Air University Review, September-October 1981

"They Shoot People, Don’t They?"

News reports alleging executions by Soviet forces invading Afghanistan and the elimination of local political opposition by their Afghan surrogates came as no surprise to those familiar with Russian history. Soviet leaders are well versed in the use of political terror. Not terror in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) vein, but terror of a wholly homegrown variety not terror to cause anarchy, but terror to prevent it; not terror to topple a government, but terror to preserve their own. The political elite of the Soviet Union view terror as a flexible tool that can be used to control the population, stifle dissent, and perpetuate their power. They see in terror an effective instrument of political control.

Using terror as an instrument of political control is not solely a Communist phenomenon, however. Every technique of terror used by the Soviets was developed, practiced, and refined in prerevolutionary Russia. Soviet use of terror is simply the manifestation of a mentality traditional among Russian political elites. It is a mentality that considers social institutions with guarantees and norms sanctioned by law as unimportant and their manipulation for political reasons as quite permissible.¹ It is a mentality engendered by five centuries of domination by the state’s technicians of terror, the secret police.

If U.S. Air Force leaders are to gain a better perspective of potential adversaries, they must understand this important aspect of the total Soviet experience. This understanding will not ensure firm prediction of how our Soviet counterparts will react in any given situation, but it will explain the Russian people’s acceptance of numbing discipline and their relative domestic docility. It is the Russians who produce the majority of Soviet military officers.

If Air Force leaders are to understand this mentality, they must appreciate it as an integral part of a Soviet Russian’s cultural subconsciousness. They must realize that it is the end product of a cultural lifetime of terror and come to understand its history.

This history extends back to the two-and-a-half-century Tatar rule of ancient Russia. For it was from the Tatars that the Russians learned the "cynical disregard for human life and a ruthless cruelty" that was to start them on their road to terror.² When Ivan III drove out the Tatars and reestablished the Rurik dynasty in the fading years of the fifteenth century, many of the formerly autonomous princes resisted his efforts to unify the country. Ivan III (The Great) saw that only by a ruthless insistence on unity could it be achieved.³ He took his lessons of cruelty from the Tatars seriously and observed that the necessary degree of ruthlessness could stem only from the control of one man. He gained this control by organizing a special body of men, responsible to him alone, to enforce his rules.⁴ The seed from which future Russian secret police organizations would grow had been planted.

This seed began to sprout when Ivan IV (The Terrible)* established the first formalized Russian political police. He called it Oprichina, meaning "special men."⁵

*Ivan IV was the first Russian ruler to call himself "Tsar" (Caesar).

Perhaps more of the traditions and techniques of the Russian secret police were established under Ivan the Terrible than any other ruler. The practice of uprooting the whole areas of populations and transporting them by force to some distant region was well established by the end of his reign. This technique foreshadowed mass arrests and expulsions of Balts, Poles, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and others by Stalin’s police in the 1940s.⁶

In aiming at the mass terrorization of an entire population rather than at the selective investigation and punishment of individual political dissidents, the oprichina closely anticipated an organization generally accepted as the classic model of a twentieth-century political police, Stalin’s NKVD. Stalin’s admiration for the oprichina and their techniques was revealed when he once spoke of their "progressive role" and jested that Ivan IV’s fault was not "ruthlessness, but insufficient ruthlessness." Stalin said that Ivan had wasted too much time praying when he might have been usefully killing still more of the opposition.⁷

Another precedent was set by Ivan the Terrible in the early 1570s when he turned on his chief oprichniks and had several executed, just as Stalin was to liquidate his NKVD commissars Yagoda and Yezhov nearly four centuries later.⁸ With the death of the leaders, the oprichniks were disbanded in 1572. The absence of a political police contributed to the anarchy that followed Ivan IV’s death in 1584. Greatly weakened, Russia was finally invaded and occupied by Poland in 1610.⁹

Tsar Michael expelled the Poles and established the Romanov dynasty in 1613, but the process of restoring order from anarchy was a slow and painful one. It became clear to Michael that only strong central control could prevent a return to the pre-Ivan III conditions of separate, autonomous principalities.¹⁰ However, Tsar Michael died before establishing an organized political police force. This task he left to his son, Peter I, the Great.

In his youth Peter the Great witnessed the Streltsy* mutiny and march on the Kremlin to slaughter his relatives.¹¹ Thereafter, he felt the need for an organization to protect him. He established such an organization comprised of faithful young men headed by Prince Romodanovsky, committed to his protection. They practiced terrorism in the highest tradition of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichina but were unable to fully subdue Peter’s opposition. In 1697 Peter reestablished a secret police force, the Preobrazhensky office, to relieve Romodanovsky’s men of some of their responsibility.¹²

*The Streltsy were the soldier-traders who garrisoned Moscow and who themselves functioned as a rudimentary civil police.

Russian state terrorist tactics continued unimaginatively throughout the eighteenth century. It was not until Tsar Alexander I came to power in 1801 that some of the more important precedents of state terrorism were set. Among other things, Alexander I instituted state censorship in Russia, a technique still used today.¹³

He also established a special body of field security police whose sole task was to spy on the army. And with good reason, for the members of the Decembrist revolt (December 1825) were military men. During the Napoleonic Wars they had come in contact with Western Europe, an experience that made them painfully aware of their own country’s political, economic, and social backwardness. Arriving home with high hopes of domestic reform, they became bitterly disillusioned when they came up against the reactionary policies of Alexander I. The repression of the Decembrists was but a foretaste of the experiences that awaited the returning Red Army of 1945 at the hands of the NKVD.¹⁴

The Decembrist revolt became a crucial episode in the evolution of Russian political police because of its impact on Nicholas I. Crowned in 1826, he established a special Corps of Gendarmerie. Responsible to no one but the tsar, their duty was to "fight the spirit of rebellion which has penetrated from the west."¹⁵

The number of terroristic precedents established by Nicholas I is exceeded by that of no one but Ivan the Terrible. It was Nicholas I who laid the foundations of the system that even today influences the espionage machine of modern Soviet Russia. Additionally, exile to Siberia, one of the most infamous of Russian state terrorist tactics, was first used by Nicholas I.¹⁶

Nicholas I’s reign was remarkable for collisions between intellectuals and police. A classic example is the case of Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, who was exiled for revolutionary writing. Nicholas I agreed to free him from exile if he would promise to stop publishing subversive material. When Pushkin complained of censorship, the tsar suggested that he personally act as Pushkin’s censor. Pushkin acquiesced, thereby falling into Nicholas’s carefully laid trap of placing him under the direct tutelage of the secret police.

Nicholas Polevoy, a journalist during the reign of Nicholas I, wrote a hostile review of a crudely patriotic play. "The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland." When, to his horror, he learned of the tsar’s enthusiastic admiration of the play, he tried unsuccessfully to stop publication. Called before the chief of the secret police, he was asked "How could you express an opinion so contrary to the opinion of everybody else?"¹⁷

A final example is that of Peter Chaadayev, a philosopher. In 1836 he published his first "Philosophical Letter," which contained a violent attack on the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russia herself as a nation too primitive even to be credited with having her own history. In all Russian states, orthodoxy (whether of church or party dogma), patriotism and autocracy (supremacy of the tsars and the commissars) have always formed the three main planks of official ideology. Nicholas I’s reaction to Chaadayev’s violation of all three was to issue a proclamation stating that the inhabitants of Moscow had at once realized that an article such as this could not have emanated from a compatriot in full possession of his mental faculties. He officially branded Chaadayev a lunatic and required that he be attended each morning by a doctor. Although the requirement was withdrawn after a year, this incident has been cited as the imperial precedent for the far more severe Soviet practice, common under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, of confining political dissidents in mental hospitals.¹⁸

Nicholas I was succeeded by Alexander II, ‘‘the Liberator,’’ who made sweeping domestic changes. For a time, he even did away with the secret police.¹⁹ But his subjects’ ungrateful attitude toward his benevolence made him see the wisdom of his predecessors, and he became reactionary, reestablishing the political police. The reign of Alexander II saw the addition of two important refinements to state terrorism in Russia. The first was the use of agents provocateurs, which became a common, accepted practice under Alexander II’s secret police.²⁰ The second, which was more far-reaching, occurred in 1871, when the tsar assigned to all gendarmerie officers the function of trial judges. Subsequently, they became prosecutor-judges.²¹ However, the terroristic potential of these prosecutor-judges was not fully realized until after "the Liberator’s" assassination.

Alexander II’s assassination so terrified the new tsar, Alexander III, that he doubled the personnel of all police organizations. More important, he created the Okhrana, the Administration for the Protection of State institutions and Public Security, and gave it the power to go into any private house without a warrant, to arrest without warrant, to deport to Siberia without trial, to place any individual under surveillance, and even to carry out the death penalty in important cases.²² This precedent was profound, for 100 years later the situation remains essentially unchanged. The KGB, the present Soviet secret police, still exercises these same unchecked powers. Arkadiy Shevchenko, a Soviet United Nations diplomat who defected to the United States, said as much when he testified before a congressional committee in January 1980: "They [the KGB] can do everything," he said, "follow you, bug you, send you away, open your mail, detain and arrest you, send you to a mental institution—all without a warrant."²³

Many legal methods of terrorism had their foundation during the reign of Alexander III’s Okhrana. General Strelnikov, a prosecutor active in the military courts of southern Russia during the 1880s, pioneered the concept of preemptive arrest of those thought likely to commit crimes of which they were actually innocent. Strelnikov "practiced mass searches and arrests . . . seizing persons entirely unconnected with revolutionary activity. . . . He felt it better to seize ten innocents than to let one guilty person escape."²⁴

Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Sudeykin, an officer of the Saint Petersburg Okhrana, was another pioneer of police techniques. He convinced revolutionary terrorists to give names of accomplices and provide details of conspiracies by saying that the police and revolutionaries should work together to establish a new order. He used this technique to trick Degayev, a prominent leader of the People’s Will terrorist organization, into collaboration. Eventuallv, the entire People’s Will group was taken over by the political police, a situation which was to become almost normal in the later development of Russian police-revolutionary collaboration.²⁵

There were limits to the legal weapons of terror, however. For example, because of the way political trials had gotten out of hand under Alexander II (the state had actually suffered an acquittal at a rigged trial), no further use of the jury system was made in political trials under Alexander III.²⁶ This was but a preview of late twentieth-century Russia. In January 1980, Andrey Sakharov, a dissident Soviet human rights activist, was exiled to the provinces without benefit of trial²⁷—only one unusually prominent example of thousands of involuntary exiles.

Nicholas II became tsar in 1894, and shortly thereafter, in the early twentieth century, Russia appeared to stabilize. But this stability was an illusion. In reality, competition between the police and the revolutionaries intensified, with state terrorism becoming more sophisticated.²⁸

One of the more sophisticated innovations of the Okhrana in the early twentieth century was "police socialism": the organization of trade unions under Okhrana control. The Moscow Mechanical Production Worker’s Mutual Aid Society, formed in 1901, was the first in a long line of such unions, which extended well into the Soviet period.²⁹ Another sophisticated technique introduced by Nicholas II’s Okhrana was internal passport regulation. Although abhorred by the communists, these regulations were nevertheless reintroduced not too many years after the Bolsheviks came to power.³⁰

But despite its sophisticated techniques, the Okhrana mainly relied on a system of mass observation to suppress opposition. This called for a colossal number of agents of all kinds, and an organization far larger than any similar one before. We can still see the Okhrana’s influence on the Soviet security machine, for it too counts on a huge number of agents for success.³¹ The Okhrana under Nicholas II also relied heavily on agents provocateurs. The Political Investigating Committee established by the (Kerensky) provisional government in 1917 alleged that "even . . . Leon Trotsky had served the Okhrana as a special agent."³²

Even with its sophisticated techniques and vast number of agents, the Okhrana was unable to cope with the events for which it had been created. It went the way of Imperial Russia when the Bolsheviks murdered Nicholas II in 1918.

The murder of Nicholas II was more than the end of the Imperial Russia. It was the reaffirmation of a terrorist mentality by the Bolsheviks, who carried it over into Soviet Russia. This mentality continues to color Soviet perception of life, politics, and the world at large. It is exhibited in dissident trials, confinement in mental hospitals as punishment, internal exile, and imprisonment in a still-existing Gulag Archipelago.

It flourishes in the Soviet Union today. But it is not a new phenomenon.

We recognize neither freedom, nor equality, nor labour democracy if they are opposed to the interest of the emancipation of labour from the oppression of capital.

LENIN, 1919
Andrews AFB, Maryland

1. Boris Levytsky, The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Police 1917-1970, translated by H. A. Piehler (New York, 1972), p. 318.

2. Ronald Seth, The Executioners: The Story of Smersh (New York, 1967), p. 4.

3. Ibid., p. 3.

4. Ronald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police, Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet Political Security Operations (New York, 1970), p. 1.

5. Ibid.

6. Hingley, pp. 2-3.

7. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Toronto, 1968), pp. 74-75.

8. Hingley, p. 4.

9. Ibid., pp. 4-6.

10. Seth, p. 3.

11. Hingley, p. 8.

12. Seth, p. 6.

13. Ibid., p. 7.

14. Hingley, pp. 24-25.

15. Seth, p. 7.

16. Ronald Seth, Unmasked! The Story of Soviet Espionage (New York, 1965), pp. 12-13.

17. Hingley, p. 42.

18. Ibid., pp. 41-42.

19. Ibid., p. 50.

20. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

21. Seth, The Executioners, p. 7.

22. Ibid., p. 8.

23. Washington Post, January 26, 1980, p. A-1.

24. Hingley, p. 74.

25. Ibid., p. 75.

26. Hingley, pp. 77-91.

27. Washington Post, January 23, 1980, p. A-1.

28. Hingley, pp. 77-91.

29. Ibid.

30. Conquest, p. 8.

31. Seth, Unmasked! p. 8.

32. Seth, The Executioners, p. 8.

Special Agent Lyman E. Holler (B.S., Florida State University) is an enlisted counterintelligence specialist assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He is a graduate of the USAF Special Investigations Academy.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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