20th+

Friday, June 13, 2014

On the 20th of December 1917, the Russian Bolshevik secret police, known as the Cheka, was established.

Established following a decree by Lenin on 19 December, the Cheka’s focus was on defending the revolution by removing internal threats to the communist regime. Lenin’s decree was purposefully vague, and this enabled the Cheka’s leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to recruit and direct his Chekist agents in whatever way he saw best. With virtually unlimited powers, the growing number of agents soon began rounding up anyone identified as an ‘enemy of the people’. Although often referred to as the Bolshevik secret police, the Chekists were easily identifiable from their long leather coats, and a number of their activities were reported in official Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia.

The organisation’s name was derived from the Russian initials for its original full name – The All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Hundreds of Cheka committees were formed across Russia, and these went on to arrest, torture or execute many thousands of dissidents, deserters and other enemies of the state.

Known as the Red Terror, the Cheka’s campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression grew more fierce as the Russian Civil War progressed. Its activities included a number of atrocities using torture methods that respected historian Orlando Figes says were ‘matched only by the Spanish Inquisition’.

Official Soviet figures placed the total number of Cheka victims at 12,733. However, in reality the figure is probably significantly higher. Some historians place the actual number of people killed by the Cheka at 200,000 or more.

The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (Всеросси́йская чрезвыча́йная коми́ссия, tr. Vserossíyskaya chrezvycháynaya komíssiya, abbreviated as VChK (Russian: ВЧК, and commonly known as Cheka (Russian: Чека, from the initialism ЧК, ChK), was the first of a succession of Soviet secret-police organizations. Established on December 5 (Old Style) 1917 by the Sovnarkom, it came under the leadership of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat-turned-Bolshevik. By late 1918, hundreds of Cheka committees had sprung up in the RSFSR at the oblast, guberniya, raion, uyezd, and volost levels.

Ostensibly set up to protect the revolution from reactionary forces, i.e., "class enemies" such as the bourgeoisie and members of the clergy, it soon became the repression tool against all political opponents of the communist regime. At the direction of Lenin, the Cheka performed mass arrests, imprisonments, torture, and executions without trial.

In 1921, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered at least 200,000. They policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, put down rebellions and riots by workers and peasants, and mutinies in the Red Army.

The organization was dissolved in 1922 and succeeded by the State Political Directorate or GPU, which acted with similar aims but more restraint.

1917-11-15 Clemenceau, 2nd term

1917-11-15: Georges Clemenceau as Prime Minister of France, second time - HiPo > .

23-5-14 French Defence Strategy & Rearmament - strategic autonomy, Hx - Perun > .

22-7-26 France's Hx & Geostrategic Choices in Central Europe - gtbt > .

On 15 November 1917, Georges Clemenceau was appointed Prime Minister of France for the second time.

Clemenceau first had served as Prime Minister until 1909, after which he spent much of his time criticising the government in his radical newspaper. However, by 1917 France had experienced three separate wartime Prime Ministers. President Raymond Poincaré, with whom Clemenceau had a frosty relationship, was frustrated by the government’s instability and began to believe that Clemenceau’s desire to defeat Germany made him the best replacement.

Throughout 1917 the French government had become increasingly divided over whether to negotiate peace with Germany. Clemenceau was a fierce critic of this approach, having held a deep-seated hatred of Germany since France’s loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War five years before he was first elected. His appointment therefore heralded a marked change in government as he sought to consolidate French support behind its troops.

In a speech three days after his appointment, Clemenceau declared, ‘Nothing but the war. Our armies will not be caught between fire from two sides. Justice will be done. The country will know that it is defended.’ This coincided with a clampdown on pacifist opponents and suspected traitors, and he continued to speak in favour of ‘war until the end’ until Germany’s surrender in November 1918.

Victory was a double-edged sword: Clemenceau now needed to negotiate the terms of the peace treaty with Wilson and Lloyd-George, who described it as like being ‘between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.’

Georges Eugène Benjamin Clemenceau (28 September 1841 – 24 November 1929) was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920. A key figure of the Independent Radicals, he was a strong advocate of separation of church and state, amnesty of the Communards exiled to New Caledonia, as well as opposition to colonisation. Clemenceau, a physician turned journalist, played a central role in the politics of the Third Republic, most notably successfully leading France through the end of the First World War.

After about 1,400,000 French soldiers were killed between the German invasion and Armistice, he demanded a total victory over the German Empire. Clemenceau stood for reparations, a transfer of colonies, strict rules to prevent a rearming process, as well as the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine, which had been annexed to Germany in 1871. He achieved these goals through the Treaty of Versailles signed at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920). Nicknamed Père la Victoire ("Father of Victory") or Le Tigre ("The Tiger"), he continued his harsh position against Germany in the 1920s, although not quite so much as President Raymond Poincaré or former Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch, who thought the treaty was too lenient on Germany, famously stating: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." Clemenceau obtained mutual defence treaties with the United Kingdom and the United States, to unite against a possible future German aggression, but these never took effect.