The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

But the willingness of the German civilian authorities to hold the line on the fragile legal ground of Brest had not yet faced its sternest test. Sensing the growing vulnerability of the Bolshevik regime, the terrorist teams of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries raised the stakes. Three days after the Supplementary Treaty to Brest was initialled, on 30 August, Lenin was in an industrial suburb of Moscow delivering the new and drastic slogan that had replaced his promises of peace – ‘Victory or death!’ As he left the Mekhelnson armaments works, he was hit in the neck and shoulder by an assassin’s bullets. In a simultaneous attack the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky was killed. The policy of repression that had been gathering force since July was now transformed into the open proclamation of the ‘Red Terror’.