The assassination of Moisei Uritsky, the attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin, who was seriously wounded on August 30, 1918, along with general tightening of the forms of waging the Civil War, prompted the adoption of the Resolution on the Red Terror by the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian SFSR on September 5, 1918. By the resolution, “all persons involved in the White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and rebellions” were subject to execution, while other “class enemies” were to be isolated in concentration camps. At the same time, the practice of holding hostages was legalized, when the people of “suspicious” social groups (especially officers of the former Tsar’s army, bourgeoisie) were arrested and could be shot in return to counter-revolutionary actions of the Bolsheviks’ opponents.

While previously these measures had been applied on an individual basis, the resolution provided for their application to entire organizations, segments of the population. Fundamentally new was the fact that terror was introduced throughout the country (previously it had been used during a state of emergency and a state of siege in individual cities and governorates). The largest-scale repressions took place in Petrograd (512 people shot on August 30 – September 5, and 800 people more – in September 1918), and in Moscow (300 people killed in September).

Subsequently, the Bolsheviks actively used the Red Terror until the end of the Civil War. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (VChK) headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, was the main instrument of the Red Terror along with revolutionary tribunals and all sorts of extraordinary courts.