In response to rumors that bureaucratic hold-overs from the tsarist era are planning to launch a general strike in the capital city of Petrograd , the Council of People’s Commissars decrees the establishment of an “All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-revolution and Sabotage” (Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissia po borb’e s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem / Всероссийская чрезвычайная комиссия по борьбе с контрреволюцией и саботажем). Popularly known as the Cheka (stress on the last syllable: Che-KA), the organization is directed by Feliks Dzerzhinskii, the son of Polish gentry and a former Catholic seminarian who had spent close to a dozen years of brutal imprisonment and exile under the tsarist system.
Within weeks of its creation, the Cheka begins targeting alleged enemies of the Party and “speculators” for arrest and the confiscation of property. By February 1918 it proclaims the power to undertake summary executions in an effort to destroy ” the hydra of counter-revolution.” Reporting directly to Lenin, the Cheka functions as an extra-judicial institution for the application of state violence including hostage taking, mass arrests, imprisonment, and executions without trial. Attracting criminal elements, sadists, and sociopaths, members of its rapidly growing ranks routinely use torture to advance the cause of “socialist justice.” Known methods include longstanding practices such as skinning captives alive, impaling, crucifying, and stoning victims to death as well as tying people to planks and slowly pushing them into a furnace or tank of boiling water or rolling naked victims around inside nail studded-barrels.
Already by mid-1921, at which point the organization is firmly in control the country’s burgeoning labor camp (GULag) system, the number of so-called “Chekisty” approaches close to 250,000.