The existing assumption of facts I have going into this is that from a period between 1918 and 1922 an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 people were executed by the Bolsheviks. What isnt clear to me is was this just mopping up what was left of the Whites and couter-revolutionaries, or was any dissent against the Bolsheviks liable to put you in the line of fire? Was the high death count justified or not? Thoughts?
My understanding is that according to the soviet archives 750,000 people were killed. i have no idea how they decided who to kill.
i have seen some journals and diaries at the time suggesting workers approved of the red terror and viewed it as protecting the soviet state and the rev from counter-revolutionaries. idk how seriously to take the scattered documents i’ve come across, but it sounds like the worker on the street may have had a different perception then than we do now about what it was, why it was being done, and whether it was justified. afaik the actual details, especially the amount of executions, was not public knowledge.
i imagine people who had been serfs or worked in horrible conditions, then fought in the civil war, then immediately seen Russia invaded by armies from every western power while communists outside Russia were hunted down, slaughtered, executed, forced in to exile, imprisoned, and so forth may have viewed the Red Terror very differently from us.
The headline image for the Red Terror page on Wikipedia is a large sign in Pertrograd that reads “Death to the bourgeois and their helpers. Long live the Red Terror.” I think you’re probably right about it being viewed as a force for good by the working class.