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The policy of Red terror in Soviet Russia served to frighten the civilian population and exterminate certain social groups considered as "ruling classes" or enemies of the people. Karl Kautsky said about Red Terror: "Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, Terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellent of all.. Kautsky recognized that Red Terror represented a variety of terrorism because it was indiscriminate, intended to frighten the civilian population, and included taking and executing hostages ". Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, emphasized that Red terror was an extrajudicial punishment not for specific acts, but membership in condemned social classes:

"Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."

One of the most common terrorist practices was hostage-taking. A typical report from a Cheka department stated: "Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example".

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The 1977 Moscow bombings were allegedly organized by the Soviet KGB in Moscow to frame-up Armenian nationalists who were executed despite having an alibi .

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The SR Combat Organization was founded in 1902 and operated as an autonomous branch of the Socialist Revolutionary Party responsible for assassinating government officials, was led by Grigory Gershuni and operated separately from the party so as not to jeopardize its political actions. SRCO agents assassinated two Ministers of the Interior, Dmitry Sipyagin and V. K. von Plehve, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the Governor of Ufa N. M. Bogdanovich, and many other high-ranking officials. It has been estimated that all together in the last twenty years of the Tsarist regime (1897-1917) more than 17,000 people were killed or wounded in terror attacks.

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Terrorism in Russia has a long history starting from the time of the Russian Empire. Terrorism, in the modern sense, means violence against civilians to achieve political or ideological objectives by creating extreme fear.

Terrorism was an important tool used by Marxist revolutionaries in the early 20th century to disrupt the social, political, and economic system and enable rebels to bring down the Tzarist government. Terrorist tactics, such as hostage-taking, were widely used by the Soviet secret agencies, most notably during the Red Terror and Great Terror campaigns, against the population of their own country, according to Karl Kautsky and other historians of Bolshevism.

Starting from the end of the 20th century, significant terrorist activity has taken place in Russia, most notably Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, 1999 apartment bombings, Moscow theater hostage crisis and Beslan school siege. Many more acts of terrorism have been committed in major Russian cities, as well as the regions of Chechnya and Dagestan.

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Contemporary Russian government has been frequently accused of sponsoring or inspiring terrorist activities inside the country and in other countries in order to achieve its political goals.

Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, Johns Hopkins University and Hoover Institute scholar David Satter, Russian lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov, historian Yuri Felshtinsky, politologist Vladimir Pribylovsky and former KGB general Oleg Kalugin asserted that Russian apartment bombings were in fact a "false flag" attack perpetrated by the FSB (successor to the KGB) in order to legitimize the resumption of military activities in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin and the FSB to power. FSB operatives were actually briefly arrested in the case, but their presence at the crime scene was explained as "training". This view was disputed by philosopher Robert Bruce Ware and Richard Sakwa,, but supported by historians Amy Knight and Karen Dawisha

Former FSB officer Aleksander Litvinenko and investigator Mikhail Trepashkin alleged that a Chechen FSB agent directed the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002.

Yulia Latynina has accused the Russian security services of staging fake terrorist attacks (with minimal casualties) to report false successes in solving those cases, instead of investigating the actual terrorist attacks.

Vyacheslav Izmailov from Novaya Gazeta has accused the Russian authorities of extorting confessions from suspect terrorists with torture, instead of engaging in genuine investigative efforts.. According to him, the kidnappings of journalists and members of international NGOs in 2005 in Chechnya, along with Andrei Babitsky from Radio Free Europe, Arjan Erkel and Kenneth Glack from Doctors Without Borders were organized by FSB agents.

Alexander J. Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University argues that Russia's direct and indirect involvement in the violence in eastern Ukraine qualifies as a state-sponsored terrorism, and that those involved qualify as "terrorist groups."

In May 2016, Reuters published a Special Report titled "How Russia allowed homegrown radicals to go and fight in Syria" that, based on first-hand evidence, said that at least in the period between 2012 and 2014 the Russian government agencies ran a programme to facilitate and encourage Russian radicals and militants to leave Russia and go to Turkey and then on to Syria; the persons in question had joined jihadist groups, some fighting with the ISIL. According to the report, the goal has been to eradicate the risk of Islamic terrorism at home; however Russian security officials deny that terrorists were encouraged to leave Russia.

In 2018, after the poisoning of Skripals, the State Department was reportedly prepared to officially designate Russia as "state sponsor of terrorism" by US law based on the cases described above, but the work has been stopped as it was decided that it would interefere with US options in areas where it has to cooperate with Russia.

In April 2019 Security Service of Ukraine arrested 7 Russians traveling on counterfeit passports accused of preparing a car bombing against a Ukrainian military intelligence officer. One of them, traveling with fake Kyrgyzstan passport, was identified as Timur Dzortov, previously deputy chief of staff to the leader Ingushetia. Another man, responsible for actually planting the bomb in the car, accidentally triggered it and was wounded by the blast. SBU accused officer Dmitry Minayev from Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) of coordinating the group.

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The Russian apartment bombings were a series of bombings in Russia that killed nearly 300 people and, together with the Dagestan War, led the country into the Second Chechen War. The five bombings took place in Moscow and two other Russian towns during ten days of September 1999.

The bombings were followed by a controversial episode when a suspected bomb was found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan on 22 September, which was then explained to be an exercise by the Russian security services, the FSB .

An official investigation of the bombings was completed only three years later, in 2002. Seven suspects were killed, six have been convicted on terrorism-related charges, and one remains a fugitive. According to the investigation, all bombings were organized and led by Achemez Gochiyaev - who as of 2007 remained at large.

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have since died in assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003 respectively. The Commission's lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested in October 2003 to become one of the better-known political prisoners in Russia.

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German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky traces the origins of terrorism, including the one in Russian Empire, to the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution. Others emphasize the role of Russian revolutionary movements during the 19th century, especially Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") and the Nihilist movement, which included several thousand followers. "People's Will" organized one of the first political terrorism campaigns in history. In March 1881, it assassinated the Emperor of Russia Alexander II, who twenty years earlier had emancipated the Russian serfs.

Important ideologists of these groups were Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechayev, who was described in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed. Nechayev argued that the purpose of revolutionary terror is not to gain the support of the masses, but on the contrary, to inflict misery and fear on the common population. According to Nechayev, a revolutionary must terrorize civilians in order to incite rebellions. He wrote:

"A revolutionary must infiltrate all social formations including the police. He must exploit rich and influential people, subordinating them to himself. He must aggravate the miseries of the common people, so as to exhaust their patience and incite them to rebel. And, finally, he must ally himself with the savage word of the violent criminal, the only true revolutionary in Russia".

"The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it."

According to historian and writer Edvard Radzinsky, Nechayev's ideas and tactics were widely used by Joseph Stalin and other Russian revolutionaries.

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The Red Terror (Russian: Красный террор) was a period of political repression and mass killings carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. The term is usually applied to Bolshevik political repression during the Civil War (1917–1922), as distinguished from the White Terror carried out by the White Army (Russian and non-Russian groups opposed to Bolshevik rule) against their political enemies (including the Bolsheviks). It was modeled on the Terror of the French Revolution. The Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police) carried out the repressions perpetrated during the Red Terror. Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror for the initial period of repression are at least 10,000. Estimates for the total number of victims of Bolshevik repression vary widely. One source asserts that the total number of victims of repression and pacification campaigns could be 1.3 million, whereas another gives estimates of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000, whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.

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Historian I.S Ratkovsky argues that the establishment of the Red Terror regime in September 1918 was caused by various factors. There was economic and political disorganization in the country, the radicalization of the masses, the devaluation of life and polarization of society that intensified during the First World War, leading to the emergence of mob justice, banditry, and riots. Increasingly, a violent solution to political and social problems were emphasized. Ratkovsky wrote that the use of coercion was inherent to all parties to the conflict.

Ratkovsky emphasized the role of foreign countries in intensifying the civil war, involving German, Czechoslovakian, American, British, French, and Japanese forces. The use of repression was justified by the State on the basis of the foreignness of its enemies. There was the suppression of revolutions in Hungary, Germany, and especially Finland, which pushed for more decisive action by the Soviet state against its adversaries. Believing that its foes were diametrically opposed to it, the Soviet forces aimed at suppressing them, including their social basis. Thus, the repression was directed against ancien regime officials and military officers, policemen, and members of the upper classes

In addition to clearing the old state apparatus, the Red Terror had a purpose in strengthening the Soviet state. According to Ratkovsky, the situation demanded the Bolsheviks retain power not only by suppressing rebellion, but also to prevent it at all costs, as well as signs of anarchy. The Red Terror sought to fix the problem of the spontaneous, individual terror.

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was justified in Soviet historiography as a wartime campaign against counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921, targeting those who sided with the Whites (White Army). Bolsheviks referred to any anti-Bolshevik factions as Whites, regardless of whether those factions actually supported the White movement cause. Leon Trotsky described the context in 1920:

The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances [than the French Revolution]. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are those attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Esthonians, Lithuanians ... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges.

— Trotsky (1920)

He then contrasted the terror with the revolution and provide the Bolshevik's justification for it:

The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November 1917 (new style) was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any resistance. ... A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all attempts to tear the power out of its hands. Where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty.

— Trotsky (1920)

Martin Latsis, chief of the Ukrainian Cheka, stated in the newspaper Red Terror:

We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

— Martin Latsis, Red Terror

The bitter struggle was described succinctly from the Bolshevik point of view by Grigory Zinoviev in mid-September 1918:

To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.

— Grigory Zinoviev, 1918

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The campaign of mass repressions officially started as retribution for the assassination (17 August 1918) of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky by Leonid Kannegisser and for the attempted assassination (30 August 1918) of Vladimir Lenin by Fanni Kaplan. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror".

On August 5, 1918, a revolt led by wealthy peasants broke out in Kuchkino district in the Penza region. The rebellion was suppressed on August 8, but the situation in the region remained tense. On August 18, another revolt broke out, led by the Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Penza regional leaders were seen as not responding firmly enough against rebellion, which prompted Lenin to send several telegrams urging them to be more resolute in fighting against the rebels: "Essential to organise a reinforced guard of selected and reliable people, to carry out a campaign of ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and whiteguards; suspects to be shut up in a detention camp outside the city."

On August 11, 1918 Lenin instructed the following action:

"Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because 'the last decisive battle' with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.

1. Hang (absolutely hang, in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, filthy rich men, bloodsuckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Seize all grain from them.

4. Designate hostages - in accordance with yesterday's telegram.

Do it in such a fashion, that for hundreds of verst around the people see, tremble, know, shout: "strangling (is done) and will continue for the bloodsucking kulaks".

Telegraph the receipt and the implementation. Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Use your toughest people for this."

The Bolshevik communist government executed five hundred "representatives of overthrown classes" immediately after the assassination of Uritsky.

The first official announcement of a Red Terror, published in Izvestia, "Appeal to the Working Class" on 3 September 1918, called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror! ... anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp". There followed the decree "On Red Terror", issued on 5 September 1918 by the Cheka.

On 15 October, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii, summing up the officially ended Red Terror, reported that in Petrograd 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned.Casualties in the first two months were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of summarily executed people published in newspaper Cheka Weekly and other official press. A declaration About the Red Terror by the Sovnarkom on 5 September 1918 stated:

that for empowering the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission in the fight with the counter-revolution, profiteering and corruption and making it more methodical, it is necessary to direct there possibly bigger number of the responsible party comrades, that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by way of isolating them in concentration camps, that all people are to be executed by fire squad who are connected with the White Guard organizations, conspiracies and mutinies, that it is necessary to publicize the names of the executed as well as the reasons of applying to them that measure.

— Signed by People's Commissar of Justice D. Kursky, People's Commissar of Interior G. Petrovsky, Director in Affairs of the Council of People's Commissars V. Bonch-Bruyevich, SU, #19, department 1, art.710, 04.09.1918

Opponents of the Soviet government, particularly the government of White army leader A Denikin, claimed that significant numbers of prisoners, suspects and hostages were executed because they belonged to the "possessing classes", including between 2000 and 3000 in Kharkov in 1919 and 1,000 in Rostov in 1920.

According to Professor Ratkovsky of St Petersburg University, the number of executions carried out during the Red Terror amounted to 8000 people: 2000 executions occurred from August 30 to 5 September 1918, and another 3000 during the remaining days of September. 3000 more were executed during October-November 1918.

There were claims among Russian emigres of large-scale repression in the Crimea after the Soviets established control of the region in 1920. Emigrant B.L. Solonevich wrote about 40,000 executed in the first three months alone, and S.P. Melgunov, who readily quotes eyewitness accounts and the white emigrant press, gave estimates of 50, 100 and 150 thousand people. These estimates are considered to be exaggerated. In the book “The Last Hermitage”, which contains reports on the executions of captured officers and gendarmes, there are 4,534 executed. Of these, there were 2,065 in Simferopol, 624 in Kerch, and 53 in Sevastopol. The report of P. Zotov, the head of the Special Division of the 9th Division, was published, in which out of 1,100 whites registered in Feodosia there were 1,006 people were executed. All the people who were executed belonged to officers, military officials and police officers of the White Army. A resolution was also issued on the execution of 320 officers in Dzhankoy on November 28, 1920. The scale of repression in Crimea was considered extraordinary, and there was no similar wave of repression against the captured armies of Denikin and Kolchak.

The author of an article in Crimean newspaper Sevastopol Pravda doubted claims of atrocities in Crimea in 1920, writing "I could not believe in the "Red atrocities" that Melgunov wrote about, because having lived in Sevastopol since 1948, I had not heard anything like this from the locals. Less than 30 years had passed by that time, and witnesses were alive... In addition, during and after the civil war, my grandfather lived with his family in the village, and my father, who was then 14 years old, lived in Simferopol. I did not hear anything about "Red atrocities" from them either. Moreover, in Sevastopol, two elder brothers of my father, privates who served with the White Army, were captured. One of them was wounded at Perekop and was in the hospital. None of them were subjected to violence and were not exiled to the North."

On 16 March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic, which numbered 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps, ran the Gulag system, conducted requisitions of food, and put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army (which was plagued by desertions).

One of the main organizers of the Red Terror for the Bolshevik government was 2nd-Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889–1938), whose real name was Pēteris Ķuzis. He took part in the October Revolution of 1917 and afterwards worked in the central apparatus of the Cheka. During the Red Terror, Berzin initiated the system of taking and shooting hostages to stop desertions and other "acts of disloyalty and sabotage". As chief of a special department of the Latvian Red Army (later the 15th Army), Berzin played a part in the suppression of the Russian sailors' mutiny at Kronstadt in March 1921. He particularly distinguished himself in the course of the pursuit, capture, and killing of captured sailors.

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The Red Terror was significant as the first of numerous Communist terror campaigns that followed in Russia and many other countries. It also unleashed the Russian Civil War according to historian Richard Pipes. Menshevik Julius Martov wrote about Red Terror:

The beast has licked hot human blood. The man-killing machine is brought into motion ... But blood breeds blood ... We witness the growth of the bitterness of the civil war, the growing 🤬 of men engaged in it.

The term 'Red Terror' came to refer to other campaigns of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups.

Examples of the usage of the term "Red Terrors" include the following:

The Hungarian Red Terror: The executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 24 June 1919.

The Spanish Red Terror during the Spanish Civil War.

The Red Terror in Greece during the Greek Resistance and the Greek Civil War.

The Ethiopian Red Terror during Mengistu Haile Mariam's rule.

In China, the Red Terror is regarded to start from the Red August of the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong wrote: "Red terror ought to be our reply to these counter-revolutionaries. We must, especially in the war zones and in the border areas, deal immediately, swiftly with every kind of counter-revolutionary activity."

The Nandigram violence in Nandigram, West Bengal in November 2007 was called "Red Terror" by critics of the actions by the local administration alluding at the Communist Party of India ruling in West Bengal. The situation was described as one of "Red Terror" by media.

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The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practised the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. According to Orlando Figes, more than 1 million people deserted from the Red Army in 1918, around 2 million people deserted in 1919, and almost 4 million deserters escaped from the Red Army in 1921. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions. Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostage. According to Lenin's instructions,

After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to the cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly.

In September 1918, in just twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 bandits were arrested, 1,826 were killed and 2,230 were executed. A typical report from a Cheka department stated:

Yaroslavl Province, 23 June 1919. The uprising of deserters in the Petropavlovskaya volost has been put down. The families of the deserters have been taken as hostages. When we started to shoot one person from each family, the Greens began to come out of the woods and surrender. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example.

Estimates suggest that during the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1921, around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported and perhaps 15,000 executed.

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September 1921 (this number excludes those in several camps in regions that were in revolt, such as Tambov). Conditions in these camps led to high mortality rates, and "repeated massacres" took place. The Cheka at the Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river. Occasionally, entire prisons were "emptied" of inmates via mass shootings prior to abandoning a town to White forces.

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On 16 March 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. More than 900 workers who went to a strike were arrested, of whom more than 200 were executed without trial during the next few days. Numerous strikes took place in the spring of 1919 in cities of Tula, Oryol, Tver, Ivanovo and Astrakhan. Starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privileges for Bolsheviks, freedom of the press, and free elections. The Cheka mercilessly suppressed all strikes, using arrests and executions.

In the city of Astrakhan, a revolt led by the White Guard forces broke out. In preparing this revolt, the Whites managed to smuggle more than 3000 rifles and machine guns into the city. The leaders of the plot decided to act on the night 9-10 March 1919. The rebels were joined by wealthy peasants from the villages, which suppressed the Committees of the Poor, and committed massacres against rural activists. Eyewitnesses reported atrocities in villages such as Ivanchug, Chagan, Karalat. In response, Soviet forces led by Kirov undertook to suppress this revolt in the villages, and together with the Committees of the Poor restored Soviet power. The revolt in Astrakhan was brought under control by 10 March, and completely defeated by the 12th. More than 184 were sentenced to death, including monarchists, and representatives of the Kadets, Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, repeat offenders, and persons shown to have links with British and American intelligence services. The opposition media with political opponents like Chernov, and Melgunov, and others would later say that between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919.

However, strikes continued. Lenin had concerns about the tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region. On 29 January 1920, he sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov stating "I am surprised that you are taking the matter so lightly, and are not immediately executing large numbers of strikers for the crime of sabotage".