Red Terror

(1918–21) The Bolshevik campaign of terror and anarchy that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was carried out systematically by the Cheka (Secret Police) and loosely-organized Red Army forces during and after the Russian Civil War (1918–20) against potential political opponents and ‘class enemies’ - especially the bourgeoisie, former aristocracy, and peasants who resisted the seizing of grain for the war. Atrocities were committed on both sides. The tsar and his family were executed along with 200 000 other Russians, as territory changed hands between the Red Army and the White Russian forces in the Crimea, Poland, Siberia, Moscow, N Russia, and Vladivostok. Lenin justified terror as a means of obtaining and maintaining power; class, not deeds, was enough to confirm guilt.

The Red Terror was a campaign of mass arrests and deportations targeted against counterrevolutionaries in Russia during the Russian Civil War. It was initiated and conducted by the Bolsheviks as retribution for the simultaneous successful assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918.

The fact that these two assassination attempts happened at the same time strongly suggested that they had been coordinated by some larger counterrevolutionary organization, perhaps affiliated with the White movement, which was fighting against the Red Army in the civil war. As such, the Bolsheviks began to fear that more assassination attempts - and perhaps various acts of sabotage - were soon to follow.

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, with 70,000 imprisoned by September, 1921.

The Bolsheviks' enemies, the White movement, adopted similar measures at roughly the same time.

By extension, the term Red Terror came to refer to any acts of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups during a period of civil war or other armed conflict.

Examples of these other "Red Terrors" include the executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on June 24, 1919, as well as many acts of violence during the Cultural Revolution in China.