The Cheka (Vecheka) Secret Police was created by Vladimir Lenin's Soviet government in December 1917 to ruthlessly stamp out all opposition to the Bolshevik Revolution. During the Russian Civil War, the Cheka operated without restrictions of any kind, arresting, torturing, and executing without trial tens of thousands of citizens deemed enemies of the state. The Cheka, dissolved in 1922, was the first of many Soviet incarnations of a secret police force which involved itself in every aspect of public and private life in the USSR.

A government decree on 7 December 1917, a highly secret one, established Lenin's secret police, the Cheka. The name derives from the Russian acronym (VChK) for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Misconduct in Office. The idea was not a new one since the Russian tsars had also had a secret police force, the Okhrana. At the same time, Lenin decentralised the regular police force.

The role of Cheka was, using any means whatsoever, to eradicate opposition and any prospect of a counter-revolution following the Bolshevik Revolution the previous month. The Bolsheviks (Reds) faced wide opposition to their coup, notably from Royalists, members of the military (Whites), militant peasant groups (the Greens), and Anarchists (the Blacks), as well as rival socialist groups and several foreign powers. Although the opposition was far from united, there was significant dissatisfaction with certain Bolshevik decisions, notably the abolition of the monarchy, the redistribution of land to the peasantry, and the withdrawal from the First World War (1914 to 18). The Bolshevik hold on power was tenuous, and so began the Russian Civil War (1917 to 22).

The Bolsheviks finally won the civil war, but to do so they employed what has been termed 'War Communism.' This was imposed from the summer of 1918 and involved such unpopular policies as conscription and the requisitioning of grain. Other draconian measures included extending the working day to 11 hours, making labour compulsory for every able-bodied male between the ages of 16 and 50, and punishments for those workers considered to be slacking. Cheka agents ensured these rules were enforced and lawbreakers punished. Around 800,000 soldiers died in the Russian Civil War, but at least 5 million civilians were also killed by famine, disease, and executions. The Cheka contributed to these figures after it was given the arbitrary right to arrest, imprison, and execute suspected enemies of the Bolshevik regime from February 1918 onwards.

The head of Cheka was a Polish Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877 to 1926), known as 'Iron Felix.' The historian A. Beevor memorably describes Dzerzhinsky:

…a tall, emaciated Pole from a background of impoverished nobility had a pale, ascetic, El Greco face, a wispy wizard's beard and hooded eyes. He was a true fanatic, devoted to a belief for which he would sacrifice everything, even his own health and sanity.
(122)

Dzerzhinsky was selected by Lenin because he was a man with a revolutionary conscience and so would instil this consciousness in the general population as one of the main aims of Cheka. As the historian C. Read notes, "One cannot underestimate the Cheka's importance as an embodiment of correct revolutionary consciousness" (209). The Cheka was to become what Lenin described as the "sword of the revolution" (Freeze, 295). The Cheka was formally attached to the Bolshevik government but, in reality, answered only to the Politburo of the Communist Party Central Committee.

While the Bolsheviks were fighting and winning military campaigns to keep in power, the Cheka became a key instrument not only to foster the right attitude towards the Marxist revolution as envisaged by Lenin but also in subduing the general population. The Cheka was made responsible for press censorship and could arrest anyone involved in the publication of material the Bolsheviks considered detrimental to their revolution. Obvious right-wing targets were closed down, but even more moderate socialist publications were targeted by the secret police. In short, the Cheka was "given very wide powers to detect and suppress 'counter-revolutionary elements' of all sorts" (Brown, 359).

Dzerzhinsky was fully in agreement with Lenin on the Cheka's role as an instrument of coercion, as shown by the following extract from the Soviet newspaper Svoboda Rossii (Russia's Freedom):

We stand for organized terror – this should be frankly stated – terror being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions…We terrorize the enemies of the Soviet government in order to stifle crime at its inception. Terror serves as a deterrent.
(Shukmann, 182)

The headquarters of the Cheka were established in the Lubyanka building near Moscow's Kremlin. The Cheka had branches across Russia, at both provincial and district levels. It had its own armed division, the Corps of Vecheka Troops, a branch specialised in controlling borders, and another department specialised in operating on the railways (and later, other forms of transport).

By 1919, the Cheka had around 37,000 members, both men and women; by 1921 its personnel had risen to around 250,000. A sort of unofficial uniform was black leather jackets, initially adopted because Dzerzhinsky had a quantity of them given by the British government during the Civil War for aviators in the White Army.

The majority of Cheka members were not enlightened revolutionaries and over half were not even Communist Party members. Many members were non-Russian. Amongst the recruits, as Lenin knew, there were criminals and psychopaths. These were individuals all too prone to exceeding their authority. Lenin, though, had no qualms about using terror tactics, stating in January 1918: "Until we apply terror – shooting on the spot – to speculators, we shall achieve nothing" (Wood, 53).

The Cheka quickly expanded its area of control from traditional enemies of Bolshevism to anyone who (was deemed to have) committed crimes or abused their authority. Agents provocateurs were widely used to reveal opponents to the Bolshevik regime. By December 1920, there was even a Cheka Foreign Department, which gathered intelligence from other countries, particularly on subversives and foreign spies operating in Soviet territory.

The Cheka's reign of 'Red Terror,' a period when the repression reached new levels, began following a failed assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918. The Cheka now had the excuse to attack anyone at all. The secret police used methods ranging from the confiscation of ration books to brutal interrogations, torture, and execution without trial or any recourse to the judicial system. Many people were simply imprisoned without trial in the growing network of prisons, concentration and labour camps the Cheka managed across the USSR. In effect, the Cheka became a state within a state, involved in every aspect of life and responsible to no external and identifiable authority beyond Lenin himself.

Official Cheka figures record 6,300 executions in 1918 and 3,456 in 1919. This was only the tip of the iceberg as the depravity sank to new depths. The victims were not only spies, revolters, royalists, and reactionaries but very often the socialist rivals of the Bolsheviks. Workers on strike were targets. Other victims included any individuals deemed unnecessary to the Bolshevik vision of the state, whether that be opposition political parties or independent trade unions, intellectuals or peasants, prostitutes or priests. Embezzlers, black marketers, and war profiteers were also targeted, as were specific groups such as Ukrainian Jews, Crimean Tatars, and Cossacks in the Don region, to name but a few. Many victims were innocent of nothing more serious than wearing glasses and so looking like an intellectual.

Broken bones, flaying, mutilation, and burning with fire were some of the more mundane medieval torture methods used by the Cheka. More perversely imaginative methods of execution besides simply shooting the victim included roasting a suspect alive in a train engine's furnace, tying up people using barbed wire and throwing them in a river, or making hundreds of detainees hopelessly bail out a barge with a hole in the bottom until exhaustion led to it eventually sinking and everyone aboard drowning. A common method in winter, known as the 'ice statue', was to strip the victim outside and pour cold water over them, which soon froze, along with the victim. The killing spree was sanctioned at the highest level and usually welcomed since it cleared the mounting backlog of investigations – if there had ever been one – and removed any logistical necessity to imprison, feed, or even record victims.

Even Bolsheviks could not escape the inquisitive eyes of Cheka agents. The Cheka assisted commissars in controlling both internal security troops and the Red Army, which had 5 million members (including 60,000 women) by June 1920. As 83% of these members were conscripts, 'Special Departments' (OO - Osobye Otdely) had been created within the Cheka in January 1919 to deal with the Red Army. The OO reported each week directly to one Joseph Stalin (1878 to 1953). Even Cheka members could fall foul of their superiors; Petr 'Vicheslav' Alexandrovich, deputy head of the Cheka, was executed, shot by Dzerzhinsky personally.

There were some voices who protested against the excesses of the Cheka, such as Mikhail Olminsky (1863 to 1933), a prominent Bolshevik ever since 1904, who wrote several articles in the party newspaper Pravda against the Cheka. Such voices were few and far between and ultimately ineffective in achieving any meaningful change.

The most infamous victims of the Cheka were the Romanovs of the royal family. Yakov Yurovsky, a Bolshevik commissar and member of the Cheka, was the man charged by Lenin with carrying out the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Yurovsky had no qualms over his dreadful mission, once stating, "It was left to me the son of a worker to settle the Revolution's score with the Imperial House for centuries of suffering" (Montefiore, 643). In the early hours of 17 July, the Romanovs, including the children, were shot and buried in a forest near Ekaterinaburg (Yekaterinburg).

Admiral Alexander Kolchak, the Whites' leader in Siberia and polar explorer of some repute, was executed by the Cheka on 7 February 1920. Another notable Cheka victim was Maria 'Yashka' Bochkareva (1889 to 1920). She had fought with distinction in the First World War (1914 to 18) and was then tasked with forming the first Women's Death Battalion. The main idea was that the well-drilled and disciplined 300 women of this battalion (who all shaved their heads) would shame male soldiers into being more disciplined themselves and inspire more men to join the armed forces. This was a time when Russia's armed forces had suffered many defeats, lacked equipment, and discipline had broken down following Bolshevik infiltration and the abandonment of the traditional officer-ranks hierarchy. Bochkareva's battalion inflicted a serious defeat on a German army on the South-West Front in July, a victory which included the capture of 2,000 prisoners. Bochkareva, a staunch supporter of the tsar, refused to join the Bolsheviks and, despite being a national hero, was executed by the Cheka on 16 May 1920.

While the Cheka might go after specific individuals, the organisation was typically indiscriminate in its targets and committed multiple massacres of general civilians. One such documented massacre occurred around January 1919 in the Palermo forest, near Rakvere, Estonia. Mass killings occurred against rebel groups in the Civil War, peasants revolting against the requisition of grain, groups identified as belonging to a specific class or occupation, and, on a regular basis, all internees in labour and concentration camps merely to clear them for new arrivals. It was not unusual for hundreds of corpses to be taken to another location for mass burial, with the local population informed the dead were victims of a typhoid outbreak.

The Cheka's legacy was a bloody one. "Chekas of the various Soviet republics were directly responsible for perhaps 140,000 executions, and maybe another 140,000 deaths in the suppression of insurrections" (Shukman, 185). Some historians would put the death figures across the Soviet Union as high as 3 million. In one drunken moment, Dzerzhinsky even begged Lenin to shoot him, lamenting, "I have spilt so much blood that I no longer have any right to live" (Beevor, 279).

The Cheka was dissolved in February 1992, replaced by the State Political Directorate (GPU), itself later replaced by various similar bodies, notably the NKVD through the Second World War (1939 to 45), and then the KGB from 1954. Members of the latter organisation even called themselves "Chekisty" in homage to the first Soviet force to use terror as an instrument of power. The political police then became a permanent fixture of life in a Soviet state. The name Cheka was later revived and given to a new supreme Russian tax agency in 1997.