38. The Russian Civil War’s Femme Fatale
Rozalia Zemlyachka returned to Moscow in 1914, seemingly a spent force, only to spring back to life during the 1917 Russian Revolution. As a founding member of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet, she was on the ground floor of the Bolshevik hijacking of that revolution. Indeed, Zemlyachka played a key role in securing Moscow for the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. In the ensuing Russian Civil War, she split her time between Moscow and various Bolshevik field armies, where she bucked up the troops as an electrifying speaker and political agitator. Lenin made her chief political commissar for the 8th Army in Ukraine, then for that the 13th Army. Her most famous – or infamous mark – however was made during the Red Terror.
The Red Terror was a period of extreme repression and mass killings carried out by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, that began in 1918, after a failed attempt at assassinating Lenin. Zemlyachka was involved in the repression campaign from the start, advocating for the annihilation of class enemies, and taking part in the first batches of executions in Moscow. However, her zeal and methods alarmed even Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka (forerunner of the NKVD and KGB). Considering that Dzerzhinsky was known as “Iron Felix“, alarming him must have taken some doing, yet that is just what Zemlyachka did. So in 1920, she was bundled out of Moscow and sent to Crimea, as Secretary of the Crimean Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party.