And unfortunately, the Romanovs were just a fraction of the tens of thousands, if not millions, butchered by the Bolshevik government. Here is a passage from Robert Payne'sThe Life and Death of Lenin:
"The ordinary human sins had no appeal for Lenin; his sin was pride, which devours all those who suffer from it. His pride led him to believe that he alone was in possession of an infallible dogma which had been handed down from Marx; he saw himself as the vehicle of a new social order, a new dispensation of time, a new era of destruction. Those who opposed him must be struck down immediately, mercilessly, at whatever the cost, absolutely and irrevocably. So he wrote in a letter to Grigory Sokolnikov in May 1919. It was not enough that they should be killed once; they must be killed over and over again, as the interminable adverbs swoop down on their prey.
Sitting quietly in his warm study, with his books around him and a litter of state documents on his desk, he would give way to sudden rages. He had been slighted; something had gone wrong; his orders were not being carried out promptly; immediately there is the flash of lightning followed by the rumbling of thunder. A workman called Bulatov complained to him about the actions of the Soviet government in Novgorod. Some days later Lenin learned that Bulatov had been arrested. Lenin regarded the arrest as an intolerable abuse of power. It was clear to him that Bulatov was in prison because he had dared to approach the President of the Soviet of People’s Commissars. Without a further thought, he wrote off a telegram to the Executive Committee of the Novgorod guberniya:
Apparently Bulatov has been arrested for complaining to me. I warn you that I shall have the chairmen of the guberniya executive committees, the Cheka and members of the executive committee arrested for this and see that they are shot. Why did you not answer my question immediately?
In his rage Lenin was sentencing the government of Novgorod guberniya to be shot for having arrested one man. In her memoirs Krupskaya refers to this telegram. “It was,” she wrote, “a very characteristic one.”
Why did he write this telegram? Did he seriously believe that the executive committee, to whom it was addressed, would turn themselves in and arrange to be shot by the Cheka, which would then turn the weapons on itself? It is much more likely that he sent the telegram merely to inspire them with terror, to frighten them out of their wits. But there is very little difference between frightening men out of their wits and killing them, especially when you have the power to kill them.
The letters written in that quiet room sometimes reek with terror — with terror wielded as a weapon and with terror felt on the nerves and sinews. There were times when he was mortally frightened, when all his dreams seemed about to collapse, when he was alone in his cell, waiting, like the doctor in Chekhov’s story “Ward No. 6”, for the blow to fall, knowing that only by a desperate expedient would he be able to survive it. Engels had once described terror as “the domination of men who are themselves terrorized”. Lenin may never have known what Engels thought of terror, but his eagerness to employ the weapon hints that he was himself its victim rather than its master. It was always terror “at saturation point”. It was never a question of shooting one man in ten, as a warning to the remaining nine. He must shoot five, or six, or seven, and go on until there are only the shreds of a man left. He practiced terror like the Romans. When the Emperor Gallienus cried out, “Tear, kill, exterminate! — Lacera, occide, concide!” he was saying no more than Lenin, who spoke of destroying “immediately, mercilessly, at whatever the cost, absolutely and irrevocably”.
Lenin to Zinoviev: June 1918
Comrade Zinoviev, only today did we in the Central Committee learn that the Petrograd workers want to react to the assassination of Volodarsky by mass terror and that you — I am not talking about you personally, but about the Petrograd members of the CC and CP — have restrained them. I most emphatically protest … This is in-admissible … It is necessary to cultivate the mass nature of the terror against counterrevolutionaries and push it forward with even greater energy, especially in Petrograd, whose example is decisive. Greetings! LENIN.
Lenin to Yevgeniya Bosh: August 1918
Your telegram received. It is necessary to organize an intensive guard of picked reliable men to conduct a merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests and White Guards; suspects to be held in a concentration camp outside the city. Punitive expedition to set out at once. Telegraph re mission accomplished. Sovnarkom LENIN.
Lenin to the Soviet of Nizhni Novgorod: August 1918
An open uprising of White Guards is clearly in preparation in Nizhni Novgorod. You must mobilize all forces, establish a triumvirate of dictators, introduce immediately mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment. You must act promptly: mass searches for hidden arms; mass deportations of Mensheviks and security risks. Sovnarkom LENIN.
Such messages were continually being sent from the quiet room in the Kremlin. It had become a habit to write the word shoot, so that in the end it became almost meaningless; it was like brushing off flies. He had such a horror of the processes of death that he refused to have flowers in the room, knowing that they decayed, but death in the abstract and at some remote telegraphic distance pleased him. He would write, “Shoot and deport,” without pausing to wonder whether anyone could be deported after being shot. What is chiefly remarkable about these murderous telegrams is their vulgarity.
In all wars and revolutions excesses are committed; and the most hideous barbarities are excused on the grounds of expediency. Lenin, however, made no excuses. For him mass terror was the most useful and therefore the most desirable of weapons. Single acts of terror had little appeal for him: it was only when the terror was being waged on a massive scale that he rejoiced, the pulse of the sentences demonstrating his excitement, his urgency, and his barbarity. Marx praised the Paris Commune for being innocent of the violence common in revolutions. Lenin gloried in violence: it was the drug which stimulated him to further action, the whip which goaded him, the solace of his studious temperament.
At various times in the past Lenin had claimed that terror was “not the right road,” but in fact he always accepted terror gratefully. “In principle we have never renounced, and cannot renounce terrorism,” he wrote in Iskra in 1901; and he added, “It is an act of war, indispensable at a certain point in the struggle.” But these “certain points” were being continually prolonged until it seemed that Lenin was encouraging the permanent reign of terror with no end in sight. A new and entirely un-Marxist theory of the state was emerging. Terror was to become the chief instrument of state power; and Lenin discovered to his surprise that terror was so formidable an instrument that no others were necessary."
