Background
When the Revolution took power in November 1917, many top Bolsheviks hoped to avoid much of the violence which would come to define … See more

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was justified in Soviet historiography as a wartime campaign against counter-revolutionaries … See more

The Red Terror was significant because it was the first of numerous communist terror campaigns which were waged in Soviet Russia and many other countries. It also triggered the Russian Civil War according to historian Richard Pipes. Menshevik Julius Martov See more

Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists, members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, … See more

There is no consensus among the Western historians on the number of deaths from the Red Terror. One source gives estimates of 28,000 executions per year from December … See more

Historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Richard Pipes have argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support. Although the Bolsheviks dominated among workers, soldiers and in their revolutionary See more

• Soviet Union portal
• 26 Baku Commissars
• August Uprising
• Black Terror – small-scale anarchist campaign of terror
• The Black Book of Communism See more