Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

1930s. In 1942 the networks in France and Belgium were quickly de-

feated. Almost all members of the Red Orchestra were arrested and

executed. Both Schulze-Boysen and Harnack as well as their wives,

who were active in the organization, were put to death.

RED TERROR. Vladimir Leninand Chekachief Feliks Dzerzhin-

skyordered local Soviets to take violent “prophylactic measures” to

prevent insurrections in early August 1918. These messages were fol-

lowed by orders establishing concentration camps for right-wing and

left-wing enemies of the regime. The terror intensified after 30 Au-

gust when Fanny Kaplan wounded Lenin in a botched assassination

attempt. Within hours, the Cheka began shooting thousands of pris-

oners across Russia. Kaplan was shot without a trial in early Sep-

tember. According to recent historical estimates, between 10,000 and

15,000 men and women were shot, hanged, or drowned in the fall of

1918, including members of the former royal family, parliamentari-

ans, and military officers, as well as anarchists and socialists. The

number of people incarcerated in camps rose from approximately

16,000 in the summer of 1918 to more than 70,000 a year later.

Terror became a tactic of the embattled Bolshevikgovernment,

and prophylactic measures were used to executepotential enemies of

the regime, from the palaces of the aristocracy to the poorest villages

in the land. Whole categories of people became targets: members of

the middle class, rich farmers, and clergy were killed because of their

pasts. In June 1918, Lenin wrote to the head of the Petrograd Cheka:

“We are in a war to the death. We must spur on the energy and mass

character of the terror against the counterrevolutionaries.” For Lenin,

who was a student of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune

of 1870–1871, revolutionary terror was a necessity. For the Soviet

regime, the heritage of the Red Terror was impossible to erase. For

Joseph Stalin, the mass killing of enemies in the civil warjustified

a new reign of terror in the 1930s—first against the peasantry and

then within the Communist Party.

REDENS, STANISLAV FRANTSEVICH (1892–1940). An Old Bol-

shevik, Redens was a Polish worker who joined the Bolshevik Party

in 1914 and entered the Chekain 1918. He was Joseph Stalin’s

brother-in-law, which initially accelerated his career but in the end

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