This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

This article examines the debates and decisions of the military section of the Eighth Party Congress of March 1919, only released in Izvestiia TsK KPSS in 1989-90. It rebuts the standard interpretation of the military section (usually referred to as the Military Opposition) as a minority platform opposed to the use of former tsarist officers in the Red Army, most notably proposed in R. V. Daniels's The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (1960). Instead, I argue that the debates were more concerned with the military's increasing autonomy at the expense of party control. These fears were compounded by the introduction of the mass conscription of an apolitical peasantry at a time of extreme instability. This indiscriminate conscription had alarmed many Red Army party workers, who were only too aware of the dangers of arming an unconscious peasant mob. In addition, the article lays bare the beginning of the longer-term conflict between Iosif Stalin and Lev Trotskii and demonstrates Stalin's early influence within the party membership.

Based on a comparison of the prison experiences of Ekaterina Breshko- Breshkovskaia, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, revolutionary and Hindu fundamentalist, I ask two central questions: How did Breshkovskaia's story about exile and punishment help establish the tsarist genealogy of the gulag in the western consciousness, while the suffering of political prisoners in British India, as exemplified by Savarkar, were completely occluded? How and why did the specificity of incarceration in the Russian empire eclipse systems of punishment designed by other European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this article, I argue that the penumbra of modernity was darkened not only by the savagery of the Holocaust and the gulag but also by the brutal violence of western imperialism. Placing the Russian prison and exile system in comparative global perspective opens up new avenues of research in a field that has relied excessively on the intellectual binaries of a repressive Russia and a liberal western Europe.