The Red Terror - A History of the Red Army

There were little revolutionary tribunals operating at the local level haphazardly and ruthlessly. As often as not, the basis for an arrest is extremely flimsy. People were just rounded up and crammed into prisons. Now this is all just the very beginning of it, and as we move forward, there will be dungeons and tortures and executions,. The whole thing will become an absurd, paranoid blanket spreading out over everything. Initially justified by the context of the civil war, it would become a permanent feature of post revolutionary soviet life.