The Red Terror: How Lenin's Decree Became a State Policy of Mass Killing

In September 1918, after an assassination attempt on Lenin, the Bolsheviks issued the Decree on Red Terror, transforming revolutionary violence into systematic state policy. This episode traces the origins, implementation, and legacy of the Krasnyy Terror through its key architects and victims. We examine the role of the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the mass executions of 'class enemies' in Petrograd and Moscow, the hostage system targeting bourgeois hostages and former tsarist officers, the use of concentration camps, and the ideological justifications articulated by Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin. We also explore the scale of repression: roughly 10,000–15,000 summary executions between September 1918 and early 1919, with hundreds of thousands more imprisoned. The episode discusses the Left SRs' opposition, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk strike wave, and how the terror paved the way for later Stalinist purges. Drawing on recent scholarship by historians like Vladimir Brovkin and Donald Rayfield, we separate myth from evidence in this deeply controversial period.

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