what extent it was openly applied in the so-called revolutionary military 
tribunals organically linked with the Cheka, even official figures published 
in the Soviet newspapers show. For instance, in July/August there was 
published in the Izvestiya the figure of 1,183 deaths; in August/September, 
1206. The shootings were carried out on every pretext, as is seen in the 
published reports; for counter-revolution, for rebellion, for having arms, 
even for disorderly conduct in a state of drunkenness. 
It seems clear enough from what has been said above that there is no 
possibility whatever of estimating the real number of the victims of the 
Red Terror. One thing is certain: that this number surpasses anything that 
a bloodthirsty imagination could invent about pre-revolutionary Russia. 
“Quiet Terror’ under G.P.U. 
A person, accustomed to normal forms of state governmentship can 
hardly realise the atmosphere created by the Red Terror. Its essential 
meaning has been correctly described by the first Sovietic Minister of 
Justice, Steinberg (ome of those “social-revolutionists” who worked together 
with the communists in 1917/18 and who, in consequence, are also 
responsible for the creation of the Red Terror). A few quotations may 
be of interest: “Terror, writes Steinberg, is a justified way of wholesale 
intimidation, compulsion and destruction on the part of the Government... 
The political minority in power reckons new individuals, groups, classes as 
her enemies from day to day... The forms terror takes, are many and 
various... A feature of terror is that all over the country in the most 
critical stage of its development, the freedom of speech is throttled. ... 
Terror consists of a narrow network of political supervision, which the 
Government stretches over all groups of society; in the formation of a 
political police which follows one’s every step...; in cunning methods of 
espionage and provocation.... Terror consists in the off-hand, mocking, 
torturing ways in which suspected pérsons are questioned, in exquisite 
forms of moral and physical torture...; prisons in the reign of terror 
are crammed, prisoners die of hunger, death sentences are delivered anyhow, 
in a haphazard way, depending on minute changes of the Government’s 
temper, on the waverings of officials, who pursue their own political alms 
heedless of how many lives they take.... Terror banishes and confiscates 
as it pleases; and though to all appearances the fat bourgeois are made to 
pay, it is really the hungry and tired who suffer.... But the worst of it 
is — blood, torrents of blood, ruthless and senseless bloodshed... Terror 
means shooting men for their not having paid the income tax, the “natural”’ 
or “extraordinary’’ taxes, for their leaving the army, for abstaming to 
enrol, and for street robbery, high treason, daring enterprise, crimes of 
the same order as that committed in Galsworthy’s “Justice”, speculation on a 
“yy 7