or to laboring agriculturists as they are to apply it to former employers. On October 5, 1920, Trotzky said:
The bourgeoisie must be torn off, cut off. The Red Terror is an instrument used against a class doomed to go under and which does not want to go under.
An even stronger expression was used at the beginning of the Bolshevist rule by Latsis, one of the chiefs of the Extraordinary Commission, which is charged with putting the Red Terror into effect. In the organ called the Red Terror (November 1, 1918) Latsis wrote:
We are no longer waging war against separate individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.
Do not seek in the dossier of the accused for proofs as to whether he opposed the Soviet Government by word or deed. The first question that should be put is to what class he belongs, of what extraction, what education and profession. These questions should decide the fate of the accused. Herein lies the meaning and the essence of the Red Terror.
This description gives a good picture of the methods of the Red Terror, but the list of classes which were to be exterminated was soon extended to embrace all anti-Bolshevists, no matter whether they themselves were wage earners and no matter how many thousands or ten thousands of wage earners they represented. In a speech made on April 3, 1921, before the railway workers in Moscow Lenin stated that "the bourgeois class does not exist any more in Russia," and boasted
