The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was a campaign of mass arrests, executions, and atrocities conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as having been officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended about October 1918. However, many historians, beginning with Sergei Melgunov, apply this term to political repression during the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918–1922. The mass repressions were conducted by the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police), together with elements of the Bolshevik military intelligence agency (the GRU).
The term "Red Terror" was originally used to describe the last six weeks of the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution, ending on July 28, 1794 with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, to distinguish it from the subsequent First White Terror. (Historically this period has been known as the Great Terror (French: la Grande Terreur).)
Read more about Red Terror: Purpose, History, Atrocities, Interpretations By Historians, Historical Significance
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or terror:
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)