Oct. 18 that the battle-cry, “The whole power to the Soviets”, will be 
transformed now into “The whole power to the Extraordinary Commission’. 
The Cheka was declared to be the organ which stood, as it were, “on 
guard” over the Revolution. It was not an organ of justice, but an organ 
functioning outside the courts — an organ for the “pitiless settlement of 
accounts with our enemies”. It was to be guided not by the “dead code” 
of law but only by its “revolutionary experience” and by its “revolutionary 
conscience’’. In such a situation everything depended on the personnel of 
the Extraordinary Commission. The punitive apparatus “of the revolutionary 
power’, wrote Dzerzhinsky in the statement quoted, “must represent a 
crystal-clear organisation of people's revolutionary judges and prosecutors, 
invested with extraordinary power”. “The collaborators of the Cheka”, 
declared the head of that organisation, “were chosen carefully from the 
members of the party and consisted of individuals devoted to the cause and 
of unimpeachable record in the past, for only by acquiring employees of 
such predominatingly high grade was the Cheka in a position to fulfil the 
duties... imposed upon it”. What was the result of this careful selection of 
incorruptibles? 
The Cheka was bound inevitably to attract to itself all insane and 
sadistic elements of the community. Only a madman could eulogize the 
Cheka in verse and find no greater “joy” or better music than “the 
crackling of lives and bones”, as was done by one of the Cheka officials 
in Tiflis (Georgia) in a collection of verse called The Smiles of the Cheka. 
The reader should peruse the corresponding pages of my book to form 
an idea of this pathological condition of society; there will pass before his 
eyes a long line of active leaders, whom doctors would certainly pack away 
into the nearest lunatic asylum. 
Even Latsis had to admit the need of constantly changing the personnel 
of the Cheka, for “no matter how honest a man may be... the work of 
the Cheka, carried on under conditions inevitably acting on the nervous 
system and blunting the ethic sensibilities, makes itself felt”, “works 
degeneratively on many young Communists of weak character’. Inevitably 
the activity of the Cheka was bound, on the other hand, to attract all outcast 
elements, drawn by greed and the possibility of wielding power, the 
penetration into the Cheka of this jailbird material of “criminal” elements 
even Krylenko had to admit. At first the conscience of individual Com- 
munist workers, not yet accustomed to horrors, was overcome by the Cheka’s 
activity. No wonder that even one of the old Bolshevics, Olyminsky, openly 
came out on Feb. 3, rgrg, with a protest against the drastic acts of the 
Cheka. He wrote: “We may all have different opinions about the Red 
Terror, but what is going on now in the province is not all a Red Terror, 
but a capital crime.’ 
gO