The Red Terror in Russia

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Sergey Petrovich Melgounov writes from the witness stand of revolution turned terror: a historian, journalist, publisher, and democratic reformer who remained in Russia after 1917, endured arrests, searches, imprisonment, and exile, and set out to document Bolshevik violence with moral urgency. The Red Terror in Russia is both a historical indictment and a personal reckoning, shaped by his firsthand experience and his refusal to accept persecution as the price of political change. Beginning with the assassinations of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin's life, Melgounov traces the official response into a widening spiral of hostage-taking, retaliatory shootings, and secret executions. Eyewitness accounts from Petrograd, Moscow, Butyrka Prison, and beyond reveal a system of fear in which prisoners were summoned to the "Chamber of Souls," identities were mistaken, and survival or death could hinge on bureaucratic accident. As the terror spreads across Soviet Russia, local Che-Ka organs normalize vengeance through decrees, lists, quotas, and public announcements. The book's reach expands from cities to countryside, where peasants, priests, officers, landowners, workers, and Socialists alike are beaten, humiliated, extorted, or killed. From Piatigorsk and Chernigov to Astrakhan, Kazan, Saratov, and Kharkov, Melgounov shows revolutionary punishment becoming an indiscriminate machinery of state violence, crushing law, conscience, and the promise of "comradely persuasion."