To: maceng2 who wrote (90429 ) 4/5/2003 8:31:16 PM From: skinowski Read Replies (1) | Respond to Lenin studied the French revolution and thought that it didn't succeed because the new government failed to eliminate enough members of opposition. He was not going to repeat the same mistake. Draconian enforcement of price controls was merely one of a plethora of tasks entrusted to the backbone of Lenin's new regime: the secret police, or Cheka, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its nucleus was Trotsky's goon squad from the Petrograd Soviet, which almost immediately became an official organ of the government after the coup. Its rate of growth was fantastic: "The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 250,000 full-time agents." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times) Its powers were vast: now only was the Cheka judge, jury, and executioner, but it acknowledged no law to guide its actions, only "the dictates of revolutionary conscience." Its methods were savage: summary shooting, concentration camps, and forced labor were its three basic weapons. And its potential victims, the "enemies of the people" it was instructed to hunt down, were countless. As the high-ranking Chekist Latsis explained: gmu.edu
