in the other three campaigns were, in the words of one scholar, ‘subject to mass criticism, thought reform, internal exile, loss of position and lengthy jail sentences, but were rarely, if ever, executed’.⁵⁵ These campaigns were the ‘Five Antis’, ‘Three Antis’, and ‘Thought Reform’. The Five Antis campaign was directed against private entrepreneurs, those members of the bourgeoisie who had broken the law. The five ‘antis’ were said to be ‘tax evasion, fraud, bribery, production espionage, and theft of state property’,⁵⁶ and according to Domes resulted in 500 businessmen being executed and 34,000 sentenced to long-term imprisonment.⁵⁷ The Three Antis campaign targeted those who were said to have been corrupted by their contacts with the bourgeoisie. The three ‘antis’ identified were ‘corruption, waste, and bureaucracy’ and led to the purge of bureaucrats whose loyalty was deemed to be questionable. ‘Thought reform’ was directed at the education sector and intellectuals, and was an attempt to replace established patterns of ideological hegemony with Marxist ideology. This usually involved re-education efforts, and criticism and self-criticism, often combined with forced labour in a labour camp for individuals, and the purging of books, literature, film, and religion.⁵⁸ These campaigns in the first few years of the new regime clearly involved significant levels of death. But much higher was the number of those who were caught up in the campaigns but did not suffer the ultimate penalty. For many of these people, lives were broken, psychic well-being shattered, and the feeling of certainty and security banished. The campaigns terrorized not only those who were targeted as members of the opposition categories, but members of the population more broadly. Although not all local cadres were enthusiastic in their fulfilment of the demands for victims from above, many were. Driven by ideological zeal to realize the Revolution and its goals or by fear of the consequences of being perceived to be too passive in the implementation of central demands, many cast the net much more widely than official campaign slogans seemed to warrant. Some cadres used the campaigns to pursue old personal grievances or to obtain personal advantage. Some members of the general population were similarly motivated to these cadres and denounced others, either ⁵⁴ Strauss (2006), p. 901. ⁵⁵ Strauss (2006), p. 902. ⁵⁶ Domes (1973), p. 43. ⁵⁷ Domes (1973), p. 52. This is a death rate of about 1.5% and seems to modify Julia Strauss’ judgement that people were rarely if ever executed. ⁵⁸ Diko¨tter (2013), ch. 9.

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secretly or openly in the struggle meetings. The result was not just uncertainty about who was vulnerable and who was not, but there was also an erosion of the unity and trust upon which village society rested. Torture, beatings, and (sometimes mass) executions were frequently public events, with the direct participation of the local populace encouraged.⁵⁹ This was the true measure of revolutionary terror.

Transformational Terror: Collectivization and the Continuing Campaign Like their Soviet forebears, the Chinese communists were committed to the principle of collective agriculture, but unlike in the USSR the basic commitment to collectivism was not challenged from within top party ranks by a preference for continued reliance on the market mechanism. In the period before 1949, the preference in some areas and at some times for moderate land reform was generally seen as a temporary, tactical measure, ultimately to be superseded by collective agriculture. Once national power had been achieved, the economy did not collapse like it did in the USSR. While there were differences over the speed at which collectivization/cooperativization should proceed, the principle of collective agriculture did not come under question. However, unlike the Soviets, they took a graduated approach to the course of agricultural collectivization. There were essentially to be four stages. The first was land reform whereby land, tools, and livestock were to remain in private hands but those holding large areas of land (both landlords and rich peasants) had some of that land redistributed to the poor. Some of this was completed before liberation, although in the centre and south this continued into 1953. The second stage involved the creation of mutual aid teams (MAT). This was a means of pooling peasant labour, tools, and livestock while leaving the land in individual owners’ hands. This had begun before liberation in some areas and continued into 1953. Third was the lower stage agricultural producers’ cooperatives (APCs) where all productive property was controlled by the collective with each peasant receiving a dividend in line with his relative contribution of land, tools, and livestock. This occurred from 1954 into 1956, but its progress was erratic reflecting continuing debate at the centre, cadre confusion on the ground, and peasant opposition. Fourth, the higher stage APCs or

⁵⁹ For some details about what he calls ‘the great terror’, see Diko¨tter (2013).

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collectives where the dividend was replaced by payment according to labour. This led into the Great Leap Forward beginning in mid-1958.⁶⁰ The shift to higher level collectives was neither smooth nor inevitable. The implementation of this shift was a matter of continuing debate in the upper reaches of the party⁶¹ including changes in Mao’s personal position, it was subject to the contrasting attitudes of many cadres in the villages (for example, some believed it was better to err on the side of ‘leftism’ than ‘rightism’ and therefore sought to push straight through from MATs to higher stage APCs⁶²), and there was peasant resistance. That resistance did not reach the levels it did in the Soviet Union, perhaps in part because the treatment of rich peasants was different; they were neither deported nor killed, but were subject to class struggle and ultimately allowed to join the APCs; restriction rather than liquidation. Nevertheless, there was resistance: refusal to surrender grain, riots, and demonstrations, unilateral withdrawal from the collectives, slaughtering of livestock, assaults on cadres, and the delivery of protests to local and national party offices. Such action was met with force; assaults, arrests, and imprisonment of local peasants were common, while the psychological pressure stemming from the public struggle meetings continued to play a role. Coercion was always there at least in prospect, and seems to have played a larger role in the south, where the party’s village leadership was weaker than it was in the north. The lower level of opposition reflected not just an attitude of trying to ensure that unlike in the USSR the peasants were able to retain enough grain to sustain themselves (although in practice this was not always the case) and not to destroy the rich peasants, but also the fact that the party had stronger roots in many villages owing to the presence of party cadres there, including many from the pre-1949 period. Also the land reform campaign had enabled the recruitment of village activists, and these had become involved in the move towards socialized agriculture from early in the process.⁶³ ⁶⁰ For a discussion of the stages, see Teiwes (2011), pp. 57–59; Diko¨tter (2013), chs. 10 & 11; and Kenneth R. Walker, ‘Collectivisation in Retrospect: The “Socialist High Tide” of Autumn 1955–Spring 1956’, The China Quarterly 26, 1966, pp. 3–6. ⁶¹ For documents and analysis see Frederick C. Teiwes & Warren Sun (eds), The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization in China. Mao, Deng Zihui, and the ‘High Tide’ of 1955 (London: Routledge, 2015). Also see ‘High Tide Symposium’, The China Quarterly 187, 2006, pp. 700–753. ⁶² Many cadres preferred the higher stage APC because unlike in the lower stage they did not have to reconcile the different financial interests of poor and middle peasants, and because they promised rapid growth, tighter control over production, and more benefits to poor peasants through income redistribution. Walker (1966), pp. 36–38. ⁶³ Thomas P. Bernstein, ‘Leadership and Mass Mobilisation in the Soviet and Chinese Collectivisation Campaigns of 1929–30 and 1955–56: A Comparison’, The China Quarterly 31, 1967, pp. 9–11.

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The peak of collectivization occurred in the Great Leap Forward of 1958– 1962. This was an attempt, sponsored principally by Mao⁶⁴ and over the opposition of leading colleagues including Zhou Enlai, Li Xiannian, and Chen Yun,⁶⁵ to accelerate China’s course of economic development and to propel it into the communist millennium that was at the heart of the party’s rationale. While the complete collectivization of agriculture was one of the principal aims of the Great Leap Forward, central too was the drive for social and ideological transformation. The goal was the creation of a completely collectivized style of life. People were to become members of the new ‘people’s communes’ where all aspects of life were to be collective. Ideally people were to abandon their private accommodation and move into collective dormitories where they would eat, sleep, and enjoy recreational activities in a fully communal form. Fully collective social economy was to replace the socio-economic forms that had emerged over the preceding years, thereby realizing the communist dream that animated Mao and his immediate supporters. This clearly involved a rejection of the Soviet model that had shaped the first five-year plan (1953– 1957), and instead to rely upon what was seen as China’s greatest resource, its enormous stock of human labour power. People were to be mobilized initially to construct irrigation works, then to fully collectivize agriculture and all aspects of life through the creation of ‘people’s communes’, and the development of a backyard industrial infrastructure. Linked to the Anti-Rightist Campaign (see below), the Great Leap saw a switch from expertise to mobilization, and reflects Mao’s increasing dissatisfaction with what he perceived to be the economic and social effects of the Soviet model, including technocracy. The overwhelming reliance on labour power through mass mobilization was meant both to create a form of self-financed development, thereby providing a means for the simultaneous development of agriculture and industry, ⁶⁴ On Mao’s knowledge of the effects the policy was having but his determination to press on with the re-radicalization of policy from late 1959, see Thomas P. Bernstein, ‘Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960: A Study in Wilfulness’, The China Quarterly 186, 2006, pp. 421–445. On Mao’s role generally see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 2. The Great Leap Forward 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Frederick C. Teiwes with Warren Sun, China’s Road to Disaster. Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 1955–1959 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999). For a discussion of the way in which responsibility for the Leap has been discussed in China, see Felix Wemheuer, ‘Dealing with Responsibility for the Great Leap Famine in the People’s Republic of China’, The China Quarterly 201, 2010, pp. 176–194. Also William A. Joseph, ‘A Tragedy of Good Intentions: Post-Mao Views of the Great Leap Forward’, Modern China 12, 4, 1986, pp. 419–457. ⁶⁵ On the removal of some provincial leaders in December 1957-early 1958 to forestall opposition, see Alfred L. Chan, ‘The Campaign for Agricultural Development in the Great Leap Forward: A Study of Policy-Making and Implementation in Liaoning’, The China Quarterly 129, 1992, p. 53. On the purges see Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘The Purge of Provincial Leaders 1957–1958’, The China Quarterly 27, 1966, pp. 14–32.

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and to create cultural change in those who were thereby mobilized. Technical norms and perceived limitations were to be overcome by the strength of popular enthusiasm guided by ambitious planned targets. There were two major waves of mobilization: up until late 1958 when targets were modified, and pressures eased followed by a further radical surge in the second half of 1959 lasting into 1960.⁶⁶ The Leap caused massive loss of life, with the exact dimensions of this disputed. The numbers range from an early estimate by demographers of 28 million to 42–43 million claimed by an early 1980s official fact-finding exercise, to the more than 45 million claimed by Frank Diko¨tter.⁶⁷ Even if the lowest of these figures is correct, this is an enormous death toll. The overwhelming majority of deaths were a result of starvation caused by the famine that accompanied the Leap, lasting in some areas into 1962. While natural causes contributed to the famine in some areas, the principal driver of it was official policy. Unlike in the case of the Soviet famine of the early 1930s, no one has claimed that the Leap famine was organized on purpose.⁶⁸ Nevertheless, official policy was crucial, and the leaders at the time knew that that policy was leading to famine. The pressures for increased grain production led to the expansion of grain cultivation into areas not particularly suited to it, and to the displacement of other crops perhaps better suited to the region than grain. Such pressures came from central targets and from the competition between regions to over-achieve those targets,⁶⁹ allied to local cadres’ determination to avoid being labelled as ‘rightists’ by maximizing the amount of grain requisitioned. But the main problem lay in the essential mechanism established to procure and distribute grain. In principle, all grain was requisitioned by the state and then part of it sold back to the regions on the basis of a quota of grain per head.⁷⁰ The incentive to maximize state procurement meant that the rations constituted by the per head grain quota were very low, while the introduction of communal kitchens in the communes meant that officials no longer felt constrained to leave individual peasants with sufficient grain for them to ⁶⁶ On this see Kenneth Lieberthal, ‘The Great Leap Forward and the split in the Yan’an leadership, 1958–1965’, MacFarquhar (2011), pp. 88–89. On the Leap see Yang Jisheng, Tombstone. The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) and Frank Diko¨tter, Mao’s Great Famine. A History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe (New York: Walker & Co., 2010). For a very critical review of Diko¨tter and his response, see Felix Wemheuer, ‘Sites of Horror: Mao’s Great Famine’, The China Journal 66, 2011, pp. 155–164. ⁶⁷ For discussions of the numbers see Yang (2008), p. x and ch. 11, Diko¨tter (2010), ch. 37, and Margolin (1999), p. 495. ⁶⁸ Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 12, ⁶⁹ On targets and competition between areas, see Diko¨tter (2010), pp. 36–37. ⁷⁰ For some data showing this requisition and distribution in operation, see Wemheuer (2014), p. 126.

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consume and stay alive. However the successful operation of such a system of procurement and distribution required accurate knowledge of the situation in every region of the country. The infrastructure to acquire that knowledge and conduct the required distribution was sadly lacking, a factor recognized in the mounting of a campaign in the second half of 1959 against the claimed peasant under-reporting of production. The problem is highlighted by the words of Yang Jisheng: ‘The famine hit hardest where procurement quotas were highest and sales of grain to the countryside were lowest’.⁷¹ Other aspects of official policy also contributed, with the maintenance of grain exports, the priority given to feeding the industrial workers in the cities, reduction in the overall sown area, and the wastage of food in the public dining halls all factors. The central leaders were aware of the famine and the consequences of excessive requisition, and although they did finally shift away from the Leap’s methods, it was not before the massive catastrophe reflected in the above mortality figures. It is this that many see as the main responsibility of the leaders and Mao in particular: they did not heed the lessons of the first radical stage of the Leap (that policy was leading to famine) and doubled down on those policies in the second radical (post-1959) phase, contributing directly to the massive loss of life.⁷² But while most deaths were by starvation and famine, the violence with which the Leap was prosecuted on the ground was also a major cause of death and repression. Under growing central pressure to produce results, local cadres, and their supporters among the populace exerted often significant pressure on that populace to fulfil central directives. Peasants were forced into the communes where they had to adopt new ways of both living and working, with the constant threat of punishment for anything that seemed to be less than full commitment. Opposition to communization was widespread, although often low key, individual or passive. Punishments were meted out for not just opposition but for insufficient enthusiasm, and they included beatings (often while suspended in mid-air), enforced periods of kneeling, exposure to the elements, parade through the streets, deprivation of food, the cutting off of fingers or ears, incarceration in labour camps, and execution. Struggle meetings, characterized by mass criticism and psychic pressure were common, not just as a form of punishment but as a means of mobilization. In the words of one observer, violence was a ‘routine tool of control’.⁷³ ⁷¹ Yang (2008), p. 399. ⁷² See the discussion of responsibility in Wemheuer (2014), pp. 54–61. ⁷³ Diko¨tter (2010), p. 292. For studies of individual provinces where the forms of punishment are clear, see Yang (2008), chs. 1, 3, 6 & 8.

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Around the time of the establishment of the collectives, nationalization of urban-based industry and commerce was undertaken.⁷⁴ Like in the USSR, this was a process that was opposed by many individual owners, but they stood little chance of success in face of the power of the state. Many were forced to endure the humiliation of handing the keys to their enterprises over to state officials in public ceremonies. Arrests and social criticism were common, as even shopkeepers and small entrepreneurs were folded into new cooperatives, and thereby lost their independent livelihoods. Similarly the wave of strikes in factories that occurred at this time was broken up by the police. Parallel to the drive for economic transformation was pressure for social and ideological transformation, clearly reflected in the Hundred Flowers Campaign beginning in late 1956 followed by the Anti-Rightist Campaign beginning in May 1957. The former, under the banner of a statement from Mao ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend’ was an attempt to mobilize intellectuals into the discussion of major policy questions facing the country and followed more than two years of sustained pressure to remove intellectuals not considered politically reliable from positions of responsibility in the educational and cultural spheres. It was thought that given the establishment of socialism, basic differences among the populace had now been subsumed within a greater sense of national unity, and that the intellectuals were loyal to the party. Following the earlier campaign of thought reform, the intellectuals were believed not to be alienated from the system, and that giving them the opportunity for free discussion would help to overcome any demoralization that ensued from the earlier campaign and would strengthen socialism by demonstrating its superiority to all alternatives. However, some scholars believe that rather than this, the intent of the campaign was to encourage critics to come out into the open so that they could then be dealt with.⁷⁵ In any event, in early 1957, as part of the party rectification campaign that had been announced the previous year, it was said that the intellectuals should play a central part in the criticism of the party.⁷⁶ In this way the Hundred Flowers was given a keen critical edge for the party and the cadres that worked within it. Already concerned that non-party intellectuals were being encouraged to criticize their performance, it is little wonder that ⁷⁴ On this see Diko¨tter (2013), pp. 238–242 and Margolin (1999), pp. 480–487. ⁷⁵ For example, see Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao. The Unknown Story (London: Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 508–509 and Yen-lin Chung, ‘The Witch-Hunting Vanguard: The Central Secretariat’s Roles and Activities in the Anti-Rightist Campaign’, The China Quarterly 206, 2011, pp. 391–411. ⁷⁶ For one argument about why intellectuals decided to take part in the rectification movement, see Eddy U, ‘Dangerous Privilege: The United Front and the Rectification Campaign of the Early Mao Years’, The China Journal 68, 2012, pp. 32–57.

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many middle and lower ranking party cadres should have a wary view of this campaign and what it might produce. Following direct encouragement from Mao in early 1957, criticisms began to flood in through letters to the authorities, posters, street rallies, meetings, and magazine articles. The tenor of much of the criticism soon alarmed party leaders, and in mid-1957 they closed it down.⁷⁷ In response to this upsurge of criticism, the Anti-Rightist Campaign was launched in 1957, leading to the persecution of many intellectuals.⁷⁸ Although the original target was nonparty intellectuals, the scope was soon broadened to encapsulate those party intellectuals who had spoken out independent of the party line as well. In the countryside the Anti-Rightist Campaign was directed principally against those who had been sceptical about cooperativization/collectivization, and it led into the Great Leap Forward. The campaign was characterized by a high level of arbitrariness; many people were labelled ‘rightists’ for no apparent reason and Mao set quotas that every unit in the country had to meet.⁷⁹ Although physical violence was much more limited than it was to be in the Cultural Revolution, in Teiwes’ words ‘the psychological pressures of struggle sessions resulted in a significant number of suicides, and reform through labor was apparently meted out on a large scale’.⁸⁰ The latter involved people being sent to forced labour camps.⁸¹ With the end of the Great Leap Forward, in 1963 the Socialist Education Movement (SEM), also known as the ‘Four Cleanups’ was launched by Mao.⁸² The SEM was designed to guard against the perceived restoration of capitalism in China. Initially the danger was seen to lie in the rural areas where the retreat from the Great Leap had seen a decline in communes and the

⁷⁷ Emblematic of the change is the revision of Mao’s February 1957 speech, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’ in which he initially encouraged criticism into one which favoured the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed the Hundred Flowers. On this see Teiwes (1993), pp. xxv, 185 & 220–221, and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 1. Contradictions Among the People 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). ⁷⁸ On the campaign, see Domes (1973), ch. vi; MacFarquhar (1974), Part Four; and Teiwes (1993), ch. 7. ⁷⁹ Diko¨tter (2013), p. 293. ⁸⁰ Teiwes (2011), pp. 82–83. ⁸¹ Domes (1973), p. 83. Domes estimates the number executed as ‘less than a thousand’ (p. 83). ⁸² On the SEM see Teiwes (1993), ch. 11; Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 3. The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 15; Richard Baum, Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party, and the Peasant Question 1962–66 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Richard Baum & Frederick C. Teiwes, SSu-ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement 1962–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Richard Baum, ‘Revolution and Reaction in the Countryside: The Socialist Education Movement in Cultural Revolutionary Perspective’, The China Quarterly 38, 1969, pp. 92–119; Charles B. Neuhauser, ‘The Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s: Prelude to the Cultural Revolution’, The China Quarterly 32, 1967, pp. 3–36.

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restoration of some forms of private farming. In January 1965 Mao took the SEM in a new direction by suggesting the existence of possible sources of capitalist restoration inside the communist party, including at its highest levels. This reflects the growth over time of Mao’s dissatisfaction with the performance of some of his leadership colleagues, especially in the context of his growing criticism of the Soviet Union and the belief that it was following the path to the restoration of capitalism owing to the nature of its post-Stalin leadership. There was perceived to be a clear link between external, Soviet, revisionism, and the danger internally in China. The aim was to ensure the dominance of socialist values, and although the emphasis of the campaign was on class struggle, this was meant to be an educational rather than a punitive process. The early stages of the movement concentrated on rural cadres who had abused their positions to line their own pockets, with moderation being the hallmark. Reliance was to be had on persuasion rather than physical punishment, struggle meetings were largely eschewed,⁸³ and those who admitted their errors were to be counselled. There were excesses in some areas at some times, but it was not until around mid-1964 that the treatment of those found to be deficient was strengthened. By this time the movement had spread into urban areas and into the cultural sphere (leading into the future Cultural Revolution), while Mao had become convinced that in some areas socialist education was being done unsatisfactorily. The most intense period of the movement lasted from autumn 1964 until summer 1965, and was characterized by the mobilization of ordinary peasants into the process of uncovering corrupt cadres. This created what one scholar has termed a ‘tense and frightening atmosphere’⁸⁴ in the countryside as cadres were hounded by members of the local populace, subjected to public criticism and struggle meetings. According to Teiwes,⁸⁵ this involved ‘probably the deepest rural purge in the history of the PRC’ with the dismissal of around one million basic level cadres. Many people were arrested and sent into forced labour or prison. Outside the party the numbers of victims were even bigger. According to one study⁸⁶ (although these figures have been disputed), in this most intensive phase of the movement 77,560 people died and 5,327,350 were purged; 5,760 ‘antiparty, anti-socialist’ cliques were uncovered, 276,256 people were described

⁸³ Teiwes (1993), pp. 401–403. ⁸⁴ Teiwes (1993), p. 428) ⁸⁵ Teiwes (1993), p. 425. ⁸⁶ Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down. A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (London: Swift Press, 2021), p.21.

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and punished as ‘enemies’ while a further 558,220 who were also labelled ‘enemies’ received more lenient treatment. Thus, during the first decade and a half of the regime’s life, a series of campaigns was launched with the aim of transforming China. At the heart of this was the reworking of the countryside to replace private, individual agriculture by collective agriculture, as in the Soviet Union. Although initially this followed a more measured path than in the USSR, that timetable should not obscure either the scale of the changes carried out or the amount of suffering they involved. Change on the desired scale could not be achieved without a high level of coercion and compulsion, both physical and psychological. It was a feature of the transformational terror wielded by the regime at this time that significant attention was paid to the psychological aspects, manifested through the successive mobilization campaigns and especially the widespread use of struggle meetings. These were also central to inverted terror, and reflect the aim of bringing about the transformation of all aspects of life in China.

Inverted Terror: The Cultural Revolution The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which formally lasted from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, is a very different type of event from those already discussed as instances of terrorist violence. While violence was, in practice, central to its most radical phases, some aspects of it may be better classed as cases of factional conflict, civil war or insurgency than of regime-sponsored terrorist violence. The GPCR may be seen in terms of two broad stages⁸⁷, each of which comprised a number of phases.⁸⁸ The stages were the bottom-up turmoil of popular rebellion of 1966 to late 1967, and the centralized repression of late 1967–1976. The phases are not clearly distinguished, overlapping, and melding into one another. They also varied across different parts of the country with, generally speaking, many areas lagging behind the major urban centres of Beijing and Shanghai. Although it may be argued that the roots of the GPCR go back well before the beginning of 1965 (as will be discussed in Chapter 5), a preliminary period leading into the Cultural Revolution lasts from early 1965 until summer 1966. What in retrospect marks the beginning of this period

⁸⁷ This follows Jonathan Unger, ‘The Cultural Revolution at the Grassroots’, The China Journal 57, 2007, pp. 109–137. ⁸⁸ This is based broadly on Harding (2011).

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is the January 1965 rewriting of the rules of the Socialist Education Movement (SEM) to make a major target ‘people in positions of authority within the party who take the capitalist road’⁸⁹ noted above. This meant that the roots of ‘revisionism’ and ‘capitalist restoration’ were to be found not only in the country at large or the lower levels of the communist party, but among those in leading posts within that party. This is the nub upon which terror was inverted. In 1965 the opening salvo leading into the Cultural Revolution occurred around a play entitled The Dismissal of Hai Rui. Written by Wu Han, who was the deputy mayor of Beijing, this was interpreted by Mao as a criticism of the Great Leap Forward and his dismissal of Peng Dehuai in 1959, and therefore of Mao himself. On Mao’s initiative, and organized by his wife Jiang Qing, the play came under stringent public attack in November 1965.⁹⁰ This was not just an attack on the play, but also on Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing (and protector of Wu Han) who was accused of being a ‘representative of the bourgeoisie’ and removed from office along with a number of others (including Yang Shangkun who was the director of the central party’s General Office, Lu Dingyi who was director of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee (CC), and the army chief of staff Luo Ruiqing who was seen by Mao and others as becoming too powerful⁹¹). The attack on Wu Han was also the opening of an attack on Mao’s chosen successor, Liu Shaoqi.⁹² The first actual phase of the GPCR began in May 1966 and lasted until the end of that year. It was at the May enlarged Politburo meeting that Peng, Luo, Chang, and Li were formally removed and the Cultural Revolution officially launched. But also on 7 May Mao advanced a theory in a memo to the head of the army Lin Biao about the intrinsic unity between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the mass of industrial and agricultural workers, and how this constituted a school that combined all that was healthy in the path to socialism. These integrated forces (soldiers and civilians—workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, commercial employees, and bureaucrats) should jointly ⁸⁹ Cited in Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2006), p. 13. ⁹⁰ Mao personally revised the text of this attack, which was actually written by Yao Wenyuan, three times. MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 17. ⁹¹ Yang (2021), pp. 48–56; MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 19–27. The removal of Peng, Luo, Yang and Lu ‘made Mao feel safer’ and was therefore crucial preparation for the launch of the GPCR. Citation from Yang (2021), p. 62. All four were formally dismissed in May 1966 but were in practice removed from office at different times prior to this. Their removal was accompanied by the removal of many of their subordinates and putative supporters, sometimes occasioning suicide. MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 43–44. ⁹² On the circumstances of the criticism of the play being written and its political consequences, see Yang (2021), ch. 2 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 1.

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participate in the cultural revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. This encapsulated Mao’s view of the model of the Paris Commune. On 16 May the enlarged session of the Politburo (the session actually lasted from 4–26 May) detailed Peng’s crimes and announced the onset of the GPCR, although it is not clear that everyone at the top of the political system realized exactly what this meant. The document, called the 16 May Circular, claimed that ‘bourgeois representatives’ and ‘counter-revolutionary revisionists’ had infiltrated the political system including the upper reaches of the party, and said that it was necessary to eliminate the ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, and the army’.⁹³ Later that same month, in Beijing the Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) was established to lead the Cultural Revolution. This brought together leading radicals (the most important were Chen Boda, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, Qi Benyu, Wang Li, and Guan Feng) who became major drivers of the GPCR; this became ‘the campaign headquarters for the Cultural Revolution’.⁹⁴ Despite divisions within this group, it was a significant reason for the increasingly radical course the GPCR took over the subsequent couple of years.⁹⁵ May also witnessed the beginning of the mobilization of Chinese youth, principally in the schools and universities, as the shock troops of the GPCR.⁹⁶ Beginning in the universities,⁹⁷ their mobilization and their search for ‘capitalist roaders’ in the party was one nucleus of terrorist violence in the GPCR. They removed university/school authorities and teachers from their offices and excluded them from campus, routinely criticized and denounced them, and often physically assaulted them. This will be discussed below. This constituted a major, and escalating, threat to office holders at all levels of both the party and state, with the result that in June–July 1966 Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi despatched ‘work teams’ into the schools and universities to take over the leadership of the students and both moderate and redirect the activities of the mobilized youth.⁹⁸ However, after initially agreeing to this

⁹³ Cited in Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–1969’, MacFarquhar (2011), p. 170 and Yang (2021), p. 66. ⁹⁴ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 99–100. ⁹⁵ On its establishment see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 99–101. ⁹⁶ For the beginning of this in Peking University, see Yang (2021), pp. 76–80. Public rallies had occurred throughout June to denounce the four leaders who had been removed. For the situation on the campuses, see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), chs. 3 & 4. ⁹⁷ On 25 May a big character poster denouncing the leadership of Peking University was put up in the university and published in the party newspaper, People’s Daily a week later. ⁹⁸ On this as a form of self-defence by the leaders of the bureaucrats, see Yang (2021), pp. 85–88. The work teams were officially withdrawn at the end of July.

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(or at least to the sending of one into Peking University⁹⁹), Mao came out in opposition to Deng and Li (who he accused of having adopted the ‘reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie’) and in support of the youth and, most spectacularly through his injunction to the Red Guards that ‘it is right to rebel against reactionaries’ and his attendance at mass rallies in Tiananmen Square, stimulated the organization of these students into the so-called Red Guards.¹⁰⁰ Mao’s words removed the constraints on violence, giving rise to what two scholars have termed ‘the “red terror” of August-September 1966’.¹⁰¹ Although there were some signs of moderation in the proceedings of the XI Plenum of the CC held on 1–12 August (for example, the statement that a majority of cadres were good and only a minority were anti-party, anti-socialist rightists, and they should be given an opportunity to make a fresh start), the net effect of the plenum’s decisions (including the open criticism and replacement of Liu Shaoqi as the designated successor to Mao by Lin Biao¹⁰²) was, in the words of one scholar, ‘to legitimate a broad attack on the Party establishment and the intellectual community, at the personal initiative of Mao Zedong, that would entail a high degree of mass mobilization and an intense degree of political struggle’.¹⁰³ The direction of attack was officially against people in authority taking the capitalist road (symbolized by Mao’s 5 August injunction to ‘Bombard the headquarters’¹⁰⁴), something sharpened by the criticism of the so-called ‘bourgeois reactionary line’ which was directly associated with Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi.¹⁰⁵ Beginning in October 1966 those mobilized were generally referred to as ‘rebels’ (the term ‘Red Guards’ was, in Yang’s words, ‘a general term referring to all mass organizations’), and they became increasingly active on the national political stage;¹⁰⁶ as early as August 1966 they had engaged in home invasions and attacks on what was termed the ‘four olds’ (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), resulting in widespread attacks, harassment, beatings, and killing of those popularly associated with those things. ⁹⁹ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 65. ¹⁰⁰ On the origins of the Red Guards among the students, see Yang (2021), pp. 104–110. The first and most important of these rallies was on 18 August 1966. For the dates of the other rallies, see Yang (2021), p. 112. On the rallies, see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 106–110. The movement spread nation-wide as Chinese youth were encouraged to travel to share their experiences. ¹⁰¹ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 102. ¹⁰² On the fate of Liu see Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (London: Routledge, 2015) and Yang (2021), pp. 365–375. ¹⁰³ Harding (2011), p. 178. The resolution of the meeting was called the ‘Sixteen Articles/Points’, which are summarized in Yang (2021), pp. 101–103 and discussed in MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 92–94. ¹⁰⁴ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 90. This big character poster targeted Liu Shaoqi. ¹⁰⁵ See the discussion of the October 1966 Central Work Conference in MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 136–140. ¹⁰⁶ Yang (2021), p. 147. The quotation about Red Guards is on p. 150.

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If Mao had hoped that the revolutionary enthusiasm and commitment of the Red Guards would guarantee unity and clarity, he was sadly mistaken. As the attacks on office-holders mounted, in many parts of the country the latter fought back, organizing their own mobilized forces to act in their defence, and these groups usually also called themselves Red Guards.¹⁰⁷ In addition, the rebels were themselves far from united. Throughout the country they split into opposing factions, mainly over the identity of the principal targets, and often they came into open conflict, especially (but not only) as those elements that were mobilized by officials in their own defence publicly presented themselves as part of the broad mass mobilization encouraged by Mao.¹⁰⁸ Perceived conservative organizations were overrun and the mass organizations of the conservative faction of the rebels collapsed at the end of 1966, leaving the revolutionary faction of the rebels as the ‘mainstream’;¹⁰⁹ although in some cases this simply precipitated a split and further factionalization among the rebels.¹¹⁰ According to Yang, the division between the revolutionary and conservative factions of the rebels was widely based on family background; those from a relatively advantaged background with good career prospects sought to defend the established structure and the officials who embodied it, those from less privileged backgrounds sought to destroy the structure under which they believed they suffered.¹¹¹ Chaos, anarchy and violence escalated as the rebels fractured and, following the strengthening of the CCRG at the expense of established party authorities in Beijing,¹¹² they pushed for increasing radicalization and no compromise with existing party authorities; the CCRG even began to identify individual targets for attack. In November–December 1966, the rebels were also enabled to enter factories, communes, and places of work, with the result that the capacity of party committees to exercise authority throughout the country effectively collapsed. In addition, workers were accorded the right to form revolutionary organizations, and therefore rebel, just like the students.¹¹³ This launched the Cultural Revolution in the factories and villages.¹¹⁴ The situation remained confusing and contradictory as factionalization continued to characterize mass politics, differing views on ¹⁰⁷ On attempts by officials to protect themselves against attack, see Yang (2021), ch. 8. ¹⁰⁸ For some of the dynamics of this, see Yang (2021), pp. 150–153. ¹⁰⁹ Yang (2021), pp. 158–161. ¹¹⁰ Dong Guoqiang & Andrew G. Walder, ‘Nanjing’s Failed “January Revolution” of 1967: The Inner Politics of a Provincial Power Seizure’, The China Quarterly 203, 2010, pp. 675–692. Also see Dong Guoqiang & Andrew G. Walder, ‘Factions in a Bureaucratic Setting: The Origins of Cultural Revolution Conflict in Nanjing’, The China Journal 65, 2011, pp. 1–25. ¹¹¹ Yang (2021), p. 155. ¹¹² MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 155–156. ¹¹³ On the ‘Anting incident’ that precipitated this, see Yang (2021), pp. 172–180. ¹¹⁴ This was against the wishes of Zhou Enlai and other officials working in the economic area who wanted to isolate the economy and production from the Cultural Revolution.

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major issues remained unresolved, especially as the Revolution moved into the ‘seizure of power’ phase, and personal rivalries and antagonisms increasingly came into play.¹¹⁵ Although the effect of radicalization differed across the country, by the end of the year the authority of the party had disintegrated yet the rebels could offer no alternative coherent model of organization to replace it. The second phase of the Cultural Revolution lasted from the end of 1966 until late 1967. This opened with the seizure of power in Shanghai by mass organizations,¹¹⁶ the so-called ‘January storm’, and Mao calling for the pushing aside of the party and its replacement by new organs of power, which were to be characterized by power-sharing between the mass organizations, healthy party cadres, and the PLA. These were the so-called ‘revolutionary committees’.¹¹⁷ Power was to be seized from ‘those in authority taking the capitalist road’, and the Cultural Revolution was now described as a great revolution in which one class overthrew another. The PLA was told that its task was to support the radicals in their overthrow of the existing authorities; in April new directives prohibited the army from firing on the rebels, from disbanding mass organizations, or from retaliating against those who raided military installations in the search for weapons. With the army thereby seemingly side-lined (although in some cases the local military did oppose the radicals and support the party cadres) and the rebels encouraged to seize power, the result of this so-called ‘January Revolution’ was chaos and conflict as established authority dissolved across the country in the face, in many areas, of armed clashes. Such clashes occurred both between the three forces (masses, cadres, and military) and the existing authorities, and also within those forces as factionalism continued to splinter any sense of unity to which these groups may have aspired.¹¹⁸ In practice, the power seizures were highly contested with the result that by the end of 1967 only eight new provincial committees had been recognized by the central authorities.¹¹⁹ ¹¹⁵ For the importance of personal rivalries and antagonisms in factional conflict in the university, see Andrew G. Walder, ‘Factional Conflict at Beijing University, 1966–1968’, The China Quarterly 188, 2006, pp. 1023–1047. ¹¹⁶ On this see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 9. ¹¹⁷ See Yang (2021), ch. 13. For a survey of the development and role of the committees over time, see David S.G. Goodman, ‘The Provincial Revolutionary Committee in the People’s Republic of China, 1967–1979: An Obituary’, The China Quarterly 85, 1981, pp. 49–79. ¹¹⁸ On such factions, see Frank Diko¨tter, The Cultural Revolution. A People’s History 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 143–148 & 154–164. For a discussion of the emergence and operation of factions in the military in Xuzhou prefecture, see Dong Guoqiang & Andrew G. Walder, ‘Forces of Disorder: The Army in Xuzhou’s Factional Warfare, 1967–1969’, Modern China 44, 2, 2018, pp. 139–169. On factions among the youth in Hunan, see Jonathan Unger, ‘Whither China? Yang Xiguang, Red Capitalists, and the Social Turmoil of the Cultural Revolution’, Modern China 17, 1, 1991, p. 24. In the universities, see Walder (2006) and Jonathan Unger, ‘The Cultural Revolution Warfare at Beijing’s Universities’, The China Journal 64, 2010, pp. 199–211. ¹¹⁹ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 170.

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From the centre, both Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group sought to exercise guidance over what was happening, but often with indifferent results. Part of the issue was that none of the tripartite partners given responsibility for forming the new ‘revolutionary committees’—mass activists, healthy party cadres or military people—was a united entity. They were internally divided over a range of issues, often differing from region to region, and a professed commitment to obey Chairman Mao was insufficient to paper over these divisions. Furthermore, the Chairman was not consistent in either his attitude to these groups or in the instructions he gave them. This ambiguity in leadership was exacerbated by the attempt by a group of party and military leaders (at the centre they were chiefly veteran leaders from the revolutionary period) in February–March 1967 to limit rebel excesses and restore control to the established party structure.¹²⁰ This so-called ‘February Adverse Current’¹²¹, which included the view that the GPCR should be brought to a rapid conclusion, enraged the CCRG, convinced Mao that revisionism remained an issue at the top levels, and effectively drove the further radicalization of the revolution—most immediately in the so-called ‘February Suppression of Counter-revolutionaries’ which saw attempts at the bloody suppression of rebel factions and evoked a bloody response by those rebel factions¹²²—and weakened the position of the party cadres. Opposition to at least elements of the Cultural Revolution was present in the army, especially following attempts by radicals to extend the Cultural Revolution into the PLA in the second half of 1966.¹²³ In some places the PLA supported cadres under attack by the rebels, even supplying arms to conservative organizations for use in their struggle with the radicals, and, using the power they had been accorded to oversee the development of the revolutionary committees, they manoeuvred the radicals into a minority place on many of these committees, although this often involved violent and bloody conflict.¹²⁴ Essentially where the provincial military districts supported the same alternative leaders and mass organizations as the party centre (Mao), power seizure was successful; where they did not, the attempted power seizures failed.¹²⁵ This occurred against a background beginning in January 1967 of attempts to restore order and control both in and through the military with the PLA given the power to suppress rightists and counter-revolutionary groups ¹²⁰ Harding (2011), pp. 205–208. See MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 175–177 for the attempt to rein in the radicals in early 1967. ¹²¹ For a discussion, see Yang (2021), ch. 11 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 191–198. ¹²² Yang (2021), pp. 193–204. ¹²³ On the military in the Cultural Revolution, see Yang (2021), chs. 12 & 14. ¹²⁴ For this process in some provinces, see Yang (2021), pp. 232–262. ¹²⁵ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 175.

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and elements,¹²⁶ a formulation which many local commanders interpreted liberally to suppress any groups to which they objected. Provincial military leaders, while responsive to central directives, were heavily influenced in their actions by the organizational structure of the PLA and the missions assigned to them in their official military capacity.¹²⁷ Perhaps the most striking instance of military independence at this time was the so-called ‘Wuhan Incident’ (or ‘7/20 Incident’) in July 1967 when the local military allied itself with the conservative mass organizations, clamped down on the rebels and arrested an envoy of the CCRG (Wang Li) who had come to the city to try to sort out the conflicts that were wracking it.¹²⁸ He was soon released and those who arrested him dismissed, but the action of the Wuhan military encouraged the radicals both on the ground and in the CCRG to call for enhanced attacks on capitalist roaders, conservatives, and revisionists, including especially in the military. August and early September 1967 witnessed the peak of radicalism, violence, and clashes between factions (including clashes between rebels and the military), including the burning of the British Embassy in Beijing; by mid-1967 China had ‘descended into a state of what Mao later described as “all-round civil war”’.¹²⁹ This radicalization was opposed by three key leaders at the centre, Mao, Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao, respectively the putative (although in the case of Lin the official) heads of the three forces, the masses, the cadres, and the military. Some of the more radical members of the CCRG (the so-called ‘516 Group’) were dismissed,¹³⁰ and the military was called upon to restore law and order; in September 1967 the authority of the PLA was reinforced, including giving the military the right to use armed force against any mass organizations that resisted its attempts to restore order. The PLA also used this opportunity, plus the renewed emphasis on forming revolutionary committees composed of the ‘three-in-one’ (masses, cadres, and military), to consolidate its position of dominance in the new revolutionary committees.¹³¹ The third phase (which marked the beginning of the second stage) of the GPCR extended from late 1967 until around mid-1969 and marks the shift ¹²⁶ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 176–177. ¹²⁷ Harvey Nelsen, ‘Military Forces in the Cultural Revolution’, The China Quarterly 51, 1972, pp. 444–474. ¹²⁸ Wuhan had been the scene of intense factional conflict in preceding months. See Yang (2021), ch. 14 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 12. Similar factional conflict, including armed clashes, were characteristic of most Chinese cities at this time. MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 214–220. ¹²⁹ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 199. ¹³⁰ Harding (2011), pp. 213–214. On the complexities of the so-called 16 May conspiracy, see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 13. ¹³¹ Of the 29 provincial revolutionary committees established between January 1967 and September 1968, local cadres were the chairmen in only eight with military figures filling the other 21 positions. Yang (2021), pp. 231–232. Also see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 245–246.

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from rebellion from below to repression from above. It saw the deradicalization of the Revolution and a shift of emphasis towards rebuilding and consolidation. Central to this was the suppression of the rebels. In October 1967 classes had been formally resumed in the country’s educational institutions in a first step to disband the Red Guards. This was hardly a smooth process. There had been a resurgence of radical activism, with violence in some areas, by mass organizations in spring and early summer 1968, often against their perceived under-representation in the new revolutionary committees. However, in response to this, in July-August 1968 Mao sent ‘Mao Zedong Thought propaganda teams’ and ‘worker propaganda teams’ supervised by military officers into China’s universities to establish control. This action was soon reinforced by the mobilization of workers in cooperation with the PLA to re-establish order in the universities. The force of the army allied to the numerical strength of the workers was too much for the students, and the Red Guards were disbanded. This was followed in December 1968 by an order sending students into the countryside for a bout of re-education; between 1968 and 1980 some 17 million students were effectively banished from the cities in this way.¹³² Also important was the campaign to ‘purify the class ranks’ beginning in Shanghai in late 1967 and in full swing across China by mid-1968, winding down towards the end of that year. This was designed notionally to exclude ‘traitors, spies, inveterate capitalist roaders, counter-revolutionaries, unreformed landlords, rich peasants, bad elements, and rightists’,¹³³ a pantheon of opponents that was both broad and vague. This was a significant purge that encompassed a wide range of groups that did not always fit into the categories enumerated as its principal targets because those conducting the purge (often the newly-constituted revolutionary committees) used the opportunity to get rid of opponents and to settle scores. Public humiliation, arrest, beating, and killing were common.¹³⁴ Between January1967 and late 1968 revolutionary committees had been established in all of the provinces of China. Membership of these was negotiated under the guidance of military commanders, but they tended to be large and unwieldy. Although smaller standing committees were more effective, real power tended to reside with the military, in the provinces mainly regional officers loyal to the veteran marshals (rather than Lin Biao).¹³⁵ Indeed, until ¹³² Diko¨tter (2016), p. xxiv. ¹³³ Diko¨tter (2016), pp. 183–191 for a discussion of this, including of the violence it involved. Also Yang (2021), ch. 16 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 15. ¹³⁴ According to MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 259, cases of cannibalism also occurred. ¹³⁵ Diko¨tter (2016), p. 171.

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the military returned to the barracks in August 1972, they were the effective rulers of much of China. It was not until the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party of China was convened in April 1969 that a new party constitution was adopted (it had been discussed and adopted at the Twelfth Plenum of the party’s Central Committee of 13–31 October 1968¹³⁶) and that it began to function again in a more regularized fashion, although in an important change, the military now played a much more prominent role in the party’s leading organs than before. However, such regularization came at a cost. According to Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals: ‘A greater number of ordinary citizens died while revolutionary committees across the country “finished the job” that Mao had mentioned at the Ninth Congress [to carry the Cultural Revolution through to its conclusion] than at the hands of rampaging Red Guards in 1966–67 or in armed combat between “mass organizations” competing for power in 1967–68.’¹³⁷ Following the ‘purify the class ranks’ campaign, beginning in February 1970, the ‘One Strike and Three Antis’ campaign¹³⁸ involving a nationwide crackdown on ‘counter-revolutionary destructive activities’ (the ‘strike’) and action against ‘graft and embezzlement’, ‘profiteering’, and ‘extravagance and waste’ (the targets of the ‘three antis’) was launched. It was to involve mass mobilization, denunciation, and exposure, and therefore had a clear lineage in the movements of 1966–1967. The result was a vigorous assault at the local level on anyone the local authorities considered to be ‘counterrevolutionary’ or ‘bad people’. The number of victims of this campaign is not clear, but according to Yang tens of thousands were killed and many more arrested, while according to MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, by November 1970 more than 284,800 had been arrested.¹³⁹ The period after the Ninth Congress also saw continuing tension at the top, reflected in the death of Lin Biao, the return and banishment again of Deng Xiaoping, the promotion of Hua Guofeng and the struggle with the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, but these were more in the form of normal factional conflicts in the party than of any terrorist process. There were also violent crackdowns on broader dissidence, particularly in the wake of the April 1975 Tiananmen incident when force was used to clear away the demonstrators around the memorial to the deceased Zhou Enlai, but there is little hard data about the levels of such repression. The Cultural Revolution was deemed to end with the death of Mao in September 1976. ¹³⁶ ¹³⁷ ¹³⁸ ¹³⁹

MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 278–279 & 291–292. MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 286. Yang (2021), ch. 17 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 301–307. Yang (2021), p. 328 and MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 307.

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In terms of violence and terror, most casualties occurred from 1968 to 1971, after the end of the period of popular rebellion and factional conflict and of the establishment of provisional organs of local power. They were part of the central crackdown phase of the Cultural Revolution,¹⁴⁰ although clearly violence and terror were present from mid-1966. What form did this terror take? Unlike in the principal bouts of terror in the French and Russian revolutions, execution by armed forces (be they security police or armed militia) was not the most prominent form taken by the terror in the Cultural Revolution. Although such executions did occur—and were probably the cause of most deaths— especially in the wake of the armed conflict between the various groups, and there was mass killing often preceded by torture¹⁴¹ and a security-type organization did play a part in identifying and persecuting victims,¹⁴² the most striking (and unique) form of the terror and certainly the most public, was carried out by the Red Guards/rebels¹⁴³ and ranged through the destruction or confiscation of public and private property, the expulsion of undesirables from the cities (often termed repatriation to their villages of origin), harassment, beatings, and murder.¹⁴⁴ One of the most traumatic forms was through the public struggle/criticism sessions that many officials, including those at the apex of the political system,¹⁴⁵ were forced to undergo. This initially involved bureaucratic officials and university faculty in mid-1966 before spreading beyond these groups, initiating what one scholar has termed ‘a reign of terror’.¹⁴⁶ From the outset, those deemed to be ‘black elements’—people classified as landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists and capitalists, and their children¹⁴⁷—especially in the schools were subject to criticism, denunciation, beatings, and sometimes death. The main agents of this were the Red Guards. In many areas they brought a kind of fervent ascetic morality to public life, seeking to enforce their own code of what they saw to be appropriate behaviour, including short hair, a ban on smoking and drinking in public and the demand that services no longer be provided to representatives ¹⁴⁰ Walder & Yang (2003), pp. 74–99. ¹⁴¹ For one discussion, see Yang (2021), ch. 18. ¹⁴² For a discussion of this body, the Central Case Examination Group (CCEG), see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 281–284. ¹⁴³ It has been claimed that the most fervent came from the middle and even elementary schools rather than the universities. MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 104. ¹⁴⁴ For a discussion of the ‘Red Terror’, see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), ch. 7. ¹⁴⁵ For some of those leading figures forced to endure such treatment, see MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), pp. 184–190. ¹⁴⁶ Harding (2011), p. 173. ¹⁴⁷ So-called ‘red elements’ were revolutionary army officials, revolutionary cadres and martyrs, workers, and poor and lower middle peasants. On ‘blood lineage theory’ that underpinned this, see Yang (2021), pp. 114–117.

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of the bourgeoisie. They changed the names of places and things they considered repugnant, and destroyed many cultural items. All of this was justified in terms of struggling against the ‘four olds’, the ‘old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes’. School teachers and university faculty were seen as having promoted the old order and so often had their books and papers seized and destroyed, their homes and offices invaded with many of their possessions either destroyed or carried off, and they were personally subjected to harassment, beatings, and torture by their own students.¹⁴⁸ Such treatment often resulted in death. So too did the arbitrary beatings and house invasions by Red Guards and others of those considered in some way offensive, including people deemed to be from a bad class background. Officials who were singled out were often paraded through the streets filled with abusive youth, and forced to face struggle meetings of young people, shouting at, criticizing, humiliating, and often throwing things at them. Bedecked with placards around their necks listing their ‘crimes’ and ‘counter-revolutionary offenses’, and sometimes wearing a dunce’s cap, they were forced to accept their guilt and present self-criticisms, sometimes before thousands of jeering and shouting people; thousands of such rallies where leading figures were humiliated were held in Beijing alone, with many more taking place across the country.¹⁴⁹ The sort of psychic terror induced by such an experience, often accompanied by physical beatings, led to the deaths of many officials, and many of those who survived were physically and emotionally broken by the process. As a further punishment, those who survived were often sent to the countryside, to work and learn from the peasants. This treatment was not restricted to middle level officials but embraced some of those at the top of the political hierarchy too. Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping were all subject to vigorous criticism and forced to make self-criticisms (only Zhou was not dismissed), while Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Yang Shangkun, Lu Dingyi, and He Long were denounced at mass rallies that they were forced to attend in the capital;¹⁵⁰ only Mao was exempt from criticism. An important element in this was the depersonalization of the victims. While the basic theme underpinning the GPCR was to combat ‘class enemies’ who threatened to restore capitalism in China, in the course of the violence much more colourful descriptions emerged. The enemies were such things as ‘monsters’ and ‘demons’, ‘black gang elements’, ‘running dogs of capitalism’ ¹⁴⁸ For some examples of torture, see Diko¨tter (2016), pp. 75–79. This volume contains a wealth of examples of the violence of the GPCR. ¹⁴⁹ MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006), p. 123. ¹⁵⁰ Harding (2011), p. 188.

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and ‘spies’, epithets that denied their personal value and, in some cases, their very humanity. The prevalence of big posters, hand-written by students and placed on walls for all to see, injected an element of spontaneity and bottomup enthusiasm which both fed on itself and drove radicalization, and was a rich source of epithets for the victims. One effect of referring to victims in such terms was that it made categories of victims infinitely ambiguous and fluid, and thereby facilitated the settling of personal grievances under the guise of political correctness. In many cases, students or workers sought to settle personal grievances against their teachers or superiors by accusing them along the lines of the sorts of epithets noted above. It is impossible to get a clear picture of the number of casualties of the GPCR. According to Frank Diko¨tter, 1.5 to two million were killed with countless other lives destroyed,¹⁵¹ but Harry Harding gives a much smaller number. After surveying the figures cited by various, mainly Chinese, sources, he declares that ‘[I]t might not be unreasonable to estimate that approximately half a million Chinese, out of an urban population of around 135 million in 1967, died as a direct result of the Cultural Revolution’.¹⁵² It is not completely clear what Harding’s figures mean: his chapter only covers the 1966–1969 period, and do the figures only relate to urban deaths? Most of the violence did occur in the cities but there was clearly some in the countryside, and there were many more deaths in the post-1969 period. A much higher total is given by Yang Jisheng, who says ‘The Cultural Revolution produced millions of unjust cases and unnatural deaths affecting more than one hundred million people to varying degrees’.¹⁵³ Clearly, Yang has a much more all-embracing conception of victimhood than that of most other scholars. A study of the impact of the Revolution in the countryside concludes that the death toll was between 750,000 and 1.5 million, with a similar number permanently injured and some 36 million suffering some form of political persecution.¹⁵⁴ Even if we accept the lower (Harding’s) figures, which do seem to be closer than those of Diko¨tter and Yang to those accepted by most scholars, half a million excess deaths (i.e. those above what would normally be expected) is a significant figure, warranting characterization of this period as one involving excessive violence. Harding also provides some finer-grained data.¹⁵⁵ According to information provided to the Gang of Four trial in 1980–1981, 2,600 people in literary and artistic circles, ¹⁵¹ Diko¨tter (2016), p. xvi. ¹⁵² Harding (2011), p. 242. ¹⁵³ Yang (2021), p. xxix. This figure includes millions of fabricated cases. Yang (2021), p. 310. ¹⁵⁴ See the discussion in Andrew G. Walder & Yang Su, ‘The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact’, The China Quarterly 173, 2003, pp. 74–99. ¹⁵⁵ Harding (2011), pp. 240–242.

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142 cadres and teachers working under the Ministry of Education, 53,000 scientists and technicians in research institutes, and 500 professors in units under the Ministry of Public Health were ‘falsely charged and persecuted’, with some dying as a result. Among party officials, some 70–80% at regional levels and 60–70% at the centre were purged; nine of 23 Politburo members, four of 13 Secretariat members, and 54 of 167 Central Committee members survived with their political positions intact. However, we should note that many of those who suffered during the GPCR were later rehabilitated and returned to their former positions, with the future leader of China Deng Xiaoping the best example.¹⁵⁶ Nevertheless, it is this casualty rate among officials that qualifies the GPCR as inverted terror. It may be argued that this catalogue of campaigns culminating in the Cultural Revolution are not all instances of the application of a policy of terror by the authorities, and it is true that in many instances the treatment accorded to victims was different from those in the classic cases of terror in the French Revolution and Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’. One difference is that, in contrast to the French experience and much more so than the Soviet, Chinese activity in this area was underpinned by a notion of rectification, of correcting people’s aberrant views, and re-educating them in the form acceptable to the political authorities. This emphasis, at least rhetorically, underpinned most of the campaigns here in a way that it did not in France. In the Soviet Union while there was often an emphasis on criticism and self-criticism as a way not just of uncovering malefactors but of changing values, this was largely restricted to the purges directed at the party; it had no real application in the more broadly-ranging cases of terror analysed here (collectivization, Great Terror). The educational focus means that physical violence was less obviously appropriate in many of the Chinese campaigns. Another important factor in judging whether the Chinese actions were cases of terror is argued by Teiwes who says that in the rectification campaigns there was not the uncertainty that characterized terror. He argues that ‘the basic approach in dealing with individuals has been selective and surgical rather than arbitrary. Rectification movements prior to the Cultural Revolution were generally under strict Party control with targets carefully chosen, models of deviant behavior widely propagated, and sanctions meted out according to the seriousness of offenses.’¹⁵⁷ He argues that cadres could judge whether they were in danger because of the way the campaigns focused on certain types of behaviour and that therefore the sense of ¹⁵⁶ Xi Jinping went to the countryside with his father when the latter was sent there, and was obviously able to overcome this setback to his career. ¹⁵⁷ Teiwes (1993), p. 26.

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uncertainty implicit in terror was absent. While this is certainly much more the case in China than it was in the Soviet Union, the descriptions of how the campaigns unrolled suggest that too much should not be made of this. Categories of victims and descriptions of behaviour often expanded in the course of a campaign, and not always in a predictable fashion, and in particular when part of the populace was mobilized into a campaign, the ability of party cadres to control the process was often more limited. Nevertheless, it is true that some of these campaigns do appear to have been better controlled than others and to have limited the range of terrorist actions. Of course when it comes to the Cultural Revolution this idea of restraints falls away, reflecting the destruction of the party apparatus, and its controlling mechanisms at that time. The sequence of campaigns of mass mobilization stretching from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution ties together the application of state terror at different times in a way that contrasts with the Russian and French experiences. The combination of mass involvement and struggle meetings merged physical and psychic coercion in a way that must have been terrifying to those subjected to it despite official rhetoric about the importance of education in the process. On most occasions party members were meant to undergo rectification directed by party cadres, although this practice broke down spectacularly at the time of the Cultural Revolution. But crucially throughout the entire period, despite mass involvement and at times local spontaneity, the terror process remained fuelled and generally directed by Mao and part of the political elite. They set its goals, parameters, and style, and so regardless of its basis in the masses rather than overwhelmingly in the state organs, the terror was state directed.

5 The Origins of Terror This chapter will analyse the sources of the three types of terror, revolutionary, transformational, and inverted, and thereby elucidate the relationship between such terror on the one hand and revolution on the other. The sources of revolutionary terror and transformational terror are relatively straight forward. The contingency explanation for terror, that it is a response to current circumstances, is most relevant with regard to revolutionary terror. The roots of revolutionary terror lie in the essential conflict at the heart of the revolutionary process, between people trying to seize political power and others trying to deny them. This conflict rarely ends immediately upon the successful seizure of power in the capital but may be continued in the form of insurgency or civil war, and with the unleashing of this violence, terror is frequently the outcome. The propensity for terror is strengthened by the way in which the new revolutionary elite feels itself not only to be under attack, but also vulnerable to those who oppose it. This vulnerability stems not just from the fact the revolutionaries and their supporters are almost inevitably a minority in the population, but that the nature of the revolutionaries’ perception of their opposition artificially enhances the presumed scale of the threat. Transformational terror is linked to what is at the heart of revolution, politico-socio-economic transformation. If there is no such transformation, there is no revolution, only a regime change or coup. Such transformation is usually achieved at least in part through violence. This is because during the course of such change, control over power and resources is re-ordered as previous privileged groups give way to new ones who formerly lacked these things. The seizure of power in itself involves the removal of the former power-wielders and their replacement by new people. This is the political aspect of revolution. But as noted in Chapter 1, there are also economic and social aspects of revolution, and in the so-called ‘great revolutions’, significant change occurs in these two dimensions also. Economically, revolution usually involves a reworking of property relations with ownership over the productive sectors of the economy transferred from older established groups to new owners, usually coming from among the formerly lower classes. Communist

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0005

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revolutions were even more radical, seeking to abolish private ownership altogether, but in non-communist revolutions property rights were re-allocated generally without questioning the principle of private ownership. The sort of class revolution that the alteration of property rights entailed drove transformation in the social sphere. Just as the former privileged groups lost economic power with the transfer of property rights, so they also lost social status and political power. It is this transformational essence that is therefore central to the notion of revolution. And it is this transformational essence, and the implications it has for the overturning of so much of the established order, that explains both the level and the bitterness of opposition revolution usually evokes. It is this combination of a quest for fundamental change articulated in terms of purist revolutionary aims and a desire to prevent such change from coming about that underpins the resort to exceptional means in the form of transformational terror. Inverted terror has been the most difficult to explain, especially in the Soviet case where it was not temporally proximate to the revolution; a similar lack of proximity applied to the Chinese case but, as I will argue below, observers have generally shared greater agreement in their explanations of the Cultural Revolution than they have the Great Terror. Nevertheless, despite the considerable time between revolutionary seizure of power and Terror, many observers, especially of a conservative disposition, saw the Soviet Great Terror as evidence for the inevitability of revolution succumbing to inverted terror, and therefore of revolution’s futility. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which paradoxically occurred about the same time after the Chinese revolution as the Great Terror did in relation to the Russian, was similarly interpreted by some to argue this point of view as was the French Revolution. But more relevant to explaining inverted terror was the role of a dominant leader.

France In France, revolutionary and transformational terror overlapped in a pattern similar to the Chinese revolution but different to that of Russia/the USSR. The destruction of the feudal structures in the countryside, the regicide and despatch of parts of the nobility, the destruction of the secular power of the Church and the assault upon its sacral powers were all cases of the use of revolutionary terror to eliminate opposition that also had transformational effects. And later these co-existed with battles against external opposition and internal rebellion, which in turn overlapped with the onset of inverted terror.

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The key to understanding the particular French pattern of terror whereby revolutionary and transformational terror coincided and overlapped with inverted terror is two-fold. First, the duration of the revolution. Only five years separated the symbolic beginning of the revolution (the fall of the Bastille) from when the terror was turned on the elite itself. In both the Soviet Union and China, a time period three times that elapsed before the inversion of the terror. Second, the nature of the French compared with the communist revolutions and the fundamentally different conception of what the respective revolutions were about. The key to communist revolutions was the fundamental transformation of society through the complete reworking of property relations. The creation of a socialist/communist society was perceived to be dependent upon the destruction of private property and its replacement by a form of collective ownership, an aim that required the dispossession of those who at the time of the revolution owned such, especially productive, property. Socio-economic transformation was therefore front and centre to the communist revolutionary enterprise. In France the central emphasis from the outset was on democratic political change, and although they lacked a clearly articulated ideology of the sort possessed by the Russian and Chinese communist revolutionaries, the French revolutionaries did have certain principles in mind which drove them, and which were expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (this is discussed more fully in the discussion of inverted terror below). The essence of these, reflected in the famous ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ epithet, was behind the assault on privilege that was such a large part of the French revolutionary impulse. While key segments of the revolutionary elite (especially the Jacobins) were committed to notions of equality that had implications for property ownership, the complete overturning of the property structure was not part of the general revolutionary project. Accordingly while there was general agreement with abolition of the sorts of ‘feudal’ privileges that underpinned the position of the king and the nobility, and therefore the elimination of the nobility as a politically or economically meaningful category (as well as the independent position of the priesthood), and ultimately there was agreement to do away with the monarchy, the sort of socio-economic transformation envisaged in the communist revolutions was not evident in the French project. They saw the creation of a new society through the transformation of ‘man’ into a virtuous being, and this was to come about principally through educational and cultural development rather than conscious social engineering of the essential structures of ancien

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regime society. This means that transformational terror was less important, and therefore less evident, than in the other revolutions. Nevertheless, in France, revolutionary transformation did occur in all three dimensions, political, social, and economic. The king and nobility lost the political dominance they had enjoyed under the ancien regime as power shifted to the Assembly, and ultimately degenerated into a military dictatorship. While the revolution did not bring about widespread land seizure by the peasants, the destruction of the legal infrastructure whereby they had traditionally been exploited ushered in a social revolution in the countryside and created the basis for the shift of the economy in a more market direction.¹ But while the power of the nobility was largely destroyed in this way, some of the old structures of privilege remained meaning that some from the nobility were able to continue to enjoy influence, prestige, and social éclat into the modern era. Both revolutionary and transformational terror were present, but the scale was considerably lower than in the Russian/Soviet and Chinese counterparts. An important consequence of the short duration of the French revolution is that the conditions that gave rise to revolutionary and transformational terror were still operating at the time the inversion of terror occurred. In the Soviet and Chinese cases where the period between the seizure of power and the inversion of terror was more than a decade and a half, there was ample time for new factors that might affect decisions about the use of terror to come into play. A period of half a decade clearly gives much less scope for new elements to arise. Accordingly, in contrast to the treatment of the Soviet and (in part) the Chinese cases, the French experience of revolutionary, transformational, and inverted terror will be discussed together. A variety of explanations of terror in the French revolution have been offered, but they generally do not distinguish between the types of terror identified in this book. They usually provide a general explanation that collapses all types of the terror into one. One scholar has charted the course of the Terror from March 1793 (and therefore not from the beginning of the revolution) and sought to explain it on the basis of its ebbs and flows. Donald Greer² gives the figures in Table 5.1 for the total number executed by month.

¹ See the discussion of rural revolution in Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 118–128. ² Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution. A Statistical Interpretation (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1966, originally published 1935), p. 165.

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Table 5.1 Executions by month Mar ‘93 22 Aug ‘93 22

Apr ‘93 210 Sep ‘93 72

May ‘93 58 Oct ‘93 179

Jun ‘93 99 Nov ‘93 491

Jul ‘93 36 Dec Jan Feb ‘93 ‘94 ‘94 3365 3517 792

Mar ‘94 589

Apr May ‘94 ‘94 1099 780

Jun Jul Aug ‘94 ‘94 ‘94 1157 1397 86

Greer offers an explanation for the temporal fluctuations of the Terror.³ The early peak in April 1793 occurred at the same time as the highly public defection of Girondin General Dumouriez who, after unsuccessfully trying to turn his armies against Paris, defected to the Austrians, action that heightened fears of treason within revolutionary ranks. But April was also the time when the gravity of the Vendée rebellion became most apparent. The importance of this is reflected in the fact that of the 210 executions, 175 occurred in the region of that rebellion. The relative lull in terrorist activity in the spring-summer is, according to Greer, less easy to understand. This was the most critical period of the revolution. The Austrians and Prussians were advancing slowly towards Paris, the English entered Toulon in August, there were setbacks for the government in the Vendée, and the Federalist revolt broke out, while in Paris there was widespread popular mobilization as the enragés pressed for further terrorist measures. However, following their victory over the Girondins, the Montagnards temporized, enabling Danton on the Committee of Public Safety to attempt to pull back from terror. His position was related to that of other elements in the Convention who, having seen the introduction of terror in the spring as expedient hesitated to make it permanent policy until negotiation with foreign opponents had failed. By the autumn, such failure was clear. The upward trajectory of terror and the formal institution of the Terror in autumn 1793 coincided with the resurgence of republican fortunes. The invading armies were driven back, and major victories achieved in the Vendée (at Cholon, 17 October) and Federalist (at Lyons, 9 October) revolts. For its proponents, this seemed to justify the Terror, leading to the legalization of the repressive regime on 4 December 1793 (the Law of 14 Frimaire). The crescendo of Terror in December and January mainly reflects the punishment of the Vendée and Federalist rebels. For Greer, ‘Again, it appeared that ³ Greer (1966), pp. 112–123. For a discussion of criticism of Greer’s statistical analysis, see Gilbert Shapiro & John Markoff, ‘The Incidence of the Terror: Some Lessons for Quantitative History’, Journal of Social History 9, 2, 1975, pp. 193–218.

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terrorism and military successes were concomitant.’⁴ While the level of terrorist activity dropped significantly in February and March, they remained relatively high, and comprised mainly the continued punishment of rebels. Levels rose again in April and May, and although domestic enemies seemed to have been blunted, preparations were being made to launch an offensive against the foreign forces. The consolidation of national support was therefore important, yet at this time popular forces were deserting the Montagnards. The promises made by the Revolutionary Government had disappointed both urban artisans and rural peasants, and had frightened middle class Jacobins. In Greer’s words, ‘The dictatorship could no longer rely upon the support of any class; henceforth terrorism was its only means of existing.’⁵ The rise in April 1794 was mostly due to increased repression in the Vendée. By the middle of 1794, military successes had seemingly eliminated the danger from both foreign invaders and domestic rebels. The renewed peak of violence in June and July 1794 was different to that in earlier months. In this later period, the Terror was more concentrated in Paris, and in terms of victims, those from the upper class were much more prominent than they had been earlier; 60% of those condemned in Paris during these months ‘belonged to the upper classes’.⁶ Furthermore, in June and July Robespierre, Louis Saint-Just, and some others were pressing for major property readjustments. However, we should be careful in seeing this as a drive to complete social revolution. In Greer’s words, ‘the social revolution contemplated by Saint-Just and Robespierre was to be effected at the expense of the opponents of the Republic, not the property owning class at large’.⁷ Instead he argues that this final surge was a result simply of momentum, that the instigators of the Terror had believed that the Republic’s survival had been ensured by it, and that when the crisis had passed, they could not appreciate that the danger had lessened. Greer’s overall conclusion is well summarized as follows: ‘Mob pressure was often decisive, at least during the formative period of the Terror…the program of the Terror was, in large part, forced upon the Convention by the agitators of Paris backed by the mobs who lived in fear of hunger.’⁸ Greer presents the Terror as a defensive reaction to the danger posed by the Paris streets, the regional rebels,

⁴ Greer (1966), p. 115. ⁵ Greer (1966), p. 117. On the lack of other support, also see Furet ‘Terror’, Furet & Ozouf (1989), p. 148. ⁶ For the figures Greer uses to support this argument, see Greer (1966), pp. 118–119. It is really only this peak that is consistent with Hippolyte Taine’s view that this was a class war. For a discussion of his view, see Greer (1966), pp. 6–7. ⁷ Greer (1966), p. 122. ⁸ Greer (1966), pp. 124–125.

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and foreign threats, but he acknowledges that, once enacted, the ‘terrorist laws were applied as the Government saw fit’.⁹ And this means that of central importance is, in his words, ‘the psychology of the minority that governed France’.¹⁰ This refers to the ideological beliefs that motivated the revolutionaries, and is discussed below. Greer’s explanation of the rise and fall of violence reflected in the figures cited above generally fits with the chronology of the revolution, especially in terms of the contribution made to the terror peaks by the punishment of rebels. However, the chronology does not really explain why the terror broke out (indeed, his explanation ignores the early years following the fall of the Bastille), and his explanation for the June–July 1794 peak is particularly weak. Other scholars have looked at this question of why the Terror, and in particular this June–July 1794 peak, occurred. Timothy Tackett¹¹ addressed this question. He argued that terror grew out of the revolutionary process itself. Two elements were said to be important. First, the fear generated by the revolution, which is discussed more fully below. Second, the need to deal with the enemies of the Revolution, in particular those who raised the banner of revolt in the Vendée and Federalist rebellions. He, like Greer, cites the significant share of victims constituted by those rebels captured, tried, and put to death. In this view, revolutionary terror arises out of the need to combat opposition. He argued that one factor in the June–July 1794 peak was the Law of 22 Prairial which streamlined trial procedures, but he acknowledged that ‘The reasons for ratcheting up the Terror in Paris, just as it was declining in the provinces and as the armies of the Republic were becoming so successful, is by no means obvious.’¹² He argues that some revolutionaries believed that the terror had been instrumental in earlier military successes, and that if they were to now moderate those measures, the danger that treachery would sabotage their military efforts would increase. But as he also points out, this was a period of heightened fear and uncertainty within the Convention. Unsuccessful assassination attempts on 20 May of Robespierre and another deputy and member of the Committee of Public Safety Jean-Marie Collot-d’Herboire, coming on top of the earlier assassinations of Le Peletier and Marat, heightened the sense of danger and personal vulnerability for many Convention deputies. In the prevailing atmosphere of ‘suspicion, mistrust, and fear of assassination’,¹³ ⁹ Greer (1966), p. 125. ¹⁰ Greer (1966), p. 126. ¹¹ Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2015), pp. 332–334. ¹² Tackett (2015), p. 332. ¹³ Tackett (2015), p. 333.

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deputies were all too ready to believe the charges brought against people and to accept the need for heightened terrorist measures. This also contributed to greater acceptance of the turning of terror against perceived enemies within the elite. But while this may explain the June–July peak, it does not explain why terrorist methods were resorted to in the first place. After all many of the laws that underpinned the terror dated from early in 1793; they were not rushed in in response to the immediate fear of assassination in mid-1794. Alphonse Aulard emphasized that the genesis of the Terror lay in the threat to the revolution. He believed that the Terror was, in Greer’s summary, ‘a national reflex, comprehensible only when related to the foreign war and the counter-revolution. Treason, desertion, and defeat on the frontiers in the spring of 1793, synchronizing with sedition and civil war within the country, brought France to the brink of catastrophe’.¹⁴ The chronological conjunction is clear, but the association between danger to the Revolution and peaks of terror activity is very weak after spring 1793; and indeed, at that time, actual terror tactics as opposed to the introduction of legislation, was nowhere near as high as it was to become later in the year. The view that the Terror was essentially defensive is shared by Isser Woloch.¹⁵ He argues that the Terror was ‘a mind-set and series of tactics’ that operated at three levels: 1) To suppress the enemies of the Revolution, as in the Vendée and Federalist revolts, which involved draconian measures that in some cases ‘produced massacres and horrific atrocities’. 2) To intimidate citizens into complying with the regime’s laws, and accepting the authority and institutions of the new Republic. This led to the simultaneous expansion and contraction of democratic space. Expansion was reflected in, for example, ‘egalitarian initiatives in public welfare, public education, and military organization’, contraction in ‘the suspension of elections, curtailment of basic civil liberties, and the wholesale recourse to preventive detention and summary justice.’ 3) To create solid unity within the revolutionary elite by purging it of dissident and oppositional elements.

¹⁴ Greer (1966), p.7. ¹⁵ Isser Woloch, ‘Foreward to the Princeton Classic Edition’, R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled. The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, originally published 1941), p. xii.

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This is broadly consistent with the categorization of types of terror offered in this book—revolutionary terror at the time of the consolidation of the revolution, transformational terror aimed at societal transformation, and inverted terror designed to obtain elite unity. The first and third are essentially the same, while in the second Woloch’s conception of societal transformation is less extensive than in the communist cases, but does involve the sort of mental transformation the communists saw as coming from the social change they engineered. In seeking to understand why terror came about and in particular why terror became inverted, we need to understand the sense of isolation and vulnerability of the elite. One source of this isolation was obvious: there were significant elements within French society that were opposed to the overthrow of the ancien regime and the revolutionary project. Monarchists, much of the nobility, sections of the army, the Church, and the Vendée and Federalist rebels were obvious forces that opposed the revolution. There were also the foreign opponents, principally the major European powers whose military came to be stationed along the French border and who, from 1792, were in armed conflict with revolutionary forces. But in addition on the domestic scene, the revolutionary elite had to contend with the unrolling of violence committed in particular by the Paris sans culottes, something which was not only outside their control but was perceived as threatening to their positions and, potentially, their lives. The politics of the streets in Paris and how that interacted with the revolutionary elite in the Convention was central to all three types of terror; after all, terror was made official policy at the demand of the masses. The Paris populace had historically been restive over concerns about a range of issues and had become even more so in recent years because of fears about food supply as a result of poor harvests in 1788 and 1789. Demonstrations, riots, and strikes were common fare in ancien regime politics. During the Revolution these took on a more organized form in the sense that the organs of the Paris Commune and particularly the sections were taken over by radical elements.¹⁶ The latter provided logistical and organizational guidance for the Paris populace, and their effect was over time to push the Revolution in a radical direction.¹⁷ It was

¹⁶ Although some of the deputies actually attributed popular mobilization to provocation by aristocrats who sought to derail the Revolution. David Andress, The Terror. The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 44–45. ¹⁷ Much of the mobilization was designed to, in Rudé’s words, ‘reclaim traditional rights and to uphold standards which they believed to be imperilled by the innovations of ministers, capitalists, speculators, agricultural “improvers” or city authorities’ rather than ‘to renovate society or to remodel

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the Paris ‘crowd’¹⁸ that protested in mid-1789 heading off a potential attack on the National Assembly, and leading to the fall of the Bastille and the wrenching of political momentum out of the king-Estates General relationship and into the streets, forced the king to return to Paris from Versailles in October 1789, prevented him and his family from leaving for Saint Cloud allegedly to receive mass from a refractory priest in April 1791, pressed for a republic leading to the ‘Champ de Mars massacre’ in July 1791, invaded the Tuileries Palace and humiliated the king in June 1792 and in August a further attack on the Tuileries and a demonstration forced the Legislative Assembly to remove the king, conducted the ‘September massacres’ of the prison population in 1792, in April 1793 called for the expulsion of a number of Girondins from the Convention, and in September 1793 pressured the deputies to declare terror the order of the day. In addition the crowd was a continual presence around the Convention, pressuring the deputies of that body (and its predecessor) to adopt a more radical stance than they otherwise might have done. Always vulnerable to rumours, to thinking the worst of those above them in the social hierarchy, and to seeking maximalist solutions to their perceived problems, through the above measures the crowd propelled the revolution in a more radical direction than sections of the revolutionary elite in the successive national assemblies were willing to go. Much of the anarchic violence of the streets was not generally approved of by the revolutionary elite, although the position of the Jacobins on these individual cases is more ambiguous.¹⁹ The violence against refractory priests, the prison massacre of September 1792 (although it was with the connivance of the Commune’s Surveillance Committee), riots and demonstrations over a range of issues but especially food supply (which sometimes included the killing of officials), invasions of the palace, and assassinations of prominent figures (including Le Peletier and Marat) all involved violence from the streets, sometimes with the approval of local, municipal, or national authorities. Not all aspects of this popular violence can be termed terror, but the deaths they involved and the high levels of uncertainty they generated mean that such anarchic violence did have terrorist overtones. This is illustrated in the different types of violence identified at this time. In the September massacres, victims were taken from their cells, interrogated by a hastily formed popular tribunal convened in the prison, and those judged to be guilty pushed through it after a new pattern’; he saw popular activism as a ‘defensive reaction to events’. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1959), p. 225. ¹⁸ To use the term made famous in the classic work Rudé (1959). ¹⁹ This is the subject of Rudé (1959).

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a doorway to another room where they were beaten to death. Their bodies were then taken to the outskirts of the city and buried. At other times during riots, demonstrations, and the so-called ‘journées révolutionnaires’, someone would be grabbed by the crowd, hung on the nearest lamppost, decapitated, and eviscerated, and the corpse, head, and organs paraded around the city and ultimately put on permanent display in a public place.²⁰ In the latter case, public mutilation and display, the spectacle of violence with its obvious salutary warning, was a key part of the performance and clearly constituted terrorist action designed to deter; in the former, the spectacle was absent, although the effect of rumour was no less intimidating. As well as these dramatic mass interventions into national politics, there was also a general sense of menace emanating from the streets. The measures above allied to the more usual periodic riots, protests, and demonstrations emphasized the potential power of the Paris crowd, but what made it real for the deputies was their physical proximity. Members of the public filled the seats allotted to observers at the various national assemblies and often congregated in great numbers around the entrance and exit points of the buildings in which those assemblies met. Deputies had to run the gauntlet of an often-irate crowd just to get to meetings or leave them. The sense of menace was substantial for those whose views were not in accord with the streets, and the deputies felt this. The concern they felt is reflected in the range of measures introduced to try to dampen down popular activism including: a martial law decree (21 October 1789), workers’ associations and strikes were prohibited (14 June 1791 Loi le Chapelier), laws on riot and sedition (18 July 1791), municipal police (19–22 July 1791), and seditious meetings (26 July 1791), a law forbidding petitions and delegations (30 September 1791; never enforced), all travellers were to carry a passport (1 February 1792), tightening of controls on travellers and strangers (20 May 1792), municipalities were given the right to arrest suspected opponents (11 August 1792), and permission for house-to-house searches for suspects and weapons (28 August 1792). While it is not clear that these laws were effective in quelling the danger the deputies saw to lie in the streets, they are clear witness to the deputies’ fear of the influence that the crowd could wage. It was under direct pressure from the streets that the deputies agreed to make terror ‘the order of the day’ on 5 September 1793. The questions are: why did the crowd call for terror at that time, and why did the deputies agree?

²⁰ Brian Singer, ‘Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion’, Ferenc Feher (ed), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 150–173, esp. pp. 159–162.

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The tipping point for the crowd seems to have been the assassination of Marat on 13 July 1793. It was on that evening that the Parisian crowd began calling for terror²¹ in order to root out those counter-revolutionary elements who had conducted this atrocity, a demand which they pressed upon the revolutionary elite culminating in the 5 September declaration. The Parisian crowd had always been sensitive to the danger posed by counter-revolution because of the direct and immediate effect such activity was believed to have upon them. Perennially concerned about the supply of food to the capital, the crowd was vulnerable to any rumours and conspiracy theories that might purport to explain deficiencies in supply. Rumours of counter-revolutionary conspiracies dominated the public sphere for much of the duration of the Revolution,²² and while some of these may have had some material substance (for example, the existence in the court of a group of people who favoured Austrian intervention to quell the revolution as the basis of a rumoured ‘Austrian committee’ at court in 1791–1792), many were pure fabrications. But what was important was that in the often-feverish atmosphere of the streets, they gained a level of credibility that enabled popular belief and action on the basis of that belief. The crowd believed that not only were they suffering from an unreliable supply of food owing to disruptions caused by foreign wars, the Vendée uprising and the Federalist revolt, but also because of the machinations of shadowy groups seeking to blunt the activities of the sans-culottes; for example, the September 1792 massacre was a response to the rumour that prisoners were to be released from the jails and this would enable them to run amok in Paris. Particularly worrying for members of the revolutionary elite, the gaze of the crowd was directed at what it saw to be hidden enemies within that elite. The sacking of the printing presses of Girondin newspapers on 9–10 March 1793, the April 1793 mobilization against the Girondins for their part in the attempted impeachment of Marat, and the demonstrations leading into the arrest of 22 Girondin deputies on 2 June 1793 all reflect the popular distrust of the Girondins, a sentiment that was reciprocated. The outbreak of the Federalist revolt around the country, fuelled in part by the treatment of the Girondins in Paris, strengthened the popular perception of the Girondins as being at the heart of opposition to the Revolution and as still needing to be eliminated. The popular call for a purge of the government became insistent. The long-held belief that secret ²¹ Jacques Guilhaumou, ‘Fragments of a Discourse on Denunciation’, Keith Michael Baker (ed), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 4. The Terror (Kidlington: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1994), 146. ²² On conspiracy theories and rumours, see Tackett (2000), pp. 691–713 and Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser & Marisa Linton, Conspiracy in the French Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

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machinations were still occurring during the fourth year of the revolution and that existing methods of dealing with this had proved to be unsuccessful, is likely to have driven the search for more radical means of eliminating counterrevolution, and terror was an obvious end point for this. Such a conclusion was encouraged by the so-called ‘enragés’, a loosely-organized radical leftist group of activists who pressed for radical measures in 1792–1793. Members of this group, including Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, were active in the Commune and among the Paris crowd and, along with the journalist and Commune member Jacques-René Hébert, helped to shape the crowd’s perception of what needed to be done. Thus, for the crowd the Terror was a response to the fear of inchoate enemies, including within the elite, that other methods had failed to combat. What of the revolutionary elite? There is no clear evidence that the revolutionary elite had the intention of implementing a policy of terror from early in the Revolution’s course, despite various comments affirming the value of terror. For example, in October 1789 the Jacobin deputy Gilbert Romme foreshadowed the possible need for terror in the future,²³ and in 1791 Marat had declared: ‘Eleven months ago, five hundred heads would have sufficed; today, fifty thousand would be necessary; perhaps five hundred thousand will fall before the end of the year.’²⁴ And while Danton said that the state may have to implement terror in order to enable the populace to escape this responsibility,²⁵ his comments were more rhetorical demagoguery than reflective of a real plan for the introduction of terror. These statements notwithstanding, the systematic application of terror was not something planned well in advance. One factor in the acceptance of Terror by Convention deputies was clearly the pressure from the streets. If they wanted to remain both alive and relevant to the continuing course of the Revolution, many deputies realized that they had to try to at least stay abreast of the surging passions of the streets. Some who sought to oppose this were soon overrun, and although those like many of the Jacobins who supported revolution from below, and therefore popular activism, may have found themselves pushed in a more radical direction faster than they had anticipated, they felt their best chance of continuing to ²³ Tackett (2015), p. 68. ²⁴ Cited in Bronislaw Baczko, ‘The Terror Before the Terror? Conditions of Possibility, Logic of Realization’, Baker (1994), p. 24. ²⁵ Cited in Michel Biard & Marisa Linton, Terror. The French Revolution and Its Demons (Cambridge: Polity, 2021), p. 91. In Lucas’ terms, this ‘transferred revolutionary violence away from the real people and onto the revolutionary state presented as the reification of the People’. Colin Lucas, ‘Revolutionary Violence, the People and the Terror’, Baker (1994), p. 69.

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affect the course of revolutionary developments was to remain responsive to the mood in the streets. The introduction of the Terror has been seen by some as an attempt to head off or reduce the terror of the sans-culottes, who were themselves motivated by fear,²⁶ principally of the deteriorating economic conditions. In addition, the acceptability of terror may have been enhanced by this continual unrolling of mass violence because this may have made terror appear more normal and less exceptional. But this argument is, by itself, insufficient because it fails to acknowledge that there were aspects of the lives of the revolutionary elite which may independently have directed them towards terror as a modus operandi. A central theme running through the Revolution was one of uncertainty and fear.²⁷ There is a sense in which this is intrinsic to revolution. In a country that experiences revolution, not all of the population, and perhaps not even a majority, will be in favour. There will inevitably be a significant section of the population that is either politically indifferent to the revolution or actually opposed to it. Such opposition came to be openly expressed in the Vendée and Federalist rebellions, and in the support given to foreign enemies by many members of the nobility and military. But what is often more worrying for the revolutionaries is that opposition that does not openly express itself. Fear of treachery, treason, sabotage, conspiracy, and plots, all of which assume hidden enemies, is a common sentiment within revolutionary circles. The impossibility of knowing how many of these there were or who they were fuelled the rampant fears of conspiracy that rattled around revolutionary France. The defection of leading generals was a particular stimulus to this; no one could be sure who was loyal and who was not. In the face of the perception of the ubiquity of hidden enemies, a view which can only have heightened the sense of elite isolation and vulnerability, the application of revolutionary terror would have seemed rational. Not only would it result in the elimination of some enemies, but its demonstrative effect could deter further opposition, a particularly useful result when you did not know the identity of those opponents. The instrumental use of these to explain setbacks or failings is an easy response of the rulers to such things, but this does not mean that the fears are not genuine. This is especially the case given the external opposition, and the fear present in revolutionary regimes, including France, that these internal enemies and external foes may come together.

²⁶ This view is attributed to Sophie Wahnich and discussed in Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror. Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 19. ²⁷ This is a major theme in Tackett (2015), Andress (2005), Linton (2013), and Campbell et al (2007).

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The fear of counter-revolution was present from the outset in France. It was symbolized initially by the person of the king. His control over his immediate bodyguard and the presumed loyalty to him by sections of the army, his support from within the royal court and among the nobility, and the support that was believed would flow to him from the other ruling houses of Europe— especially that of Austria to which, through his wife Marie Antoinette, he was linked by marriage—seemed to give him significant potential with which to resist the Revolution. Although this potential proved to be more apparent than real, the king’s actions, and in particular his flight to join the antirevolution forces on the border and the letter he left behind showing he had only been pretending to go along with the revolutionaries, symbolized the danger that existed within France posed by those who hid their true feelings under protestations of loyalty to the new regime. The wave of emigration from France by nobles, especially in the early years, was seen not only to strengthen foreign-based opposition but to illustrate the potential danger that existed from those who remained in the country. The departure of thousands of army officers, including the high profile defections to the Austrians of Lafayette in August 1792 and Dumouriez in April 1793, and the betrayal of Toulon to the British by the local authorities in August 1793²⁸ emphasized the danger both by seemingly strengthening the hostile forces outside and raising questions about the commitment of those who remained.²⁹ Similarly the refractory priests and the hostility of the Pope highlighted the potential danger posed by the established Church and, by extension, those who believed in it. The Vendée rebellion, with its clear clerical themes, brought home to the revolutionaries the potential danger religion could pose in a country where most people were Catholics and owed some loyalty to the Church. As Tackett argues, ‘by the winter of 1791–1792, even before France had gone to war, the pervasive atmosphere of fear and suspicion had produced a veritable obsession with plots among many Revolutionaries, the assumption that a “grand conspiracy” of internal and external opponents was responsible for virtually all of the troubles encountered by the Revolution’.³⁰ The revolution opened in an atmosphere of fear of hunger as a result of recent poor harvests, something that fed into the ‘Great Fear’ of 1789 and the adoption

²⁸ Andress (2005), pp. 204–205. ²⁹ On the arrest of the first non-noble officer, General Houchard, in September 1793, on false charges of betraying his own army, see Andress (2005), pp. 216–217. ³⁰ Tackett (2015), p. 347. For fluctuations in the level of plot perception, see Tackett (2000), pp. 702–703.

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of a new surveillance committee and a High Court to deal with conspirators in October–November 1789. According to David Andress, Paris was always a ‘nervous’ city.³¹ The political uncertainty created concerns both about the future and, more immediately for many, the present. Difficulties from food shortages to military defeats fed into a vicious circle linking these to conspiracy and opposition. Intensified suspicion and mistrust developed in the first half of 1791 as a result of the incipient religious schism, the mounting wave of noble emigration, and the king’s attempt to move away from the constitutional monarchy that he had earlier seemed to accept symbolized by his flight to Varennes in June 1791.³² At the same time, the continued attempt by the rightist press to support positions seen by the revolutionaries as ‘counterrevolutionary’ exacerbated the sense of threat, feeding into what Tackett has described as a ‘paranoid’ style of politics, characterized by an obsessional fear of ‘grand conspiracy’.³³ This was fuelled by fear of war from late 1791. Once war broke out, the fear was heightened by early military setbacks, and the propensity to attribute them to conspiracy and treason; for example, the rumours of an ‘Austrian committee’ around the queen.³⁴ Following the overthrow of the king and the abolition of the monarchy in September 1792, the discovery of documents in the palace confirmed the king’s involvement in, and therefore the existence of, conspiracy against the Revolution. Fears about the approach of the Prussians reinforced this and stimulated the September prison massacres.³⁵ French battlefield victory at Valmy in September 1792, paradoxically rather than laying to rest fears of potential military treason, actually fuelled the conviction, especially among the war-party (the Girondins), that earlier defeats had been the result of treason and sabotage, and this would be the cause of any future setbacks.³⁶ The removal of the king effectively now turned the focus of fear about domestic threats onto the ‘patriots’, with the revelation that the prominent liberal of 1789 Honoré-Gabriel Mirabeau had been conspiring with the king before his (Mirabeau’s) death,³⁷ strengthening such concerns. The view that conspiracy was everywhere rested on an assumption about people’s hidden identities, that people were hiding their real feelings and ³¹ Andress (2005), pp. 39–41. ³² Tackett (2015), pp. 95–110; Andress (2005), p. 44. ³³ Tackett (2015), p. 136. ³⁴ For Brissot and the Girondins on this in mid-1792, see Tackett (2015), p. 174. This fear may have been strengthened by the Legislative Assembly’s refusal to take action against Lafayette following his June 1792 threat of military action against the Jacobins. On the ‘Austrian committee’, see Andress (2005), p. 73. ³⁵ Andress (2005), pp. 96–98. ³⁶ Tackett (2015), p. 223. On the Girondins and the fear of plots, see Linton (2013), pp. 107–110. ³⁷ Tackett (2015), pp. 234 & 243.

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commitments, and thereby undermining the quest for authenticity,³⁸ for real attachment to revolutionary values that was at the heart of the radicals’ revolutionary project. This view was firmly held by Robespierre, and in Andress’ words his belief in ‘the need to combat counter-revolution would gradually overcome his scruples against violence’.³⁹ Furthermore, authenticity was said to be best reflected in willingness to die for the Revolution, a position that was taken as a moral justification for the killing of opposition.⁴⁰ The military setbacks in March–April 1793 and similar setbacks in the Vendée in mid-1793 fuelled worries about domestic treason and sabotage, and led into the adoption of terror as ‘the order of the day’. The assassination of deputies, Lepeletier and Marat respectively in January and July 1793 emphasized the personal vulnerability of deputies with their personal fears being instrumental in the attitude they took: better to use terror against suspected enemies than have them use it against you. As the Terror unrolled in September 1793, the scope of the Committee of Public Safety was enlarged to include executive and governmental authority, reflecting the fear that there were hidden enemies in the Convention.⁴¹ Fear of conspiracy was endemic to the Revolution, building on a history of such fears in pre-revolutionary France (and one might add, Europe as a whole), fuelled by the events of the revolution, and given form in part by the Manichean ideological heritage of the revolutionaries.⁴² Real threats fuelled conspiratorial paranoia and, as the perception of danger increased, so did repression.⁴³ The effect of the resultant culture of fear and suspicion was exacerbated by factionalization among the ruling group⁴⁴ and the absence of clear rules of the game or institutional procedures. The revolutionary government always had a precarious stability. As the leadership divided into squabbling groups and former allies became opponents, and as problems mounted, real challenges became greater and the fear of conspiracy increased, the propensity to see opposition and treachery where none existed expanded. A significant ³⁸ For authenticity, see Linton (2013), p. 102. ³⁹ Andress (2005), pp. 56–57. ⁴⁰ Biard & Linton (2021), p. 54. ⁴¹ It was this fear that prompted the creation of the Revolutionary Government. Andress (2005), pp. 222–224. ⁴² This conclusion thus differs from Furet’s explanation in terms of Rousseauist ideology, and that of Campbell et al who generally downplay the role of ideology. For a discussion of this question, see Campbell et al, Introduction. ⁴³ Biard & Linton (2021), p. 70. ⁴⁴ On this see Andress (2005), pp. 251–276; Linton (2013), pp. 138–161. On the fear of enemies leading to an attempt to tighten discipline in the Jacobins, see Linton (2013), p. 131. According to Linton, ‘Fear of conspiracy undermined the Jacobins from within’. Linton (2013), p. 200; also pp. 211–225.

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element in the French situation that was absent in both the USSR and China is that at the time of the introduction of the Terror there were open divisions in the revolutionary elite. Such divisions occurred over policy (especially the war) and personality, were embedded institutionally in the existence of the various clubs (although there were also divisions within clubs), and were manifested politically on the floor of the Assembly and Convention. Given the importance attached to ‘virtue’ (see below), the related depersonalization of enemies (given an intellectual foundation by the notion of enemies as ‘outside the law’, and therefore not deserving of its protection), and the conceptual merging of ‘the Revolution’ and ‘the nation’ with the resulting elimination of the line between opposition and treason, the direction of Terror against opponents even within the revolutionary elite may have seemed justified. Under such circumstances it was easy for factions to assume the moral high ground and judge questions in absolutes; with the Revolution in danger, there could be no half measures, including compromising with those of different views. Simple differences were transformed into matters of principle: patriotism vs counter-revolution, honesty vs criminality or virtue vs treason, while selfserving behaviour, corruption, and cronyism began to be seen as evidence of conspiracy and therefore treason.⁴⁵ Inflammatory rhetoric became the norm.⁴⁶ The practice of attributing the worst of motives to one’s opponents grew, along with the dehumanization of those opponents (see below). The fear of conspiracy and threat undermined the unity of the Revolution, including the Jacobins. The elimination of deputies’ inviolability was the practical underpinning of this view, while the arrest and killing of Robespierre was its apogee. The lack of stability at the top, and especially following the fall of the Girondins in June 1793, the fact that losers in political struggles could be put to death, increased the intensity of political conflict, and fed into the generalized sense of fear and mistrust. Given this culture, terror may to many have seemed a natural recourse. Of the three revolutionary cases focused upon here, this is the only one where real factional opposition within the elite was dealt with by terrorist means. The division among the rulers and the propensity to attribute the worst of motives to opponents was in part a function of the nature of the revolutionary elite and how it was formed. Unlike in the USSR and China, this ⁴⁵ On Robespierre’s worries about conspiracy being strengthened by the Girondin ministry, see Linton (2013), pp. 122–123. On the expansion of the idea of conspiracy, see Linton (2013), p. 138. On Robespierre being sensitive to conspiracy from the earliest days of and throughout the revolution, see Peter McPhee, Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). On the Jacobins being most closely linked with a paranoid style of politics, see Tackett (2000), pp. 704–706. ⁴⁶ On the effect of war on rhetoric, see Linton (2013), p. 138.

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elite was not the product of a party that had struggled for some time to gain power, and by so doing had forged a basic unity that shaped subsequent political development. It was essentially comprised of local civilian notables, many of them lawyers, who had gained election to the successive assemblies. While they were able to generate what were sometimes fluid political identities through club membership and physical placement in the Convention chamber—Montagnards, Plain/Swamp, and Girondins⁴⁷—these sources of identity were unstable and did not involve strong programmatic unity. As a result the balance of power within the Convention was fluid and personal power bases uncertain. This leading elite remained fractious, pressured from outside by the sans-culottes, and the continuing danger of foreign military victory, and from inside by personal ambition and the illusory nature of policy consensus. This is exemplified by the way in which the six months either side of the Terror becoming ‘the order of the day’ witnessed the purging of groups that had originally been part of the Jacobin Club or closely allied to it: the Girondins in 1793, and the Hébertists and Indulgents in 1794. This purge of erstwhile ‘patriots’⁴⁸ not only caused general confusion, but for the elite it seemed to emphasize political uncertainty and their own vulnerability. This was exacerbated by Robespierre’s threats to anonymous members of the Convention (including Montagnards) in mid-1794 and by rhetoric about the need to punish those who had committed excesses in putting down opposition.⁴⁹ The fear of betrayal drove division within the elite and the belief that so much was at stake seemed to justify exceptional measures in the form of the Terror. While the unity created by the removal of the Girondins was instrumental in the establishment of the temporary revolutionary dictatorship, that unity was always fragile. Ideas are also important, notwithstanding the view of some that ideology played little role,⁵⁰ because many of the revolutionary elite saw themselves as children of the Enlightenment and motivated by reason rather than emotion. For them, the Revolution involved commitment to a set of principles involving the regeneration of society along more just and rational lines. A Republic of Virtue and Reason was to replace the ancien regime resting on obscurantist religion and unjust feudal obligations. Revolution involves fundamental change directed at building some sort of ideal society that is seen to be very ⁴⁷ Although the Girondins sat on the right side of the chamber, their name came from the Gironde region, from where some of their most prominent members originated. ⁴⁸ This was justified in part in terms of the myth of the foreign plot. On this process see Palmer (2017), pp. 256–305. ⁴⁹ McPhee (2012), pp. 211–214. ⁵⁰ For one argument downplaying it, see Mayer (2000).

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much at odds with pre-revolutionary society. In the French case, this was a future society encapsulated in the principles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. According to one scholar,⁵¹ what was important was the way in which much of the conceptual framework within which the French revolutionaries worked was based on theories of natural right. The result was a conception of the Revolution and what it stood for as something that was in accord with such a right, and that therefore anyone who opposed it was not just opposed to the highest notion of rights that existed but advocated something that was unnatural. Under this logic, opponents could be dealt with in whatever way was desired; they did not need to be afforded the protection of being dealt with in accord with the law because they were behaving unnaturally. This was the basis of the law of March 1793 outlawing rebels, a conception that according to Dan Edelstein stemmed from the legal thinking that underpinned the treatment of the king; he too was outside the law and could thus be treated in whatever way was thought appropriate. It is easy to see how such an approach could validate the use of terror and could turn what was initially seen as an extraordinary measure into a normal one. It was also instrumental in the dehumanization of opposition, reflected in the frequent references to opponents as such things as monsters, viruses, vampires, ferocious beasts, or brutes in both the extremist press and deputies’ speeches.⁵² And of course the dehumanization of opposition facilitates terror by removing moral scruples about the application of such methods to another human being. Another aspect of this was the view that the Revolution was about the rebirth of ‘man’ and the society in which ‘he’ lived.⁵³ They were to be reborn into a Republic of freedom and equality, but this required (at least in its Robespierrean form) the remaking of humans to turn them into people of ‘virtue’, the creation of a new revolutionary subject. Natural virtue was associated with the public good, not the individual good of private faction, in the classic republicanism to which most of the revolutionaries looked.⁵⁴ This conception turned the Revolution into a clash between ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’.⁵⁵ The Terror was for Robespierre a form of justice and was morally right if wielded by a man of ⁵¹ Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right. Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For an argument about Saint-Just following a conception of classical natural right, see Miguel Abensour, ‘Saint-Just and the Problem of Heroism in the French Revolution’, Feher (1990), pp. 133–149. ⁵² Tackett (2015), pp. 104, 139–141 & 231. ⁵³ This is discussed briefly in François Furet ‘Terror’, François Furet & Mona Ozouf (eds), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 1989), pp. 148–149. ⁵⁴ Linton (2013), pp. 32–41. ⁵⁵ On the clash, see Andress (2005), pp. 126–127.

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authentic virtue,⁵⁶ while the Revolution involved the transformation of the nation into a state of purity and virtue;⁵⁷ Robespierre ‘reified “the people” into the purest expression of the general good.’⁵⁸ For Robespierre terror was the means whereby revolutionary government was founded, and this was a crucial weapon through which that government was to defend itself; ‘to enemies of the people, [revolutionary government] owes nothing but death’.⁵⁹ The Terror was to be the furnace through which the Revolution had to pass to bring this about. Through politics anything was possible, and Terror was the means for bringing about the desired change. For Robespierre, terror was the extension of virtue. In his clearest statement of this Robespierre said: If the mainspring of popular [ie democratic] government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is virtue and terror both: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the homeland’s most pressing needs.⁶⁰

In the Manichean battle between tyranny and liberty, terror had to be used to ‘intimidate’ the enemies of liberty. So for Robespierre, given that virtue was natural, because terror emanates from virtue it too must be natural, and therefore morally right. So terror was both an instrument to be wielded and a furnace through which society had to pass to reach that state of virtue that was the ultimate aim of the Revolution. However, unlike Lenin, Robespierre’s view of terror was not embedded in a systematic ideology. At best, his thought constitutes a series of views or principles that had not been worked up into an extensive and coherent body of thought. The notion of the sovereign will of the people as expressed in the ‘Revolutionary Government’ was shaped in part by the revolutionaries’ knowledge of Rousseau and his conception of the general will. This manifested itself in ⁵⁶ Linton (2013), p. 190. For Robespierre’s speech of 17 Pluviôse Year II (5 February 1794) to the Convention see Bienvenu (1968), pp. 32–49, esp. pp. 36–38 on terror as the emanation of virtue. Also Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution. Violence and Nature in French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 72. ⁵⁷ Robespierre’s speech of 18 Floreal Year II/7 May 1794, cited in Miller (2011), p. 115. ⁵⁸ McPhee (2012), p. 145. ⁵⁹ Maximilien Robespierre, ‘On the Principles of Revolutionary Government’, 25 December 1793/5 Nivôse Year II, Slavoj Žizˇek, Robespierre, Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2017), p. 99. ⁶⁰ Maximilien Robespierre, ‘On the Principles of Political Morality that Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic’, 5 February 1794/18 Pluviôse Year II, Žizˇek (2017), p. 115.

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the conviction that there was a unitary general will that rendered opposition and disagreement intrinsically counter-revolutionary and as undermining the public good.⁶¹ Political pluralism and the notion of a loyal opposition had no place in this conception, while the use of terror was justified as a means of defending that will, and all it stood for. The sovereign people could use revolutionary violence to achieve and preserve liberty against tyranny. And because the sovereignty of the people was seen to be rooted in nature and natural law, the violence to protect it was also deemed to be natural and thereby right, and opposition to it unacceptable under any circumstances.⁶² The Jacobins’ reliance on the established notion of natural right meant that any sort of retribution could be wreaked on opponents because such opposition was a crime against nature. This naturalizing of revolutionary violence in the form of the Terror made it appear a necessary step in the process of regeneration and progress.⁶³ For Edelstein rather than being a significant change the Terror constituted a coming together of the different strands of legal theory the Jacobins had advocated since the king’s trial and was an attempt ‘to establish a central, lasting institution for the republic-to-come’.⁶⁴ For Robespierre, the Republic of Virtue was a political form in which power was exercised at all levels by virtuous men.⁶⁵ He believed popular sovereignty as expressed through the general will was always directed at the common good (as in Rousseau), and those men of virtue who could see that common good were justified in imposing that will on those who could not see it. The people’s sovereignty thereby became a synonym for the rule of the virtuous. And in Robespierre’s eyes, the virtuous were his associates, the false and corrupt the opposition faction. The rightness of rule by the virtuous meant that there was a need for continuing purges to eliminate the corrupt, leading directly to the Law of 22 Prairial. A society run by virtuous men would bring about the sorts of social arrangements idealized by the revolutionaries. However, this aim would be sabotaged if power were in the hands of non-virtuous men, meaning that those who were not deemed to be virtuous should be purged. Such a purge

⁶¹ For an influential discussion of this argument, see J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy London: Mercury Books, 1961; originally published 1952). ⁶² According to Miller, ‘The idea that violence and disruption were sometimes necessary and constructive forces in the natural world was translated into an exoneration of political violence. By making violence a necessary and natural part of the Revolution, rhetorical conflations between natural and political processes provided an absolution, and a providential purpose, for revolutionary activity, and allowed for a justification, and sometimes a sacralization, of bloodshed.’ Miller (2011), p. 4. ⁶³ Miller (2011), p. 169. ⁶⁴ Edelstein (2009), esp. pp. 3–19, 26, 142–143, 250 & 255. The quotation is from p. 250. ⁶⁵ On this, see in particular Linton (2013). On Robespierre’s political thought, see Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), chs. 8 & 9.

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may have been aborted by the coup against Robespierre in July 1794. At the same time, in order to remain ‘men of virtue’ they had to prove their authenticity by acting virtuously, including destroying both friends and enemies and, if necessary, sacrificing their own lives.⁶⁶ It was commitment to this sort of revolutionary ideal that underpinned the growing intolerance towards those whose opinions differed. It is therefore important to recognize that ideology did not cause the Terror, but it did contribute to its emergence in three ways. First, it framed revolutionary developments in a Manichean way. The principal focus of the ideological outlook, be it justice, virtue, or nature, automatically assumed the existence of its opposite—injustice, corruption, unnatural—and both valorized the former and condemned the latter. Revolutionary unanimity and purity were contrasted with counter-revolution; there could be no middle ground between legitimate and illegitimate in this sort of Manichean framework. And with the association of the Revolution with France the country, opposition was doubly condemned: not only was it ideologically unacceptable, but it was also treason. Conceptually the ideology thus created both an opposition and a rationale for its elimination. In a situation where fear of opposition and conspiracy was rampant, such a framework was particularly potent. Second, the terms in which the ideology framed the opposition effectively dehumanized that opposition; the ideology portrayed that opposition in non-human terms. It could be in terms of some sort of sub-human creature—beasts, brutes, monsters— but was often presented in abstract value terms—injustice, corruption, treason, unnatural. Both sorts of terms dehumanized opposition, presenting it not as people but as impersonal actors or forces. Use of this sort of imagery presumably made the application of terror to the opposition easier to conduct because the implementers could salve their consciences by arguing that the victims were not really human at all. Added to the perception that the Revolution was seeking to achieve fundamentally important aims, an attitude was created that involved pre-conditioned acceptance of the application of terror, including the extermination of opponents. Third, it provided the overarching transcendent goal the achievement of which justified the use of extraordinary methods, including terror. The ideology therefore did not produce the Terror, but it certainly facilitated its adoption. This view, that sees the values embedded in the Revolution and the interpretation of them in purist ways as generating the Terror may be one way of arguing that terror was intrinsic to the Revolution and a necessary part of ⁶⁶ Linton (2013), esp. p. 288.

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it. However, this needs to be qualified by recognition of the role of human agency.⁶⁷ Central here is the politics of the streets and the way the Paris masses in particular interacted with and influenced the political elite. The centrality of the actions of the masses to the course of the Revolution and its radicalization has already been noted. The important point here is that, feeling themselves vulnerable to the decisions of others and animated by the prevailing atmosphere of plot and conspiracy, they searched for a means of obtaining greater security through the crushing of enemies. While they may have seen some progress in eliminating declared enemies, such as the Vendée rebels and foreign invaders, the internal hidden enemies remained despite the actions against refractory priests and nobles. What had not been dealt with was those hidden enemies within the ranks of the new ruling elite. The ‘purge of patriots’ beginning with the Girondins in 1793 opened the account against such enemies in the elite in the eyes of the Paris masses, and this was eagerly taken up by the Robespierre-led Jacobins whose ideological convictions reinforced their acceptance of this opportunity to establish their control by eliminating their challengers. The seeming opportunity for the Jacobins to purge the elite of their enemies and thereby establish their own control was created by the revolutionary activity of the Paris masses which had pulsed through the Revolution since 1789. The fact that a stable Jacobin dictatorship was not established shows, ultimately, how narrow was the support base for Robespierre and the Jacobins within the elite. But the conjunction of the opportunity and the action demonstrates that what was necessary for inverted terror to begin was this combination of mass action and the political ambitions of a narrow section of the elite within the context of factional conflict, and one faction to turn on their erstwhile colleagues in the name of high principle. And in this Robespierre was central given that he was most responsible for the elite’s adoption of inverted terror as a modus operandi. Thus, in France, revolutionary, transformational, and inverted terror all stemmed from a combination of the elite’s sense of isolation and vulnerability, plus the transcendent goal that gave the Revolution its purpose. The perceived need to crush opposition was initially directed outside the elite where such opposition was both extensive and obvious, but under the influence of an inchoate sense of opposition (‘hidden enemies’) and the transcendent goal, a factionalized elite driven by Robespierre accepted the turning in of the terror on part of itself. All three types of terror were, therefore, responses to perceived ⁶⁷ Marisa Linton argues that terror was not inherent in any ideology but was a result of human choice in specific circumstances, and was therefore the result of such cumulative choices. See Linton (2013) for this argument. For an explicit statement to this effect, see p. 24.

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opposition, but the inversion of terror owed as much to the role of Robespierre as it did to the developing revolutionary situation.

Russia and the Soviet Union Revolutionary Terror and the Consolidation of Power Central to the adoption of terror was the situation the Bolsheviks found themselves in, essentially the precarious hold the Bolsheviks had on power.⁶⁸ The brief renewal of military advance by the German army in February 1918, which precipitated the government to shift from Petrograd to Moscow, had highlighted the vulnerability of the regime to hostile international forces. Furthermore, the increasingly narrow basis of popular support enjoyed by the Bolsheviks in the period after October was a major concern. This was clearly reflected in the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in November 1917 and to the soviets in spring 1918, and more generally in the weakness of the proletariat in Russia, especially compared with the overwhelming mass of the peasantry. The significant support the Bolsheviks had gained from the urban working class in the lead up to October had begun to dissipate in the difficult conditions following the seizure of power. This reflected principally the continued deterioration of the conditions of urban inhabitants including the workers. Hunger, crime, difficult living conditions and unemployment continued to cast a shadow over the cities, leading to a mass exodus into the countryside and, among those who remained, a discernible shift of sentiment away from the Bolsheviks in favour of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). This latter process threatened to call into question the Bolsheviks’ self-designation as the party of the proletariat and its proclaimed task of bringing the working class to power. The feelings of isolation and vulnerability were exacerbated by the outbreak of the civil war in the middle of 1918 and by the fact that this posed a real existential threat to the regime, manifested in the way in which the early advances of the White forces threatened to reduce the revolutionary regime to the area immediately around Moscow. The mobilization of White forces, allied intervention (although in strictly military terms this was greatly exaggerated in ⁶⁸ See Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power. The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 263–266 and Nicolas Werth, ‘A State Against its People: Violence, Repression and Terror in the Soviet Union’, Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karol Bartasek & Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1999), ch. 3.

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Bolshevik eyes), combined with the sullen and often not so sullen opposition from within worker and peasant ranks made Bolshevik leaders anxious about the prospects for their survival. Central to this was their framing of the civil war in terms of ‘class war’. The amorphous nature of ‘class’ and the attachment of the opposition class (the ‘bourgeoisie’) to the Marxist framework of history meant that the range of enemies was not limited to a strictly defined and narrow group of people, but extended to those who, although not members of that class, could be framed as allies or supporters of those class interests. This diffuse conception of the opposition in effect meant that anyone who opposed the coming to power of the proletariat through its vanguard the Bolsheviks was either a member or an ally of the bourgeoisie. Consequently the allied intervention forces, the White administrations of the likes of Denikin and Kolchak, the White forces like those led by Wrangel, the SR administrations established on the Volga, demonstrating and striking workers, peasants withholding grain or engaging in insurrection, the remnants of the political opposition in the major cities and obstreperous civil servants could all be conceived as part of the bourgeois category in the class war. An important characteristic of such opposition is that their support for the bourgeoisie was often seen to be secret, and therefore in need of being ‘unmasked’.⁶⁹ This Manichean conception of the class war, with the implication that there could be no middle ground, enabled the Bolsheviks to link their socialist opponents to the White Guard opposition supported by the bourgeois foreign interventionists and frame the war as a battle between only two sides—proletariat and bourgeoisie. They could thereby consolidate their identity as the party of the proletariat, and of the future. This Manichean conception also underpinned the use of terror. Within this context, and despite the opposition of some within the party,⁷⁰ mass terror seemed, to many, to be a logical solution. In particular it was seen as an appropriate response to the White Terror. While historians usually see this in terms of the executions, torture and wanton destruction carried out by the White armies,⁷¹ for the Bolsheviks it had a longer lineage stretching back past October. In the mythology of revolution stemming from the French Thermidor of 1794, white had been the colour of counter-revolution. Accordingly ⁶⁹ For this demand in regard to the SRs in mid-1918, see Scott B. Smith, Captives of Revolution. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship, 1918–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), p. 67. ⁷⁰ Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Breaking Eggs, Making Omelettes: Violence and Terror in Russia’s Civil Wars, 1917–1922’, Ronald Grigor Suny, Red Flag Unfurled. History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 274–275. There were even calls in late 1918 (including by Kamenev) to abolish the Cheka. Werth (1999), p. 79. ⁷¹ White terror was not organized centrally but was often triggered by the desire to settle local scores or reclaim property and position.

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the threats to Bolshevik officials and others following the revolution, including particularly the assassination attempts on Lenin in January and August 1918, were all seen to be part of a White Terror propelled by the alliance of opposition forces arrayed against them. In this regard, the claim that Red Terror was a reaction to the White Terror has a logic to it. This is particularly the case given the Bolsheviks’ Manichean understanding of the course of the revolution: in a struggle between two sides, the balance of forces in the ten months following October seemed to be shifting decisively in favour of the anti-Bolshevik side. Terror therefore appeared as an appropriate response to the regime’s precarious position in the middle of 1918. Certainly many historians have sought to explain the Terror in this way, as a response to the situation faced by the regime;⁷² for Arno Mayer it was the mounting threat of counter-revolutionary opposition, for George Leggett and Sergei Mel’gunov the paucity of popular support.⁷³ This is the contingency argument.⁷⁴ The recourse to terror may also have been linked to the experience of the preceding half dozen years. The first world war was exceptionally violent and brutal, and with much of it fought on Russian territory, that brutality was clearly evident. Even though the Bolsheviks were not in power during the war, its nature was clear to them. What the war did was to make exceptional action appear ‘normal’, to make extraordinary action appear to be an acceptable and appropriate way of dealing with problems. The revolution, itself an exceptional event, would have reinforced this view. This sort of attitude would have moderated any inhibitions that may have been felt about the use of terror.⁷⁵ The brutalization of society by the war made terror easier to accept by an elite feeling isolated and vulnerable. Thus, the contingency argument clearly has significant explanatory power with regard to revolutionary terror: opposition to the consolidation of revolutionary power required an armed response and, under the circumstances, terror was a likely outcome, especially given that civil wars are often more bloody, brutal, and violent than their inter-state comparators. But was there, as some suggest, a strong ideological driver of this terror as well?⁷⁶

⁷² For example, Rabinowitch (2007), pp. 263–266; Werth (1999). ⁷³ Arno J. Mayer, The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); George Leggett, The Cheka. Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and S.P. Mel’gunov, Krasnyi Terror v Rossii (New York: Brandy, 1979, originally published 1924). ⁷⁴ This is consistent with the argument made by Mayer that ‘the bulk of the terror, and the worst of it, was closely correlated with the fighting between the Reds and the Whites’. Mayer (2000), p. 253. ⁷⁵ This is consistent with Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 2002). ⁷⁶ For example, Jo¨rg Baberowski, Scorched Earth. Stalin’s Reign of Terror (Yale: Yale University Press, 2016).

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While Lenin clearly owed much of his theoretical outlook to Marx, who in the view of some may be seen as ultimately responsible for the USSR,⁷⁷ it was a Marxism refracted through the prism of Leninism that was the major ideological influence on early Soviet development. Lenin’s thinking underwent a process of development from the publication of his first major study of capitalism in Russia in 1899 to his last letters and articles in 1923.⁷⁸ While there are consistencies throughout this development, there are also significant inconsistencies which create some tension within his oeuvre. There is also sometimes some tension between the writings of Lenin the theorist and Lenin the political activist. Nevertheless despite this, generally his activist positions were informed by the theoretical positions that he had espoused. One further qualification is required.⁷⁹ Much of Lenin’s pre-1917 writing assumed that the forthcoming revolution in Russia would be the democratic revolution, ushering in the bourgeois period resting on capitalist development. In this perspective, the socialist revolution that would bring an end to the bourgeois period was a long way off. This perspective changed during the first world war and is reflected most clearly in his 1916 study of imperialism,⁸⁰ which encouraged him to come to believe that, owing to the effects of imperialism, Russia’s apparent backwardness could be sidelined, and socialist revolution could occur in that country. Although his theoretical perspective shifted in this way, as late as January 1917 he did not believe that socialist revolution in Russia would occur in the short term.⁸¹ Central to understanding Lenin’s attitude to terror is recognition of his thought as eschatological and Manichean. It was eschatological in that it assumed an historical course of development culminating in the achievement of communist society. He acknowledged the underlying material forces that drove history that were at the heart of Marx’s analysis, and he recognized (and attributed more importance to this than Marx) the more contingent role that conscious agents could play in this historical process, but what gave

⁷⁷ For a discussion of this question, see David W. Lovell, From Marx to Lenin. An Evaluation of Marx’s Responsibility for Soviet Authoritarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Recognition of Marx’s role is not to diminish the influence of the Russian revolutionary movement and its rich theoretical strains on Lenin’s outlook, although the precise nature of the relationship remains a contentious question. ⁷⁸ Respectively V.I. Lenin, ‘Razvitie Kapitalizma v Rossii’ , Pol’noe Sobranie Sochinenii [henceforth PSS] Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1979–1983), vol.3, pp. 1–778 and ‘Poslednie Pis’ma i Stat’i V.I. Lenina’, PSS vol. 45, pp. 341–406. ⁷⁹ This follows the analysis in Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought. Volume 1. Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1977) and Lenin’s Political Thought. Volume 2. Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981). ⁸⁰ V.I. Lenin. ‘Imperializm, Kak Vysshaya Stadiya Kapitalizma’, PSS vol.27, pp. 299–426. ⁸¹ See his comments to a meeting in Switzerland in January 1917, V.I. Lenin, ‘Doklad o Revolyutsii 1905 Goda’, PSS vol. 30, p. 328.

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it all a coherence and consistency was the assumption that it all led to the final historical apex, communism. His thought was Manichean because this eschatology drove Lenin’s thought to define people as either supporters or opponents of this transcendent aim. It has been widely recognized that Lenin was ferocious in demanding complete agreement and was reluctant to compromise. This was a direct result of this propensity to see people as being either supportive or oppositional; there could be no middle ground, no neutrality. This was particularly important for his approach to terror in 1918 and after. Lenin always accepted that violence and coercion were inevitable in a revolution, and his language was characterized by violent verbs and metaphors. But prior to 1917 he was not greatly concerned with the details of post-socialist revolution society. He accepted that revolution would involve violence and coercion because the ruling class would not willingly hand power over to the revolutionary class, but although he saw the post-revolutionary government as exercising the power of the state, this did not necessarily mean the exercise of terror. The point about revolution was that it was to come about when the material conditions for its realization had been met and the mode of production underpinning the old regime had been replaced by that of the new. Accordingly the basis upon which the power of the old regime rested was in decline, and once the state apparatus had been seized by the revolutionary class, the power at the disposal of the newly displaced former ruling class was limited. This does not mean that they would not struggle to retain their position, but that that struggle was conducted from a distinctly inferior position. As a class they were being destroyed less by the coercive power of the emergent ruling class than by the transformation of production relations upon which their power ultimately had rested. This was consistent with the view that the new ruling class could consolidate itself in power by using the regular powers of the state—removal of established privileges and rights, imposition of restrictions on activity, arrest—without having to resort to actions that would be defined as ‘terror’. This perspective seems to have shifted in 1916–1917 when Lenin’s view became more internationalized. His argument that the war accelerated revolutionary processes and unified them cross-nationally led to the conclusion that the socialist revolution might not break out first in the most advanced capitalist countries but in the ‘weakest link’ of international capital, Russia. This meant that the transformation of the mode of production that underpinned the revolutionary process would be less developed than originally envisaged and the old ruling class therefore significantly stronger than it would otherwise have been. With the February revolution, Lenin believed that socialist

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revolution was on the agenda in Russia and that it could be realized through the revolutionary activity of the proletariat led by its vanguard, the Bolsheviks. Once power was seized by the proletariat, their task was to hold firm until world revolution changed the fundamental balance of the international mode of production, of which Russia was just a part. Final success in Russia depended upon international revolution, but that should not stop the Russian proletariat from carrying out its own socialist revolution. This raised the question of what form the post-revolutionary proletarian dictatorship should take. While much of Lenin’s writings between February and October were more immediately concerned with the strategy and tactics of the revolution rather than the post-revolution situation, this was the subject of his work ‘State and Revolution’ finished in August–September 1917.⁸² Subtitled ‘The teachings of Marxism on the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution’, this was originally meant as a contribution to the continuing debate within Marxism on the role of the state and revolution (much of the preparatory work was done in 1916⁸³), rather than as an immediate guide to action for the Bolsheviks in post-revolution Russia. This was, then, a theoretical treatise, but nevertheless may be seen as the theoretical underpinning for the positions Lenin ultimately took on many questions after October. In this work Lenin accepted that the state would ‘wither away’ as a ‘special coercive force’, but this would only come about once there was no class that needed to be suppressed, that is once the former ruling class had been destroyed. In the interim the proletariat would have to utilize state power to repress their class opponent and hasten the destruction of the former ruling class. In Lenin’s view, citing Engels as his authority, the dictatorship of the proletariat is ‘a “special coercive force” for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat’, or ‘the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors’.⁸⁴ The state as a ‘special apparatus’ for suppression of the minority by the majority remains necessary temporarily.⁸⁵ It must extend to the entire society the strictest control and discipline to combat the vestiges of capitalism that remained. Lenin also argued that the logic of class struggle led to civil war, and that the greater the class antagonism that existed, the more power the state needed to have. The proletarian dictatorship was thus not the ultimate ideal, ‘but only a step, necessary for the ⁸² V.I. Lenin, ‘Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya. Uchenie Marksizma o Gosudarstve i Zadachi Proletariata v Revolyutsii’, PSS vol.33, pp. 1–120. ⁸³ For the preparatory materials, including a document entitled ‘Marxism on the State’, see ‘Podgotovitel’nye Materialy k Knige “Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya”’, PSS vol. 33, pp. 123–340. ⁸⁴ Lenin, ‘Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya’, pp. 18 & 88–89. ⁸⁵ Lenin, ‘Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya’, pp. 90–91.

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radical cleansing of society from the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation and for further progress’.⁸⁶ Thus, on the eve of the seizure of power Lenin recognized the continuing post-revolutionary need for the exercise of coercive state power both to consolidate the new ruling class and to facilitate progress towards the classless society. While this formula mandated firm coercion and control by the state it did not necessarily foreshadow the use of terror, although such an outcome was not inconsistent with it. Nor was it inconsistent with the violence of the language Lenin used: the bourgeois state had to be smashed and destroyed, and counter-revolution ruthlessly crushed. Following the seizure of power the two strands in Lenin’s thought evident in State and Revolution, the idealism of the state withering away and ‘cooks running the state’ on the one hand, and the need for strict control and discipline on the other, continued to be reflected in his writings, but it was the latter that was the more important. Rejection of the Bolshevik seizure of power by virtually all sections of political society, including all of the main socialist parties except the Left SRs which had split off from the main SR party, meant that use of the state to defend the proletarian dictatorship became the higher priority. As conditions deteriorated and opposition mounted, Lenin emphasized dictatorial power, the vigorous exercise of state power by the proletariat.⁸⁷ His Manichean perspective and his view of the peasants as petty bourgeois which was part of this perspective is reflected in his reference to terror and to ‘enemies of the people’ when establishing the ‘food dictatorship’ in May 1918: he said that there was a need for ‘a ruthless and terrorist struggle and war against peasant or other bourgeois elements who retain surplus grain for themselves’.⁸⁸ By June 1918, in the wake of the assassination of the Bolshevik official Volodarsky in Petrograd, Lenin declared ‘We must encourage the energy and mass character of the terror against the counter-revolutionaries…’⁸⁹ By this time too Lenin appears convinced of the therapeutic effect of terror, in the sense implied in State and Revolution of state coercion facilitating further progress towards the eschatological goal, although alone it was not able to achieve that goal; he remained convinced that the shift to socialism required ⁸⁶ Lenin, ‘Gosudarstvo i Revolyutsiya’, pp. 99–100. Emphasis in original. ⁸⁷ For a statement of his views leading into War Communism and the subsequent adoption of the Red Terror, see V.I. Lenin, ‘Ocherednye Zadachi Sovetskoi Vlasti’, PSS vol. 36, pp. 165–208 written in April 1918. ⁸⁸ V.I. Lenin, ‘Osnovnye Polozheniya Dekreta o Prodovol’stvennoi Diktature’, PSS vol. 36, p. 316. For the reference to ‘enemies of the people’, see ‘Dopolnenie k Dekretu o Prodovol’stvennoi Diktature’, PSS vol. 36, p. 318. ⁸⁹ V.I. Lenin, ‘G.E. Zinovievu’, 26 June 1918, PSS vol. 50, p. 106. For his memorandum to the Commissar for Finance Nikolai Krestinsky on the beginning of the Red Terror, see Richard Pipes (ed), The Unknown Lenin. From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 56.

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cultural transformation in the form of raised class consciousness, and coercion could not bring this about. Terror was viewed instrumentally. However, terror was not, in Lenin’s view, necessarily designed to physically eliminate members of the bourgeoisie (indeed, he talked of putting them to work for the proletarian state), even if some officials interpreted his words in that way. Terror was to be directed against the exploiters and those who sought to restore their rule (and hence he did not agree with the position espoused by Latsis noted in Chapter 3), but he was aware of the potential dangers that could stem from anarchic terror escaping central control. Also given his Manichean view and the vagueness of the class categories used to discuss this question, Lenin’s position could easily be seen to have been one of unrestrained and principled support for terror. But this was not so. For Lenin terror was a response to the situation the Bolsheviks faced: as yet no international revolution and increasing opposition from enemies both within Russia and outside. Bolshevik theory, including Lenin’s thought, did not lead ineluctably to the terror, but it did facilitate its adoption. The roots of the Red Terror became a major issue in Marxist circles at this time. In two pieces written in 1918 and 1920,⁹⁰ the German social democrat Karl Kautsky, who was an advocate of the parliamentary, democratic, road to socialism, argued that Russian capitalism at the time of the revolution remained in an immature state, with the result that the proletariat lacked the maturity or consciousness to carry out a socialist revolution. Accordingly the Bolsheviks seized power and, being a small minority within Russia, created a dictatorship through which they sought to rectify the lack of consciousness within their putative social base. He argued that a regime that had sacrificed its principles (by which he meant had moved away from the staged vision of revolutionary development that had been commonly shared at the beginning of 1917 and was still adhered to by much of the international socialist movement) to stay in power had to rely upon violence, and that terror was the ‘inevitable result’ of the attempt to introduce socialism from above.⁹¹ Furthermore, this dictatorship of the party would undermine the goal of socialism. As soon as the Bolsheviks introduced the dictatorship of the proletariat, they could not avoid terror. Thus, Kautsky saw terror as the inevitable result of the seizure of power by a minority who sought to bring about fundamental transformation in the society. ⁹⁰ Respectively Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971) and Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Contribution to the Natural History of Revolution (London: The National Labour Press Ltd, 1920). ⁹¹ Kautsky (1920), p. 208.

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Not surprisingly, this view was hotly disputed by leading Bolsheviks. Lenin responded to Kautsky’s first pamphlet with the vitriolic ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’⁹² in which he criticized Kautsky’s assessment of the state of the Russian proletariat and his views on the nature of dictatorship and democracy. The terror and its origins were more directly addressed by Trotsky in a pamphlet mirroring Kautsky’s title, ‘Terrorism and Communism’.⁹³ Trotsky advanced the view that the abolition of the old order based on private property required the concentration of state power in the hands of the proletariat, and the establishment for a ‘transitional period of an exceptional regime’. He argued that only force could eliminate the bourgeoisie, that the ‘systematic and energetic use of violence’ was essential to ‘breaking the class will of the enemy’. The greater the resistance of the overthrown class enemy, ‘the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror’. Trotsky, whose basic position was very close to that of Lenin at this time, seems to be arguing that state violence is a function of the opposition to the revolution mounted by the remnants of the overthrown classes: he declared that the severe measures adopted by the Soviet government ‘were forced upon it as measures of revolutionary self defence’ because of the opposition to the revolution by the Russian bourgeoisie supported by the world bourgeoisie. For Trotsky the former ruling class would not give up power without a fight, and this made terror a necessary and inevitable part of socialist revolution.⁹⁴ Terror was necessary for the achievement of socialism. He was explicit that terror did not ‘logically’ flow from revolution, but from the opposition of the former rulers to the revolution.⁹⁵ But if we assume, as he did, that such opposition was inevitable, this looks like hair splitting. While the new rulers of Russia often argued that the use of terror was a response to the opposition to the revolution, Trotsky’s basic position was that the use of terror was necessary to usher in the birth of the new era. Terror flushed out the old and enabled the new to grow. Trotsky’s position was close to that of many critics of the revolution who argue for the essential unity of revolution and terror.

⁹² V.I. Lenin, ‘Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya i Renegat Kautskii’, PSS vol. 37, pp. 235–338. Kautsky championed the parliamentary path to socialism and saw dictatorship as a rejection of this. Hence Lenin’s discussion of these in his work. ⁹³ Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism. A Reply to Karl Kautsky (London: Verso, 2007; originally published 1920). ⁹⁴ The Polish-born communist Rosa Luxemburg argued that the Bolsheviks had been forced to create a narrow dictatorship by the circumstances Russia found itself in, and that they should not generalize what was therefore a contingent response into a rule having general application. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1970; originally published 1920). ⁹⁵ The citations are from Trotsky (1920), respectively pp. 23, 55, 55, 93 & 58.

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However, in immediate post-October Russia, there were few Bolsheviks who argued for the application of terror in principle. Notwithstanding Trotsky’s view, revolutionary terror was essentially contingent, a response to the sense of isolation and vulnerability of both elite and regime, and to the opposition.

Transformational Terror and Revolutionary Transformation The consolidation of power was not achieved until 1921, after the civil war was brought to a close. Major attempts at transformation did not begin until such consolidation was achieved. There is an argument that economic transformation was also begun in the earlier period with the introduction of ‘War Communism’ in 1918 as an attempt to build a communist economy and society. However, as argued in Chapter 3, this is better seen as an ad hoc attempt to control the wartime economy in order to serve the war effort, albeit one shaped by the ideological predilections of Russia’s new rulers, than of a concerted effort to build the new utopia. Nevertheless there was some overlap of the seizure of power phase and the revolutionary transformation phase. The power pyramid resting on the monarchy and the nobility was destroyed in 1917–1918, with many of those who were not killed moving abroad into emigration and leaving the fruits of power to the Bolsheviks. Economic transformation also occurred at this time, with the widespread peasant seizure of land and the assertion of worker control in the factories. The land was transformed from being a noble asset into something in the hands of the peasants (this had actually been happening since emancipation in 1861, but it was 1917 that destroyed all trace of noble power in the countryside) while much of the industrial plant was placed under worker control. This was a major change in economic relationships and, through them, political and social relationships also. However, the most important change was to come almost a decade later. The so-called ‘great turn’ whereby the state drove through social and economic change in the form of agricultural collectivization and forced-pace industrialization completely transformed not just the national economy but also property relations and social structure. As shown in Chapter 3, it also involved a significant level of terror. Was this sort of violent assault on the prevailing status quo inevitable, or were there other ways of bringing about the desired revolutionary change? The first thing to note is the role played by the ideology the Bolsheviks espoused. There are two aspects of this. First, the ideological writings of the chief figures in the development of Marxism did not clearly and

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unambiguously specify the contours of what the new system was to look like. Even the most detailed discussion of this by a mainstream figure, Lenin’s The State and Revolution, did not provide a comprehensive blueprint for socialism. The emphasis upon the abolition of private ownership and its replacement by collective control was clear, but how this was actually to be both achieved and then organized remained open. Second, the ideology did not specifically mandate the widespread use of violence and force to achieve the change desired. Indeed, much of the theoretical discussion occurred at a high level of systemic abstraction, principally in terms of the replacement of one mode of production by another as part of a continuing and inevitable historical process of development. Discussion at this level obscured the reality of how such change was to come about on the ground. The practicalities and detail of the shift from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production, exactly how the latter was to replace the former, had no part in an argument pitched at the systemic level. However, in much of the writing of those who were central to the Bolshevik conception of what they were about—principally Marx and Lenin—there was a recognition that this shift in mode of organization of the economy (and therefore of property relations) would be met with fierce resistance. It was recognized that those who benefited from the capitalist mode of production would fight strenuously to defend it and to prevent the socialist re-ordering of society. This meant that violent conflict was envisaged as a perhaps inevitable part of the transition to socialism, although it was assumed that the magnitude of the systemic change being wrought by historical processes would so weaken the defenders of capitalism that they would ultimately be defeated. Thus, this combination of the perception of the nature of the change envisaged and the recognition of the likelihood of major opposition to this in the writings of the Bolsheviks’ ideological fathers did foresee the violent birth of the new epoch. However, it did not make that violence inevitable. And for a time it appeared to many that large-scale overt violence of the type that ultimately occurred might be avoided. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was adopted in 1921 as a means of repairing the damage to the economy that had been done by the policy of War Communism. Initially introduced as a forced compromise and a purely shortterm measure, the policy involved the passing of land to the tillers and factories to private owners, with only the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy to remain in state hands. The policy was vigorously opposed by the Left in the party and, initially, accepted by the Right and the Centre as a short-term retreat, to be reversed when the economy had revived. However, over time a reconsideration of this took place within the Centre and Right, stimulated

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by an apparent change in thinking on the part of Lenin in one of the final lucid times of his life. Increasingly sections of the party began to consider NEP as a viable road to socialism. Led by Nikolai Bukharin, the Right in particular gradually came to believe that NEP Russia could grow over into socialist Russia, although the mechanisms whereby this would take place remained obscure. Nevertheless, Bukharin and the Right began to champion the NEP as a long-term strategy for the achievement of socialism.⁹⁶ Had this strategy of development through the market been maintained, the violent process of collectivization and the accompanying civil war with the peasantry may have been avoided. The introduction of the more liberal NEP economic policies had a significant effect on the atmosphere of politics over the 1920s, but this was not to reduce tension, as one might have expected, but to raise that tension. Two spheres of this were relevant: outside the party, and inside the party. First the outside, because this also affected developments inside the party. The introduction of concessions in the economy, for that is how they were initially presented, in theory made the Bolsheviks vulnerable to the sorts of criticism that had been levelled at them by their political opponents since 1917, that through their premature seizure of power they had forsaken socialism for capitalism. Accordingly they now cracked down on that opposition. Action against members of the non-Bolshevik political parties had been a continuing feature of the years after October,⁹⁷ but now measures were stepped up to destroy them completely. In February 1921 Cheka head Felix Dzerzhinsky ordered the arrest of all anarchists, Mensheviks, and SRs, followed by the arrest of some 2000 socialist activists;⁹⁸ a number of non-party intellectuals not attached to the party were also arrested and sent abroad. The most public aspect of this crackdown was the trial of socialist revolutionary leaders in June 1922.⁹⁹ Thirty-four SRs were accused of ‘counter-revolutionary and terrorist activities’ against the government, including the August 1918 assassination attempt on Lenin. Eleven of them were condemned to death but, following

⁹⁶ The best study of this remains Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). Also see the discussion in Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (London: Pluto Press, 1975), Part I. ⁹⁷ The classic early study of this is Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy. Political Opposition in the Soviet State: First Phase, 1917–1922 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965). ⁹⁸ Werth (1999), pp. 114–115. ⁹⁹ On this see Marc Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982). On the SRs, Smith (2011) and on the initial post-October period, Oliver Henry Radkey, The Sickle under the Hammer. The Russian Socialist Revolutionaries in the Early Months of Soviet Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

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protests from socialists abroad (and chary of the possibility of enflaming further unrest in the countryside), the sentences were suspended; they were later incarcerated in camps and were put to death in the 1930s.¹⁰⁰ The activity of these former revolutionary comrades was no longer acceptable.¹⁰¹ Also in 1922 a major campaign was launched against the Church. The confiscation of much Church property, including valuables, was justified in part in terms of assisting those suffering as a result of the famine, but in fact this was designed to bring the Church under tighter party control. Many priests and nuns died, while many others were placed under arrest and sent to the camps. The initial Bolshevik decree establishing the separation of Church and state was superseded as strict controls were imposed over the Church and its (now limited) activities. Two legal developments in 1922 reflect the continuing social tension. First in February the Cheka was transformed into the Chief Political Directorate (GPU; in 1924 it became the Joint Chief Political Directorate, OGPU) and was made part of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). This meant that the security apparatus formally ceased to be an exceptional body that was notionally temporary and became part of the continuing structure of the state. Seemingly it was also brought under the control of the law, since it did not by definition enjoy extraordinary rights and powers, and it did for a time have a reduced size and range of activities, although this did not last long.¹⁰² Second the introduction of a new penal code in the middle of the year prompted Lenin to write that the code must: openly (and not simply in narrow juridical terms) espouse a politically just principle that is the essence and motivation for terror, showing its necessity and its limits. The court must not replace the terror; to do so would be deception or a mistake. It must give it a basis and legalize it in principle without falsification or deception. It must be formulated as widely as possible for only revolutionary legal consciousness and a revolutionary conscience will allow its application more or less widely.¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁰ Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police. Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009), pp. 32–33. ¹⁰¹ See the resolution of the XII Conference of the party in August 1922, ‘Ob Antisovetskikh Partiyakh i Techeniyakh’, Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza v Rezolyutsiiakh i Resheniyakh S’ezdov, Konferentsii i Plenumov ts.k.(1898–1986) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 587–593. ¹⁰² Werth (1999), pp. 134–135. ¹⁰³ Lenin, ‘Dopolneniya k Proektu Vvodnogo Zakona k Ugolovnomy Kodeksu RFSFR i Pis’ma D.I. Kurskomu’, PSS vol. 45, p. 190.

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The law was clearly a weapon to be used against the enemies of the revolution, and as Lenin acknowledged, terror was one of its arms. Crucial for developments during this decade were the perceptions of leading party figures about the environment within which they and the party found themselves. Before sections of the party began to see it as a possible alternative path to socialism, and therefore while it was still seen as a temporary retreat, NEP was the focus of widespread suspicion. This was not only because the restoration of a free market based on private ownership seemed to run counter to the prevailing views about what socialism would look like, but the strengthening of private property was perceived to pose an existential threat to the regime by strengthening the class against whom the revolution had been directed; as early as April 1923 it was claimed that NEP was resulting in the emergence of a ‘new’ bourgeoisie.¹⁰⁴ The basis of this fear was the strengthened position NEP seemed to accord the peasantry, and in particular the so-called ‘kulaks’ or rich peasants. The Bolsheviks believed that the peasants were divided into three strata, the kulaks, the middle peasants, and the poor peasants. Of these groups, the poor peasants were seen to be the natural allies of the proletariat (and the section upon which the smychka or alliance that underpinned NEP was seen to rest) while the kulaks were inveterate enemies who would seek to influence the middle peasants.¹⁰⁵ As the most successful peasants, the kulaks were believed to exercise most influence in the villages, and it was their economic position that was most shored up by the return to market conditions. Their power in the villages and their consequent ability to pursue their own narrow interests was believed to pose a danger to regular food supplies in the cities. The growth of kulak power was seen to be reinforced by the way that other opponents of the Bolsheviks, both inside and outside the USSR, would also be strengthened and emboldened, thereby creating the danger of a linking up of opponents against the regime. This basic problem was encapsulated in the fear of ‘petty bourgeois’ influence or infection. Throughout the 1920s the fear about the effect of petty bourgeois influence was a constant theme in party debates, and although some of this may have ¹⁰⁴ ‘Otchet za god raboty TsK RKP’, Dvenadtsatyi s’ezd RKP(b). 17-25 Aprel’ 1923 Goda. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1968), p. 786. There was some ambiguity about what was meant by the ‘new’ bourgeoisie; it could mean the kulaks, but it also referred to handicraft workers and petty traders that emerged in the cities. For the view that the new bourgeoisie was rooted in the free circulation of commodities, see Kamenev’s comments at the XIII Congress. Trinadtsatyi s’ezd RKP(b). Mai 1924 Goda. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1963), p. 389. ¹⁰⁵ For the danger posed by their attempt to take over the leadership of the middle peasants, see ‘Po otchetu Tsentral’nogo Komiteta’, XIV s’ezd Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b). 18–31 Dekabrya 1925g. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1926), p. 960.

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been tactical and related to the continuing factional conflict (see below), there is no reason to believe that the concern was not genuinely held within party ranks. It was reflected in the continuing emphasis upon the recruitment of industrial workers into the party¹⁰⁶ as well as direct statements by party leaders and in the resolutions of party bodies, and in the focus on ‘discipline’ in the conduct of party life.¹⁰⁷ The essential concern was that the petty bourgeois values embedded in village life would infect party workers and thereby seep into the party.¹⁰⁸ The danger of the internal decomposition of the party as a direct result of NEP was acknowledged virtually from the outset¹⁰⁹ with the ‘infiltration’ of party ranks by alien elements said to be an inevitability over the coming years;¹¹⁰ as early as 1924 struggle against the penetration of the party by a petty bourgeois mood was seen as a priority.¹¹¹ This recognition of the danger stemming from the strength of the petty bourgeoisie rooted in the villages continued to animate speakers throughout the 1920s,¹¹² with the link between it and intra-party opposition being frequently drawn. This will be discussed below. Another aspect of this fear of petty bourgeois infection was the possibility of links being established between the regime’s enemies inside and outside the country.¹¹³ The international scene as seen from Moscow was quite hostile throughout this period. While British diplomatic recognition of the country in 1924 was an important breakthrough (although it was followed three years later by the breaking off of relations), over the decade the USSR was confronted by a sea of hostility, with the perception that this was increasing during the second half of the decade; the emergence of anti-Soviet regimes on the border in Poland and Lithuania in 1926, and the rupture with Britain and the apparent collapse of the Chinese revolution in 1927 were interpreted in Moscow as the

¹⁰⁶ Although this was moderated at times by attempts to recruit poor peasants in an endeavour to overcome the party’s weakness in the countryside. Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 113–116. The standard study is T.H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917–1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), chs. 3, 4 & 5. ¹⁰⁷ Also in the self-criticism campaign initiated in 1928. ¹⁰⁸ For example see the comment in the report to the XI Congress on the work of the Central Committee, ‘Otchet za God Raboty TsK RKP’, Odinnadtsatyi s’ezd RKP(b) Mart-Aprel’ 1922 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1961), pp. 647–648. ¹⁰⁹ For example, see the comments by Kosior at the XII Congress in 1923. Dvenadtsatyi, p. 104. ¹¹⁰ ‘Po organizatsionnomu voprosu’, Dvenadtsatyi (1968), p. 703. This fear coloured all of the membership drives mounted during this decade. ¹¹¹ ‘Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partiinogo stroitel’stva’, Trinadtsatyi (1963), pp. 604–605. ¹¹² On concerns about the weakness of the party in the rural areas towards the end of the 1920s, see Gill (1990), p. 115. ¹¹³ For example see Zinoviev’s comments at the XII Congress. Dvenadtsatyi (1968), p. 11.

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harbingers of a possibly imminent war.¹¹⁴ The opposition of the Western powers to the regime was clear, and even if those in Moscow may have exaggerated the likelihood of conflict, fear of imminent war was real.¹¹⁵ The perception of external hostility gave added impetus to the danger that was seen to lie in the domestic petty bourgeois environment, and this fed into the second, intraparty, sphere where tension was raised, reflected in the factional conflicts of the 1920s. Following the incapacitation of Lenin in 1922, a struggle over power and policy enveloped the party. In the process the group around Stalin successively defeated the Trotskyist opposition, the Left Opposition, United Opposition and Right Opposition, culminating in 1929 in the final victory of the Stalin group. The principal protagonists in these struggles, at least at the top level, were all Old Bolsheviks, people who had spent long years working in the party prior to the 1917 revolution. Trotsky was the most important exception to this, having spent many years in the revolutionary movement but formally joining the party only in 1917. There was no objective basis to claim that these people had anything other than genuine revolutionary credentials nor that they were not committed to the achievement of socialism; many had suffered considerable hardship for the cause, and many were highly literate in the theoretical principles that they claimed guided them, Marxism (although many of those at lower levels were much less literate in this regard). While the debate was often couched in terms of immediate practical policy—chiefly the future of NEP, the attitude to the peasants, and the international situation—underpinning this were arguments based in theory about the possibility of achieving socialism in a country that was not highly industrialized. These were issues upon which Marxists could genuinely differ and, reflecting the history of the party which was one in which theoretical debate and disagreement were common, such differences were accepted as legitimate. The party had always been characterized by vigorous debate and discussion over issues, and this was seen as the norm. Members of the party were entitled to disagree vigorously with one another and with the leadership, but ¹¹⁴ For example, see Stalin’s comments and the report on the CC’s work, Pyatnadtsatyi s’ezd VKP(b). Dekabr’ 1927 Goda. Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1961), p. 43 & 1429–1430; also Stalin at the XVI Congress, XVI s’ezd Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b). Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1930), pp. 17–23. ¹¹⁵ On one instance of this, see Alfred G. Meyer, ‘The War Scare of 1927’, Soviet Union/Union Sovietique 5, 1, 1978, pp. 1–25; Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The Foreign Threat during the First Five Year-Plan’, Soviet Union/Union Sovietique 5, 1, 1978, pp. 26–35; John P. Sontag, ‘The Soviet War Scare of 1926–27’, The Russian Review 34, 1, 1975, pp. 66–77; and N.S. Simonov, ‘“Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets”: The 1927 “War Alarm” and its Consequences’, Europe Asia Studies 48, 8, 1996, pp. 1355–1364.

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they were expected to fall in behind a decision once it had been made. There was not, in the pre-revolutionary situation, a demand that people should publicly renounce their personal views once a decision had been made, but they were to keep those views to themselves and bend their behaviour to the formal decision. However, both this right to express differing views and to continue to hold them as long as they were not publicly enunciated were swept away during the course of the factional conflicts of the 1920s; from spring 1929 the discussion of policy in the party was no longer open and combative. The first step in this process was to equate internal party opposition to policy with the opposition to the revolution found outside the party. This was initiated in 1923 with the claim by Zinoviev that internal critics from the Left (he had in mind the Workers’ Opposition) were objectively Mensheviks; Larin was a little more broad-ranging in complaining that internal critics were labelled either Mensheviks or SRs, but the effect was the same.¹¹⁶ Such Menshevism was seen as stemming directly from NEP and the ‘new’ bourgeoisie.¹¹⁷ In actions that were later to be used against him, Zinoviev in 1924 called for the public recantation of its views by the opposition.¹¹⁸ At this time too, Trotsky declared that ‘the party is always right…it is impossible to be right against the party…’,¹¹⁹ a position which effectively denied the right of party members to hold a different position. It became common for much of the rest of the decade to refer to intra-party opposition in terms of a ‘petty bourgeois deviation’.¹²⁰ For Stalin, the opposition was merely a mouthpiece for the ‘new’ bourgeoisie, and whoever weakened the party strengthened that bourgeoisie.¹²¹ It was also claimed as early as 1924 that the party purge had been used against oppositionists,¹²² and that the security apparatus (the OGPU) was keeping a watchful eye on the intra-party opposition; by 1927 it was engaged in active counter- measures including surveillance, harassment, and arrest.¹²³ The legitimacy of opposition was further eroded in 1925. At the XIV Congress in December, the opposition-oriented delegation from Leningrad (headed by Zinoviev) was heckled and shouted down when they tried to speak, in the first instance of what was to become routine practice at party meetings. ¹¹⁶ Dvenadtsatyi (1968), pp. 53 & 116. ¹¹⁷ Dvenadtsatyi (1968), pp. 111–112 and Trinadtsatyi (1963), p. 101. ¹¹⁸ Trinadtsatyi (1963), p. 106. ¹¹⁹ Trinadtsatyi (1963), p. 158. ¹²⁰ This formulation was found in the resolution on the report of the CC to the XIII Congress and was used by a number of speakers. On the resolution, Trinadtsatyi (1963), p. 599. ¹²¹ Trinadtsatyi (1963), pp. 235–236. ¹²² See the comments by Preobrazhensky, Yaroslavsky, and Stalin in Trinadtsatyi (1963), pp. 192, 223 & 233. ¹²³ Gill (1990), p. 190.

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At that congress too a number of speakers declared it was the duty of party members to be an agent of the Cheka and to inform the relevant authorities of objectionable activity by party members; this was declared to be the responsibility of every party member.¹²⁴ In the second half of the 1920s, especially with the beginning of the ‘economic turn’ in 1927, these themes became even more dominant in the discussion of opposition. The opposition were Mensheviks,¹²⁵ they must completely disarm and renounce their views,¹²⁶ those who weakened party discipline strengthened the bourgeoisie and thereby became an instrument of the bourgeoisie/petty bourgeoisie,¹²⁷ and some of the opposition were giving voice to a kulak position.¹²⁸ Many of these claims were mutually contradictory but this did not matter because the essence was the same: intra-party opposition was an expression of external enemies and had no place inside the party.¹²⁹ The XV Congress in December 1927 explicitly rejected the position that an opposition could continue to hold their views while remaining in the party as long as they did not propagate them, and called on the opposition to openly renounce their heterodox opinions; there was no room in the party for anyone whose views were held to be ‘anti-Leninist’.¹³⁰ This was realized in practice with the increased role of the OGPU in dealing with intraparty opposition,¹³¹ and with the first large-scale expulsion from the party of leading figures for opposition activity, including Trotsky and Zinoviev in November 1927; at the same time other prominent figures were removed from leading party organs but retained their party membership.¹³² By April 1929 opposition was explicitly one of the formal grounds for expulsion.¹³³ The XVI Congress in June–July 1930 was the first at which no objections were raised to any aspect of party policy.

¹²⁴ XIV s’ezd (1926), pp. 600–601, 617 & 623. ¹²⁵ For example Pyatnadtsatyi (1961), pp. 87, 155, 289, 1232, 1392–1393. ¹²⁶ For example Pyatnadtsatyi (1961), pp. 90, 225, 228 & 1434. ¹²⁷ For example Pyatnadtsatyi (1961), pp. 347, 411, 432 & 1468 and XVI s’ezd Vsesoyuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (b). Stenograficheskii Otchet (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo,1931), pp. 147 & 337. ¹²⁸ For example XVI s’ezd (1931), pp. 157 & 173–174. ¹²⁹ The expulsion of the leaders of the United Opposition in late 1927 was rationalized explicitly in terms of the war scare of that year. ¹³⁰ ‘Ob Oppozitsii’, Pyatnadtsatyi (1961), pp. 90, 155, 225, 413–414, 1391 & 1469. This focus on views expanded the grounds of what was unacceptable from that of forming factions, which had been explicitly outlawed in 1921, to merely holding heterodox views. Although on the problematic nature of this resolution, see Gill (1990), pp. 95–99. ¹³¹ Werth (1999), p. 141. ¹³² In October 1926 Trotsky had already been removed from full membership of the Politburo and Kamenev from candidate membership. On those removed in November 1927, see Gill (1990), p. 170. ¹³³ See the list of types of people who should be expelled from the party adopted by the XVI Conference in April 1929, ‘O Chistke i Proverke Chlenov i Kandidatov VKP(b)’, KPSS v rez… vol. 4, p. 490.

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The treatment of opposition and the phrasing of its crimes in terms of opposing ‘Leninism’ marked the emergence of a sense of orthodoxy in party life. Rather than different views being permitted, everyone now had to toe the party leadership’s line, which was defined in terms of ‘Leninism’. Although it was a stretch to claim that some of the positions enunciated by the party leadership stemmed directly from Lenin’s writings, what this did was to encase the leadership’s views in a shroud of legitimacy stemming from the regime’s founder.¹³⁴ And it thereby meant that anyone opposing those views was turned into an opponent of the whole Bolshevik project. Hence the association of internal party opposition with external opponents like the Mensheviks. A theoretical explanation for the levels of opposition was offered by Stalin initially in July 1928,¹³⁵ building on the position Lenin had espoused during the civil war when he declared that the exploiters’ efforts against the revolution would increase the closer capitalism came to its death.¹³⁶ Stalin now declared that the closer socialism approached, the more bitter the class struggle became as it became clear to the former exploiters that they were about to lose everything. This also provided an explicit justification for the terrorist measures taken during agricultural collectivization. One element of the picture emerging during the 1920s with regard to opposition was that there could be no neutral position; a Manichean view ruled: people are either completely with us or completely opposed to us. This was reflected in a series of trials that emerged at the end of the 1920s into the early 1930s. The Shakhty trial of mine engineers in April–May 1928 was important here. Its message was that there were hidden enemies in various parts of the politico-administrative and industrial structures who, although they had worked for the building of Soviet power, ultimately sought to undermine, and topple it. What appeared to be slips and accidents in the mines were really a result of ‘wrecking’, reflecting their malign intent. In the eighteen months from January 1930 48% of engineers in the Donbas were dismissed while 4,500 ‘specialist saboteurs’ were ‘unmasked’ in the transport sector in the first six months of 1931.¹³⁷ This view undermined the position of all experts and specialists ¹³⁴ For Stalin’s attempt to establish himself as the interpreter of this orthodoxy, see his 1924 lectures published as ‘Ob Osnovakh Leninizma’, I.V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1952), vol. 6, pp. 69–188. Zinoviev also sought to establish the same status for himself through the publication in October 1925 of a volume entitled Leninism. An Introduction to the Study of Leninism. Trotsky’s On Lenin. Notes Towards a Biography also appeared in 1924. ¹³⁵ I.V. Stalin, ‘Ob Industrializatsii i Khlebnoi Probleme’, Sochineniya vol. 11, p. 171–172, and ‘O Pravom Uklone v VKP(b)’, Sochineniya vol.12, pp. 34–39. ¹³⁶ For two succinct statements of this view, see V.I. Lenin, ‘Privet Vengerskim Rabochim’, PSS vol. 38, pp. 386–387 and ‘Ekonomika i Politika v Epokhu Diktatury Proletariata’, PSS vol. 39, p. 280. ¹³⁷ Werth (1999), p. 171.

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who had relied upon their claims to professionalism rather than ideological commitment to justify their crucial positions and roles in the building of the Soviet state. It harked back to the early suspicion of tsarist era bureaucrats, and forward into the 1930s and, initially, the show trials of the Industrial Party in November–December 1930, the Mensheviks in March 1931,¹³⁸ and Metro-Vickers engineers in April 1933, as well as a series of less prominent trials involving bacteriologists (August 1930), food industry officials (September 1930), historians (February 1931), timber industry workers (February 1932), officials of state farms (March 1933), and officials of the Commissariat of Agriculture (March 1933). Sackings and arrests of government officials, especially those inherited from the tsarist regime, occurred in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with 138,000 civil servants removed from office between 1928 and 1931.¹³⁹ Total and unquestioning commitment was now required. Ultimately NEP was rejected for four main reasons. First, despite the arguments of Bukharin and his supporters, reliance upon a private enterprise market system seemed to run counter to the collectivist impulse at the heart of Marxism. It was all very well to talk about dialectical development and the way the market created the conditions for collectivism, but for many people this did not seem credible. For them, private property needed to be abolished, not strengthened. They had not won victory in the revolution to simply hand power back to the bourgeoisie through the entrenchment of a private market economy. Second, by 1926–1927 the NEP system seemed to be running into trouble as grain procurement fell and rising prices caused increasing hardship in the cities. This was interpreted not just as a failure of the market mechanism, but as evidence of the hostility of the peasants to Soviet power. They were accused of holding back grain in order to undermine the regime and defeat the Revolution, and it was argued that the only way this resistance could be broken was by destroying the economic basis of their power, private property, and the NEP system. Third, against the background of this perceived challenge from inside the country, there was a perception of increasing danger without. The hostility of most of the rest of the world, at least its most heavily industrialized sections, had been evident since 1917, and although the sense of isolation had eased somewhat as the 1920s advanced, the war scare of 1927 enhanced sensitivities to the external environment. Confronted with a dangerous and hostile

¹³⁸ Most of the ‘Menshevik wreckers’ had been working as economists in Gosplan. By publicly casting the economists as Mensheviks, the authorities drew an explicit line between professionalism and political opposition. ¹³⁹ Werth (1999), p. 171 and Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin. Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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world, it was easy to mount the argument that the country needed to industrialize quickly, and thereby create the industrial base for national defence. The market economy, it was argued, could not achieve this quickly, particularly if its operation was characterized by the sorts of internal opposition noted earlier. Only rapid, state-based economic development could meet this external challenge. Fourth, it was in the political interests of Stalin and his supporters to support the replacement of NEP by state-driven economic development. Given that Stalin’s main opponents were the Right and the main supporters of NEP and that the other three reasons had created a reservoir of potential opponents of the continuation of NEP, it was in Stalin’s short-term political interests to support the shift to more radical methods. Was a different sort of outcome to that achieved possible? In principle, the course of collectivization could have been at a more measured pace, as in China in the first part of the 1950s. Some have argued that a slower pace, like that prior to autumn 1929, may have avoided much of the chaos and disruption attendant upon the actual program because it could have ensured that when established the new collective farms actually had sufficient equipment and resources to be able to function effectively. And if it had been carried out more slowly, it is possible that it may have rested rather more on cooperation than the actual program did. Furthermore, had the leadership been less enamoured of fast-pace industrialization, it may have been able to increase grain prices and potentially thereby increase the flow of grain into the state’s coffers.¹⁴⁰ It would also have needed less grain if the pace of industrialization had been slower. However, this all ignores two things: the perception the leadership had of its strategic position, and the effect of factional conflict. With regard to the former, given the widespread distrust in leading party circles of the kulaks and the role they could play in the village, socialism could be secured only by breaking the power of this group. The best way of achieving this was seen to be through the rapid destruction of their position through the recasting of social and economic relations in the village into a socialist form. Rapid wholesale collectivization was therefore seen as a logical response to the danger posed by the countryside. And given the perceived international danger, such consolidation at home was a logical and credible strategy. Turning to the latter, the struggle for power at the top of the party was always conducted in part in terms of policy in the countryside. Mass collectivization was at the extreme end of one side of that argument, and it was the promise of this that the ¹⁴⁰ For a discussion of some of the policy measures that could have been done differently, see Moshe Lewin, ‘The Immediate Background of Collectivization’, Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System. Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 114–118.

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victors used to defeat their final challengers, the Right Opposition. However, the perception of impending threat, and the consequent need to guard against it through rapid industrialization and re-armament, seemed to counsel against moderate speed. Even if the pace and nature of the change may actually have detracted from the country’s ability to ready itself for conflict because of the disruption, chaos, and conflict that it created, at the time the perception of the need for haste overshadowed any such concerns. And despite the temporary pause in 1930, once the full-scale assault on the villages had been launched, it would have been very difficult to have altered course and taken a more moderate approach. But, in any case, it is not clear that a more moderate approach would have resulted in less violence and conflict. The essence of the process would have been the same: the seizure of the peasants’ private property and the forcing of them into the new collective farm structures. This would have been opposed whether it was done quickly or slowly, in one step or many, and it is possible that had a slower pace been adopted, opposition would have had more time to organize on a scale greater than the local village. The greater speed with which collectivization was pursued did contribute to the brutality of the process and to the death toll. Under pressure from above to achieve optimistic targets cadres often felt impelled to use heightened coercion to achieve their ends. With many of those cadres militarized, and rendered relatively insensitive to killing and suffering by their participation in the first world war and civil war, resort to force was almost a natural reaction. The lack of humanity reflected in this state of affairs would only have been strengthened by the depersonalization of their opponents—they were the class enemy standing in the way of the bright future, not individual human beings trying to protect their homes and families—and the transcendent nature of the communism they sought to build. Also the view of the peasant possessed by urban cadres was often one that saw them as crude and unsophisticated, even lesser beings, against whom the use of violence was an acceptable course of action. The use of violent force to quell the opposition and to re-structure the villages was a natural, perhaps even inevitable, consequence. Given that any form of collectivization involved the elimination of peasants’ property rights, regardless of how fast or slow collectivization was, it is likely that it would have evoked major opposition, and thereby required significant force for its implementation. Thus, the resort to terror to engineer socio-economic transformation was not an inevitable development. The seriousness with which sections of the party contemplated NEP as a viable route to socialism shows that there was, at least in principle, an alternative to forced collectivization. That this proved

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to be a less attractive option than collectivization was a function of contingent circumstances: ideology, the fear of class-based opposition rooted in private property, the imperatives of the factional struggle, and the limitations of NEP itself in the conditions of the late 1920s all combined to produce support for the course of collectivization. Once this had been decided, the terror embedded in the revolutionary transformation of agricultural collectivization was always a very likely outcome because those who possessed property were likely to attempt to defend it against state seizure. The scale of the changes involved, the speed with which it was believed such changes should be carried out, and the obdurate opposition they provoked was always likely to lead to the commission of terrorist actions on a large scale. When these were combined with the brutalization of the public culture stemming from the civil war and the sense of circling threat, resort to terror should not be particularly surprising. The actual mode of implementation and form of collectivization that emerged were not the inevitable conclusion of the revolution, but some form of this was a highly likely outcome given the strength of the commitment to socialism and the opposition this would inevitably generate.

Inverted Revolution: ‘The Revolution Devours its Children’ The explanation for the Great Terror that had most currency during the first decades after the end of the second world war¹⁴¹ was that it was a direct result of Stalin’s paranoid fear and that he had carefully planned it from at least the early 1930s. This argument, described as the established explanation, will be discussed more fully below. The central role of the dictator that this assumed became associated with the argument that the USSR was a totalitarian state in which terror and its application against the populace was an essential quality. In the first systematic model of totalitarianism, two of its central features were said to be a ‘dictator’ typically at the head of a single mass party, and ‘A system of terror, whether physical or psychic…’¹⁴² Once established, the totalitarian paradigm gained wide currency as a means of explaining the Soviet ¹⁴¹ For a survey of a range of suggestions for the outbreak of the Terror, some bizarre, and some more soundly grounded, see F. Beck & W. Godin, Russian Purges and the Extraction of Confession (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1951), pp. 181–232. ¹⁴² The most important totalitarian theorists were Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Andre Deutsch, 1986; originally published 1951) and Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1965; originally published 1956). Also see Leonard Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London: Macmillan, 1972). The quotation is from Friedrich & Brzezinski (1956), p. 22.

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system. For many, the driver in this paradigm was Bolshevik ideology,¹⁴³ with the principal argument that the attempt to impose an ideology so at odds with the nature of society ensured that the only way this could be achieved was through terror.¹⁴⁴ However, for those who argued that terror was thereby intrinsic to the Soviet state, the winding back of terror (and indeed its public rejection through destalinization) after Stalin died, was a major problem, while the studies that showed that the degree of control over society by the centre envisaged in the totalitarian paradigm was never achieved in the USSR even called into question classic totalitarianism as a means of characterizing the Stalin period. However, the problematic nature of totalitarianism as an explanation does not gainsay those arguments about the role of ideology in the generation of the terror. For some, Marxism, in particular its utopian teleology and lack of restraints on power, and the attempts to apply it were central to the emergence of a dictatorial regime and its use of terror.¹⁴⁵ In its relevance for inverted terror, this view was linked to an organic view of the relationship between the revolution and terror, an argument that was usually mediated through notions of Leninism, Stalinism, and their relationship. This was in part a function of the association of Stalinism with totalitarianism, with terror seen as intrinsic to Stalinism. This argument has taken the form of the so-called ‘continuity thesis’, and in its strongest form saw an organic and inevitable causal link between Leninism (sometimes Bolshevism) and Stalinism.¹⁴⁶ The revolution is here mediated by Leninism, but the proponents of the continuity thesis accepted Kautsky’s argument discussed above that revolution in an under-developed country was bound to lead to high-level centralization with adherents of the continuity thesis seeing this as embodied in Leninism and inevitably leading to Stalinism. This would seem to suggest that the Great Terror was a direct result of the revolution. Another approach is suggested by Sheila Fitzpatrick who argues that although Stalinism was not ‘the intended, inevitable or desirable outcome’ of the Russian revolution, it was ‘the actual outcome,

¹⁴³ For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago. An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918–1956 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). ¹⁴⁴ This was a similar argument to that of Karl Kautsky noted earlier and to that of many conservative critics of both the USSR and revolution. ¹⁴⁵ Lovell (1984). This is a central argument in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Also see Courtois, Werth, Panné, Paczkowski, Bartosek & Margolin (1999) and Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy. A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1995). ¹⁴⁶ The continuity thesis is discussed and rigorously critiqued in Stephen F. Cohen, ‘Bolshevism and Stalinism’, Robert C. Tucker, Stalinism. Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1977). Cohen provides a guide to the vast array of publications that articulated the continuity thesis.

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the only one that exists …[and] represented a conclusion or settlement of the Russian Revolution’.¹⁴⁷ But what was the relationship between the two? Fitzpatrick argues correctly that there was ‘a logical, if not inevitable, sequence’ from the banning of factions in the party, the use of the police against Trotskyists in the late 1920s and the exile of Trotsky from the country, the proposal to apply the death penalty within the party (the Ryutin affair), and the arrest of former opposition leaders on trumped up charges of terrorist conspiracy, to the Great Terror.¹⁴⁸ This argument does not necessarily imply causality. However, later Fitzpatrick argues that ‘it does seem reasonable to see the Purge [Terror] as Stalin’s last effort of social engineering—a final product, however monstrous, of the impulse towards revolutionary transformation that had gained ascendancy in 1917.’¹⁴⁹ This does seem to imply an organic connection between Revolution and Terror, albeit mediated through Stalin. With the emergence of social history in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began to search for the roots of Stalinism and the Terror outside the realms of high politics that had been the focus of most study up until then. One such focus was on differences within the party and state, especially in terms of tensions between regional leaders and the centre. An important work by J. Arch Getty¹⁵⁰ argues that central to the period leading up to the onset of the Terror were central-regional tensions in the party, an explanation which disputes the essential unity of the period assumed in the established explanation—the purges prior to the Terror (1933–1934 chistka, and the 1935 Verification and 1936 Exchange of Party Cards) were bureaucratic housekeeping operations, the Terror was a blood purge—but which does not really explain the terror; for Getty, the membership purges of 1933–1936 were ‘only obliquely’ related to the police terror of 1937.¹⁵¹ In similar vein, Moshe Lewin¹⁵² argued the Terror was an attempt to overcome the problem of an inefficient, corrupt, and ¹⁴⁷ Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 154. ¹⁴⁸ Fitzpatrick (1982), p. 156. ¹⁴⁹ Fitzpatrick (1982), p. 159. ¹⁵⁰ J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges. The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933– 1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Getty elaborated his argument in a number of subsequent publications. For other studies of regional leaders see James R. Harris, The Great Urals. Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Roberta T. Manning ‘Government in the Soviet Countryside in the Stalinist Thirties: The Case of Belyi Raion in 1937’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 301, 1984; E.A. Rees (ed), CentreLocal Relations in the Stalinist State, 1928–1941 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and more broadly Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications. Social Tensions and Political Conflicts in the USSR 1933–1953 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991). I am interested here only in arguments seeking to explain why the Terror came about and therefore am excluding reference to that burgeoning of work which looks at the unrolling of terror among various social groups in Soviet society. ¹⁵¹ Getty (1985), p. 6. ¹⁵² Moshe Lewin, ‘Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State’, Moshe Lewin, Russia/USSR/Russia. The Drive and Drift of a Superstate (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 185–208.

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growing bureaucracy which had its roots in the traditions of peasant Russia while David Priestland¹⁵³ emphasized Stalin’s desire to replace a bureaucratic by a more mobilizational mode of functioning in the party-state; official recalcitrance and poor performance needed to be replaced by enthusiastic commitment. In this view, both the Left and the Right were purged because they supported a technicist approach based on rational economic planning and technical expertise. This explanation is similar to that accepted as a major reason for the Cultural Revolution in China, the fear that the enthusiasm and commitment that animated the Revolution had been superseded by bureaucratism and routine (this argument has clear resonance with the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism). However, there is no real evidence of Stalin ever having been sufficiently moved by such concerns to want to destroy the existing political structures in favour of a more mobilizational model; indeed much of his career and success were owed precisely to his ability to work through, shape, and be only minimally constrained by the emergent bureaucratic structures. In a parallel line of argument, some have cast the Terror more generally in terms of the perceived need to renew the leading stratum (personnel, not structures),¹⁵⁴ while others have argued (specifically in relation to Order 00447) that this was partly an attempt to create a utopian society which involved the repression of the remaining ‘anti-Soviet elements’ within the country’s borders.¹⁵⁵ But nowhere does Stalin elaborate on any of this, meaning that there is actually no direct evidence for it. Nor is there any evidence of Stalin believing in the psychic transformational effects that terror could have. It may be that he did believe that terror was a vehicle for creating the communist utopia and changing consciousness, but this was not a view he publicly articulated. Priestland’s argument highlights one important element of most explanations of the Terror, the central role of Stalin himself. As noted above, the established view assumes that from the start Stalin planned the whole process culminating in the Terror because he believed this was the only way to rid himself of challengers. This view was that Stalin’s fear of personal opposition

¹⁵³ David Priestland, ‘Terrors of Left and Right: 1937 in Comparative Perspective’, James Harris, The Anatomy of Terror. Political Violence Under Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013b), pp. 125–142, esp. pp. 129–133 and David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ¹⁵⁴ In particular see A.L. Unger, ‘Stalin’s Renewal of the Leading Stratum: A Note on the Great Purge’, Soviet Studies 20, 3, 1969, pp. 321–330 and Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928–1939’, Slavic Review 38, 3, 1979, pp. 377–402. ¹⁵⁵ Rolf Binner & Marc Junge, Kak Terror Stal Bol’shim: Sekretnyi Prikaz No. 00447 i Tekhnologiya Ego Ispolneniya (Moscow: Airo XX, 2003) discussed in Seth Bernstein, ‘Introduction to the English Language Edition’, Alexander Vatlin, Agents of Terror. Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016), p. xxvi.

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led him to initiate the 1933–1934 purge, to organize the assassination of a putative rival in Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov in December 1934, and to implement the 1935 Verification and 1936 Exchange of Party Cards, all designed to eliminate that opposition. When these failed, he turned to the blood purge. This whole process was seen to be prepared and planned by Stalin, with some nuances as to precisely why he did this. For some it was simply a lust for power, to be realized by the destruction of potential opponents and thereby the consolidation of his personal dominance.¹⁵⁶ Some (including Trotskyists) argued that he sought to eliminate those who offered an alternative democratic path to socialism.¹⁵⁷ Others argued it was an attempt at social engineering on a grand scale, to eliminate those groups that did not fit into his conception of socialist society,¹⁵⁸ an argument consistent with that which posits terror as therapeutic, as something through which the Revolution must travel in order to become hardened and inured against backsliding or Thermidorian reaction.¹⁵⁹ Many speculated about Stalin’s mental state, attributing to him such disorders as paranoia, manic depression or schizophrenia, resulting in high levels of distrust and hatred of those who, through close association, knew about his problems.¹⁶⁰ While not embracing the idea of paranoia, Stalin’s most recent biographer acknowledges his extreme distrust and ‘maniacal suspiciousness’.¹⁶¹ However, there is no concrete evidence whatsoever that Stalin had a longrange, detailed plan in mind. Certainly he was directly and personally responsible for what happened in the 1930s—he was central to all of the major decisions directing the Terror, he took a close interest in the course of the major trials including reportedly being involved in the scripting of them, and

¹⁵⁶ Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1964 rev. ed.), p. 441. Fainsod also speculates that the destruction of the Old Bolsheviks may have been a reprisal for past insubordination. ¹⁵⁷ For example, Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge. The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and Vadim Z. Rogovin, Stalin’s Terror of 1937–1938. Political Genocide in the USSR (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2009). ¹⁵⁸ For example, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas. A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Peter Holquist, ‘“Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Perspective’, Journal of Modern History 69, 3, 1997, pp. 415–450; and David Hoffman, Stalinist Values. The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). ¹⁵⁹ This echoes the position of Gilbert Romme in revolutionary France. ¹⁶⁰ For example, see the psychobiography by Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1879–1929. A Study in History and Personality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974) and Stalin in Power. The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990). Roy Medvedev (1989 ) also noted psychological problems. ¹⁶¹ Stephen Kotkin, Stalin. Vol.II. Waiting for Hitler 1928–1941 (London: Allen Lane, 2017), pp. 492–493.

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he signed many of the lists of victims forwarded to the leadership¹⁶²—but he shares this responsibility with many of the other leaders¹⁶³ and this does not seem to have been because he was following a pre-established plan (although there appears to have been some forethinking in the way the show trials were scripted so that each would plant the seeds for the next). He was consistent in wanting to consolidate his power and make himself invulnerable to challenge, but this seems more to have been the product of a series of sequential decisions, taking advantage of perceived opportunities, than of a worked-out plan of action. As Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov show,¹⁶⁴ Stalin’s policy often appeared hesitant and reflects someone feeling his way rather than the decisive implementation of a pre-conceived plan; see for example, the delays between the implication of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and later Bukharin in oppositional activity and the bringing of decisive action against them. But why did Stalin feel potentially vulnerable, and therefore launch the Terror? The established account posits that there was a moderate faction inside the Soviet leadership that blocked Stalin on various measures, particularly on the imposition of the death penalty on Ryutin in 1932, that was able to introduce a relaxation in domestic policy in 1932–1934,¹⁶⁵ and that wanted to replace Stalin with Kirov at the XVII Congress.¹⁶⁶ However, the documents of party meetings at this time show no evidence of such a faction; the liberalization in domestic policy seems to have been a policy of the whole leadership including Stalin, not something forced upon him. Nor is there evidence of a split in the leadership at this time. Some of the Politburo did fall during the Terror; among full members, Kuibyshev died of a heart attack, Ordzhonikidze committed suicide, Chubar and Kosior were arrested and shot; among candidates, Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yezhov, and Eikhe were arrested and shot, and Petrovsky was sacked but not arrested. Of these, only Kuibyshev’s demise was from natural causes. While some of these people had been critical of Stalin or the ¹⁶² For some figures on how many lists different leaders signed, see Werth (1999), p. 189. On Stalin personally, see E.A. Rees, ‘Stalin: Architect of the Terror’, Harris (2013b), pp. 44–65. ¹⁶³ Yezhov was particularly important. As well as his activist leadership in the NKVD, he was involved in writing some of the main documents and he spent more time in Stalin’s office than any other official except Molotov during the time of the Terror. Iain Lauchlan, ‘Chekist Mentalité and the Origins of the Great Terror’, Harris (2013b), p. 15. ¹⁶⁴ J.Arch Getty & Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). ¹⁶⁵ The incorporation of the OGPU into the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1934 is often seen as reflective of such moderation. However, what this did was to enable the security apparatus to gain control over the civil police (the militia) and thereby expand the scope of their responsibilities and powers. Any restriction imposed by its incorporation into the NKVD was very short-lived. On the ‘moderate turn’ and its support by the leadership as a whole rather than it being forced on Stalin, see Lenoe (2010), pp. 129–130. ¹⁶⁶ In fact only three votes seem to have been cast against Stalin. Lenoe (2010), pp. 128 & 757 fn. 56.

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course he was following, they did not constitute either a serious opposition or a cohesive group. Many former members of the leadership fell in the Terror (and some relatives of current members also suffered), but the key group around Stalin generally survived (with Yezhov as the main exception). Contemporary conflict and division within the leadership was not a central driver of the Terror. However, there were grounds for Stalin to suspect that elements in the party were not as enthusiastic about his leadership as he would have wanted them to be. His criticism of regional party leaders in 1930, the reported opposition to his suggestion that the death penalty be applied to Ryutin in 1932, and the rumours of votes against him at the XVII Congress may all be considered to be emblematic of the existence of a level of reservation about Stalin and his leadership among the party elite and membership more broadly. If Stalin was the sort of paranoid that many of his actions suggest and that many authors have concluded, this apparent of anti-Stalin sentiment would have been worrying. But even so, these putative challenges were handled through the normal processes without there being either any real challenge to his position or resort to large-scale violence or terror. The answer to why this was not enough for Stalin may be found in the regime’s, and his, conception of opposition. The combination of the regime’s Manichean approach and its understanding of opposition in elemental class terms transformed what may have been an undertone of dissatisfaction into a perception of a burgeoning challenge to the regime as a whole. The various oppositions in the party—the two-faced oppositionists, enemies with a party card in their pockets, the Zinovievists, the Trotskyists, and the Rightists—were all part of the more general opposition of the ‘bourgeoisie’ which hoped to overthrow the rule of the proletariat. They represented merely the cutting edge of the much more basic bourgeois opposition to the Revolution, a conception that was intrinsic to the regime and what it saw itself to be about. The 1933–1934 purge, the 1935 Verification and the 1936 Exchange were about dealing with that oppositional cutting edge in the party, but they had been unsuccessful in this. Obstruction, foot-dragging, and outright opposition by lower-level party and state officials as well as the continued existence of ‘family groups’ throughout the political structure (local cliques following their own interests rather than the wishes of the centre) could be taken to imply that the routine methods of housekeeping could not eliminate the dangers these posed to the regime. Agricultural collectivization had created the conditions for the elimination of the independent petty bourgeois peasantry while the mass-scale industrialization drive accelerated the process whereby a hardened working class could emerge as a basis for continuing party rule. But

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both of these processes were relatively young, with the result that petty bourgeois mentality had not yet been expunged from among the peasantry and hardened class consciousness had not yet emerged among the working class. Furthermore, these processes had also created significant resentment among those who had lost out: displaced peasants, those caught up in the successive sweeps against undesirable elements, people expelled from the party or who had lost their jobs, the mass of itinerant people who took to the roads in the face of the social and economic dislocation, all could be seen to pose a distinct threat. The 1936 Constitution may have exacerbated this because it accorded Soviet citizens a range of new freedoms which those who had been incarcerated but had recently been released (but who remained under suspicion) had increasingly sought to exercise. With elections scheduled in 1937 providing enhanced opportunity for this to occur, the fear that these ‘former’ people might pose a threat to the regime appears to have risen within the leadership. Given the Manichean attitude that prevailed, this meant that the danger of bourgeois regeneration in the society was believed to remain high. This would be consistent with the view of the mass operations as designed to remove from society those social elements alien to the socialist society that was being created.¹⁶⁷ Stalin’s theory that the closer socialism approached the greater would be the class conflict could certainly be seen as justifying the Terror, especially in the context of the announcement of the achievement of socialism in 1936. The perceived danger seen to be posed by this domestic opposition was increased by the hostile international environment: continuing general hostility by established capitalist powers, and in particular, the emergence of the fascist threat in Germany, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Fear of war had been a constant for the Soviet leadership from the end of the civil war, and this was always seen as being linked to domestic opposition. Poland was a particular focus of this. Following the rise of the hostile Pilsudski regime in Poland in October 1926, the June 1927 assassination of the Soviet ambassador to Poland and the contemporaneous war scare, the Soviet leaders were concerned about the possibility of Polish assistance to rebelling Ukrainian peasants during collectivization. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 raised the prospect of war in the east, while the rise of the Nazis in Germany increased their concerns. In 1936 this sense of threat ‘dramatically increased’;¹⁶⁸ in March Germany seized the Rhineland ¹⁶⁷ For example, Hagenloh (2009). ¹⁶⁸ On the importance of the perceived foreign threat, see James Harris, ‘Intelligence and Threat Perception: Defending the Revolution, 1917–1937’, Harris (2013b), pp. 29–43; David Shearer, ‘Stalin at War, 1918–1953; ‘Patterns of Violence and Foreign Threat’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas

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and in July the Spanish civil war broke out. The former highlighted the potentially aggressive action of a state whose leadership was clearly hostile to the USSR, while the latter seemed to illustrate the danger from within. The worry was that in the event of war, domestic opposition would act as a ‘fifth column’, either working to weaken the war effort or even rising in support of the foreign aggressor. Domestic danger was thereby heightened by potential international peril. It was the combination of domestic and foreign enemies that was the danger, and, with the acknowledged approach of war, Stalin may have sought to ensure that there was no fifth column in the rear.¹⁶⁹ Under these conditions it would not have been surprising for leaders to assume that the regular way of doing things was not going to result in the elimination of such an opposition. After all, the evaluation of the 1933–1934 chistka, the Verification, and the Exchange was that they had been to a degree subverted by lower-level officials, initially interpreted as maladministration but soon taken as evidence of sabotage. Under these circumstances, given the visceral nature of the threat posed by such class opposition, Stalin may have believed that extraordinary measures were the only means to rid the regime and himself of such opposition. But the question remains, even if Stalin believed this, why did his fellow leaders go along with it, especially when some of their number were among its victims? Much of the logic sketched above would have applied as much to them as it did to Stalin: class opposition to the regime and thereby to them as well. They may well have believed that had the Trotskyists been able to replace Stalin, they would also be replaced, so it was not just a question of the survival of the Revolution, but of them personally also. Furthermore, each would individually have been certain that they were not sympathetic to the alien class outlook that they believed threatened them all, so if they were not thus tarred there was no reason to think that they would become victims of the process. And in any case, the top leadership was much less affected by the Terror than those sections of the party lower down,¹⁷⁰ and when it did strike the leading figures, it took individuals sequentially rather than all at the same time. There

66, 2, 2018, pp. 188–217; Oleg Khlevnyuk, ‘The Objectives of the Great Terror, 1937–1938’, David L. Hoffman (ed), Stalinism. The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 102–104; and James Harris, The Great Fear. Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ¹⁶⁹ An early proponent of this view was Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 376–377. More substantially, Harris (2013b & 2016), David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism. Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), Khlevnyuk (2003), pp. 102–104, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, ‘Archives of the Terror. Developments in the Historiography of Stalin’s Purges’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 22, 2, 2012, p. 377. ¹⁷⁰ On this see the classic T.H. Rigby, ‘Was Stalin a Disloyal Patron?’, Soviet Studies XXXVIII, 3, 1986, pp. 311–324.

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was probably little sense of common threat that would stand in the way of their support for the use of Terror to combat the perceived existential threat confronting the Revolution. As the Terror wore on, the fear that any reticence about, let alone opposition to, the Terror would lead to their own demise is also likely to have become more influential. This latter concern is also important for explaining the extent of the Terror. Although it is clear that the basic guidelines for each stage of the Terror emanated from Moscow, the situation on the ground was also shaped by the attitudes and actions of the individual local officials. In the uncertain times when any perceived deficiencies in performance could be interpreted as evidence of oppositionist sentiments, there was an incentive for individual officials to be extra zealous in the performance of their duties; better to exceed the victim target than to fall below it. This means that individual local initiative on the part of those whose job it was to prosecute the terror was instrumental in shaping how that played out in the regions and thereby its overall dimensions. Perhaps hardened by the brutalized culture from the civil war period followed by agricultural collectivization and fearful of arrest if they were deemed to be slacking, local officials had some responsibility for the widening dimensions of the Terror.¹⁷¹ This does not, however, detract from central responsibility for the Terror. This is not to suggest that the Terror was rational in any common sensical way. After all, the destruction of the army top command and the widespread disruption in administrative circles on the eve of a war that all knew was likely was not a rational act. But the frame within which they were operating, characterized by a Manichean outlook and a view of opposition in ambiguous class terms, added to the deteriorating international environment, makes the descent into Terror more explicable. Thus, Stalin was central to the outbreak and course of the Great Terror, meaning that any connections between 1917 and the inverted terror were mediated through political agency, principally the central initiating and directing role of Stalin. The inverted terror did not come about through some selfpropelling inner revolutionary impulse, but by political decision of the central decision-makers. And while the regime of which those central decision-makers were part came to power as a result of the revolution, the dominance of those particular decision-makers or the decisions they would take were not foreordained by the revolution. The political agency of Stalin was the key, but the ¹⁷¹ On their actions, motivations and understanding of the position they were in, see the discussion of some of the perpetrators in Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial. Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Vatlin (2016).

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environment of suspicion and fear of opposition was also relevant. Individual agency was also important in revolutionary and transformational terror in the sense that, respectively, Lenin and Stalin were instrumental in their emergence, but both types of terror were also organically connected to the revolution and the need to defeat opposition, consolidate the regime in power and implement its revolutionary program. In this sense their origins were different from those of the inverted terror.

China Revolutionary and Transformational Terror: Importance of ‘the Act’ The spatial and temporal structure of the Chinese revolution was very different from both the French and Russian revolutions. In the latter two, the main action occurred in the capital (although obviously there was significant activity elsewhere as well) and over a relatively short space of time. In China, following the communist party’s flight from Shanghai associated with the Guomindang (GMD) attack in 1927, most of the revolutionary activity was decentralized, taking place in the base areas and through guerrilla warfare and extended over some two decades. This was a pattern that should have ensured a sense of isolation, perhaps also vulnerability, for the leaderships of these scattered areas. However, that may have been ameliorated by the prism through which they viewed their situation. While class analysis meant that the practical boundaries of the opposition were obscure, so too were the boundaries of class support. And unlike in Russia, the class basis of that perceived support (poor and perhaps middle peasants) actually constituted a majority of the population. This means that the sense of isolation and vulnerability felt by the Bolsheviks, and by the French revolutionary elite, was not replicated in China. In China the sequence was different with the capture of power coming at the end of the wars against the Japanese and then the GMD in 1945 and 1949 respectively compared with France and Russia where such conflict followed the collapse of the ancien regime. Clearly terrorist action emerged out of the fighting as it did in the other two cases, but it was also evident as the communists sought to introduce land reform in areas that came under their control before they were able to gain national power; as in France, revolutionary and transformational terror coincided. But unlike in France and Russia, the new rulers of China did not have to face a major foreign invasion as soon as they

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had claimed national power, although they did become involved in the major conflict that broke out on the Korean peninsula in 1950. This did not spill over onto Chinese soil, but the presence of such a conflict on its border heightened the sense of security threat for the new regime, a fact only partly ameliorated by the presence of a powerful international ally in the Soviet Union. And as in the other cases, the extension of control out from the centre was not achieved overnight and in some local areas there was violent conflict and brutality as opposition was put down. The different nature of the Chinese revolution had implications for the role of ideology in the generation of terror in China. Lenin’s initial thoughts on terror in the revolution occurred when that revolution still seemed a long way off and he was physically located outside Russia, although his later writings did occur during the process of revolution and the consolidation of power. In contrast, Mao’s writings for the most part were completed during his involvement in direct revolutionary activity, and from the outset he saw terror as having a part to play in the conduct of the revolution. In his report on the situation in Hunan in February 1927,¹⁷² he itemized methods the peasants could use to ‘deal political blows’ to the landlords. One of these was ‘shooting’ (or ‘execution’), which he argued should be applied by the peasants along with other sections of the popular masses, but should be limited to ‘the worst local bullies and bad gentry’. After listing examples of the bad behaviour of local bullies and bad gentry, Mao declared ‘Such being the cruelty of the local bullies and bad gentry in former days, and such being the white terror they created in the countryside, how can one say that the peasants should not now rise and shoot one or two [in 1967 “a few”] of the local bullies and bad gentry to create just a little reign of terror in order to suppress the counterrevolutionaries?’ Violence, described by Mao as terror, was therefore seen as an appropriate instrument to overcome those opposed to the revolution. These were not people who might be confused; they were the enemies of the revolution. But Mao’s view does not yet appear to be grounded in a coherent set of ideological principles except for the Manichean class-based outlook he gleaned from Marxism and his nativistic faith in the worth of ‘the people’. In October 1928 Mao bemoaned the failure in the past in the rural areas ‘to impose a severe Red terror, and to massacre the landlords and despotic ¹⁷² Mao Zedong, ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’, Stuart R. Schram (ed), Mao’s Road to Power. Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949. Volume II. National Revolution and Social Revolution December 1920–June 1927 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994) pp. 429–464. The following quotation is from p. 447. Mao’s works were often rewritten and adjusted in various ways before publication, especially in the standard volumes appearing after 1949. For this report see Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 23–59, and for the slightly changed quotation, p. 38–39.

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gentry as well as their running dogs’, and that the overall strategy in the rural struggles was to ‘unite the poor peasants; pay attention to the middle peasants; plunge into the land revolution; strictly impose Red terror; massacre the landlords and the despotic gentry as well as their running dogs without the slightest compunction; threaten the rich peasants by means of the Red terror so that they will not dare to assist the landlord class’.¹⁷³ Mao’s view was clear: terror could be used against the class enemy, but he was insistent that this should be administered by the masses who were to be mobilized into the struggle.¹⁷⁴ Mao’s view on the need for terror saw it as inherent in the revolutionary process, was predicated on the strength and continuing opposition of class enemies, and applied to both revolutionary and transformational terror. While Mao continued to emphasize the need for violence in combating counter-revolution, he also warned on numerous occasions that terror and killing must not be indiscriminate, it must be targeted at those who warranted it. In March 1951 he declared ‘The suppression of counter-revolutionaries must be carried out precisely, cautiously, and in a planned and methodical way. Besides, it must be controlled from above.’¹⁷⁵ Two months later he said, ‘The number of counter-revolutionaries to be killed must be kept within certain proportions’¹⁷⁶ Mao clearly saw violence and terror as an instrument to be wielded in a careful fashion in order to get rid of the enemies of the Revolution. Central to Mao’s view of terror is that it was a weapon in class struggle.¹⁷⁷ Mao argued that class struggle would continue to exist following the victory of socialist transformation. Crucial here was his belief in the continued existence of contradictions in socialist society and, by extension, in the party. In his major work on this,¹⁷⁸ Mao distinguished between two different kinds

¹⁷³ Mao Zedong, ‘Draft Resolution of the Second Congress of Xian Party Organizations in the Hunan-Jiangsi Border Area’ (5 October 1928), Stuart R. Schram (ed), Mao’s Road to Power. Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949. vol. III. From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangsi Soviets July 1927–December 1930 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), p. 74. Only the first part of this document (and not including the quoted text) appeared in the post-1949 official collection of Mao’s works, under the title ‘Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?’, Selected Works (1967), vol.1, pp. 63–72. ¹⁷⁴ Mao Zedong, ‘The Present Political Situation and the Tasks of the First Front Army and of the Party in Jiangxi’ (26 October 1930), Schram (1995), p. 585. ¹⁷⁵ Cited in Michel Oksenberg, ‘The Political Leader’, Dick Wilson (ed), Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History. A Preliminary Assessment Organized by The China Quarterly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 83. ¹⁷⁶ Mao Zedong, ‘The Party’s Mass Line Must be Followed in Suppressing Counter-revolutionaries’, Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), vol. V, p. 51. ¹⁷⁷ For comprehensive surveys of his thought see Arthur A. Cohen, The Communism of Mao Tsetung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) and John Bryan Starr, Continuing the Revolution. The Political Thought of Mao (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). ¹⁷⁸ Mao Zedong, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’. For the original text, see Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek & Eugene Wu (eds), The Secret Speeches of Chairman

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of contradictions, antagonistic and non-antagonistic. Antagonistic contradictions were those basic differences that existed between ‘the people’, or those who supported the party’s line in building socialism, and those who opposed it, the ‘enemies of the people’. These differences were irreconcilable and could be resolved only through the victory of one side over the other. Non-antagonistic contradictions were those differences that existed within ‘the people’. They could be reconciled and would always be subject to the common interests of the people as a whole. Non-antagonistic contradictions could be resolved through the process of rectification, antagonistic contradictions required the purge. Counter-revolutionaries (a manifestation of antagonistic contradictions) were to be subject to extreme violence.¹⁷⁹ Terror remained ideologically validated throughout. Like Lenin, Mao’s thought was Manichean and eschatological. Premised on the assumption of continuing progress towards communism, Mao divided the world into supporters and opponents of that course of development. Violence and terror were important means of pushing that progress forward because they involved the destruction of opposition to that progress. But Mao also saw another positive side to terror, achieved through one means whereby that terror was exercised. For Mao, an individual’s values could be re-shaped and consolidated through the application of criticism and self-criticism in struggle meetings. In his view those struggle meetings could result in the transformation of the thoughts and values of those subject to personal struggle as well as those involved in administering the process. Terrorist activism was instructive and a positive force for changing people’s psychology. The insistence on mass involvement in the terror against former exploiters was designed in part to promote psychological change within the populace. Mao believed that only after the people had confronted, criticized, and denounced their former exploiters in public meetings (the so-called struggle meetings) and then put them to death would the psychological hold these groups had on the people be broken. Terror could thus assist in the transformation of malleable human nature and the creation of a new revolutionary subject. Participation in terror was therapeutic and consciousness-shaping. As noted above, the spatial and temporal qualities of the Chinese revolution fuelled the coincidence of revolutionary and transformational terror. Prior

Mao. From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 131–190. The official, later, version is in Selected Works (1977), vol. V, pp. 384–421. ¹⁷⁹ See the discussion in the section entitled ‘The Relationship Between Revolution and CounterRevolution’ in Mao Zedong, ‘On the Ten Major Relationships’ (25 April 1956), Selected Works (1977), vol. V, pp. 298–301.

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to 1949, the communists sought in the villages they had under their control to promote land reform in such a way as to revise local property relations, undercut the power of local authorities, and destroy the opposition and their supporters, thereby combining the two types of terror. They did not seek to do away with private ownership (at least after the failure of radical reform in the Jinggang Mountains in the late 1920s) but to pass the land into the hands of those poorer strata within the village that they believed would support them. While as in the Soviet case this usually meant cadres from outside the village supervised land reform, the Chinese sought to mobilize local villagers into the quest for land reform through means of struggle meetings. Soviet cadres had also sought to involve local villagers in the process, but it seems to have been much more structured in the Chinese case with the struggle meetings being performative arenas designed to both radicalize the peasantry and isolate perceived counter-revolutionary elements. This combination of aims— land reform and destruction of opposition—underpinned the coercive nature of this process, and linked revolutionary and transformational terror. When power was achieved and a more national approach was possible, the new rulers of China drew on two experiences. The first experience was their own prior to the announcement of the People’s Republic in October 1949. The success of land reform in many of the villages they controlled during the war informed the way they sought to implement land reform after 1949, including the mobilization of villagers through struggle meetings. They had a model informed by their own experience and that they knew worked, promising a smoother process than in the USSR. The second was the Soviet experience of collectivization, from which they seem to have taken the lesson that a more graduated approach was likely to lead to less disruption and conflict, and to a better outcome. Such a more moderated approach would have appeared more possible than in the USSR because of a reduced perception of a combined internal and external threat, reflecting in part the party’s view of its relationship with most peasants as not hostile, as it was in the USSR. Rather than being seen as an alien and hostile force as it was perceived in Russia, in China the peasantry constituted the water within which the communists could swim. Also although power was not consolidated in every part of the country for some time (indeed Taiwan remains ‘unliberated’), there was no equivalent of the Russian civil/foreign intervention war where both domestic forces and those of international powers were active on the territory of the new regime. And although the Korean War broke out in 1950 and at one stage US troops approached the border, this was not seen as constituting the level of existential threat to the regime that was present in the

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French revolutionary wars or the Russian civil war, in part because of the international support China received from the Soviet Union. There was therefore less immediate military imperative hastening the drive for collectivization and industrialization than there had been in the USSR. In ideological terms, the Chinese communists were motivated by the same sort of vision that had guided the Bolsheviks. A society of equals in which property was not held in private hands mandated the complete revision of property relations in the village, but the twin experiences noted above counselled a more cautious approach than that adopted in the USSR. Until the Great Leap Forward collectivization moved ahead by stages, and although there were debates at various times about the pace of such change,¹⁸⁰ it was not until Mao vastly accelerated this with the Leap that a sense of moderation disappeared. While terror did occur during this graduated process because many peasants objected to the proposed re-ordering of land relations and therefore had to be coerced, the scale of this was dwarfed by the suffering of the Great Leap. In both phases (that is both before and during the Leap), the widespread use of struggle meetings exposed many people to incidents that frequently degenerated into instances of both physical and psychic terror. This means that, because struggle meetings were intrinsic to the process, the high likelihood of terror was also built into that process. As the Soviet example shows, struggle meetings were not an inevitable part of land reform; it was a political choice to use them, reflecting Mao’s belief that participation in such meetings developed the revolutionary consciousness of the participants and thereby helped to create the new socialist person. Therefore the terror that could be embedded in them was a function of political decisions rather than an inevitable result of the process of land reform itself. But even without the struggle meetings, coercion would have accompanied land reform because of the opposition such reform was bound to provoke. The speed of the change would not have been decisive in whether terror was present or not, but it was probably instrumental in the levels and concentration of it. In those instances of attempted rapid change, Soviet collectivization and the Great Leap Forward, the levels of violence and death were much higher than in the more moderate period in China of the early 1950s. So in revolutionary transformation, terror was implicit in the process because this was necessary to overcome the opposition to the changes, and in particular their magnitude, that were being introduced. It was the magnitude ¹⁸⁰ For example, see Frederick C. Teiwes & Warren Sun (eds), The Politics of Agricultural Cooperativization in China. Mao, Deng Zihui, and the ‘High Tide’ of 1955 (London: Routledge, 2015).

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of the changes being sought and the resultant level of opposition that were central to the higher levels of transformational terror in the communist revolutions than in France. However, the level of terror and the degree of violence also seems to have been a function of political decision-making, and here the Chinese pre-1949 experience was a crucial factor in shaping the process of collectivization, at least until the Great Leap Forward when human agency in the form of Mao intervened decisively. This role of human agency seems even greater in the case of the third type of terror, that which is turned on the regime itself.

Inverted Terror: Mobilize the Masses to Purge the Elite Perhaps somewhat paradoxically given scholars’ diverse reactions to the Cultural Revolution at the time, there has been much more agreement about the explanation for the outbreak of the inverted terror in China than in either the French or Soviet cases. While there has not been complete unanimity over the origins of the Cultural Revolution, differences and disagreements have tended to focus more on empirical explanations of particular events than on the overall explanatory framework. At the centre of the established explanation is Mao and his growing dissatisfaction with the course of the Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, observers at first found it difficult to come to agreement about what it was and what it meant. The initial interpretation was that it was simply a power struggle between leadership factions.¹⁸¹ This interpretation essentially accepted at face value a crude understanding of the predominant theme coming out of the Cultural Revolution especially in its early period that this was a struggle between the advocates of ‘two roads’, the capitalist road and the socialist road. The argument that there were ‘capitalist roaders’ in positions of power in the regime represented most importantly by Liu Shaoqi was seen as evidence of factional struggle, and following the line of argument emanating from Mao’s Cultural Revolution headquarters, this struggle between the two roads was extended back to the beginning of communist power in China. The Cultural Revolution clearly involved the settling of some long-standing personal differences,¹⁸² but the emphasis upon factional conflict is misleading. ¹⁸¹ This sort of approach is captured in the following title: The Great Power Struggle in China (Hong Kong: Asia Research Centre, 1969). ¹⁸² For the view that it was in part about Mao settling personal scores, see Frank Diko¨tter, The Cultural Revolution. A People’s History (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. xi.

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While factions did exist,¹⁸³ they were not the chief axis around which elite politics turned in the pre-Cultural Revolution period. The problem here was the identification of a ‘capitalist road’ with an actual faction. Given the nature of the way in which enemies were conceptualized in China—in class terms with their danger lying in the way they could erode the essence of the socialist revolutionary project—concrete factions were less important than the values they represented. The Cultural Revolution was therefore directed at cultural change, at driving out those values that might contribute to a restoration of capitalism, to stop the Revolution from degenerating into revisionism as Mao came to believe the Russian revolution had done. Mao was central to this, as reflected in Harding’s view that the Cultural Revolution was a result of ‘Mao’s restless quest for revolutionary purity in a postrevolutionary age.’¹⁸⁴ How did this result in the terror that was manifested in the Cultural Revolution? One of the key questions about the pre-Cultural Revolution period in China relates to the position of Mao and the degree to which he encountered opposition in the upper ranks of the party. At the time of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Mao was the acknowledged primary figure in the regime. His authority had been formally recognized in the party constitution adopted in 1945 which had declared his ‘ideas’ as ‘the guiding principles of all [the party’s] work’ while two years earlier he had been accorded the right to make decisions unilaterally on any matters being considered by the party Secretariat (its central administrative body).¹⁸⁵ Mao’s predominance rested on his personal authority rather than any position he occupied. Throughout the 1949–1965 period Mao was the predominant leader and could get his way on issues if he really insisted. While there were factions within the leadership, Mao’s personal authority was basically unchallenged, and he was considered the ultimate authority. This does not mean the leadership was composed of acolytes who meekly accepted everything Mao said. The leadership, which ¹⁸³ On factions in Chinese communism of this period, see Graeme Gill, Bridling Dictators. Rules and Authoritarian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 71–75; Andrew J. Nathan, ‘A Factionalism Model for CCP Politics’, The China Quarterly 53, 1973, pp. 34–66; Tang Tsou, ‘Prolegomenon to the Study of Informal Groups in CCP Politics’, The China Quarterly 65, 1976, pp. 98–116; Lucian W. Pye, The Dynamics of Faction and Consensus in Chinese Politics: A Model and Some Propositions (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation R-2566-AF, 1980). There is also a large literature focusing on the post-Cultural Revolution period. ¹⁸⁴ Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, Roderick MacFarquhar (ed), The Politics of China. Sixty Years of The People’s Republic of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 147. ¹⁸⁵ Respectively ‘Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party (June 11, 1945)’, Conrad Brandt, Benjamin Schwartz & John K. Fairbank (eds), A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 422 and Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘The Establishment and Consolidation of the New Regime, 1949–1957’, MacFarquhar (2011), p. 12. Direct reference to his thinking was removed from the 1956 party constitution, but the new formulation did indirectly make reference to it. This was apparently done at Mao’s instigation. Gill (2021), p. 135 fn. 37.

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remained remarkably stable throughout this period,¹⁸⁶ comprised veteran revolutionaries whose revolutionary lineage was often as strong as Mao’s. They had status because they had suffered for their commitment, many of them had expansive egos, but they deferred to Mao. This meant that while other leaders may disagree with him and make their cases, ultimately, they accepted Mao’s decision.¹⁸⁷ Mao remained above the factions and intervened decisively when he thought this was necessary.¹⁸⁸ There were only two major instances of factional conflict before the Cultural Revolution. The first was in 1954–1955 when Gao Gang and Rao Shushi tried to mobilize regional party and state leaders and the military to unseat some of Mao’s leadership colleagues (but not Mao), and Mao intervened in opposition to this, leading to the collapse of the conspiracy.¹⁸⁹ In Mao’s eyes the second instance was much more serious. This involved the criticism of the Great Leap Forward by Peng Dehuai in 1959.¹⁹⁰ Although the thrust of Peng’s criticism was not directed explicitly at Mao himself but at the excesses of the policy, Mao interpreted it as a personal challenge and had Peng removed. The importance of this for our purposes is that widespread acknowledgement of the difficulties the Leap had run into placed a question mark over Mao’s economic expertise and his judgement. And Mao could not be sure how many of his colleagues secretly agreed with Peng’s criticisms. This seems to have been a turning point for Mao. Up until this time, steady progress had been made in the socialist transformation of China both in the cities and in the countryside through land reform. While Mao may have wanted faster progress in the socialization of ¹⁸⁶ Of the thirteen people elected to the Politburo in 1945, eleven were still there at the end of 1965 (and one of those who was not had died), while of the twenty-three elected in 1956, nineteen were still there in 1966 (two had died). ¹⁸⁷ Mao’s position did sometimes change as a result of the arguments of others. ¹⁸⁸ Teiwes (2011), pp. 14–15. ¹⁸⁹ There have been different interpretations of the Gao-Rao affair. For example, see Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1990) and Avery Goldstein, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics. Structural Constraints and Politics in China, 1949–1978 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 5. ¹⁹⁰ For differing views on the nature of this event, which actually illustrate different approaches to the period as a whole, see Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, China’s Road to Disaster. Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward 1955–1959 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1999), pp. 202–212; Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 2. The Great Leap Forward 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Parris H. Chang, Power and Policy in China (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), and David Bachman, Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Chang gives a ‘two line struggle’ interpretation emphasizing the role of factional division within the elite, Bachman focuses on bureaucratic politics, MacFarquhar stresses leadership conflict but differs from the ‘two line struggle’ approach by emphasizing Mao’s power while at the same time arguing that he was dependent upon the support of his leadership colleagues, while Teiwes and Sun see Mao more powerful again while relying not on the political calculations of his colleagues (as MacFarquhar does) but on their ‘instinctive obedience’ to his authority.

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the countryside, he remained content that movement was going in the correct direction, towards socialism. However, the slowing down and even reversal following the high point of the Leap, even though Mao had accepted that a more moderate course was necessary given the crisis induced by the Leap’s failure, caused him concern that the drive towards socialism might come under challenge. What was important here was the overwhelming degree of support in leading ranks for the moderation of policy, something that caused him to question the continuing revolutionary credentials of the other members of the leadership. The effect of this was exacerbated by his personal withdrawal to the ‘second line’ of leadership in 1959. This had been anticipated for some time and was at Mao’s own instigation so was not part of a demotion in the wake of the failures of the Leap. Mao even stopped attending Politburo meetings.¹⁹¹ What it meant was that Mao would step back from day-to-day decision-making to take a more strategic approach to the direction of the Revolution. His withdrawal from daily decision-making did not mean he had no role; he remained the ultimate arbiter retaining the right to approve policy made by the other leaders.¹⁹² However, his stepping back from daily policy development combined with his increased suspicion about possible backsliding by leadership colleagues was a potent mix. The problem from Mao’s perspective is that during the first decade of the regime’s existence a process of what we would see as routinization and institutionalization of the regime had set in, reflected in the growing regularization of administration and political life. Certainly, the frequency of campaigns of mass mobilization in the 1950s did not fit into this pattern, but the objects of such campaigns were mainly particular sectors of the population at large rather than the politico-administrative structure which had generally settled in to a pattern of regularized procedures.¹⁹³ In practice what this meant was the primacy of bureaucracy over voluntarism, technicism over enthusiasm, and proceduralism over spontaneity. This process arose from within the institutional structures of the party-state, but it also reflected the preferences of most of the elite (but not Mao). Regularity, consistency, and predictability not only facilitated efficient administration, but also seemed to embody the promise of

¹⁹¹ Kenneth Lieberthal, ‘The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yan’an Leadership 1958–1965’, MacFarquhar (2011), p. 122. ¹⁹² On the shift see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 1. Contradictions Among the People 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 152–156. On leaders checking with Mao before committing to policies, see Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. 3. The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961–1966 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 66, 199, 267–268 & 344. ¹⁹³ For a discussion of this in regard to the apex of the system, see Gill (2021).

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certainty and security. Most of the elite assumed that because the emergent procedures had a special role for Mao built into the policy process, that he was satisfied with this set of arrangements. However, at this time the lesson Mao was drawing from the Soviet experience became relevant. Around this time, with relations with the Soviet Union becoming increasingly strained, Mao came to the conclusion that, under Stalin’s heirs, the USSR was abandoning the path of socialism and degenerating into revisionism. For him, this decline of the first socialist revolution into a revisionist embarkation onto the path to capitalism constituted a real lesson for China.¹⁹⁴ It seemed that no revolution was secure from the danger of degeneration and the only way of guarding against this was further cultural revolutions to secure the dominance of revolutionary socialist values and to drive out those that potentially could have challenged those values. As his concern grew about the danger to the Revolution reflected in the Soviet experience, Mao became increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of his leadership colleagues. Despite their continued attempts to involve him in the policy-making process by referring matters to him before announcing decisions (including delaying decisions to seek his imprimatur when he was away from Beijing, which he was frequently), he became convinced that they were using his place in the ‘second line’ to isolate him from what was happening. He felt cut off and ignored as, he believed, his colleagues followed a course that threatened to lead to the corruption of the Revolution. Increasingly this attitude led to frustration among the other leaders. They tired of Mao’s carping and the seeming contradiction of his position, believing that the Chairman seemed to be seeking both general oversight as well as detailed involvement. The result was dissatisfaction on both sides. Mao attempted to remedy what he saw to be the growing problem of the degeneration of the Revolution through enhanced emphasis on class struggle in the early 1960s and the introduction of the Socialist Education Movement (also called the Four Cleanups Movement) in 1963.¹⁹⁵ Beginning as an attempt to cleanse politics, economy, ideology, and organization, Mao saw this as a way of rolling back those challenges to collectivism in the countryside that had marked the moderation of agricultural policy in the wake of the Leap. ¹⁹⁴ For documents reflecting Mao’s position, see Alexander Dallin with Jonathan Harris & Grey Hodnett (eds), Diversity in International Communism. A Documentary Record, 1961–1963 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 200–296; William E. Griffith, Sino-Soviet Relations, 1964–1965 (Cambridge [Mass]: The MIT Press, 1967). See especially The Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchov’s Revisionism. Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU (VIII) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964) which is only excerpted in Griffith. ¹⁹⁵ For one study of this see Richard Baum, ‘Revolution and Reaction in the Chinese Countryside: The Socialist Education Movement in Cultural Revolutionary Perspective’, The China Quarterly 38, 1969, pp. 92–119.

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However, it soon became clear to him that many of the rural cadres could not be relied upon to pursue the course he desired; many instead continued to support the peasants in their cultivation of private plots and a free market. The movement soon developed into a purge of rural cadres by central officials who worked under the aegis of Liu Shaoqi,¹⁹⁶ that is those who were increasingly being seen by Mao as responsible for the danger of capitalist restoration. This dissatisfaction with officials at all levels, including in the leadership, persuaded Mao of the need to generate revolutionary successors, something that could only be done through cultural revolution. The form the Cultural Revolution initially took—mass mobilization for the critique of those in authority—reflects Mao’s fundamental faith in the masses and his conviction that participation in revolutionary activity was therapeutic and a way of fuelling revolutionary consciousness. His faith in the masses was a fundamental tenet in his political outlook stemming from pre-1949 and was reflected in the way ordinary peasants were to be involved in land reform, his advocacy of the mass line as a process of decision-making,¹⁹⁷ and ultimately the Cultural Revolution. Importantly, for Mao popular involvement in such activity speaks to the perceived educative and consciousness-transforming effect of involvement in such terrorist activity. Two conclusions follow from this analysis. First, the Cultural Revolution was a response to the perceived degeneration of the Revolution. The perception of the Revolution being endangered by the threat of revisionist degeneration into capitalism, something reflected in both the fate of the USSR and the growing dominance of bureaucrats and bureaucracy in the administration of the Chinese state, is similar to Trotsky’s charge about the effects of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁸ Building upon the opaque understanding of opposition and enemies, the threat was seen to be everywhere and could only be rebuffed by a revolution in the values of society as a whole. The result was the Cultural Revolution and the terror that involved. Second, Mao was central to the Cultural Revolution. It was his perception of the danger to the Chinese Revolution and the way it could be combated that was fundamental to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Without Mao

¹⁹⁶ Roderick MacFarquhar & Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge [Mass]: The Belknap Press, 2006), p. 9. ¹⁹⁷ On the mass line, see Mark Selden, ‘The Yenan Legacy: The Mass Line’, A.Doak Barnett (ed), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 99–151 and John Wilson Lewis, Leadership in Communist China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), esp. ch. III. ¹⁹⁸ For a similar analysis see Yang Jisheng, The World Turned Upside Down. A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (London: Swift Press, 2021), pp. xxiv–xxviii.

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and his position of dominance, none of the other people who seemed to share his vision and were central to its introduction (such as his wife Jiang Qing or Yao Wenyuan) had the personal authority to launch a Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Mao was fundamental to the course of the Cultural Revolution, at strategic points making decisions that directly affected the way that Revolution unrolled. His role is well summarized by Harding when he says in the longer version of the earlier cited statement ‘Mao’s restless quest for revolutionary purity in a postrevolutionary age provided the motivation for the Cultural Revolution, his unique charismatic standing in the Chinese Communist movement gave him the resources to get it underway, and his populist faith in the value of mass mobilization lent the movement its form.’¹⁹⁹ Thus, it was the course of the development of the Revolution and the bureaucratism that that involves that was important in Mao’s eyes for the Cultural Revolution to combat because he did not see that development as inevitable. This means that crucial for the onset of the Cultural Revolution was a human interlocutor who objected to the course of development and initiated mass mobilization to prevent it from occurring. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, using the essentialist notion of opposition evident from the time of the Revolution to rally the youth to attack the state and its power-wielders. So while the Cultural Revolution was directed against the primacy of the non-Maoist bureaucratic impulse that was the necessary outcome of the revolution, it required the human agency of Mao to bring that inverted terror into existence. Human agency was fundamentally crucial to the outcome. As in the other cases, in China revolutionary and transformational terror were organically connected to the course of the revolution and more specifically to the opposition thereby generated. In terms of inverted terror, central responsibility belongs to Mao. It was his perception of the danger of revolutionary degeneration that formulated the concept of opposition against which the Cultural Revolution was directed, and it was his personal authority that drove the overturning of the prohibition against the use of excessive violence against party members and the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Human agency, as in France and the Soviet Union, was therefore essential to the jerking of the course of the political development of the revolution out of the path it was in and to exposing the elite to inverted terror. ¹⁹⁹ Harding (2011), p. 147. Also see for example, Hong Yung Lee, ‘Mao’s Strategy for Revolutionary Change: A Case Study of the Cultural Revolution’, The China Quarterly 77, 1979, pp. 50–73; Michael Schoenhals, ‘“Why Don’t We Arm the Left?” Mao’s Culpability for the Cultural Revolution’s “Great Chaos” of 1967’, The China Quarterly 182, 2005, pp. 277–300.

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The Puzzle of Inverted Terror It is clear from the above analysis that in these three cases revolutionary terror was organic to the particular conditions of the revolution itself, in the sense that it was a response to the existence of or actions taken by the opponents of the revolution. The fact that revolution was conceived as a violent process within Marxist thought may have strengthened the likelihood that terror would occur, but its actual occurrence owed more to contingent or conjunctural factors than ideology. Transformational terror also appears linked to the revolution because of the way in which revolution involves widescale political, economic, and social transformation. But here crucial may be the scope of the change desired and the level of opposition such transformation encounters. In the Soviet Union the scope of proposed change was large scale and the level of opposition high, resulting in significant terror. In China where the scope of change was similar but, initially, the sites whereby such change was attempted were localized (in the base areas) the opposition seems to have been lower and the levels of terror less. When that site shifted to the national level and the effort accelerated with the Great Leap Forward, levels of both opposition and terror escalated. In France where the scope of change sought was more restricted, the overall level of terror seems to have been less, although it was most extensive in those sites of open opposition, the Vendée and Federalist revolts. Turning to inverted terror, the direct link with the revolution is less strong, with the terror mediated substantially through the human agency of the respective leaders. Nevertheless even given the importance of human agency, was there something about revolution that led to inverted terror? The view that inverted terror in the form of the Terror/Great Terror/Cultural Revolution was the last gasp of the revolutionary impulse set in train in 1789, 1917 or 1949 is a beguiling idea, but it is difficult to see how it can have plausible explanatory value; it is primarily metaphorical. It assumes the terror was a direct, even inevitable, result of the Revolution itself, that the Revolution constituted a force that proceeded ineluctably regardless of the will of men. This view was common both around the time of the French Revolution— see the comments of the conservative thinker Joseph de Maistre²⁰⁰—and later;²⁰¹ it is reflected in the comment of Bronislaw Baczko that the Terror ²⁰⁰ Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; originally written 1796), p. 5. ²⁰¹ For Simon Schama the essence of the revolution was an act of mass violence with terror at its heart. For Francois Furet, the revolutionaries’ attraction to abstract theorizing (resulting from their lack

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‘created itself bit by bit, using “materials” that were already produced and stockpiled during the Revolution’.²⁰² If there was a revolutionary impulse that was projected forward from 1789 to 1793, 1917 to 1936 and 1949 to 1965, we would expect it to have been manifested in some form over those periods. Certainly the sense of the revolutionary creation of a new world animated the revolutionaries throughout these periods, buttressed spectacularly in the communist countries by agricultural collectivization and industrialization. There were also echoes of revolutionary purpose at the time of the adoption of the new Soviet Constitution in 1936. Throughout these periods the rhetoric of the ‘Republic of Virtue’ and the ‘building of socialism’ against overwhelming odds dominated the public sphere in the respective countries. Revolutionary aspirations about the building of a new world continued to animate many, including the ruling elite, over the duration. But alongside this was another force, less revolutionary than bureaucratic administrative, embedded in the continuing construction of a politico-administrative machine designed to run existing state and society. This juxtaposition between revolutionary and administrative impulses occurs after every revolution if the revolutionary victors are intent on ruling the post-revolution state, although in France the duration was too short for this to become apparent, and means that the primacy of a revolutionary impulse is by no means assured. This is discussed under point 8 below. Nevertheless the question remains: is there something about revolution that leads to the sort of inverted terror that consumed part of the revolutionary elite? As we have seen, revolutionary and transformational terror do stem directly from the nature of revolution, the former from the strength of opposition (perceived to exist) to the revolution, the latter from the revolutionary drive to transform society and the opposition that it was perceived to have generated. Turning to inverted terror, in all three cases there are some features of the revolution that could link the revolutionary seizure of power with the inversion of terror. These links are more attenuated in the Soviet and of political experience) combined with the Rousseauist notion of the general will created a Manichean outlook that facilitated the demonization of opposition that seemed to be a natural result of revolution. Respectively, Simon Schama, Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) and Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For a short evaluation of the merits of the different approaches, see Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 108–109. ²⁰² Baczko (1994), pp. 23 & 35. For the argument that by late summer 1793, the tenor of revolutionary references to ‘nature’ suggested that nature was itself revolutionary and it rather than the people were the active force behind the Revolution, see Miller (2011), p. 17.

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Chinese cases than in the French because of the more truncated nature of the revolutionary period in France. What are these features? 1) In most cases revolution constitutes the extraordinary use of violence in pursuit of political ends. Revolution is politics jerked out of its normal course into an extraordinary stream, and while over time a post-revolutionary politics becomes normalized, the precedent exists for the extraordinary use of violence to achieve political aims. The enactment of revolutionary and transformational terror affirms this precedent. Neither of these normalize terror in the sense of making it a regular, everyday occurrence, but they do lower the threshold for the use of terror. They also affirm the principle embodied in the very outbreak of the revolution: if the aim is sufficiently important, extraordinary methods including terror may be an appropriate means of achieving it. 2) Linked with the acceptance of extraordinary means as acceptable ways of achieving political ends was the existence of significant social flux. Revolution induces social flux in the sense that many of the established verities of the past are called into question. Institutionally this involves the replacement of some institutions by others, but it also involves a questioning of many of the values that had held a hegemonic place in the society’s culture. For many individuals there was also a strong personal sense of flux, as for some the revolution was an opportunity for gain and social ascent, for others loss and social decline. This is particularly clear in those social revolutions that brought a new class into power at the expense of an old one, as in particular in Russia and China but also in France. In periods of social flux, many existing norms of behaviour are weakened or disappear completely, and uncertainty prevails as new norms are forged. In France this was most clearly reflected in the attack on the Church and its doctrines and the execution of the king, while in the Soviet Union and China it was clear in the revolutionary transformation of the socio-economic structure. In such a situation the norms inhibiting the use of violence and terror may erode; what was unacceptable in normal times becomes acceptable in times of uncertainty and potential danger. Accordingly the threshold for the use of terror is lowered as the intellectual barriers against its use weaken. This inevitably happens around the time of the seizure and consolidation of power, and given the continuing uncertainty in early 1790s France, this fed into the inversion of terror in 1793–1794. However, in the USSR and China the situation was different. In the USSR there had been some stabilization in the

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early-mid 1920s following the end of revolutionary terror, but this was once again overthrown with the embarkation on socio-economic transformation beginning in the late 1920s. Stability seemed to have returned around 1933, although the ripple effects of collectivization and industrialization were continuing. Particularly important was the movement of people from the villages into the cities and the new factories being built there, accompanied by the campaign against religion and the increasing projection of new values into the popular realm, all of which reinforced the sense of uncertainty and flux stemming from revolutionary transformation. In China too the continuing process of transformation throughout the 1950s generated uncertainty and flux, and although the drive for such socio-economic change had been moderated by the early 1960s, uncertainty still stemmed from the tension between an emphasis upon the party and effective administration on the one hand and mass campaigns as a means of proceeding on the other. This means that in all three cases, an environment of normality in which norms could have grown up inhibiting the resort to terror either did not appear or did so in a compromised fashion; a sense of flux remained dominant. The use of revolutionary and transformational terror that emerged in this atmosphere lowered the resistance to terror when it took an inverted form. 3) The revolutionary elite at the time of the inversion of terror continued to be dominated by people who played an active part in the revolution and, thereby, were involved in politics at the time of both revolutionary and transformational terror. In France the process of reconstituting the Assembly and Convention did mean an influx of new people into the politics of the capital, but many of these had been active in the revolution in their local areas. Many of those who were becoming prominent leading up to the arrest of the king remained prominent into the Terror. In the Soviet Union the party had experienced a massive influx of members following 1917, and many of these had been working their way up the politico-administrative hierarchy. However, by the mid-1930s the central elite remained dominated at its apex by people who had worked for the party in 1917. It is true that a significant number of the initial revolutionary elite were no longer powerful (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin), but they had been replaced by people of lower revolutionary status but with direct personal revolutionary experience. In China there had also been an influx into the party, but the top elite remained dominated by veteran revolutionaries; the apex of the Chinese elite remained very stable over the 1949–1965 period. What is important about this level of personal

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continuity is that they had conducted the revolution, which involved for many of them considerable personal sacrifice in the pursuit of their transcendent goal. They were highly driven and committed to the cause, and were willing to use any means to achieve their ends, including violence and terror. Furthermore, they had experienced the brutalization that went with the civil war, and had been in positions of varying responsibility during the revolutionary and transformational terror. The earlier precedents were real for them; they were responsive to the principle of using extraordinary means for political ends. 4) All three regimes were characterized by the pursuit of a transcendent goal, one which by its nature could justify the use of extraordinary means for its achievement. In France the pursuit of democracy was given a sacral lustre by the emphasis on the Republic of Virtue, a program for the remaking of ‘man’ into the virtuous citizen of the new world. This idea was particularly associated with Robespierre, the driver of the Terror, but commitment to the transcendent goal was widespread in the Convention. In both the Soviet Union and China the quest to build a communist society was what animated the regimes, with in China the added layer of Mao’s growing dissatisfaction with the perceived degeneration of the Revolution and his recognition of the need to act to reverse this process. The Revolution and its aims were reified. For the true believers, these goals justified the use of extraordinary means. They were the reason for conducting the revolution in the first place and for undertaking the massive transformation of society, at least in the USSR and China. Here was the ideological basis for the commitment to continuing revolutionary transformation. It could also therefore justify the use of extraordinary methods to eliminate opposition even within the elite. Of course, commitment to a transcendent goal also carries with it the danger that it could be at the heart of disagreement within the elite, leading to the outbreak of conflict that could spur inverted terror. Differences could emerge within the elite about how best to pursue that goal, or there could be disappointment about the failure to achieve or at least make substantial progress towards that goal. If such divisions were to occur, it would have been the transcendent goal that linked the revolution and inverted terror. However, in neither the USSR not China were significant elite disagreements present at the time of terror’s inversion. Certainly there had been disagreements within the Soviet elite (and possibly some concern about Stalin) but these were not a

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major issue in 1936. In China, policy disagreement had also existed but there was an accepted mechanism for resolving them that had worked for the last decade and a half. However, this did not assuage Mao’s concerns about the weak revolutionary commitment of many of his colleagues, prompting him to unleash inverted terror. In both cases the link between transcendent goal and inverted terror was mediated through the individual leader. Had neither Stalin nor Mao been there, it is not clear that a link between transcendent goal and inverted terror would have been established. 5) The perceived nature of opposition to the Revolution was an important continuing theme. The Manichean character of the way opposition was viewed—those who were not totally supportive were opposed—and its visceral and essentialist nature facilitated the use of terror. The essence of opposition was something inanimate but was directly represented by flesh and blood people. In France it was opposition to the basic democratic project and the transformation into the virtuous individual. In the communist states it was bourgeois values, the fear that these values would seep into the regime and lead to the degeneration of the Revolution. The opposition was implacable and insidious, and could infect individuals who were not sufficiently revolutionary (in France) or class (in the USSR and China) conscious; perceived membership of a mythologized notion of counter-revolution or of the bourgeois class was sufficient to render someone as an oppositionist. This perception of the opposition as being rooted in values is reflected in all three cases in the emphasis on creating a ‘new man’. While this was perhaps most obvious in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it was also clear in Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being and in the renewed Soviet cultural drive in the 1930s. This view of opposition, including the belief in the widespread existence of hidden enemies, also fuelled the potency of the conspiracy theories that swirled around these revolutions and their subsequent regimes. Eternal vigilance against the danger of infection was considered the key to blunting such conspiracies, with terror a useful antidote to their nebulous nature; not only could it destroy opposition, it could also deter some of the hidden enemies from acting. The notion of opposition as a ubiquitous and potent force fuelled acceptance of extraordinary means to combat it. 6) There is a sense of institutional continuity too, sometimes in the form of actual bureaucratic institutional structures, sometimes in more regularized procedures. In France the fear of counter-revolution had prompted the creation of the Central Surveillance Committee in late 1791, followed soon after

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by the precursor of the Revolutionary Tribunal in August 1792, explicitly to deal with any counter-revolutionary challenge. Soon after the killing of the king affirmed the link between counter-revolution and death. But perhaps more symbolically on 10 October 1789 it was proposed to the National Assembly that capital punishment should always be carried out by decapitation, with the first execution by the guillotine taking place on 25 April 1792. The guillotine became the symbol of the defence of the Revolution, even though the popular tradition of killing opponents was alive and well in the streets of Paris throughout this whole period, including before the guillotine came into use. In the Soviet Union there was a hard institutional link in the form of the Cheka, established in December 1917 with its lineal descendant the NKVD a principal actor in the Great Terror. In the party there was also a tradition of purges whereby those deemed deficient in some respect were punished, although these were not blood purges, and usually simply involved demotion or losing party membership. There was also a tradition of criticism and selfcriticism whereby individuals were to be re-educated, taught about the error of their ways, and instructed in how to be better in the future. In China too there was a public security apparatus from the time of the revolution, but it was more controlled by the political leaders and much less powerful than the Cheka. There was greater continuing emphasis on mutual surveillance and the checking of behaviour through workplace or neighbourhood groups (danwei) which were ubiquitous throughout China. Mass campaigns, struggle meetings, and the terrorization of individuals by mass meetings were also a major feature of Chinese life from before the seizure of power into the Cultural Revolution, reflecting Mao’s continuing commitment to the educational and therapeutic effects of participation in such activities. So in all three cases there were institutional sinews of control and combating of counter-revolution that carried forward into the time of inverted terror. 7) It has been common to argue that revolution usually leads to a stronger state and an authoritarian, often personalist, regime. Much of that literature also sees the problem of leadership succession as a major question, and one which is almost inevitably resolved by force.²⁰³ This could in principle take a terrorist turn in the form of limited or mass purges. But if we look at these three regimes, only in France was terror a factor in leadership change, most spectacularly in the fall of Robespierre. In the USSR there was a prolonged ²⁰³ This argument has been challenged in Gill (2021).

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succession struggle in the 1920s once Lenin had become incapacitated, but this did not involve the immediate killing of the losers. Those who were defeated were usually demoted, expelled from the party, and not allowed to participate in political life. Many of these people did lose their lives during the Great Terror, but this was not during a succession struggle, and reflects Stalin’s personality rather than a struggle for power. In China, there was no succession struggle until Mao died in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and in that succession struggle some participants did lose their lives, but this was a small number. The Cultural Revolution was more about the modus operandi of the Chinese regime in Mao’s eyes than it was a struggle over specific policy or position. Terror was not the means for these authoritarian regimes with revolutionary origins to resolve either succession issues or policy disputes. 8) There is an argument about the presence of two patterns of regime development stemming from the revolution, revolutionary/mobilizational, and administrative/bureaucratic. Despite Mao’s wishes, permanent revolution was not a viable practical option. Administration of a country the size of China or France let alone Russia could not be run through mass meetings or the mass line. Bureaucratic organization was necessary to secure both effective domestic administration and a viable defence against external foes. All revolutions are therefore subject to a process of ‘de-revolutionization’ whereby the extraordinary of revolutionary times must be replaced by the humdrum of ordinary life and day-to-day administration.²⁰⁴ This process is usually embraced by those the revolution brought to power because they realize that this sort of institutionalization is essential to their continued hold on power. And they believe that their remaining in power is necessary for the Revolution ultimately to achieve its aims. There may be some with whom this does not sit well. They are concerned by what they see to be the degeneration of the Revolution driven by the process of bureaucratization. Trotsky used this to rationalize his defeat by what he saw to be the epitome of the bureaucracy, Stalin, while for Mao, this led him to unleash the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to reverse this process. There is little evidence that this was a concern for Stalin²⁰⁵ encouraging him to launch the Great Terror, but it was clearly a major factor in ²⁰⁴ This was argued persuasively by Robert Tucker many years ago. Robert C. Tucker, ‘On Revolutionary Mass-Movement Regimes’, Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind. Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), pp. 3–19. ²⁰⁵ Which is not to say the upper levels of the Soviet system functioned in a completely arbitrary manner. Even when Stalin was at his most powerful, regularity and routine were significant features of the way the system functioned. Gill (2021).

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China. This means that for the revolutionary impulse not to succumb to the bureaucratic/administrative impulse, human agency is required in the form of someone or ones being able to act decisively to overturn the bureaucratic imperative, as Mao did. In terms of explaining inverted terror, it did not spring from this process of bureaucratization itself but from Mao’s reaction to it. Human agency was central. What is the significance of such links between the revolution and inverted terror? Were they channels through which revolutionary maximalism could course into the future and thereby shape the inversion of terror? Together they may constitute the building blocks for an argument that in all three regimes exceptional methods stemming from the revolution were required to combat the threat posed by counter-revolution and hidden enemies, including inside the elite. But by themselves they were insufficient to cause the Terror/Great Terror/Cultural Revolution. That the emergence of inverted terror was not an automatic or inevitable result of the revolution is shown by two things. First, there was still a crucial threshold that needed to be crossed before inverted terror could be applied to the elite. In France, this required a conscious decision to abolish deputies’ immunity from arrest, and although this was achieved, it was not without some resistance. In the Soviet Union and China, the threshold was the application of the death penalty to members of the party elite. In both countries blood purges were not acceptable until the Great Terror and the Cultural Revolution. In the Soviet Union the slow breaking down of the barrier that protected the elite could be seen in process from 1923 and the moves against Trotsky, but it was not until the attack on the elite in 1936 that the prohibition against execution seemed to fall with the sentences in the first Moscow show trial. In China the threshold was broken when Mao threw out the rule book and launched the Cultural Revolution. These thresholds could be overcome only as a result of conscious decision; there was nothing automatic or inevitable about their fall. They were essentially self-defence mechanisms for the elite, and therefore enjoyed strong support among that elite. It required conscious action to bring about their rejection. Second, inverted terror was in each case championed by a dominant leader. Had Robespierre, Stalin and Mao not pushed for the application of terror to the elite, it is not clear that its inversion would have occurred. Where there may have been others in the elite who favoured the application of terror to their colleagues, it is doubtful that they would have had sufficient power or

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authority to bring this about. The power of the dominant leader was needed, and without it it is doubtful that inverted terror would have embraced the elite. These two factors mean that inverted terror was not an inevitable result of the revolution. One sort of terror may have paved the way for the next, but it did not necessarily make it inevitable. The same applies to the continuities noted above. By making terror seem more normal, they may have facilitated the further use of terror, but this was contingent on the conscious decision to breach the threshold and the view of the dominant leader. Autonomous human agency was clearly central to the inversion of terror. Finally, did one revolution influence those that followed? Can we see ‘scripting’ of the revolution?²⁰⁶ Russian revolutionaries generally were familiar with the history of the French Revolution of 1789 and the course of developments leading up to the Paris Commune of 1871, although the accuracy of the views they held was not always high. Certainly Soviet figures used the French experience as a frame to understand and talk about contemporary events; for example, the coming to power of Napoleon was a powerful meme in the struggle with Trotsky in the early 1920s. More importantly, in the debates in the Russian Marxist movement prior to 1917, ‘Jacobinism’²⁰⁷ was widely seen in a critical light. It was held to refer to secrecy, to the dictatorship of a small group, and to terror, and it was in this light (particularly the first two elements) that Lenin was widely criticized as a Jacobin. Lenin did not accept this as a criticism, explicitly identifying himself as a Jacobin in 1904 and the Bolsheviks as Jacobins in 1905.²⁰⁸ But he also declared that this did not mean that they would ‘wish necessarily to imitate the jacobins of 1793, to borrow their views, program, slogans or means of action’.²⁰⁹ None of the Bolshevik leading figures produced any extended written consideration of the French Revolution and its relevance to the Russian,²¹⁰ but passing reference to it was a common ²⁰⁶ Keith Michael Baker & Dan Edelstein (eds), Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). ²⁰⁷ There has been some literature on this question of the role of the French Revolution in revolutionary and Soviet Russia. John Keep, ‘1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’, Soviet Studies 20, 1, 1968, pp. 22–35; Jay Bergman, ‘The Perils of Historical Analogy: Leon Trotsky on the French Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 48, 1, 1987, pp. 73–98; Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘The Images of the French Revolution in the February and Bolshevik Revolutions’, Russian History 16, 1, 1989, pp. 31–54; George Jackson, ‘The Influence of the French Revolution on Lenin’s Conception of the Russian Revolution’, Gail M. Schwab & John R. Jeanneney (eds), The French Revolution of 1789 and Its Impact (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), pp. 273–284; Gabriel Schoenfeld, ‘Uses of the Past: Bolshevism and the French Revolutionary Tradition’, Schwab & Jeanneney (1995), pp. 285–303. ²⁰⁸ Respectively, V.I Lenin, ‘Shag Vpered, Dva Shaga Nazad’, PSS vol. 8, p. 370 and ‘Dve taktiki sotsial-demokratii v demokraticheskoi revolyutsii’, PSS vol. 11, p. 48. ²⁰⁹ Lenin (Dve taktiki), p. 48. ²¹⁰ Trotsky did briefly consider it in a chapter entitled ‘1789–1848–1905’ in his 1906 pamphlet ‘Results and Prospects’, Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 52–61.

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practice. In mid-1917 Lenin did refer favourably to the Jacobins’ use of terror, at the same time defining Jacobinism as ‘the transfer of power to the revolutionary oppressed class’²¹¹, a conception that linked a positive view of terror with a very different conception of power to that normally associated with the notion of Jacobinism, and one that actually justified what was to come. By April 1918 Lenin was arguing that in all previous revolutions including the French, the people’s ‘revolutionary enthusiasm’ had not been maintained long enough to complete the suppression of the exploiters and the ‘elements of disintegration’;²¹² in other words, the Jacobins had not carried the terror far enough, and this was not a mistake the Bolsheviks would make.²¹³ However, in Lenin’s view this did not seem to necessarily imply a higher level of killing. In October just before seizing power he argued that ‘the guillotine’ (the French experience) had only terrorized people and broke active resistance, whereas the proletarian state would have a ‘force unprecedented in history’ that would force the capitalists to work for the new order, thereby breaking not only active but also passive resistance.²¹⁴ So although leading Bolsheviks were aware of the Jacobin experience, there is no evidence that this was a decisive factor in the decision to introduce terror as state policy in September 1918. Certainly the French example may have provided some revolutionary justification for the adoption of terror, but as the earlier discussion of Lenin’s views makes clear, his conception of revolutionary change and the shift to socialism could encompass terror without resort to the French Jacobin precedent. The Chinese revolutionaries were also aware of the French precedent, but they were much more influenced by their Russian predecessor, both because of temporal proximity and shared ideological outlook. But given the different circumstances of the two revolutions, there were not many lessons that Mao and his colleagues took from the Russian example, at least after the mid1930s. However, two were significant. One is the approach to land reform and collectivization, where the Chinese took a more measured path, at least until the Great Leap Forward. The result is that a Soviet-style war against the peasants was less in evidence throughout most of the decade when cooperativization/collectivization was in process. The second relates to the place of the ²¹¹ V.I. Lenin, ‘Mozhno li Zabugat’ Rabochii Klass “Yakobinstvom”’, PSS vol. 32, pp. 374–375. ²¹² V.I. Lenin, ‘Ocherednye Zadachi Sovetskoi Vlasti’, PSS vol. 36, p. 195. ²¹³ Trotsky referred to the coming terror as assuming ‘a very violent form after the example of the great French Revolution’. Cited in Schoenfeld (1995), p. 292. ²¹⁴ V.I. Lenin, ‘Uderzhat Li Bol’sheviki Gosudarstvennuyu Vlast’?’, PSS vol. 34, pp. 310–311. Lenin’s view here of what needed to be done is consistent with the argument that the Bolsheviks used more ‘soft’ terror than the Jacobins and this reflects learning from the Jacobin experience. Alistair S. Wright, ‘Guns and Guillotines: State Terror in the Russian and French Revolutions’, Revolutionary Russia 20, 2, 2007, pp. 173–195.

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Soviet security apparatus and its role in the Great Terror. The Chinese learnt from this, ensuring that the security apparatus was weaker and less able to work autonomously than its Soviet counterpart had been. These were important lessons. However, ultimately, in neither the Soviet nor the Chinese case, can one say that the shift to inverted terror was shaped by the experience of perceived revolutionary forebears.

6 Revolutions Compared As the preceding discussion of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions has shown, the relationship between revolution and terror is complex. It is dependent upon the nature of the revolution and the type of terror. But also important is human agency, and in particular the outlook and perspective of leading figures in the revolutionary regime because it is those individuals who both shape the type of revolution, and play a major part in determining whether terror will be used and the forms it may take. Revolutionary terror, that involved in the consolidation of the new regime, logically seems almost inevitable. It was present in the three cases reviewed here, and its basic underlying cause, that ruling regimes tend not to surrender without a fight while the array of enemies confronting the new revolutionary regime is rarely restricted to members of that ancien regime, is often a feature of revolution. Furthermore, given that revolution is seen as involving the substantial redrawing of the lines of power and privilege in the society, many elements of that society who may not necessarily have supported the old political regime did support the social status quo of power and privilege. With potentially a lot to lose as a result of revolutionary victory, many of these people are likely to support attempts to frustrate the revolutionaries. The revolutionaries too have a lot to gain and much to lose. They are struggling for a better world, and the failure to seize and consolidate power means the inability to bring those dreams to fruition. Defeat also could have direct and very negative personal consequences for those on all sides. This combination means that the stakes are high for both revolutionaries and opponents, and high stakes may be held to justify extreme measures. The extent of revolutionary terror appears to be shaped mainly by the perceived dimensions of the opposition. A powerful opposition which is seen to constitute a real danger to the revolution is more likely to produce a highlevel state terrorist response than an opposition that is weak. The greater the level of opposition, the more likely the revolutionary regime is to use terror as a weapon in the seizure and consolidation of power. In this sense Kautsky and Luxemburg were correct in arguing that the narrowness of the social base of the Bolshevik regime would cause that regime to resort to terror if it

Revolution and Terror. Graeme Gill, Oxford University Press. © Graeme Gill (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198901105.003.0006

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wanted to remain in power. In terms of actual, positive, support, most revolutionary regimes begin with a similarly narrow social base. This narrow basis of support is usually exacerbated by two things: first, the resultant sense of isolation and vulnerability felt by the elite; and second, a conception of opposition in vague, essentialist terms that serves to exaggerate and amplify the dimensions of opposition in the mind of the elite. This sense is enhanced by the belief that they are beset not just by open enemies but by hidden enemies as well. The propensity to resort to terror is stronger if there is prolonged military conflict, when the imperatives of such conflict and the brutalizing effect it can have upon participants come into play. The militarization of society created by such a conflict and the brutalizing effect of it can remove the ordinary constraints that prevent people from acting cruelly against others. Inhibitions disappear in the face of the brutalizing effects of conflict over high stakes, with terrorist means being used to prosecute that conflict. Pressures may also emerge from below for the use of revolutionary terror. While this can be idiosyncratic and locally-based, it can create a momentum of its own and spread through the conflict zone. It can also force the hand of central decision-makers, especially if it either stimulates the use of similar methods by the opposition or is in response to such methods. This is the claim made for the Red Terror in Russia during the civil war period. Local action on the ground can interact with central leaders to produce a terrorist response to perceived oppositional activity, as in France. Based on these three cases, given that revolution involves the active overthrow of a regime by the revolutionaries and that this will in all likelihood be widely resisted, violence is almost inevitable, and, with that, some degree of terror is highly likely. It is not inevitable, but the likelihood of revolutionary terror is very high under these conditions. A similar logic applies to transformational terror. This is the sort of terror that is implemented in the process of bringing about revolutionary change to the political, social, and economic structure of the society. It is the combination of this sort of change that is the hallmark of the so-called ‘great revolutions’ whereby they bring fundamental alteration to the way much of the society is structured and functions. The level of change sought by new power-holders is not always sufficient to qualify the change as a social revolution—for example, most regimes emanating from military coups do not seek to implement such root-and-branch change—but where they do, they usually encounter resistance. This is partly because such change to economic and social structures is more immediate and personal; unlike political change which may happen far away, this sort of change can affect

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local structures of power and privilege, and can overturn the basis upon which an individual’s own position and resources rest. In France the feudal basis upon which the nobles’ property rested was overturned, while in the socialist revolutions of Russia and China, the private basis of property in town and country was destroyed. With people’s direct interests under challenge, opposition becomes more likely, with the resort to violence and terror correspondingly more justified in the eyes of the revolutionaries, and therefore more probable. But it is also because of the transcendent nature of the goal the revolutionaries espouse. While it is not inevitable that this will be the case, most revolutions have been animated by the quest for a utopia, an aim which of necessity involves a fundamental re-working of the status quo. Such a situation is bound to maximize opposition while raising the stakes in the eyes of the revolutionaries. For the revolutionaries the challenge posed by such opposition is enhanced by the conception of opposition noted above in regard to revolutionary terror, which usually also exists at the time of socio-economic transformation. Opposition to transformational change is not the only potential source of terror at this time. At various times revolutionary leaders have seen terror and participation in it as a revolutionary act in itself. Encouraging people to be involved in terrorist actions—such as torturing or killing former authorities, seizing, or destroying their property—has sometimes been seen as a means of promoting revolutionary change not just through the practical effect of what is being done, but in terms of re-shaping the values and perceptions of those involved in that action. Encouraging Chinese peasants directly to confront, criticize, and humiliate former landlords or authorities was seen as a way of cracking the deference that previously had held those peasants in thrall to their ‘betters’. This was seen as a way of driving out ‘feudal’ thinking and raising mass revolutionary consciousness. The commission of such acts was thus seen as an intrinsic part of the revolutionary process itself, as part of the re-making of the culture and thereby the embedding of the revolution in the society. This sort of thinking was clearly much more prominent in China, where the focus on the transformation of consciousness was seen as something that did not have to rely solely on revolution in the socio-economic base of society but was amenable to shaping through direct participation in struggle, than in Russia or France, but even in both of these the revolutionary nature of ‘the act’ was accepted. This applied to both revolutionary and transformational terror. Thus, based on the experience of the three ‘great revolutions’, revolutionary terror and transformational terror may both be seen as stemming directly from the intrinsic nature of the revolution and the opposition it generates. But what of inverted terror?

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In France the attack on members of the elite culminating in the fall of Robespierre and establishment of the Directory government, in the USSR the Great Terror, and in China the Cultural Revolution may be seen in terms of the inversion of terror, but their location in the process of regime development was very different. In France where the duration of the revolution was short, the inversion was temporally coincident with transformational terror as well as being linked to revolutionary terror through institutional forms, the unbroken thread of the politics of the streets, and regional revolts. In the Soviet Union and China, by the time inverted terror appeared, revolutionary terror was more than a decade in the past and the material basis of socio-economic transformation had been laid, although clearly in the view of Mao in China the construction of revolutionary consciousness had not been completed. Nevertheless, Chapter 5 has suggested eight ways in which the revolutionary seizure of power and inverted terror may be linked: 1) The principle that the extraordinary use of violence in pursuit of political ends was acceptable. 2) A situation of social flux in which values are fluid and changing. 3) Continuity of revolutionary personnel who are both committed and highly motivated, and have been affected by the brutalizing effects of the civil war period. 4) The regime is pursuing a transcendent goal the pursuit of which is seen to justify the use of exceptional means. 5) The perception of a dangerous and ubiquitous opposition the defeat of which is seen to require extraordinary means. 6) The existence of institutional continuity in the form of institutional structures (such as the security apparatus) or regularized procedures and practices. 7) The emergence from the revolution of a personalist regime in which succession remains an issue that is resolved by force. 8) The inevitable process of the bureaucratization of the revolution and associated feelings about its betrayal, often expressed in terms of ‘thermidor’. However, none of these were, of themselves, sufficient to generate inverted terror. In explaining inverted terror, a direct, independent causative link with the revolution does not exist. The eight means whereby revolution and inverted terror may be linked certainly created conditions conducive to the resort to terror, but alone they could not produce that terror, let alone bring about

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its inversion. Those links that did exist required human agency to result in inverted terror. For their own reasons Robespierre, Stalin, and Mao fostered the inversion of terror, and in all cases, it would not have occurred had they not wished it to and been in a position to see their wishes realized. Certainly they all came to power as a result of the revolutions and those revolutions created the conditions that facilitated the resort to terror, but it is a long bow to then argue that this terror was a direct and inevitable result of the respective revolutions. Having established that the same basic causal logic applied to explain the existence of terror in the three revolutions, we can see that there are also other parallels among the three revolutionary experiences.

Sequencing The three revolutions all experienced the three types of terror identified in Chapter 1—in the consolidation of power, in the revolutionary transformation of society, and in the assault on the revolutionary regime itself—but these were experienced in different ways. In Russia/the Soviet Union the main bouts of the exercise of each of these types of terror occurred in a definable sequence with some temporal overlap. Revolutionary terror in the consolidation of power was concentrated in the 1917–1921 period, with much of it a direct extension of the military operations of the civil war. This period of terror activity was therefore completed before the application of transformational terror to the revolutionary transformation of society in the form of agricultural collectivization and industrialization beginning in the late 1920s. Of course insofar as this latter development involved the elimination of enemies and the consolidation of power through the reworking of the economy, there was an overlap in terms of the function of the terror, but the essential perceived purpose remained different: consolidation compared with transformation. And the use of terror in the revolutionary transformation had substantially ended by the time the terror was turned against the regime itself in the mid-1930s.¹ This was the classic pattern one would expect on the basis of the function of the different types of terror. In China the sequencing was more complex. The seizure and consolidation of power was stretched over a much longer period, dating from the late 1920s when the first base areas were established until into the 1950s when ¹ This judgement is qualified when the mass operations of the Great Terror are seen as aiming to bring about social transformation.

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central control was extended to all parts of the mainland. Here too many terrorist actions were associated with the military violence of the anti-Japanese and civil wars. But the Chinese case differs from that of Russia in that transformational terror coincided with the revolutionary struggle in many areas because of the attempt to revolutionize the land structure along with the power hierarchy in the villages that came under communist control during the war. This means that even before the revolution was successful nationally, revolutionary transformation had already begun, and with it the application of transformational terrorist methods. Revolutionary and transformational terror were thus contiguous prior to October 1949. Once the People’s Republic of China had been established, transformational terror was unleashed as socio-economic transformation was pursued on a national scale. The application of transformational terror was largely completed, at least insofar as economic transformation was concerned, before the inversion of terror saw terror applied to the regime itself. So while the general sequence of power seizure and consolidation, transformation, and inversion may be seen in the Chinese experience, these stages and the type of terror associated with each were much more overlapping and inter-linked than was the case in the USSR. A sequence was much less evident in France. The shift in and consolidation of power spanned 1789 until around the end of 1793 and the suppression of the Vendée and Federalist rebellions. Much of the violence and terrorist activity during this period stemmed from the streets, but the revolutionary state was responsible for some of it: the killing of the king and those actions associated with the military suppression of the rebellions by state forces are the most obvious, but elite encouragement given to the violence of the streets was also important in outbreaks of revolutionary terror. Revolutionary transformation was less apparent outside the realm of the removal of the existing political elite. There was no widespread change in land ownership (although the relationship between noble landowners and those who worked on their land did change from a feudal towards a more commercial relationship), but there was significant alteration of the Church’s relationship with the state, and this did in some places involve violence. Inverted terror begins around mid-1793 with the purge of the Girondins and picks up following the September 1793 declaration. Given that the rebellions were still in train at this time, power-consolidating revolutionary terror and inverted terror overlapped, and both were simultaneous with the terror designed to bring about revolutionary transformation. The different sequence patterns of the three revolutions highlight two important things. First, the temporal overlapping of terror in China and France

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shows that revolutionary, transformational, and inverted terror were types of terror defined in terms of their aims; they were not temporal stages. It also shows how the aims of the different types of terror could coalesce: the removal of external (to the regime but inside the country) enemies could be said to have acted to consolidate the regime and, through the removal of major parts of the former ruling classes, to transform society. Similarly given that in all three countries inverted terror was accompanied by wider revolutionary terror directed at perceived enemies outside the regime, this too can be seen as at least aimed at consolidating the regime through the removal of opposition and transforming society. Second, the different sequences show the importance of the regime-opposition relationship. In Russia, the old regime was effectively removed from power before the Bolsheviks took over and began to consolidate their rule. The tsarist regime had fallen some eight months before the Bolsheviks seized power while the Provisional Government which took over from it was summarily despatched in October 1917. The Bolsheviks did not have to share power with either the tsarist regime or the Provisional Government. This enabled the temporal separation of the types of terror used by the Bolsheviks. In China, where the revolution was conducted in Mao’s words through the countryside surrounding the city, revolutionary advance involved the progressive expansion of control over territory. This meant that the communists ruled over rural areas before achieving national power, but in doing so were effectively sharing power with their opponents. In so doing they were thus in a position whereby they could pursue revolutionary transformation on the local level at the same time as they were seeking to expand and consolidate their control nationally. This effective sharing of power with the ‘counter-revolutionary forces’ thereby facilitated the coalescence of revolutionary and transformational terror before national control was achieved, and they could then concentrate on transformation. In France where the consolidation of power was not achieved through the destruction of the domestic opposition until late 1793, the conditions also existed for the co-existence of revolutionary and transformational terror. This was not as marked as in China because French transformational aims were more measured, but nevertheless, the need to share power with the opposition made for the simultaneous application of revolutionary and transformational terror. The truncated nature of the French revolution meant that there was less of a break between transformational and inverted terror than in the other two countries. Thus, in all three revolutions, the presence of domestic opposition in the form of the former regime was instrumental in shaping the use of terror by the revolutionary regime.

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Instrumental Terror In all three cases, the elite perpetrators of terror saw it principally in instrumental terms: revolutionary terror was to defeat opposition outside the regime and consolidate power, transformational terror was to bring about socioeconomic transformation and to defeat opposition to that change, and inverted terror was to defeat opposition inside the regime and secure unity. These were the acknowledged aims of the terror and underpinned the support for this type of action among elite actors. In addition, the use of terror could be seen as performing a prophylactic function, warning against future opposition, and thereby ensuring continuing control.² In this sense terror was seen in essentially defensive and reactive terms; it was a reaction to the presence of opposition and the danger this posed to the Revolution. But for some within the respective elites, especially in France and China, terror was seen to also have a more positive, even creative, purpose. In France, this more creative view of terror was held by Robespierre, the principal exponent of terror. Robespierre saw terror as the crucible within which the new society was to be born; it was what society had to experience in order to achieve the transcendent goal that was the aim of the Revolution. As the expression of virtue, terror was the means for the creation of the new world, including the new citizen. It was in his view cathartic, creative, and crucial to the construction of the new world the Revolution was to create. In neither the Soviet Union nor China was this seen to be the case, but in both there was perceived to be a link between participation in some of the activities that constituted the terror and the emergence of the desired ‘new man’. This was most explicit, and important, in China. Participation in criticism and self-criticism sessions in both countries was seen as a form of re-education, of enabling people to understand where they had gone wrong in the past and reform themselves for a better future.³ But in China this was accompanied by the view that participation in revolutionary activity, including struggle meetings at which criticism and self-criticism occurred, was a means of not just raising revolutionary consciousness but of embedding that consciousness in the masses. Terror was thought to have a therapeutic and personally transformational function for those who were involved in its conduct. While the Chinese agreed with the Soviets about the way in which the ‘new man’ would be shaped ² This is the basis upon which theorists of totalitarianism argued that terror was a mode of government. For the classic statement, see Carl J. Friedrich & Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge [Mass]: Harvard University Press, 1956), ch. 13. ³ For one early attempt to study the effect of what he calls thought reform, see Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).

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by the transformation of the mode of production, they also allowed for greater voluntarism by seeing participation in revolutionary activity as character- and value-transforming for those engaged in it. Terror was thus seen as not just instrumental to the achievement of revolutionary success, but as part of the basic transformational process at the heart of the revolutionary project, the creation of a new society including a new revolutionary subject. In the Soviet Union, while participation in criticism and self-criticism sessions were seen as important means of education for those involved in them, and they were seen as means of raising revolutionary consciousness, they appear to have been less important in the eyes of the Soviet elite as means of engineering psychological change than was the case in China. So while revolutionary elites in all three great revolutions saw terror in instrumental terms, as a tool for the defence of the revolution, in France and China elements within those elites also saw the terror as a positive and creative force, contributing to the building of the new world embodied in the Revolution.

Opposition and its Nature Revolutionaries in all three countries had a highly developed sensitivity to the existence of enemies. The fear of counter-revolution was a constant for the respective revolutionary elites, so much so that in each case they greatly exaggerated the dimensions of the opposition they actually faced. This fear had a firm basis in fact, in the sense that there were significant forces opposed to the revolution and to the changes that seemed to imply. Domestically the most obvious source of opposition was the former regime and those who served it, including the bureaucracy and the military. These direct servants of the old regime were often not only personally committed to that regime, but also potentially had a lot to lose should that regime fall. But as well as such obvious sources of opposition, there would also have been a potentially significant part of the general populace who would have opposed the new regime as well. Sometimes this will have been on ideological grounds, but it too was often a response to the perceived material loss that a change in system could entail. While some of these opponents may have been relatively easy to identify—for example, those whose privileges flowed from the ancien regime in France or the owners of large private businesses in Russia and China—many would not have been, something flowing in to the perception of the nature of opposition discussed below. The point is that domestically, there were actual sources of opposition to the new regime.

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Internationally too there were real opponents. The mobilization of other European powers against the French revolutionaries in 1792, the involvement of Western forces in the Russian civil war, and the intervention of American and allied forces into the Korean War were a stark reflection of the intensity of international opposition to the new regimes. Stephen Walt has sought to explain war following revolution by the changes revolution brings to the international system.⁴ He argued that revolution increased inter-state competition and the risk of war because it altered each side’s perception of the balance of threats it faced. There were a number of aspects of this. First, the fear on the part of the non-revolutionary states that the revolution might spread outside its original borders was paralleled by a belief in the revolutionary states that precisely such a development was bound to occur, and that this was something they should foster. Second, revolution can make the revolutionary state initially appear to be weak and vulnerable.⁵ The relative chaos that often ensues following revolution may be interpreted as providing an opportunity for opposing states to strangle a potential challenger at birth. And for the revolutionary state, fear of this may encourage reckless military activity to forestall such a development. Third, revolution can create conflicts of interest between the revolutionary state and those states that supported the former regime, especially given that such revolutionary states are usually seen as wishing to change the established status quo if not of the types of units of international society, then of the distribution of power in that society. Fourth, the emergence of a new, inexperienced administration complicates the efforts of both the revolutionary state and its international competitors to evaluate the intentions and capabilities of the other side. The result may be to inflate the perceptions of hostility and capacity, and encourage both sides to rely more on their ideological understandings of the other side. And such ideological understandings tend to portray the other side as incorrigibly hostile. Walt provides a useful framework based on international relations theory for explaining the outbreak of wars after revolutions, and has applied it to ⁴ Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). On revolution often bringing on international conflict, also see Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Revolution, War, and Security’, Security Studies 6, 2, 1997, pp. 127–151; Ted Robert Gurr, ‘War, Revolution, and the Growth of the Coercive State’, Comparative Political Studies 21, 1, 1988, pp. 45–65; Theda Skocpol, ‘Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization’, World Politics 40, 2, 1988, pp. 147–168; Jeff D. Colgan & Jessica L.P. Weeks, ‘Revolution, Personalised Dictatorships, and International Conflict’, International Organization 69, 1, 2015, pp. 163–194; and Jeff D. Colgan, ‘Domestic Revolutionary Leaders and International Conflict’, World Politics 65, 4, 2013, pp. 656–690. Colgan points to the nature of revolutionary leaders as central to the outbreak of post-revolution international conflict. Walt’s analysis is the most comprehensive explanation offered for the link between revolution and international conflict. ⁵ Walt (2013), p. 21 argues that revolution usually reduces a state’s capabilities in the short term. However, generally revolutions have produced more powerful states than those they replaced.

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the French and Russian cases.⁶ However, it is more problematic in the Chinese case. Although war did break out some eight months after the formal announcement of the People’s Republic of China, this war was precipitated by the revolutionary state’s allies rather than its opponents (although it could be argued along the lines of Walt that this was actually an international anticommunist response to the Korean revolution not the Chinese). However, as the Vietnam war showed, especially in terms of the evocation of the theory of falling dominoes in Southeast Asia, there was a real fear in the West that the communist revolution in China would spread internationally. Walt’s theory is a valuable contribution to understanding the post-revolution outbreak of conflict. But underpinning that theory is the existence of basic opposition to the new revolutionary regime on the part of already existing states. International opposition to all three revolutions was real. The existence of these two sources of opposition, internal and external, created the conditions for what was one of the revolutionaries’ major nightmares, the potential coming together of domestic and international opposition. In France this was recognized early with the belief in the existence of a so-called ‘Austrian committee’ at court, but it was also present in fears about the popular response to foreign militaries should they invade, and the activities of underground agents working against the regime. In Russia and China, fear of agents was also high, especially in Russia given the activities of foreign agents at the time of the civil war,⁷ but more important was the belief that the shared ideology (anti-socialist capitalism) of domestic and foreign enemies could bring the opposition together in an attempt to undermine the Revolution. The coalescence of internal and external enemies remained a continuing concern throughout all three revolutions. It was not just the existence of opposition to the revolution that was important, but its perceived nature. In all revolutions, enemies were defined in vague and nebulous ways by using collective categories that dissolved individual identity—rich peasants, enemies of the people, spies, traitors, revisionists, saboteurs, bourgeois. An important aspect of this was the dehumanization of opposition with anthropomorphic figures common. By casting opponents ⁶ See his discussion of these cases in Walt (2013), Chapters 3 and 4. China, along with the American, Mexican and Turkish revolutions, is discussed in Chapter 6; Chapter 5 looks at the Iranian revolution. For a short literature review surveying other scholars’ arguments about why revolution and war may be related, see Colgan (2013), pp. 659–661. ⁷ On such agents, see Robert Service, Spies and Commissars. Bolshevik Russia and the West (London: Macmillan, 2011), ch. 21; Vladimir Alexandrov, To Break Russia’s Chains. Boris Savinkov and His Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks (New York: Pegasus Books, 2021); R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London: Putnam, 1932); and F.M. Bailey, Mission to Tashkent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946).

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in terms like monsters, vile creatures, dogs, swine, cockroaches, vermin, filth, garbage or serpents, enemies were denied any personal or human agency or essence. Accordingly the restraint that might have been thought to apply in the treatment of people disappeared if they were not considered to be human. The revolutionary elite was not simply concerned about the possibility of such enemies overthrowing them militarily. They were worried about the way in which the influence of these enemies could erode the revolutionary essence of society, that their influence would seep into the community and infect its members, thereby undermining the revolution, and potentially creating the conditions for the revolution to fail. This sort of opposition was insidious and could not be allowed to gain a foothold. This perception was central to the frequently-expressed concern about ‘hidden’ opposition, about those who publicly expressed their support for the Revolution but actually opposed it. The dimensions of such opposition were impossible to either measure or see clearly, with the result that their form was prescribed overwhelmingly in ideological terms. It also meant that the extent of this opposition and its capacity to do harm tended to be exaggerated. Both domestic and external opposition was seen as violently hostile, extraordinarily powerful, and implacably counterrevolutionary. In all three countries they were seen as a mortal challenge to the Revolution and needed to be expunged. Consistently, the authorities exaggerated both the strength of the opposition they faced, and the level of its organization and preparedness. Publicly they were always presented as more cohesive and better organized than they in fact were. Indeed, in many cases, the opposition publicly conjured up was a figment of the imagination of the authorities, feeding in to the ubiquity of conspiracy noted below. The nebulous nature of the opposition, often the absence of a concrete opposition figure, meant that not only was there a certain degree of randomness about who the terror would pick up, but there was generated a prevailing sense of uncertainty and danger. If there was danger everywhere as a result of the opposition, extreme measures were acceptable to keep that danger at bay.

The Ubiquity of Conspiracy In all three countries the revolutions were characterized by a very high level of belief in shadowy conspiracies of people out to undermine the Revolution. This belief was widely shared among the populace, but it also had many adherents within the political elite. Sometimes the belief in conspiracy had some basis in hard fact; all revolutions were bitterly opposed by enemies internal

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and external, and the policies of socio-economic transformation clearly created a population of losers. But often the conspiracies were far removed from reality, something related to the nature of enemies discussed above. Paradoxically the less likely the conspiracies were to have existed, the greater the likelihood of their ubiquity because of the way that the fantastic nature of the claims meant that everyone, including the country’s leaders, could be cast as a conspirator. Regardless of whether the conspiracies were well-founded or not, they exaggerated the dimensions of the perceived challenge to the Revolution, and generated a sense of crisis and uncertainty that helped to fuel the belief that the resort to extraordinary means was acceptable in order to ‘defend the Revolution’.

Victims The revolutionary terror associated with the consolidation of power in Russia and China essentially targeted the same broad groups: the former elite and those groups among the populace who were deemed to be hostile to the Revolution: landowners, peasants who were judged to be opposed to the revolution, religious officers, some former bureaucrats, and soldiers, sections of the former middle/commercial classes, and in the Russian case, the nobility. Some of the action against these groups in both countries was a spin off of the bitter civil war during which terror was seen as a legitimate weapon. In France most revolutionary terror was directed specifically at former members of the ruling classes and those who gave them public support, including especially the perceived rebels in the Vendée and Federalist revolts. In both France and Russia the execution of the former head of state (King Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II) was an important symbolic moment in the respective campaigns of revolutionary terror. Purely transformational terror in Russia and China was directed outside the elite, principally at those who opposed economic transformation, both in the cities and the countryside. While this would have included established local elites in the villages and towns, and certainly rich peasants (religious figures were also targets), the central political elite was largely spared from this; those within the elite who opposed particular aspects of the policies of transformation, principally concerning agricultural collectivization and its speed, were not caught up in the terror campaigns at this time. Similarly in France the former ruling elite was not a target of transformational terror, much of which was directed at religious officials and those believers who refused to shift their allegiance away from the refractory clergy. The inverted terror was, by definition, directed at sections of the revolutionary

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elite in all three countries. At the same time terror also embraced many members of the populace who were not part of the elite but were simply ordinary people who may not even have been politically interested or active. And in all three cases the number of ‘ordinary’ victims far exceeded those from the elite. Inverted terror in all three countries went through phases in terms of targets. In France, the phases were a result of the changing disposition of power in the elite. Initially it was directed against those perceived by Robespierre to be opponents, initially the Girondins but then more broadly conceived, but once broader sections of the elite felt threatened, Robespierre’s support disintegrated, and the terror was turned on him and his supporters. It was the change in the balance of opinion in the Convention that led to the re-orientation of the terror, clearly reflecting the way inverted terror was a weapon in intra-elite relations. In China too there was a shift in power, but this time it was among instruments of the terror. Initially the tone was set by the Red Guards with terror directed against establishment figures, but when this seemed to be heading in the direction of an attack upon the military, the latter flexed its muscles, and used the power its arms gave it to suppress the Red Guards and re-establish order. Much like Robespierre, the Red Guards moved from being the wielders of terror to the victims of it. Although the military’s intervention in this way was favoured by many of the leaders of that institution, Mao’s personal authority remained so strong that the mobilization of the military in this way was only possible because he approved of it. The role of the supreme leader, in this case Joseph Stalin, was also central in the USSR in the shift from party officials to the military to the mass operations embracing specific social and national groups. It is not clear what role Stalin actually played in initiating this shift, but it would not have occurred had he opposed it. The revolutionary elite thus largely escaped revolutionary and transformational terror but was a major focus of inverted, terror. Parts of the general populace were the principal focus of transformational terror, and were caught up in the inverted terror, while old regime elites along with supporters of that regime among the populace were the target of the revolutionary terror designed to assist the consolidation of power.

Revolutionary Elite and Terror State terror was initiated and largely driven from within the revolutionary elite. Notwithstanding arguments about whether it was a response to terror perpetrated by opponents or pressure from the streets, conscious decisions had to be

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made by the elite to engage in terrorist activity. When it came to revolutionary and transformational terror, the elite was generally united behind such a policy. Especially in Russia and China where civil war was a reality, the resort to terror did not seem problematic. Even in France, terror seemed appropriate to the elite because of the perceived nature of the opposition discussed above. There were individuals who may have demurred (for example, those opposing collectivization and supporting the continuation of the NEP in Russia), but most (perhaps reluctantly) accepted that this was the cost that had to be paid for the victory of the Revolution. When it came to inverted terror, the situation was more complex. In all three cases, initially there seemed little outward division over inverted terror. In France, there was broad support across the Convention both for the initial arrest of the Girondins in June 1793 and for the official adoption of the Terror in September 1793. In the USSR and China we have no evidence of significant opposition within the elite to the beginning of inverted terror activity, although most members of the elite did not foresee the ramifications of the decisions made at this time. However, once the terror began, some members of the elite proved to be much less enthusiastic about it than others, while some actually tried to moderate its effects at least in those parts of the system under their control (for example, Sergo Ordzhonikidze in the Soviet Commissariat of Heavy Industry and Zhou Enlai in the Chinese state machine). And in France the Terror was actually initially redirected against its principal exponent Robespierre, and then brought to an end by members of the elite following Robespierre’s execution. In both the USSR and China, the principal leader was central to the decision to end the terror (see below). The nature of the elite was different in each case too. In France, the mainly middleclass revolutionary elite came together as a body only at the time of the revolution, and its composition changed over time as a result of the changing membership of the successive national assemblies. Despite their membership of different clubs, they had neither party discipline nor shared commitment to a coherent or systematized set of ideas which could have provided them with a common basis for unity, with the result that fissiparous tendencies were built into that elite from the outset. The French elite was pluralistic organizationally and, to a limited extent, ideologically, and this was manifested in the high levels of conflict that characterized that elite. In contrast, in both Russia and China the revolutionaries were members of a single party united around an official ideology. The process of revolution effectively made these parties cohere in contrast to other political forces, and when power was seized, they did not have to share it with other groups. The sorts of divisions that played

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out in France had thereby been largely fought through before respectively 1917 and 1949. Furthermore, in both Russia/the USSR and China, when the party came to power it had an acknowledged leader whose authority ultimately was unchallengeable. Mao was able to exercise that authority right up until his death in 1976, with the Chinese elite remaining remarkably united over the first decade and a half of the People’s Republic’s existence. Thus, the original revolutionary elite remained in power at the time the Cultural Revolution was introduced, although some of its main drivers (the younger members of what came to be called the ‘Gang of four’, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen) did come from outside that group. In the Soviet Union the dominant Lenin’s death in 1924 opened the way for factional conflict over the succession, resulting in the rise of Stalin to the dominant position. However, by the time of the Terror in the mid-1930s, the apex of the elite (the Politburo) was dominated by people who, while they had been active revolutionaries in 1917, had not been first rank leaders of the status of the original revolutionary generation of leaders who had been largely removed as a result of the factional conflicts of the 1920s. While they remained overwhelmingly members of the revolutionary generation, unlike in China their personal standing stemmed less from their revolutionary heritage than from their relationship with the supreme leader, Stalin. Thus, in France and China, the original revolutionary leadership cohort remained substantially intact at the time of the inversion of terror, while in the USSR that cohort had been partly re-shaped. In both Russia and China the survival of the revolutionary elite through to the time of inverted terror means that those who had gone through the revolution and associated civil war remained in power. The brutalizing effect that the revolution and civil war had on their participants was therefore carried into the time of inverted terror. Not only did this involve a level of callousness about the value of human life, but it also seemed to suggest that terror and force were acceptable instruments to achieve political goals. This conviction would have been reinforced by the successive waves of revolutionary and transformational terror that washed over these societies in the decade and a half before terror was inverted. Once terror was unleashed, and especially when it was seen to be successful, the barrier against further terror was lowered. This enhanced the effect of the civil war on the elite, and thereby facilitated the later terror. There was also a significant difference between France on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and China on the other, in terms of the state of unity in the elite at the time of the inversion of terror. In France factional conflict in the Convention wracked the elite throughout the revolutionary era, including in particular that period leading into the official adoption of the Terror.

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Based on long-standing policy and personality differences, such conflict had been a driver of the course of the revolution. In contrast, in neither the Soviet Union nor China was such elite factional conflict in evidence at the time of the inversion of terror. There were certainly differences within both elites over specific policy issues and there were personal rivalries as well, but these were kept within check and in neither country did they manifest themselves in open elite conflict around the time of the Great Terror and Cultural Revolution. In the Soviet Union primary differences had been sorted out in the 1920s leading into the onset of transformational terror, and in China the general revolutionary consensus had not been destroyed in the decade and a half to 1965 notwithstanding the Gao Gang/Rao Shushi and Peng Dehuai conflicts in the 1950s. In neither the Soviet Union nor China was the sort of power struggle within the French elite that was so important in bringing on the Terror instrumental in the inversion of terror.

The Leader and Terror In the cases of all three revolutions individual leaders were crucial to the unrolling of all types of terror. In Russia, Lenin was central to the use of terror during the consolidation of revolutionary power in the civil war. He gave it its theoretical justification and, through direct orders to those on the ground, was instrumental in the conduct of terrorist actions in some places. Both transformational terror and inverted terror owed much to Stalin. It was his switch to a policy of rapid collectivization that was crucial to the abandonment of NEP and the effective opening of civil war in the countryside, while his insistence on speed contributed to the use of maximalist force as the means of achieving that result. In terms of the inverted terror, he was the person who drove it in all of its major essentials. In China the centrality of Mao has been undisputed. He was a leading architect of the process of land reform and a major proponent of the struggle meeting as the means of bringing this about. He was in this way crucial to both revolutionary and transformational terror. He was also the key actor in inverted terror, with his views and actions directly responsible for the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, and for much of its course. The situation was more complex in France. Although the Jacobins were more sympathetic to the mood in the streets than any other part of the political elite (except perhaps the more marginal enragés), they were not specifically instrumental or directly responsible for the mass-based terror evident in the consolidation or transformation aspects of the Revolution. The entire elite

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generally condoned and encouraged the use of terror in the suppression of the Vendée and Federalist revolts, but they were not direct leaders of it. Turning to inverted terror, Robespierre clearly did play the major part, not just in the action against the Girondins in mid-1793, but in its later more widespread use. Indeed, it was his suggestion that the terror might have to be widened to encompass even more deputies that led to his demise. Thus, in all three revolutions, political leaders have played key roles in the rolling out of terror. That revolutions should result in the emergence of regimes that are characterized by dominant leaders should not be a surprise. Individual leaders usually play a prominent role in bringing revolutions about, and their performance in doing so is often translated into personal authority in, and leadership of, the new regime. Accordingly the important role played by Lenin in the revolutionary terror and Mao in all three types of terror is consistent with this sort of outcome of the revolution; so too is the experience of Robespierre. Stalin’s dominance did not stem so much from the revolution as from his ability to build on the leadership model provided by Lenin allied to his own political skills and the nature of his support. If Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all bore inordinate responsibility for the terror, in particular its inversion in the case of Robespierre, Stalin, and Mao, is there something about them as people that is relevant to our understanding of the unrolling of terror? Attempts to establish a common ‘revolutionary personality’ type that fits all (or even most) revolutionary leaders have been failures. No one has been able to isolate the characteristics of personality that such revolutionaries shared, although there have been some attempts at a psychological analysis of particular leaders.⁸ More recently, Jeff Colgan has argued that revolutions bring to power leaders with a high tolerance for risk and strong political ambition, arguing that they would not have achieved the positions they reached without such qualities.⁹ However, one could argue that Colgan’s point would have applied to the whole leadership, not just the individual leader and, as noted above, the whole cohort shared the experience of revolution and civil war. This is consistent with the argument above that there was general agreement within the elite about both revolutionary and transformational terror. When it comes to inverted terror,

⁸ For an examination of the idea of a ‘revolutionary personality’, see E. Victor Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality. Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). For some biographies with a psychological emphasis, see Stefan T. Possony, Lenin. The Compulsive Revolutionary (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), and the two volumes by Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary. A Study in History and Personality (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974) and Stalin in Power. The Revolution from Above, 1929–1941 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990). ⁹ Colgan (2013), pp. 656–657. He acknowledges (p. 665) that there is no single type of revolutionary personality.

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the role of the individual leader (Robespierre, Stalin, and Mao) is more important. It is clear given the role that they played in that terror, they were willing to countenance immense suffering and even the death of colleagues. Scholars have characterized them as cruel, vindictive, and paranoid, and there is little evidence to contradict this judgement. Clearly what they did have is a heightened consciousness of danger and opposition. Not only were they partly responsible for the nebulous characterization of opposition explained above, but they were also strong adherents of that view. Robespierre did believe that fellow members of the revolutionary elite were in fact hidden conspirators against the Revolution. Stalin does appear to have been convinced that there was a fifth column in the Soviet Union seeking to overthrow the Revolution. Mao truly believed that the bacillus of counter-revolution was carried in the deficient consciousness of many of his colleagues. But what is important is that these three leaders were much more sensitive to the perceived danger than their immediate colleagues, and this is why they drove the inversion of terror. One other factor may have been important in the role these leaders played: the level of commitment to the revolution; their willingness to drive inverted terror may have been related to their intense commitment to the Revolution and its goals. Certainly, Robespierre and Mao seem to have been driven by such a commitment. Scholars have been less inclined to believe that Stalin was thus motivated, with much of the scholarship tending to argue that his chief aim was simply personal aggrandizement. But it is not clear why we should doubt his commitment to the revolutionary aims as he saw them. His entire adult life had been spent in pursuit of the Revolution and its goals, with a significant part of that period being out of power, suffering privation, and with little apparent likelihood of gaining power. Ideological belief must have been part of his commitment to the revolutionary movement, and it is unlikely that this would have disappeared entirely once he was in power. Important too was the fact that they were in a position to be able to launch inverted terror. There were two aspects of this. First, the personal authority these leaders were able to wield enabled them to persuade their colleagues to go along with their view about the need for inverted terror. In this regard the authority of Stalin and Mao was much greater than that of Robespierre. Both Stalin and Mao had played roles in both the seizure of power and socioeconomic transformation, their authority was rooted in achievement, albeit significantly exaggerated by the cults that surrounded their persons. In contrast, while Robespierre may have been seen as leader, this was because of his position within one of the factions/clubs (the Jacobins), and his command of and performance in the legislative chamber. For those not in his faction, it was

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the exigencies of day-to-day politics that shaped their acceptance of his leadership role, a fact that is clear in the shift of opinion against him leading to his arrest in July 1794. Personal authority was crucial in the ability of these leaders to lead. Second, the relative weakness of institutional constraints upon their actions. In the early years of the revolution, with new governing institutions being established, those institutional structures frequently lacked the authority to constrain a determined leader. Over time, institutional processes and conventions did develop in such a way as to structure elite politics, including placing some constraints on the leader.¹⁰ The balance between institutional constraints and individual voluntarism varied from case to case, and over time within individual cases, but it is clear that the personal power and authority of both Stalin and Mao was sufficient to overcome any constraints that had emerged. In contrast, Robespierre was unable to do this, despite the fact that the revolutionary institutions were very new, and therefore lacked the institutional heft that history endows. His problem was that his personal authority was also not soundly based, enabling the self-interest of other members of the elite to win out and cause his arrest.

Role of the Populace State terror in all three countries was initiated and mainly driven by the revolutionary elites, but this does not mean that the populace was simply a passive object of the terror. In all three countries, spontaneous mob violence was a part of the revolutionary process, while the application of methods of revolutionary terror during military activity in the civil wars and suppression of rebellions was often a result of spontaneous activity from below, by rank-and-file soldiers, and low-level officers and their supporters, rather than a result of direct orders from above. When it came to transformational and inverted terror, the general populace had a larger role to play. In all three countries, denunciation was a major aspect of the terror, with the authorities seeking to use local knowledge (and often old antagonisms) to identify those against whom action should be taken; denunciation was usually also part of the trials that were held. People were encouraged to inform on those around them, with the result that the effective boundaries of those who suffered from the terror were in part drawn by ordinary members of the populace, albeit within the broader context of opposition as defined by the elite. They were also mobilized directly into ¹⁰ On this see Graeme Gill, Bridling Dictators. Rules and Authoritarian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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the struggle to achieve socio-economic transformation through their participation in land reform and collectivization in the Soviet Union and China, and campaigns against the monarchy and refractory priests in France. The population was thus mobilized to help identify and deal with the opposition, and to create the new revolutionary structure. While this use of the populace may have reflected the conviction that direct participation in the revolution was good for building both commitment and revolutionary consciousness, it was also in practice a response to the relative weakness of the new state in society. Lacking powerful, effective institutional structures extending into local society, reliance upon local knowledge was essential if central elites hoped to achieve their revolutionary aims. In France the populace was also significant as a major independent driver of the terror. The politics of the Paris streets, and the sensitivity to this of the Jacobins in particular, was an important force driving the radicalization of the revolution and, in particular, the adoption of the September 1793 declaration making terror ‘the order of the day’. This sort of seemingly spontaneous mob violence, or violence organized by local organizations, was a much more important factor in France than in either the USSR or China, especially when it came to inverted terror, and it was something that the Paris elite did not always welcome. In China the autonomous activity of Red Guards was a factor fuelling the radicalization and violence of the Cultural Revolution, but they were initiated and encouraged by Mao (and his supporters), and ultimately brought under control by the military. Thus, while they were temporarily autonomous actors, they were unleashed by a part of the political elite. In the USSR the populace did not play a similar autonomous role in either introducing or structuring the terror. The populace also played a significant role in the USSR and China acting through a process that also occurred in France where it was less structured and more spontaneous, the public meeting. During revolutionary, transformational, and inverted terror, public meetings were an important vehicle for the playing out of both psychic and physical terror. In France such meetings were often organized by the local Paris sections or by political agitators rather than the central elite, and their outcomes were often reflected in violence in the streets. Those instances of mass confrontation of the king in both Versailles and Paris were also the outcome of such meetings. Ordinary members also often played a part in the ad hoc tribunals that were set up to judge individuals, such as in the prison massacres of September 1792. In the USSR workplace meetings were an important venue for the accusation and denunciation of individuals, with the process of criticism and self-criticism as the chief

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mechanism whereby this was achieved. Such meetings were the place where speakers worked the audience up to condemn enemies, and to identify and criticize particular individuals who were said to form part of the opposition. This was not just a means of consciousness raising, but of sending a message to the accused that they were completely isolated in society, to be ostracized by the good honest citizens among whom they lived and worked. It was also a means for the authorities to use local knowledge to find out who might be an enemy and to embed suspicion and distrust among the populace which would act as a barrier to any potential counter-revolutionary plotting.¹¹ In China public struggle meetings characterized by criticism and self-criticism had been a feature of land reform from before 1949, and continued to be used during the transformation of the 1950s-early 1960s. At the time of the Cultural Revolution they became even more significant for two reasons. First, they were often outside the control of the party cadres formally responsible for them and who had generally run them earlier, with the result that any moderating effect such cadres may have wished to exercise was often impossible. Second, many of the struggle meetings became quite violent, criticizing, denouncing, and humiliating individual officials to their faces, often leading to physical assault and even death. The Chinese struggle meetings performed similar basic functions to the Soviet workplace meetings discussed above. Thus, members of the populace were more activist and autonomous from the central elite in France and China during the transformational and especially inverted terror periods than in the USSR.

Instruments of Terror In Russia two months after the seizure of power, a special organ (the Cheka, or security apparatus) was established which was central to all forms of the terror. It was clearly not the only organ involved in terror activities, but it was closely involved in the Red Terror of the civil war, agricultural collectivization, and dekulakization,¹² and was the principal purging organ during the ¹¹ This was relevant to the claims by totalitarian theorists about the way these regimes sought to atomize society, breaking down the social bonds that united it. ¹² Initially the task of identifying and dealing with kulaks was undertaken by plenipotentiaries from the centre, including mobilized industrial workers sent into the villages to conduct these campaigns. However, this was chaotic and disorganized, and in 1930 the OGPU took over the dekulakization process, including identification of those to be repressed and the actual repression. The OGPU acted as judge, jury, and executioner.Lynne Viola, ‘The Role of the OGPU in Dekulakization, Mass Deportations, and Special Resettlement in 1930’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1406, January 2000.

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Great Terror. Inside the party purge commissions and control commissions functioned from time to time to conduct the regular administrative, non-blood purges that were a feature of party life, while outside, revolutionary tribunals and the legal system were used to prosecute the terror.¹³ Terror was largely institutionally mediated in the Soviet Union, with the institutional interests of the security apparatus playing a part in the unrolling of the terror and the forms it took. In China similar security bodies existed, but their role was overshadowed, at least in terms of public activity, by the struggle meetings noted above, and the legal system was effectively abolished by transferring the procuracy and courts under the control of the revolutionary committees. Institutional mediation was therefore less apparent in China than in its socialist forebear. In France the machinery of the terror mainly pre-dated the September declaration. Its main institutional focus was the Committee of Public Safety which not only was the major centre for the organization of terrorist repression, but which functioned as the ‘revolutionary government’ in 1793–1794. Revolutionary tribunals were also active in both trying and punishing the victims of the terror. Substantial institutional continuity was therefore a feature in all three cases. In France and the USSR, there was a form of legal framework for the terror in the sense of a judicial hierarchy that was meant to judge the accused, with the show trials the most obvious manifestation of this.¹⁴ In the USSR the Moscow show trials were carefully scripted while those in the regions were sketched out in very broad terms (categories, defendants, and punishments), with the broader educational and warning aspects of the trials as important as their particular outcomes. In France the law was used instrumentally and, even though the French revolutionary tribunals did acquit some people, it provided little real protection for those brought before it. And of course many were not brought before those organs but were dealt with summarily, especially those targeted by inverted terror. In China condemnation was much more the function of the popular meetings with an effective legal apparatus playing no real role in what were unashamedly political exercises. A word should be said about the military. In none of these countries was the military a primary instrument of the terror, except insofar as their role ¹³ For example, see David R. Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism. Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Peter H. Solomon Jr, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ¹⁴ Similar trials occurred in the regions. On the USSR see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, The Russian Review 52, 3, 1993, pp. 299–320 and Michael Ellman, ‘The Soviet 1937 Provincial Show Trials: Carnival or Terror?’, Europe-Asia Studies 53, 8, 2001, pp. 1221–1233.

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in the civil wars in Russia and China, and in the suppression of the Vendée and Federalist revolts in France meant that they were among the executors of revolutionary terror in those conflicts. They did not play a leading role in collectivization and the associated transformational terror, although units could be mobilized into the villages when needed. In France, the military remained relatively immune from the central terror, and in China it played a major part in the winding down of inverted terror through the suppression of the Red Guards. In the Soviet Union, the military was a major victim of the terror with its leading ranks destroyed in 1937.

Ideology In both Russia/the USSR and China, the revolutionary elite professed commitment to a broadly codified official ideology. This was a generally coherent body of thought that they used ostensibly to guide their actions and decisionmaking. Perhaps more importantly, this constituted an intellectual basis upon which they could all stand, notwithstanding the disputes over what the ideology meant and how policy related to it. It gave them a program, a set of principles which they professed to seek to implement, and a rationale for their actions, including the revolution. It did not specify exact policy, did not provide precise guidelines for action, and was ambiguous in regard to terror; it did not prescribe terror, but it did acknowledge that terror could be part of the general revolutionary process. It also constituted a broad guide to the future and embodied the transcendent goal towards which all revolutionaries committed themselves to work. Ideology gave them the filter through which to understand the world, including the basic social categories necessary for prosecuting the revolution. Ideology thus provided a basis for elite unity. However, as explained below, it was but one step from this to providing a rationale for terror. The French revolutionaries did not have a similar systematized ideology. They may have possessed a commitment to a broad set of principles that were enunciated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but this did not provide the sort of galvanizing unity that the official ideology did for its true believers in the early decades of the revolutionary regimes in Russia and China. When policy disputes arose, the vagueness of this commitment in France did not provide the intellectual glue that could prevent the elite from splitting. It could, however, provide a rationale for terror. The key to this link with terror and the basic source of legitimacy of the regime was the transcendent goal that animated each revolution: in France,

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the Republic of Virtue, and in the Soviet Union and China, communism. It was this for which the revolution was mounted, and it was this which led to the reification that transformed revolution into Revolution. Achievement of the transcendent goal justified the Revolution and was the essential purpose behind the transformation sought in the socio-economic sphere. In all three cases, the overriding importance of this goal was held to justify the use of extraordinary methods including terror for its achievement. In this sense, terror was linked to the ideological principles the revolutionaries espoused, but it was a conjunctural link; terror did not flow automatically from the transcendent goal, but this did provide a handy rationale for the adoption of terrorist methods. In Robespierre’s view this was explicit, with terror being necessary to forge the new society and the new revolutionary subject, but in the communist cases the link was less direct and immediate. The ideological sphere in each country was also shaped in part by the promotion of the leader into a symbol of authority which was instrumental in the terror. In the USSR and China during the times of transformational and inverted terror, the leader was the subject of an elaborate and all-encompassing leader cult. Elevated symbolically as the supreme figure, responsible for all that went on in the society and, importantly, fundamental through his writings and guidance to the achievement of the teleological goal of communism, which was the rationale for the Revolution, the leader dominated the public sphere, especially leading into the Great Terror and the Cultural Revolution. They were the figures whose writings and leadership were the guarantee of success in the achievement of the teleological goal. There was no such elevation of a leader in France (although Robespierre’s profile far outstripped that of any other political figure at the time), but under Robespierre’s sponsorship the Cult of the Supreme Being was generated, and many interpreted this to show that Robespierre personally aspired to a position of supreme leadership. The Cult of the Supreme Being sought to link the Revolution with a future of national greatness built on the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. There is no necessary link between either the leader cults or the Cult of the Supreme Being and the terror in each country. However, those personifications provided a figure of leadership and belief that could in turn provide a rationale for the terror: the future they represented was what the terror was to bring about. Thus, the three great revolutions shared many common characteristics, but they also differed in significant ways. The question that arises is whether their experiences remain relevant to other revolutions, and particularly to revolution in the contemporary world.

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Contemporary Relevance There is a question as to whether the experience of these three great revolutions is also reflected in other revolutions. While it is certainly the case that many revolutions experience revolutionary and transformational terror—for example, witness the regicide, seizure of royalist lands (although most were returned when the monarchy was restored), and administrative purges in England, land seizures and assaults on loyalists in the American revolution, and the arrests of opponents and imposition of clerical law in Iran¹⁵—there is a striking series of related revolutions where neither form of terror was present. These are the ‘negotiated’, ‘velvet’ or ‘unarmed’ revolutions in what was called Eastern Europe in 1989.¹⁶ These revolutions involved the fall of communism in that region, meaning that single party dictatorships based on a central command economy (Hungary and Yugoslavia were partial exceptions with regard to the economy) were replaced by political democracies resting on emergent capitalist economies.¹⁷ The dimension of the change in both the political and economic spheres was sufficient to warrant the description ‘revolution’. However, with the partial exception of Romania, the transfer of power was largely peaceful. Both sides (rulers and protesters) rejected the use of violence as an appropriate means of resolving the situation, and instead agreed to work through negotiations and new mechanisms such as round tables. There was no widespread killing of former leaders (Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania was the chief exception), and the attempt by the communist rulers to suppress the popular movement for change was, in comparison to what many had expected, minimal. Similarly there was no transformational violence as the basis of property relations was reworked from state ownership to private hands. Why were these processes lacking in widespread violence despite the ¹⁵ For specific studies of this in the American case, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence. America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017) and Loretta Valtz Mannucci, ‘Employing Terror and Terrifying Acts in the American Revolution’, Larry Portis & Joseph Zitomersky (eds), Terror and Its Representations. Studies in Social History and Cultural Expression in the United States and Beyond (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranée, 2008), pp. 57–76. According to one study, between 1980 and 1985 in Iran between 25,000 and 40,000 people were arrested, 15,000 were tried and between 8,000 and 9,500 were executed. Spencer C. Tucker, The Roots and Consequences of Civil Wars and Revolutions: Conflicts that Changed World History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Press, 2017), p. 439. ¹⁶ There is an enormous literature on these events. For examples that reflect some of the issues discussed here, see George L. Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions. The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (London: Ashgate, 2004); Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Claus Offe, Varieties of Transition. The East European and East German Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). ¹⁷ While there may be debate over the quality of democracy and the private ownership economy in some states, they were clearly revolutionary changes from what had existed prior to 1989.

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revolutionary nature of the changes involved? And does this mean that the nature of revolution has changed, and the experience of the great revolutions is no longer relevant? The basic reason for the lack of violence was the weakness of opposition. At an early point in the process the incumbent communist rulers decided that they would not oppose the forces pressing for a change in regime; they lost the will to rule. In part this was because of the scale of popular opposition they faced, but it also reflected uncertainty about whether the domestic military and security apparatus would support them in any direct confrontation with the citizenry. But what was crucial was the withdrawal of the external guarantee that had sustained such regimes for forty years. The Soviet suppression of uprisings in Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, and of the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (the Polish Solidarity movement of 1981 was a similar if more complex case), showed that ultimately these regimes rested on the continuing support of the USSR and the threat of its military mobilization in case of threats to the regimes.¹⁸ However, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had made it clear that, in the event of a challenge to the regimes of the region, the Soviet Union would not intervene. Accordingly domestic leaderships knew there would be no external support and the challengers knew there would be no external intervention in the form it had taken in the past; there was no international opposition to regime change in the region. Accordingly both rulers and challengers negotiated an outcome, with part of the conditions of that outcome being limited retribution against the former rulers. Such retribution mainly took the form of lustration, denial of former regime office-holders and some supporters (the precise terms differed from country to country) of the right to continuing political involvement for a set period of time.¹⁹ Thus, there was no opposition to regime change against which revolutionary terror needed to be directed once regime change had occurred. When it came to the lack of transformational terror, crucial here too was the lack of opposition. The popular support for the change was so overwhelming that opposition seemed impossible. But also important was that those seeking change did not present themselves as wishing to implement a transcendent utopian vision requiring significant sacrifice. Their aims were expressed in terms of a ‘return to normality’ or a ‘return to Europe’, a prosaic aim that did not seem to involve the sort of massive upheaval the quest for a transcendent ¹⁸ There was no such external guarantor for either Yugoslavia or Albania, whose leaderships had both split with the Soviets earlier. ¹⁹ For example, see Natalia Latki, ‘Lustration and Democratisation in East-Central Europe’, EuropeAsia Studies 54, 4, 2002, pp. 529–552.

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goal seemed to imply. Their goal was not utopian, and people could buy into it with little personal investment because it did not seem to require the herculean efforts that may have been needed had the goal been more utopian. The effect of this weight of support for the change was reinforced by the fact that, unlike in the communist revolutions, the proposed change in property relations in 1989 did not involve taking away people’s personal property (except for the excesses enjoyed by the ruling elite). Privatization actually involved the reverse: taking state property and passing it into private hands, both in the sphere of individual housing and of the productive part of the economy. Thus, the key to the lack of violence, and either revolutionary or transformational terror in the negotiated revolutions, was the absence of major opposition to the revolutionaries. And in none of these states has inverted terror been present. The absence of major opposition to popular mobilization and regime change also has a broader international dimension. Unlike in the great revolutions that are the focus of this book, the East European negotiated revolutions did not take place in the context of a hostile international environment. Along with the changes occurring in the USSR at that time, the negotiated revolutions constituted a central part of the end of the Cold War. The effective disappearance of socialism as a challenge to Western liberal democratic capitalism that the disintegration of the Soviet bloc constituted left the notion of liberal democratic capitalism hegemonic within the international arena. And as noted above the withdrawal of the Soviet Union as the guarantor of the pre-1989 status quo in Eastern Europe marked the removal of what had been the chief enforcer of discipline on one side of the Cold War conflict. There was no longer either an authoritarian paradigm, nor a supportive power to which the rulers of the Eastern European countries could look. The world was no longer divided into two hostile camps which would seek to support opposite sides in any revolutionary situation. Accordingly the proposed shift through negotiated revolution to liberal democratic capitalism was consistent with the perceived post-Cold War international zeitgeist and in line with the preferences of the rest of Europe. The potential support for the sort of counterrevolution that threatened the great revolutions and has been seen to be at the heart of the failure of the Arab Spring²⁰ was therefore absent in 1989, enabling the countries of Eastern Europe to establish new regimes which achieved a high degree of stability. With no powerful external opposition but significant ²⁰ Jamie Allinson, ‘Counter-revolution as international phenomenon: the case of Egypt’, Review of International Studies 45, 2, 2019, pp. 320–344. For an argument about the international dominance of liberal norms and the effect this has, see Daniel Ritter, The Iron Cage of Liberalism: International Politics and Unarmed Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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international support for the protesters, opponents of the change were left weak, leading to their abdication of power, and therefore revolutions without terror. The relative lack of violence, and therefore the negotiated nature of the negotiated revolutions, was thus enabled by the absence of three key characteristics of the three great revolutions: 1) A perceived high level of opposition domestically and internationally which created a sense of vulnerability and a propensity to believe in conspiracy within the ruling elite. 2) A transcendent goal which could be used to justify terror. 3) A program of social revolution involving major socio-economic restructuring of society. Where these existed, the choice of revolutionary and transformational terror seemed logical and justified; opposition provided the target, the transcendent goal the justification, and the program of social revolution the purpose, and they all helped create a favourable environment for terror. What was needed to extend revolutionary and transformational terror into inverted terror is a leader who for whatever reason saw this as necessary. None of these were present in 1989, and without them there seemed to be no need for terror. But the absence of these in the negotiated revolutions, and in particular the absence of opposition, does appear to be an unusual conjunction, unlikely to be present in many cases of potential revolution. This is clearly suggested by two other instances of post-Cold War popular mobilization, the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring.²¹ In the case of the Arab Spring, mobilization did not generally lead to regime change and is widely seen as having failed; for example, after a short interval in Egypt the military returned to power, and in Syria and Libya the result was civil war, including significant external intervention. The colour revolutions did lead to a change in ruling personnel in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, but there was little change other than of the regime. Both of these are better seen not as revolutions (and therefore not as ²¹ There are large literatures on both. For example, on the colour revolutions see Mark Beissinger, ‘Structure and Example in Modern Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions’, Perspectives on Politics 5, 2, 2007, pp. 259–276; Valerie J. Bunce & Sharon L. Wolchik, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and on their trajectories, Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics. Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On the Arab Spring, Jason Brownlee, Tarek Masoud & Nathan Reynolds, The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Ritter (2015); and Allinson 2019).

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examples of ‘unarmed’ or ‘peaceful’ revolution), but as instances of revolutionary situations that did not develop into fully-fledged revolutions, the Arab Spring because of the strength of opposition, the colour revolutions because of the absence of a transcendent goal. Contrasting cases of mobilization where there were significant levels of revolutionary and transformational terror were ISIS in the Middle East²² and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both of these confronted significant opposition (especially international), were motivated by a transcendent goal, and had a program of social revolution. If anything, the international situation has deteriorated even more since then with growing polarization along claimed democratic vs authoritarian lines, and therefore potential international sponsors of both sides in any revolutionary conflict. This suggests that it is by no means certain either that the model of negotiated revolution will be the principal vehicle of change going forward or that the lessons of the great revolutions will be irrelevant in the twenty first century. Fundamentally, whether any type of terror follows upon revolution depends upon decisions by the new rulers to use terror as a weapon to consolidate their newly-won power, to transform society, or to attack another part of the regime. None of these are independent. However, the propensity to resort to revolutionary and transformational terror is much greater as a result of the nature of revolution. Revolution usually generates opposition, and a new regime insecure in its occupation of power will be encouraged to use terror in an effort to shore up its position against perceived opponents. The attempt to transform society, which is intrinsic to the notion of revolution, also generates significant opposition, which once again may encourage leaders to resort to terror to overcome this and push through such change. When it comes to inverted terror, revolution does not appear directly relevant in any causal sense. Certainly the high hopes for revolutionary success may be disappointed and terror seen as a means of renewing the revolutionary ethos, as in the case of Mao, but this too depends more upon the personal views of individual leaders than upon the nature of revolution. Thus, while revolutionary and transformational terror may be seen to have their roots firmly embedded in revolution itself, the relationship between inverted terror and revolution is much more problematic.

²² ISIS did not successfully establish a state but did create a temporary proto-statelet.

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Index Afghanistan/Afghanis 105, 260. Al Qaeda 14. Albania 257. Andress, D. 24, 48, 55, 165, 166. Antoinette, Marie 36, 37–38, 55, 164. Arab Spring 3, 12, 258, 259. Assembly Legislative 26, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 159, 165, 167, 222. National 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 153, 159, 222, 225. Aulard, A. 18, 157. Austria 34, 36, 39, 52, 154, 161, 164. Austrian Committee 161, 165, 241. Baader-Meinhof gang 14. Bachman, D. 214. Baczko, B. 219. base areas 112, 113, 114, 115, 206, 219, 235. Bastille 5, 26, 27, 28, 32, 152, 156, 159. Beck, C. 7, 12. Beijing 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 146, 216. Bentabole, P-L. 33. Beria, L. 106. Billaud-Varenne, J. 33, 50. Bolsheviks/Bolshevism 59, 60–61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 174, 175, 176, 183, 184,185, 187, 192, 196, 197, 206, 211, 228, 229, 231, 237. Breslauer, G. 20–21. Brinton, C. 7–8, 12, 13, 15–16, 22. Brissot, J. 29, 165. Britain 34, 39, 45, 52, 64, 65, 154, 164, 188. Bukharin, N. 68, 96, 98, 100, 106, 185, 193, 201, 222. Calvert, P. 6, 14. campaigns Anti-Rightist 129, 132, 133. Five Antis 122, 126.

Hundred Flowers 132–133. One Strike and Three Antis 144. Purify the Class Ranks 143, 144. Socialist Education Movement 133–134, 136, 216. Thought Reform 122, 126, 132. Three Antis 122, 126. to Suppress CounterRevolutionaries 122, 123–125. camps 14, 65, 69–70, 78, 81, 103, 104, 108, 109, 117, 119, 131, 133, 186. Carnot, L. 50. Ceausescu, N. 256. Central Control Commission 88–90, 253. Central Cultural Revolution Group 137–142. Central Purge Commission 90, 253. Chabot, F. 33. Chang, P. 214. Cheka 61–64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 175, 185, 186, 191, 225, 252–253. Ch’en, J. 8. Chen Boda 137. Chen Yun 129. Chiang Kai-shek 112. Chile 5–6. China 17, 21–22, 111–149, 150, 152, 167, 194, 199, 206–219. Chinese Communist Party 111, 112, 113, 114, 119–120, 122, 134, 137, 139, 144, 148. chistka see purge Chubar, V. 106, 201. Church 29–30, 39, 45, 51, 56, 59, 69, 76, 78, 79, 81, 125, 151, 158, 164, 186, 221, 236. civil war 5, 44, 46, 47, 70, 101, 102, 109, 113, 114, 119, 135, 142, 150, 157, 174, 175, 176, 179, 183, 185, 192, 195, 196,

280

INDE X

civil war (Continued) 203, 204, 205, 210–211, 223, 232, 235, 236, 240, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250, 252, 254, 259. Civic Certificate 42, 48. class 2, 3–4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 26, 30, 45, 59–60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 77, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 103, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 140, 143, 144, 146, 150, 151, 155, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180–181, 182, 187, 195, 196, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207–208, 213, 221, 224, 229, 231, 243, 245. class struggle 4, 5, 12, 16, 59–60, 103, 115–119, 123, 128, 134, 175, 178, 179, 184, 192, 207–209, 216. clubs 26, 31, 33–34, 35, 55, 56, 167, 168, 245, 249. Cochin, A. 17. Cold War 11, 23, 258, 259. Colgan, J. 248. collectivization, agricultural 20, 21, 71–86, 90, 91, 103, 106, 109, 110, 127–135, 148, 183–196, 202, 203, 205, 210–212, 220, 222, 229, 235, 243, 245, 247, 251, 252, 254. Collot-d’Herbois, J. 33, 50, 156. Comintern 119. Committee for General Security 40, 49, 50, 51. Committee of Public Safety 26, 42, 49, 50–51, 52, 53, 54, 154, 156, 166, 253. Conquest, R. 83, 86–87, 106, 108, 109. conspiracy 18, 28, 44, 45, 53, 56, 86–110, 161–162, 163, 164–166, 167, 172, 173, 198, 214, 224, 242–243, 259. Constituent Assembly 174. constitution 21, 25, 27, 29, 33, 35, 36, 38, 47, 49, 58, 99, 100, 104, 144, 203, 213, 220. Convention, National 18, 24, 26, 27, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 154, 156, 158, 162, 166, 167, 168, 222, 223, 244, 245. Corday, C. 45. Cordeliers 26, 31, 33, 55. counter-revolution 16, 18, 30, 32, 37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73–74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 88, 91, 96, 97, 104, 108, 112, 117, 118–119,

120, 121, 122, 123–124, 125, 126, 135–49, 157, 161, 164, 166, 167, 171, 172, 175, 176, 180, 185, 208, 209, 210, 224–225, 227, 234, 237, 239–242, 249, 252. coup d’etat 3, 5, 54, 232. Couthon, G. 50. criticism/self-criticism 102, 120, 126, 145, 146, 148, 209, 225, 238, 239, 251–252. Cult of the Supreme Being 51, 53, 224, 255. Cultural Revolution 1, 21, 133, 134, 135–149, 150, 199, 212–130, 234–156. Czechoslovaks 64. Dallin, A. 20–21. Danton, G. 33, 42, 50, 52, 56, 154, 162. David-Fox, M. 7–8, 10. Davies, B. 83–4. Davies, J. 8. Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 24, 29, 152, 169, 254, 255. dekulakization 71–86, 90, 110, 252. Deng Xiaoping 137, 138, 144, 146, 148. Denikin, A. 175. denunciation 47, 48, 57, 100, 101, 102, 107, 124, 144, 145, 161, 250, 251. Desmoulins, C. 52. Diko¨tter, F. 130, 147. Directory 234. Domes, J. 126. Doyle, W. 55. Dumouriez, C. 34, 44, 154, 164. Dzerzhinsky, F. 65, 66, 185. Eastern Europe 12, 256. Edelstein, D. 169, 171. Egypt 12, 259. Eikhe, R. 106, 201. enemies of the people 31, 52, 53, 61, 70, 85, 95, 106, 170, 180, 209, 241. enragés 154, 162, 247. Estates General 25, 159. exchange of party cards 87–8, 91, 92, 99, 198, 200, 202, 204. factions 27, 34, 35, 44, 45, 52, 54, 71, 91, 120, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 166–173, 188, 189–194, 198, 201, 212, 213, 214, 225–226, 246, 247, 249–250.

INDE X famine 70–71, 74, 82–85, 86, 91–92, 109, 130–131, 186. Federalist revolt 44, 46, 47, 52, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163, 219, 236, 243, 248, 254. Feuillants 26, 33, 48. fifth column 35, 37, 204, 249. Figes, O. 70. Fitzpatrick, S. 197–198. Foran, J. 10. France 17, 18, 24–57, 62, 65, 113, 148, 151–174, 211, 212, 219. Furet, F. 17. Gao Gang 214, 247. genocide 22. Georgia 259. Germany/Germans 94, 96, 97, 98, 104, 105, 106, 174, 203, 257. Getty, J.A. 109, 198, 201. Girondins 26, 27, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 55, 154, 159, 161, 165, 167, 168, 173, 236, 244, 245, 248. Goldman, W. 101. Goldstone, J. 2, 6, 9, 10. Gorbachev, M. 257. Gough, H. 24. Goupilleau, J-F. 29. GPU 79, 186. Great Fear 27–28, 164. Great Leap Forward 128, 129–131, 133, 136, 211, 212, 214–215, 216, 219, 229. Greer, D. 55, 153–156, 157. Guan Feng 137. Gulag see camps Guomindang 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 123, 206. Gurr, T. 8. Hagenloh, P. 103. Harding, H. 147, 213, 218. He Long 146. Hébert, J. 52, 162. Hébertists 52, 53, 54, 56, 168. hidden enemies 32, 34–5, 37, 65, 71, 90, 94, 95, 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 101–102,

281

117, 161, 163, 165, 166, 173, 188, 192, 202, 204, 224, 227, 232, 241–243, 249. Holland 34, 39. Hua Guofeng 144. Hungary 256, 257. ideology 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 21, 53, 54, 64, 114, 126, 152, 166, 168–173, 177–193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 203, 207–209, 211, 216, 219, 220, 223–224, 233, 234, 238, 241, 245, 249, 254–255. Indulgents 52, 53, 168. industrialization 20, 71, 72, 73, 82, 84, 85, 183, 193–194, 195, 202, 211, 220, 222, 235. international hostility 9, 32, 34, 47, 72, 96, 98, 106, 134, 154, 158, 164, 173, 176, 187, 188–189, 193–194, 203–204, 210, 240–241, 258–259, 260 (also see war) IRA 14. Iran 256. ISIS 14, 260. Jacobins 1, 24, 26–27, 33, 35, 36, 42, 44, 48, 50, 55, 56, 152, 159, 162, 167, 168, 171, 228–229, 241, 249. Japan/Japanese 97, 98, 106, 111, 113, 114, 115, 119, 203. Jiang Qing 136, 137, 218. Jiangxi 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119. Jinggang Mts 112, 114, 210. Johnson, C. 10. Kamenev, L. 68, 90, 94, 96, 97, 201, 222. Kang Sheng 137. Kautsky, K. 181–182, 197, 231. Kazakhstan 81, 82–83, 105. Kerensky, A. 58. Khrushchev, N. 109. Kirov, S. 87, 93, 94, 95, 96, 200, 201. Kolchak, A. 175. Korean War 122, 123, 206–207, 210–211, 240–241. Koreans 105. Kosior, S. 106, 201. Kremlin Affair 95. Kuibyshev, V. 201. kulaks 63, 71–86, 88, 89, 90, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 187, 191, 194, 252.

282

INDE X

Kuz’michev, B. 96. Kyrgyzstan 259. land reform 115–119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127–35, 206, 210, 211, 214–215, 217, 229, 236, 247, 251, 252. Larin, Yu. 190. Latsis, M. 67. law 21, 22, 29, 31, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 57, 60, 63, 74, 103, 117, 126, 142, 156, 157, 160, 167, 169, 171, 186, 187, 253, 256. Law of Suspects 47–48. Lawson, G. 2–3, 6, 7, 10–11, 13, 15, 16. Lafayette, G. du M. 39, 164, 165. Le Peletier, L. 156, 159, 166. Lefebvre, G. 18. Leggett, G. 176. Lenin, V. 61, 63, 65, 69–70, 95, 170, 176, 177–183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191–192, 206, 207, 209, 226, 228, 246, 247, 248. Lewin, M. 198–199. Li Xiannian 129. Libya 259. Lin Biao 136, 138, 142, 143, 144. Lindet, J. 50. Linton, M. 56. Lithuania 188. Liu Shaoqi 136, 137, 138, 146, 212, 217. Lockhart, B. 64. Long March 111, 112–113, 119. Louis XVI, King 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37–38, 39, 44, 45, 152, 153, 159, 164, 165, 169, 171, 221, 222, 225, 243, 251. Lu Dingyi 136, 146. Luo Ruiqing 136, 146. Luxemburg, R. 182, 231. Macfarquhar, R. 144, 214. Maistre, J. de 219. Malia, M. 2, 9. Manicheanism 48, 562, 166, 170, 172, 175, 176, 177–178, 180, 181, 192, 202, 203, 205, 207, 209, 220, 224. Mao, Zedong 1, 16, 17, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 207–209,

211, 212–219, 223, 224, 226, 227, 234, 235, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251. Marat, J-P. 33, 43, 45, 156, 159, 161, 162, 166. Marx, K. 49, 177, 184. Marxism 73, 126, 175, 179, 181, 183, 189, 193, 197, 207, 219, 228. mass mobilization 5–6, 27, 28–9, 30, 32–3, 35, 36, 37, 44, 51, 58, 64, 118, 123, 129–130, 137–149, 154, 158–160, 162, 208, 210, 215, 217, 218, 225, 251, 259, 260. mass operations 87, 101, 102–107. Mathiez, A. 18. Mayer, A. 18, 176. Mel’gunov, S. 176. Mensheviks 63, 66, 69, 174, 185, 190, 191, 192, 193. military 3, 5, 6, 15, 24, 26, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 40, 44, 61, 62, 63, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79, 87, 96, 100, 106, 110, 113–114, 119, 136, 140–144, 145, 153, 154–155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168, 174, 211, 214, 232, 235, 236, 239, 240, 244, 251, 253–254, 257, 259. Mirabeau, H-G.R. de 38, 165, 250. Molotov, V. 96. Montagnards 18, 27, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42–43, 44, 47, 55, 154, 168. Moore, B. 9. Moscow 63, 64, 83, 86, 87, 94, 97, 98, 104, 105, 106, 120, 174, 188, 189, 205, 227, 253. Myasnikov, G. 89. Napoleon 24, 55, 228. Naumov, O. 109, 201. Nepstad, S. 11. New Economic Policy 69, 71, 81, 184–196, 245, 247. Nicholas II, Tsar 58, 243. Nikolaev, L. 93, 94, 95. NKVD 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 186, 201, 225. Northern Caucasus 72, 83. OGPU 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 93, 103, 186, 190, 191, 201, 205, 252. Ol’minskii, M. 68.

INDE X opposition 18, 19, 20, 39, 50, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 74, 83, 88, 91–110, 115, 158, 163, 167, 169, 172, 175, 189–206, 209, 210, 213, 219, 224, 231–232, 233, 238, 239–242, 257–259. Democratic Centralists 89. Left 95, 97, 189. Right 74, 76, 96, 106, 189, 195. Ryutin Platform 92, 198, 201, 202. Smirnov-Eismont-Tolmachev 92. Syrtsov-Lominadze 93. United 189. Workers 190. Ordzhonikidze, S. 201, 245. Paris 5, 18, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 165, 251. Paris Commune (1789) 27, 32, 37, 39, 43, 44, 156, 159, 162. (1871) 137, 228. peasants 9, 26, 27–28, 60, 64–65, 68, 69, 70, 71–86, 91–92, 112, 113, 114–119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127–135, 136, 143, 145, 146, 153, 155, 174, 175, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188, 189, 193, 194, 195, 199, 202–203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 217, 229, 233, 241, 243. Peng Dehuai 136, 214, 247. Peng Zhen 136, 137, 146. P’eng P’ai 112. Petrovsky, G. 201. Pettee, G. 7. Pincus, S. 4, 6, 7. Pinochet, A. 5–6. Plain/Swamp 27, 39, 43, 168. Poland/Poles 104, 105, 106, 188, 204, 257. Pope 30, 31, 164. Portugal 5. Postyshev, P. 99, 201. Priestland, D. 199. Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, C. 50. Prieur de la Marne, P. 50 proletariat see workers Provisional Government 58, 59, 237. Prussia/Prussians 34, 39, 154, 165. purge 1, 22, 43, 44, 46, 54, 55, 86, 87–110, 121, 126, 134, 143, 148, 157, 161, 168,

283

171, 173, 190, 198, 199, 200, 202, 204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 227, 236, 253, 256. Pyatakov, G. 98, 101. Qi Benyu 137. Qing Dynasty 111. Radek, K. 68, 98. Rao Shushi 214, 247. rectification 119–120, 121, 122, 132, 148–149. Red Brigade 14. Red Guards 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 146, 244, 251, 254. Reilly, S. 64. representatives on mission 41, 46, 49, 52, 56. Republic of Virtue 53, 54, 168, 171, 220, 223, 255. revolution American 12, 13, 22, 24, 256. Chinese 1, 5, 6, 8, 19, 22, 23, 111–49, 153, 188, 206–260. colour 12, 259–260. definition of 2–7. economic 4, 5–6. English 6, 7, 12, 22, 256. failed 2, 12. French 1, 5, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24–57, 111, 145,148, 151–174, 206, 219–260. negotiated 5, 11, 12, 256–259. political 3–6. Russian 1, 5, 8, 12, 17, 22, 23, 58–110, 111, 145, 151, 153, 174–206, 213, 219–260. social 3–6, 153. velvet 5, 11, 12, 256–259. revolutionary committees 140, 141, 143. Revolutionary Government 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 155, 166, 170, 178, 253. revolutionary situation 3, 5, 11, 12, 174, 259–260. revolutionary tribunals 41, 43, 48, 50, 53, 54, 56, 62, 225, 253. Robespierre, M. 1, 16, 17, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 155, 156, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 223, 224, 225, 227, 235, 238, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250, 255.

284

INDE X

Romania 256. Romme, G. 29, 162. Rousseau, J. 16, 170–171. Roux, J. 55, 162. Rudzutak, Y. 201. Russia see Soviet Union Ryazanov, D. 68. Rykov, A. 96, 100, 106. Saint-Andre, J. 50. Saint-Just, L.A. de 49, 50, 155. sans-culottes 24, 26, 27, 32–33, 36, 38, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 55, 158–161, 163, 168, 173. Savinkov, B. 63. Schama, S. 219. Schmidt, D. 96. Schoenhals, M. 144. Scripts 9, 228–230. Selden, M. 120. September massacres 36, 37, 43, 45, 159. Serbia 259. Shanghai 112, 135, 140, 143, 206. Shchastny, A. 62. Sheboldaev, B. 99. Siberia 64, 74, 81. Skocpol, T. 4, 9. Soboul, A. 18. Socialist Revolutionaries 58, 63, 69, 174, 175, 180, 185, 109. Left 63, 67, 180. Right 65. Sokolnikov, G. 98. Soviet of Workers’ Deputies 58. Soviet Union 1, 5, 21–22, 58–110, 113, 127, 128, 129, 134, 135, 148, 149, 150, 152, 167, 174–206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 257, 258. Sovnarkom 61, 66, 67. Spain 5, 34, 39, 204. Stalin, J. 1, 22, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 83, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 100, 106, 112, 119, 134, 148, 189, 190, 192, 194, 196–206, 216, 223, 224, 226, 227, 235, 244, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250. State Duma 58. Stone, B. 7–8. Strauss, J. 124.

struggle meetings 101, 116, 117, 118, 121–122, 123, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134, 135,145, 146, 149, 209, 210, 211, 225, 238, 247, 251–252, 253. Sun Yatsen 111. surveillance committees 41–42, 48–49, 54. Syria 259. Tackett, T. 156, 164, 165. Taine, H. 17. Taliban 260. Tallien, J-L. 33. Teiwes, F. 121, 123, 133, 134, 148–149. Teleology 197, 255. terror definition of 14–21. Great 1, 21, 86–110, 148, 150, 196–206, 219–230, 234, 252–253, 255. inverted 19–20, 21, 35, 40–57, 86–110, 135–149, 150, 151, 153, 158–174, 196–206, 212–230, 234–256. psychic 117, 121, 131, 133, 145–146, 211, 232–260. Red 58–71, 138, 207, 208, 232, 252. revolutionary 19–20, 25–40, 56, 58–71, 107, 112–27, 150, 151–83, 206–212, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 231–232, 235–260. transformational 19–20, 21, 22, 25–40, 56, 71–86, 107, 112–122, 127–135, 150–174, 183–196, 206–212, 219, 220, 221, 223, 232–260. White 55, 175, 176. Thionville, M. de 33. threat 3, 17, 18, 27, 28, 32, 35, 36–37, 45–47, 48, 54, 61, 63, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 92–93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 105, 106, 107, 131, 137, 146, 150, 153–174, 185–196, 207, 208, 210, 217, 227, 240, 244, 257, 258. Thuriot, J. 50. Tilly, C. 2, 4, 13. Tocqueville, A. de 7. Tomsky, M. 96. totalitarianism 196–197. transcendent goal 16, 21, 53, 54, 168, 172, 173, 178, 183, 195, 197, 199, 211, 220, 223–224, 233, 234, 238, 249, 254–255, 257–259, 260.

INDE X treason 35, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 53, 98, 100, 106, 120–121, 154, 157, 163, 165, 167, 172, 241. trials 14, 15, 37, 44, 45, 50, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 68, 69, 87, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 107, 119, 147, 156, 171, 185, 192, 193, 200, 201, 227, 250, 253. Trotsky, L. 89, 94, 96, 98, 182, 183, 189, 190, 191, 198, 199, 217, 222, 226, 227, 228. Trotskyists 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 189, 198, 200, 204. Uihgurs 22. Ukraine/Ukrainians 22, 68, 72, 74, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 204, 259. united front 111, 112, 113, 119. Uritsky, M. 63, 65. USA 14, 122, 210–211. Varlet, J. 162. Vendée revolt 39, 40, 45–46, 47, 52, 56, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 173, 219, 236, 243, 248, 254. Vergniaud, P. 1, 19. verification of party documents 87, 88, 90–91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 198, 200, 202, 204. victims 37, 55, 67–68, 78, 86, 104, 107–110, 123, 125–126, 130, 134–135, 145–148, 243–244. Villeneuve, J.P. de 37. violence 14, 15, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 58, 60, 63, 68, 77, 79, 80, 81, 85, 103, 105, 118, 119, 120, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155, 156, 158–160, 162, 163, 166, 170, 171, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 195, 202, 207–209, 211, 212, 218, 219, 221, 223, 232, 233, 234, 236, 250, 251, 256, 257, 258, 259. virtue 12, 15, 16, 17, 43, 51, 52, 53, 54, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 220, 223, 238, 255.

285

Volkogonov, D. 8. Volodarsky, M. 63, 180. Voroshilov, K. 96. Vovelle, M. 18. Walt, S. 240–241. Wang Hongwen 246. Wang Li 137, 142. war (foreign) 25, 34–36, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 67, 70, 72, 73, 96, 111, 113–122, 123, 154–157, 161, 164, 165, 166, 174, 176, 177, 178, 183, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 203, 204, 205, 206–207, 210–211, 229, 232, 236, 240, 241. War Communism 63, 64–65, 69, 183, 184. Werth, N. 109. Wheatcroft, S. 83–84, 109. White Guards 65, 66, 69, 90, 94, 175. Woloch, I. 157–158. workers 5, 26, 58–59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 95, 101, 102, 112, 131, 136, 139, 143, 145, 147, 160, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188, 193, 202–203, 252. Wrangel, P. 175. Wu Han 136. Wuhan Incident 142. Yagoda, H. 97, 100, 106. Yan’an 111, 113, 119. Yang Jisheng 131, 138, 139, 144, 147. Yang Shangkun 136, 146. Yao Wenyuan 137, 218, 246. Yenukidze, A. 95. Yezhov, N. 97, 100, 106, 201, 202. Yezhovshchina 100–101, 105, 107. Yugoslavia 256, 257. Zhang Chunqiao 137. Zhou Enlai 129, 142, 144, 146, 245. Zinoviev, G. 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 190, 191, 201, 222. Zinovievists 90, 94, 96, 97. Zunyi 113, 119, 120.