October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

by China Miéville

Other agents carry out their work with anguish. One may feel sceptical, even disgusted, at the notion of an attempt, under desperate necessity, at an ‘ethical’ terror, a terror as limited as possible, but the testimonials of agents tormented at what they believed they had no choice but to do are powerful. ‘I have spilt so much blood I no longer have any right to live,’ says a drunken and distraught Dzherzhinsky at the end of 1918. ‘You must shoot me now,’ he begs. One unlikely source, Major General William Graves, who commanded US forces in Siberia, considers himself ‘well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to every one killed by the Bolsheviks’. Many of the Soviet regime’s leaders struggle to restrain the degrading tendencies of their own Terror, of which they are horribly aware. In 1918, a Cheka newspaper notoriously calls for torture: the CC excoriates the editors and closes it down, and the Soviet renews its condemnation of any such practice. But without question a political and moral rot is setting in.