The other Bolsheviks agreed, and instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky, whom Lenin had appointed to head the Cheka in 1917, to commence a “Red Terror”, which was officially announced to the public on 1 September 1918, by the Bolshevik newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta.[43] According to Christopher Read, at this time, due to the assassination attempt by Kaplan, Lenin was lying severely wounded in the hospital and was too ill to advise retaliatory measures.[44] But, according to MI5's official historian at the University of Cambridge, Christopher Andrew, and Richard Pipes, while recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary - secretly and urgently to prepare the terror."[45][46] According to Pipes, Lenin's Hanging Order, which was translated and published by Robert Service Professor of history at Oxford and an outspoken anti-communist,[47] claims that Lenin himself ordered terror on 11 August 1918, before he was fired on.[48]
The Cheka killed and abused their victims without mercy, says historian Robert Gellately.[unreliable source?] In his book, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe,[49] Gellately, Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University, claims that suspected enemies could expect brutal torture, flogging, maiming or execution. Some were shot, others drowned, frozen, buried alive, or hacked to death by swords, and quite often those about to be executed were forced to dig their own graves, Gellately claims.[50] Many lurid and often embellished accounts of these atrocities were produced. A British observer claimed that "The evidence of wholesale executions...of the cold-blooded and refined tortures carried out by Chinese experts and of the revolting sadism of young Jewesses is irrefutable".[51] Historians Serge Petrovich Melgunov, who supported the armed overthrow of the Bolsheviks, W. Bruce Lincoln and George Leggett also claim that these atrocities occurred.[52][53][54][unreliable source?] Orlando Figes, Professor of History at Birkbeck College and who has also written extensively against communism, claims the torture practiced by the Chekas was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition.[55]. The only published Soviet statistics regarding Cheka executions are the semi-official ones provided by the Chekist Martin Latsis, limited to RSFSR over the period 1918–1920, giving the grand total of 12,733 executed, including 3,082 for taking part in rebellions, 2,024 for membership of counter-revolutionary organisations, 643 for gangsterism, 455 for incitement to revolution, 206 for corruption, 102 for desertion and the same number for espionage.[56] These statistics are considered by many scholars to be understatements, as they do not embrace the war zones of the Ukraine or the Crimea.[57] In the latter at least 50,000 people were shot or hanged after General Wrangel was put down at the end of 1920, according to Robert Gellately.[58] Some historians estimate that between 1917 and 1922 up to 280,000 people were killed by the Chekas, of which about half perished through summary executions and the other half through the suppression of rebellions (e.g. Tambov Rebellion).[59] Orlando Figes goes so far as to assert that it is possible more people were killed by the Cheka than died in battle.

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of “mass terror against enemies of the revolution” and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment. Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged.[65] When Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the “excesses” of the Cheka in late 1918, it was Lenin who defended it.[66] In 1921, the Politboro, chaired by Lenin, expanded the Cheka's use of the death penalty.

Allied with Lenin, he successfully defeated attempts by other Bolshevik Central Committee members (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Alexei Rykov, etc) to share power with other socialist parties.
By the end of 1917, Trotsky was unquestionably the second man in the Bolshevik Party after Lenin, overshadowing the ambitious Zinoviev, who had been Lenin's top lieutenant over the previous decade, but whose star appeared to be fading. This turnaround led to enmity between the two Bolshevik leaders which lasted until 1926 and did much to destroy them both.
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