13. A Revolutionary Whose Extremism Alarmed Even the Head of the Soviet Secret Police
The Red Terror was a period of extreme repression and mass killings carried out by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. It began in 1918, after a failed attempt at Lenin’s life. Rozalia Zemlyachka was involved in the repression campaign from the start, advocated for the annihilation of class enemies, and took part in carrying out the first batches of executions in Moscow. Her zeal and methods alarmed even Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (forerunner of the NKVD and KGB).
Considering that Dzerzhinsky was known among his circle of hardened revolutionaries as “Iron Felix“, it must have taken quite some doing to alarm him. Yet, that is just what Zemlyachka did. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to the Crimea, as Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party. When she arrived, that peninsula was one of the last remaining enclaves of the Whites – those opposed to the Bolshevik Reds. She took care of that in a ruthless fashion.