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Red Terror

Arising after assassination attempts on Lenin and Trotsky along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky, the Red Terror was enacted. The French Reign of Terror has been viewed as an influence and a model for the civil war repressions. The decision to enact the Red Terror was also driven by initial White Army massacres of "Red" prisoners in 1917, allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and the large-scale massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War in which 10,000-20,000 workers had been liquidated by the Finnish Whites. In his book, Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky argued that the reign of terror in Russia began with the White Terror under the White Guard forces and the Bolsheviks responded with the Red Terror.

Felix Dzerzhinsky was tasked with rooting out counter-revolutionary threats and appointed director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (aka Cheka), a predecessor of the KGB that served as the secret police. From early 1918, the Bolsheviks started physical elimination of opposition and other socialist and revolutionary fractions, anarchists among the first. On 11 August 1918, prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, Lenin sent telegrams "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising, and to "crush" landowners who resisted, sometimes violently, the requisitioning of their grain by military detachments.

On August 30, Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin. In September, Trotsky rushed back from the far-eastern front of the civil war to Moscow after the second day of the shooting and Stalin remained in Tsaritsyn. Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's lobbying for greater terror against opposition. The campaign of mass repressions would officially begin thereafter. The Red Terror is began between 17 and 30 August 1918. Regarding the Red Terror Trotsky wrote:

The bourgeoisie today is a falling class... We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie.