A short history of the Red Terror. 12.1917 Establishment of Cheka The establishment of the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka. The head of Cheka was one of the former leaders of SDKPiL, Felix Dzerzhinsky.The photo shows Felix Dzerzhinsky., 2.1918 German offensive actions in the east Following the failure of the winter negotiations with the Bolsheviks, Germans commenced offensive actions in the east. Their attack did not meet much resistance. The Russian army ceased to exist, and Lenin issued a decree making it possible to execute an entire category of people, i.e. “agents, profiteers, counterrevolutionary campaigners and spies” on the spot, without trial. The photo shows the Secretary of the Bolsheviks’ delegation in Brest-Litowsk, Lev Karakhan, by a telegraph used for communication with Lenin in Saint Petersburg., 7.1918 Murder of the tsar’s family In the cellars of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.The picture shows Tsar Nicholas II and his family outside the governor’s house during their internment in Tobolsk, which lasted from the end of August 1917 to April 1918., 9.1918 The Red Terror Lenin’s decrees formally established the Red Terror. The first decree allowed the taking and execution of hostages without trial, and the second decree allowed the creation of concentration camps for “class enemies”. This is how Fanny Kaplan died in the yard of the Kremlin. She was guilty of the attempted assassination of Lenin. Her deed was the reason for the above-mentioned decrees being issued.The photo shows Fanny Kaplan., 1919 Soviet forced-labour camps The first camps for “enemies of the people” and “dissenters” were established in 1918. At the end of the 1930s, 9% of the USSR’s adult citizens were placed in such camps. Prisoners were treated as a free labour force and used to construct large Stalinist projects. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, roughly 18 million people were placed in the camps. The process of closing forced labour camps commenced in 1987 under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev.The photo shows the forced labour of prisoners in a gold mine in Kolyma, 1932, 1929 Stalin gained absolute power in the USSR While Lenin was not a despot, and during his rule the country was governed by an oligarchy of party leaders, Stalin, having broken the party’s resistance, established a single-rule system. The photo shows Stalin in the company of the OGPU security department officer (another incarnation of Cheka) in Moscow in the late 1920s., 1934 NKVD is established (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the successor of Cheka and the OGPU. The terror’s range reached an absurd size. For example, in 1937–1938 the NKVD arrested over 1.5 million people. About 1.3 million people were convicted and 700,000 were executed. Others were sent to forced labour camps on a mass scale. This year marks the beginning of the collective responsibility law, according to which if one person in a family was convicted, other members of that family were also punished (children older than 12 years of age could be sentenced to death).The photo shows the head of the NKVD, Yagoda (in the middle), during the inspection of the Moskva–Volga Canal, 1935., 1936 - 1939 The Great Purge Three show-trials were organised in Moscow during which party members who had previously cooperated with Lenin were sentenced to death. The heads of the political police, that is the Red Terror machine, were killed also. The purge encompassed the army as well. A total of 90% of generals and 80% of colonels were sentenced to death.The photo shows the funeral of Kirov with Stalin at the forefront, who probably commissioned his murder.