small scale, cunning counter-revolutionary plotting, light-hearted Ilése 
majesté. Terror means that executions form part of every day life, that 
the weak may be prosecuted at will, that human beings rank with inanimate 
things, and that bestial instincts know no restraint. Terror means that the 
will is paralysed, the strong are made to tremble and to grovel at the feet 
of the man with the gun. Terror means wholesale executions of innocent 
hostages, of chance prisoners. Terror is not only an active force; it works 
also when it is but a constant threat.” 
There is no exageration in these words of one of the repentent creators 
of the Red Terror. And things do not seem to change. There reigns an 
unprecedented tyranny, under whose rule the commonest and most ele- 
mentary rights of man are abolished. The whole land is turned into a 
prison, under the keen supervision of the G.P.U. For tactical reasons in 
1922 the name of the Cheka was changed to the Government Political 
Office. But the substance and form of the Cheka organisation, and even its 
personal activities remained unchanged. And the G.P.U., as it was called, 
bore the same reputation as the Cheka. 
The new period of the Red Terror was called the period of the 
‘Quiet Terror”, for throughout the country under the weight of the Terror 
all vestiges of political life disappeared. The people, psychologically de- 
pressed and physically exhausted, showed no political activity. 
And nevertheless the Terror in all its various forms continued to rule 
the land. 
Unquestionably it could not, in these last years, retain the nightmare 
aspect which it had at the outset. No Government could find executioners 
enough to continue such massacres, as for instance, took place in 1918 
to 1920, when people were tortured and cynically mutilated, when 
hundreds used to perish in the course of one night. Such moments 
history does not repeat at short intervals. They are always con- 
nected with a certain revolutionary state of mind. That psychic phase has 
now passed. And, on the other hand, the Government could no more find 
pretexts for wholesale butchery in a country which it had driven into a 
state of terrorised submission. The forms in which the Quiet Terror were 
carried out were marked by more “revolutionary justice” than the blood- 
thirsty orgies of the period of military Communism and civil war. This 
“revolutionary justice” is expressed therein, that the unlimited functions 
of the former Cheka are limited, and certain of them are given over to 
the courts. “Inevitably”, wrote Lenin, the infallible Communist authority, 
in 1918, “in the measure that the original aim of the (Bolshevic) power 
becomes not military repression, but government, the typical manifestation 
of repression and condemnation will be not shooting down on the spot,