Christmas Every Day

A good day for terror.

1793

The French Revolution institute the Reign  of Terror.

“Let’s make terror the order of the day!” said the French politician Bertrand Barère in the National Assembly. The revolutionaries of 1793 were afraid both of the unpredictable violence of the Parisian mob and the gathering forces of counter-revolution, so they launched an attack not only on the aristocrats and clergy but also political moderates such as the Girondists. Over 16,000 death sentences were passed in less than a year. Former leaders of the Revolution such as Georges Danton, Louis Hébert, and Camille Desmoulins, found themselves being sent to the guillotine by their old comrades. Maximilien Robespierre explained the ideological underpinnings of this bloody project: “If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.”

But the Revolution always eats its own children. In July 1794 Robespierre and his followers were executed and the steam went out of the Terror.

1918

The Bolsheviks unleash the Red Terror.

The assassination of Moisei Uritsky, the secret police chief in St Petersburg, and the attempt on the life of Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, on the orders of Lenin, to issue the decree “On Red Terror”. Frightful violence against class enemies was necessary to save the Revolution. It was not necessary to have actually done anything to merit death. Martin Latsis, the head of the Chekists in Ukraine, proclaimed: “Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.” Communist leader Grigory Zinoviev declared: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”  And annihilated they were, by gunfire, drowning, burning, crucifixion, live burial, and starvation. It aroused similar atrocities by the White counter-revolutionary forces and inspired other Communist revolutions to practise their own Terrors.  As is usual, the perpetrators themselves were later victims of their own methods: Latsis, Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky (see illustration above) and many more of the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1918 perished at the hands of their former colleagues.