Following the attempt on Lenin's life and the killing of the Petrograd Cheka chief, the Soviet government proclaimed the Red Terror in September 1918, authorising the execution of hostages drawn from former officers, clergy, landowners and the bourgeoisie and the confinement of class enemies in concentration camps. Werth estimates 10,000 to 15,000 people shot in the mass executions of September-October 1918 alone and observes that the Cheka executed more people in a few weeks than the tsarist regime had sentenced to death in ninety-two years. Camps established by decree in 1918 grew into a network that by 1921 held tens of thousands, and the suppression of the Tambov peasant rising in 1921 saw seven camps holding around 50,000 people, including hostage families, with monthly mortality of 15 to 20 percent in the autumn. White governments and armies carried out their own executions and reprisals, on a smaller scale but including mass shootings at Omsk, Ufa and elsewhere. The Solovki special-purpose camp, opened in 1923 in a confiscated monastery, became the model for the later Gulag.
The Cheka and the Soviet government took hostages, carried out mass executions and created a network of concentration and forced-labour camps; White governments and armies conducted their own executions and reprisals
The Soviet census of 1920 counted 136.8 million in the areas it could reach, with substantial territory - the western borderlands, parts of Central Asia, the Far East - unenumerated because of the fighting. Population figures for these years are unusually poor, and the war, famine and epidemics of 1918-1923 were themselves moving the total sharply.
Werth documents 10,000-15,000 executions in the first weeks of the Red Terror in autumn 1918 and camp mortality of 15-20 percent a month in Tambov in autumn 1921. Estimates of total Red Terror victims range from official Cheka figures of about 12,700 through 50,000 to 100,000 in cautious reconstructions and up to 250,000 or more in wider counts that include front-line and military-tribunal executions and deaths in detention. White Terror deaths are generally put in the tens of thousands, with the anti-Jewish pogroms treated separately.
Hostage-taking, mass execution and the concentration camps of 1918-21 are documented in Soviet decrees and in Cheka and camp administration records opened after 1991 and summarised by Werth.
Russia, Finland