Wildfires in the United States

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Current burn acreage is 80% lower than peak burn in the 1930s, per US Dept of Agriculture, National Report on Sustainable Forests - 2010 pg II-48.

 

Average U.S. acreage burned annually by wildfires has almost tripled in three decades.

Wildfires can happen in many places in the United States, especially during droughts, but are most common in the Western United States and Florida. They may be triggered naturally, most commonly by lightning, or by human activity like unextinguished smoking materials, faulty electrical equipment, overheating automobiles, or arson.

Fire management policy favored aggressive wildfire suppression starting in the early 20th century.

In the 21st century, higher temperature and droughts driven by global warming have become more of a concern, and there has been increased advocacy for controlled burns and other measures to prevent fuel from accumulating in wild areas that can create more intense, larger, and difficult to control fires.

Firefighters are generally employed by governments, including municipal and county fire departments, regional mutual aid organizations, and state agencies like the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the New Jersey Forest Fire Service. Wildfire response is coordinated at the federal level by the National Interagency Fire Center, with the participation of the U.S. National Weather Service, and various agencies of the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Homeland Security, and Commerce. Fire squadrons of the United States Army are also sometimes called to large fires.

History of wildfire policy

Poster for forest fire prevention showing a burning cigarette and a forest fire.

 

See also: History of wildfire suppression in the United States

 

1985 Smokey Bear poster with part of his admonition, "Only you can prevent forest fires".

Since the turn of the 20th century, various federal and state agencies have been involved in wildland fire management in one form or another. In the early 20th century, for example, the federal government, through the U.S. Army and the U.S. Forest Service, solicited fire suppression as a primary goal of managing the nation's forests. At this time in history fire was viewed as a threat to timber, an economically important natural resource. As such, the decision was made to devote public funds to fire suppression and fire prevention efforts. For example, the Forest Fire Emergency Fund Act of 1908 permitted deficit spending in the case of emergency fire situations. As a result, the U.S. Forest Service was able to acquire a deficit of over $1 million in 1910 due to emergency fire suppression efforts. Following the same tone of timber resource protection, the U.S. Forest Service adopted the "10 AM Policy" in 1935. Through this policy, the agency advocated the control of all fires by 10 o'clock of the morning following the discovery of a wildfire. Fire prevention was also heavily advocated through public education campaigns such as Smokey Bear. Through these and similar public education campaigns the general public was, in a sense, trained to perceive all wildfire as a threat to civilized society and natural resources. The negative sentiment towards wildland fire prevailed and helped to shape wildland fire management objectives throughout most of the 20th century.

Texas was particularly hard-hit by wildfires in 2011, as noted by this placard at the state Forestry Museum in Lufkin.

Beginning in the 1970s public perception of wildland fire management began to shift. Despite strong funding for fire suppression in the first half of the 20th century, massive wildfires continued to be prevalent across the landscape of North America. Ecologists were beginning to recognize the presence and ecological importance of natural, lightning-ignited wildfires across the United States. It was learned that suppression of fire in certain ecosystems may in fact increase the likelihood that a wildfire will occur and may increase the intensity of those wildfires. With the emergence of fire ecology as a science also came an effort to apply fire to ecosystems in a controlled manner; however, suppression is still the main tactic when a fire is set by a human or if it threatens life or property. By the 1980s, in light of this new understanding, funding efforts began to support prescribed burning in order to prevent wildfire events. In 2001, the United States implemented a National Fire Plan, increasing the budget for the reduction of hazardous fuels from $108 million in 2000 to $401 million. In addition to using prescribed fire to reduce the chance of catastrophic wildfires, mechanical methods have recently been adopted as well. Mechanical methods include the use of chippers and other machinery to remove hazardous fuels and thereby reduce the risk of wildfire events.

Today the United States Forest Service maintains that "fire, as a critical natural process, will be integrated into land and resource management plans and activities on a landscape scale, and across agency boundaries. Response to wildfire is based on ecological, social and legal consequences of fire. The circumstance under which a fire occurs, and the likely consequences and public safety and welfare, natural and cultural resources, and values to be protected dictate the appropriate management response to fire" (United States Department of Agriculture Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy, 13 February 2009). The five federal regulatory agencies managing forest fire response and planning for 676 million acres in the United States are the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the United States Forest Service and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Several hundred million U.S. acres of wildfire management are also conducted by state, county, and local fire management organizations. In 2014, legislators proposed The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act to provide $2.7 billion fund appropriated by congress for the USDA and Department of Interior to use in fire suppression. The bill is a reaction to United States Forest Service and Department of Interior costs of Western Wildfire suppression appending that amounted to $3.5 billion in 2013.

Wildland-urban interface policy

See also: Wildland–urban interface and fire-adapted communities

An aspect of wildfire policy that is gaining more attention is the wildland-urban interface (WUI). More and more people are living in "red zones," or areas that are at high risk of wildfires. FEMA and the NFPA develop specific policies to guide homeowners and builders in how to build and maintain structures at the WUI and how protect against property losses. For example, NFPA-1141 is a standard for fire protection infrastructure for land development in wildland, rural and suburban areas and NFPA-1144 is a standard for reducing structure ignition hazards from wildland fire. Compensation for losses in the WUI are typically negotiated on an incident-by-incident basis. This is generating discussion about the burden of responsibility for funding and fighting a fire in the WUI, in that, if a resident chooses to live in a known red zone, should he or she retain a higher level of responsibility for funding home protection against wildfires. One initiative aimed at helping U.S. WUI communities live more safely with fire is called fire-adapted communities.

Economics of fire management policy

Numerous departments respond to the Tumbleweed Fire near Los Angeles in July 2021

Today, in the United States, it is not uncommon for suppression operations for a single wildfire to cost millions of dollars.

Federal funding to manage wildfires comes from the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior. The combined annual appropriations from these two departments were around $1.6 billion from FY1994–FY2000. More recently, from FY2008–FY2017, the combined annual appropriations were about $4.0 billion. (During this period, the high was $5.2 billion in FY2008 and the low was $2.9 billion in FY2012.) Subsequent years were $3.6 billion (FY2013), $4.1 billion (FY2014), $3.6 billion (FY2015), and $5.0 billion (FY2016).

Although fire suppression purports to benefit society, other options for fire management exist. While these options cannot completely replace fire suppression as a fire management tool, other options can play an important role in overall fire management and can therefore affect the costs of fire suppression.

Short-term fire suppression can, in the long term, result in larger, more intense wildfire events. In economic terms, expenditures used for wildfire suppression in the early 20th century have contributed to increased suppression costs which are being realized today.

Climate change also results in larger, more intense wildfires.

Regional burden of wildfires in the United States

Map of United States National Interagency Fire Center agency Geographic Area Coordination Centers

 

This map depicts regional burden to wildfires in the US from 1980–2014. These are categorized by "fire weather zone" as defined by the National Weather Service.

Nationally, the burden of wildfires is disproportionally heavily distributed in the southern and western regions. The Geographic Area Coordinating Group (GACG) divides the United States and Alaska into 11 geographic areas for the purpose of emergency incident management. One particular area of focus is wildland fires. A national assessment of wildfire risk in the United States based on GACG identified regions (with the slight modification of combining Southern and Northern California, and the West and East Basin); indicate that California (50.22% risk) and the Southern Area (15.53% risk) are the geographic areas with the highest wildfire risk. The western areas of the nation are experiencing an expansion of human development into and beyond what is called the wildland-urban interface (WUI). When wildfires inevitably occur in these fire-prone areas, often communities are threatened due to their proximity to fire-prone forest. The south is one of the fastest growing regions with 88 million acres classified as WUI. The south consistently has the highest number of wildfires per year. More than 50,000 communities are estimated to be at high to very high risk of wildfire damage. These statistics are greatly attributable to the South's year-round fire season.

Western U.S. wildfire trends

Smoke from the 2020 California wildfires settles over San Francisco

 

Smoldering brush in the Tumbleweed Fire, which burned 1,000 acres of vegetation north of Los Angeles in July 2021

Save for areas near the Pacific coast, North America tends to be wetter in the East and drier in the West. The Western United States is a region of widespread, high-intensity wildfires. Aggressive suppression in the 20th century reduced wildfire size and intensity, but the resulting buildup of fuels has led to a resurgence in the last couple decades.

Between 1970 to 2015, three times more "large fires" (fires that burn 1,000 acres or more) occurred in the Western U.S., with six times more acreage burnt, more than 1.7 million acres annually. Between 1970 and 2003, the region experienced wildfire seasons that were 78 days longer. It has been found that throughout the United States, 84% of wildfires are started by humans.

A study conducted in 2019 found that from 1972 to 2018, California saw a fivefold increase in the area burned in any given year, and an eightfold increase in the area burned by summer fires. Another study estimated that the area burned between 1984 and 2015 could have been half of what it was without human-caused climate change. Finally, a 2020 research paper suggests that the number of autumn days with “extreme fire weather” has doubled over the past two decades. The climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century.

In 2020, a series of particularly large wildfires burned across California, Oregon, and Washington. They were described as unprecedented, fueled by climate change and decades of bad environmental policies.

National Interagency Fire Center Geographic Area Coordination Centers

United States agencies stationed at the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho maintain a "National Large Incident Year-to-Date Report" on wildfires, delineating 10 sub-national areas, aggregating the regional and national totals of burn size, fire suppression cost, and razed structure count, among other data. In 2020, as of October 21, "Coordination Centers" of each geography report the following:

 

Red Terror

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

Red Terror

Part of the Russian Civil War
Propaganda poster in Petrograd, 1918: "Death to the Bourgeoisie and its lapdogs – Long live the Red Terror"
Native name	Красный террор / Красный терроръ Krasnyy terror
Date	August 1918 – February 1922
Duration	3–4 years
Location	Soviet Russia
Motive	Political repression
Target	Anti-Bolshevik groups, criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and dissidents
Organized by	Cheka
Deaths	50,000–200,000 executed

The Red Terror (Russian: Красный террор, romanized: krasnyj terror) in Soviet Russia was a campaign of political repression and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. It started in late August 1918 after the beginning of the Russian Civil War and lasted until 1922.

Arising after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin and Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, the latter of which was successful, the Red Terror was modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, and sought to eliminate political dissent, opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power. More broadly, the term is usually applied to Bolshevik political repression throughout 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.

Estimates for the total number of victims of Bolshevik repression vary widely in numbers and scope. One source gives estimates of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922. Estimates for the number of people shot during the initial period of the Red Terror are at least 10,000. Estimates for the whole period go for a low of 50,000 to highs of 140,000 and 200,000 executed. The most reliable estimations for the number of executions in total put the number at about 100,000.

Bolshevik justification

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 White movement. Bolsheviks referred to any anti-Bolshevik factions as Whites, regardless of whether those factions actually supported the White 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 provided 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

It should also be noted, however, that Latsis' suggestions never became official policy. On the contrary, Lenin himself considered that such a policy of indiscriminate killing would be 'fraught with untold harm to communism,' as this would preclude the ability to recruit sympathetic members of the former ruling classes and their resources to the Bolshevik cause:

Political distrust means we must not put non-Soviet people in politically responsible posts. It means the Cheka must keep a sharp eye on members of classes, sections or groups that have leanings towards the white guards. (Though, incidentally, one need not go to the same absurd lengths as Comrade Latsis, one of our finest, tried and tested Communists, did in his Kazan magazine, Krasny Terror. He wanted to say that Red terror meant the forcible suppression of exploiters who attempted to restore their rule, but instead, he put it this way [on page 2 of the first issue of his magazine]: “Don't search [!!?] the records for evidence of whether his revolt against the Soviet was an armed or only a verbal one”) ... Political distrust of the members of a bourgeois apparatus is legitimate and essential. But to refuse to use them in administration and construction would be the height of folly, fraught with untold harm to communism.

Against Latsis, Lenin's position was that reprisals should only be directed against those members of hostile classes, who were actively working to undermine and suppress the revolution, and he was against collective punishment.

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

A completely different point of view from those of the Bolsheviks was expressed in November 1918 by the Left Socialist Revolutionary leader Maria Spiridonova, at the time in prison awaiting trial. In her Open Letter to the Central Executive of the Bolshevik party, she wrote:

Never in the most corrupt of Parliaments, never in the most venal papers of capitalist society has hatred of opponents reached such heights of cynicism as your hatred.

[…] These nightly murders of fettered, unarmed, helpless people, these secret shootings in the back, the unceremonious burial on the spot of bodies, robbed to the very shirt, not always quite dead, often still groaning, in a mass grave—what sort of Terrorism is this? This cannot be called Terrorism. In the course of Russian revolutionary history, the word Terrorism did not merely connote revenge and intimidation (which were the very last things in its mind). No, the foremost aims of Terrorism were to protest against tyranny, to awake a sense of value in the souls of the oppressed, to rouse the conscience of those who kept silence in the face of this submission. Moreover, the Terrorist nearly always accompanied his deed by a voluntary sacrifice of his own liberty or life. Only in this way, it seems to me, could the Terrorist acts of the revolutionaries be justified. But where are these elements to be found in the cowardly Cheka, in the unbelievable moral poverty of its leaders? … So far the working classes have brought about the Revolution under the unblemished red flag, which was red with their own blood. Their moral authority and sanction lay in their sufferings for the highest ideal of humanity. Belief in Socialism is at the same time a belief in a nobler future for humanity—a belief in goodness, truth, and beauty, in the abolition of the use of all kinds of force, in the brotherhood of the world. And now you have damaged this belief, which had inflamed the souls of the people as never before, at its very roots.

— Maria Spiridonova Open Letter to the Central Executive of the Bolshevik Party, November 1918

"Escort of prisoners", by Ivan Vladimirov

History

The Red Terror campaign is considered to have officially begun between 17 and 30 August 1918 as retribution for two assassination attempts (one of which was successful). The official decree of a "Red Terror," however, came a few days later, in September.

Background

In December 1917 Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed to the duty of rooting out counterrevolutionary threats to the Soviet government. He was the director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (aka Cheka), a predecessor of the KGB that served as the secret police for the Soviets.

From early 1918 Bolsheviks started physical elimination of opposition and other socialist and revolutionary fractions:

Of all the revolutionary elements in Russia it is the Anarchists who now suffer the most ruthless and systematic persecution. Their suppression by the Bolsheviki began already in 1918, when — in the month of April of that year — the Communist Government attacked, without provocation or warning, the Anarchist Club of Moscow and by the use of machine guns and artillery "liquidated" the whole organisation.

— Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Bolsheviks Shooting Anarchists

On 11 August 1918, prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, Vladimir Lenin had sent telegrams "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to a suspected civilian uprising there, and to "crush" landowners in Penza who resisted, sometimes violently, the requisitioning of their grain by military detachments:

Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people.

(1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers.

(2) Publish their names.

(3) Seize all their grain.

(4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram.

Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ...

Yours, Lenin.

P.S. Find tougher people.

— Lenin's Hanging Order

On 17 August 1918, Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky was assassinated by Leonid Kannegisser; shortly after, on August 30, Fanni Kaplan unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin.

These attacks would finally persuade the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's lobbying for greater internal security. The campaign of mass repressions would officially begin thereafter as retribution.

Repression begins

"In the basements of a Cheka", by Ivan Vladimirov

While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror." In immediate response to the two attacks, Chekists killed approximately 1,300 "bourgeois hostages" held in Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons.

Bolshevik newspapers were especially integral to instigating an escalation in state violence: on August 31, the state-controlled media launched the repressive campaign through incitement of violence. One article appearing in Pravda exclaimed: "the time has come for us to crush the bourgeoisie or be crushed by it.... The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!" The next day, the newspaper Krasnaia Gazeta stated that "only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky."

The first official announcement of a Red Terror was published in Izvestia on September 3, titled "Appeal to the Working Class", calling for the workers to "crush the hydra of counter-revolution with massive terror!"; it would also make clear that "anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp". Izvestia also reported that, in the 4 days since the attempt on Lenin, over 500 hostages had been executed in Petrograd alone.

Subsequently, on September 5, the Central Committee of the Bolshevik government issued a decree "On Red Terror", prescribing "mass shooting” to be "inflicted without hesitation;" the decree ordered the Cheka "to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps", as well as stating that counter-revolutionaries "must be executed by shooting [and] that the names of the executed and the reasons of the execution must be made public."

The government executed 500 "representatives of overthrown classes" (kulaks) immediately after the assassination of Uritsky. Soviet commissar Grigory Petrovsky called for an expansion of the Terror and an "immediate end of looseness and tenderness."

In October 1918, Cheka commander Martin Latsis likened the Red Terror to a class war, explaining that "we are destroying the bourgeoisie as a class."

On October 15, 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

As the Russian Civil War progressed, significant numbers of prisoners, suspects and hostages were executed because they belonged to the "possessing classes". Numbers are recorded for cities occupied by the Bolsheviks:

In Kharkov there were between 2,000 and 3,000 executions in February–June 1919, and another 1,000–2,000 when the town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don, approximately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa, 2,200 in May–August 1919, then 1,500–3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kiev, at least 3,000 in February–August 1919; in Ekaterinodar, at least 3,000 between August 1920 and February 1921; In Armavir, a small town in Kuban, between 2,000 and 3,000 in August–October 1920. The list could go on and on.

In Crimea, Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka, with Vladimir Lenin's approval, had 50,000 White prisoners of war and civilians summarily executed by shooting or hanging after the defeat of general Pyotr Wrangel at the end of 1920. They had been promised amnesty if they would surrender. This is one of the largest massacres in the Civil War.

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 prodrazvyorstka (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.

Repressions

Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists, liberals, non-Bolshevik socialists, members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and other political dissidents. Later, industrial workers who failed to meet production quotas were also targeted.

The first victims of the Terror were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). Over the months of the campaign, over 800 SR members were executed, while thousands more were driven into exile or detained in labor camps. In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the amount of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over its 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. While the Socialist Revolutionaries were initially the primary targets of the terror, most of its victims were associated with the Tsarist autocracy.

Peasants

"Bolshevik freedom" – Polish propaganda poster with nude caricature of Leon Trotsky from the Polish–Soviet War

The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced 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 brigands were arrested: 1,826 were executed and 2,230 were deported. 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.

Industrial workers

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 putting up with this and do not punish sabotage with shooting; also the delay over the transfer here of locomotives is likewise manifest sabotage; please take the most resolute measures."

At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators used torture. At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Oryol, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kyiv, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.

Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.

According to Edvard Radzinsky, "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body". During decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, "on an unheard of scale". The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander [ru], the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the 'class struggle'".

Clergy and religious

Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice. An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.

Interpretations by historians

Historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Richard Pipes have argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use terror to stay in power because they lacked popular support. Although the Bolsheviks dominated among workers, soldiers and in their revolutionary soviets, they won less than a quarter of the popular vote in elections for the Constituent Assembly held soon after the October Revolution, since they commanded much less support among the peasantry. The Constituent Assembly elections predated the split between the Right SRs, who had opposed the Bolsheviks, and the Left SRs, who were their coalition partners, consequentially many peasant votes intended for the latter went to the SRs. Massive strikes by Russian workers were "mercilessly" suppressed during the Red Terror.

According to Richard Pipes, terror was inevitably justified by Lenin's belief that human lives were expendable in the cause of building the new order of communism. Pipes has quoted Marx's observation of the class struggles in 19th century France: "The present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world", but noted that neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels encouraged mass murder. Robert Conquest was convinced that "unprecedented terror must seem necessary to ideologically motivated attempts to transform society massively and speedily, against its natural possibilities."

Orlando Figes' view was that Red Terror was implicit, not so much in Marxism itself, but in the tumultuous violence of the Russian Revolution. He noted that there were a number of Bolsheviks, led by Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Mikhail Olminsky, who criticized the actions and warned that thanks to "Lenin's violent seizure of power and his rejection of democracy," the Bolsheviks would be "forced to turn increasingly to terror to silence their political critics and subjugate a society they could not control by other means." Figes also asserts that the Red Terror "erupted from below. It was an integral element of the social revolution from the start. The Bolsheviks encouraged but did not create this mass terror. The main institutions of the Terror were all shaped, at least in part, in response to these pressures from below."

The German Marxist Karl Kautsky pleaded with Lenin against using violence as a form of terrorism because it was indiscriminate, intended to frighten the civilian population and included the taking and executing hostages: "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."

In The Black Book of Communism, Nicolas Werth contrasts the Red and White Terrors, noting the former was the official policy of the Bolshevik government:

The Bolshevik policy of terror was more systematic, better organized, and targeted at whole social classes. Moreover, it had been thought out and put into practice before the outbreak of the civil war. The White Terror was never systematized in such a fashion. It was almost invariably the work of detachments that were out of control, and taking measures not officially authorized by the military command that was attempting, without much success, to act as a government. If one discounts the pogroms, which Denikin himself condemned, the White Terror most often was a series of reprisals by the police acting as a sort of military counterespionage force. The Cheka and the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic were a structured and powerful instrument of repression of a completely different order, which had support at the highest level from the Bolshevik regime.

James Ryan points out that Lenin never advocated for the physical extermination of the entire bourgeoisie as a class, just the execution of those who were actively involved in opposing and undermining Bolshevik rule. He did intend to bring about "the overthrow and complete abolition of the bourgeoisie", but through non-violent political and economic means.

Leszek Kołakowski noted that while Bolsheviks (especially Lenin) were very much focused on the Marxian concept of "violent revolution" and dictatorship of the proletariat long before the October Revolution, implementation of the dictatorship was clearly defined by Lenin as early as in 1906, when he argued it must involve "unlimited power based on force and not on law," power that is "absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever and based directly on violence." In The State and Revolution of 1917, Lenin once again reiterated the arguments raised by Marx and Engels calling for use of terror. Voices such as Kautsky calling for moderate use of violence met "furious reply" from Lenin in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918). Another theoretical and systematic argument in favor of organized terror in response to Kautsky's reservations was written by Trotsky in The Defense of Terrorism (1921). Trotsky argued that in the light of historical materialism, it is sufficient that the violence is successful for it to justify its rightness. Trotsky also introduced and provided ideological justification for many of the future features characterizing the Bolshevik system such as "militarization of labor" and concentration camps.

Historical significance

Memorial stone to victims of the Red Terror in Daugavpils

The Red Terror was significant because it was the first of numerous Communist terror campaigns which were waged in Soviet Russia and many other countries. It also triggered 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 bestiality of men engaged in it.

The term 'Red Terror' was later used in reference to other campaigns of violence which were waged by communist or communist-affiliated groups. Some other events which were also called "Red Terrors" include:

• Hungarian Red Terror — the execution of 590 people who were accused of being involved in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on 24 June 1919.
• Spanish Red Terror — assassinations which were carried out during the Spanish Civil War.
• Red Terror (Greece) — a campaign of repression which was waged in Greece by the Communist organizations of the Greek Resistance (during the Axis occupation of Greece which coincided with World War II) and the Greek Civil War (1943–49).
• Ethiopian Red Terror — a campaigned of repression which was waged by the Derg during the rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam.
• Chinese Red Terror — a campaign of repression which is believed to have begun with the Red August of the Cultural Revolution. According to Mao Zedong himself: "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."
• Indian Red Terror — a name which was given to the "Nandigram violence" (November 2007) in Nandigram, West Bengal, critics use it in order to allude to the actions of the local administration Communist Party of India, the ruling party in West Bengal. The situation was also called a "Red Terror" by the media.
• Finnish Red Terror — the 1918 Civil War in Finland.
• Yugoslavian Red Terror — another name for the period from 1941 to 1942 in Yugoslavia known as the "Leftist errors."

Terrorism in Russia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Russia 

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 the Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis, the 1999 apartment bombings, the Moscow theater hostage crisis and the Beslan school siege. Many more acts of terrorism have been committed in major Russian cities, as well as the regions of Chechnya and Dagestan.

Russia has been declared a state sponsor of terrorism or terrorist state by Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine, the European Parliament, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as a result of its actions during the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

19th century

German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky traces the origins of terrorism, including the terrorism seen in the 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.

Early 20th century

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.

Soviet Union

Main article: Terrorism and the Soviet Union

Red terror

Main article: Red Terror

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".

1977 Moscow bombings

Main article: 1977 Moscow bombings

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.

Russian Federation

Accusations of terrorism

See also: Russia–European Union relations § Allegations of Russian intimidation and destabilisation of EU states, and Active measures

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government of the Russian Federation 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 interfere 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.

On February 10, 2020, seven Russian anarchists and anti-fascist activists were sentenced to six to eighteen years in prison, being housed in different penal colonies. The activist were accused to be members of "The Set" an alleged terrorist organization from Penza that aimed to "overthrow the Russian government".

1999 Russian apartment bombings

Main article: Russian apartment bombings

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 four bombings took place in the Russian cities of Buinaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk during early 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, the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings were organized and led by Achemez Gochiyaev, who headed a group of Karachai Wahhabis, while the Buinaksk bombing was organized and perpetrated by a different group of Dagestani Wahhabis.

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.

More recent attacks

2002

The Moscow theater hostage crisis (also known as the 2002 Nord-Ost siege) was the seizure of a crowded Dubrovka Theater by 40 to 50 armed Chechens on 23 October 2002 that involved 850 hostages and ended with the deaths of at least 170 people.

2004

In September 2004, following bombing attacks on two aircraft and the downtown Moscow Metro, Chechen terrorists seized over 1,000 hostages at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia.

2006

The 2006 Moscow market bombing occurred on 21 August 2006, when a self-made bomb with the power of more than 1 kg of TNT exploded at Moscow's Cherkizovsky Market frequented by foreign merchants. The bombing killed 13 people and injured 47. In 2008, eight members of the neo-Nazi organization The Saviour were sentenced for their roles in the attack.

2010

Main article: 2010 Moscow Metro bombings

In March 2010 suicide bombings were carried out by two women who were aligned with Caucasus Emirate and Al-Qaeda. The terrorist attack happened during the morning rush hour of 29 March 2010, at two stations of the Moscow Metro (Lubyanka and Park Kultury), with roughly 40 minutes interval between. At least 38 people were killed, and over 60 injured.

2011

Main article: Domodedovo International Airport bombing

The Domodedovo International Airport bombing was a suicide bombing in the international arrival hall of Moscow's Domodedovo International, in Domodedovsky District, Moscow Oblast, on 24 January 2011.

The bombing killed 37 people and injured 173 others, including 86 who had to be hospitalised. Of the casualties, 31 died at the scene, three later in hospitals, one en route to a hospital, one on 2 February after having been put in a coma, and another on 24 February after being hospitalised in grave condition.

Russia's Federal Investigative Committee later identified the suicide bomber as a 20-year-old from the North Caucasus, and said that the attack was aimed "first and foremost" at foreign citizens.

2013

Main articles: December 2013 Volgograd bombings and October 2013 Volgograd bus bombing

In December 2013, two separate suicide bombings a day apart targeted mass transportation in the city of Volgograd, in the Volgograd Oblast of Southern Russia, killing 34 people overall, including both perpetrators who were aligned to Caucasus Emirate and Vilayat Dagestan. The attacks followed a bus bombing carried out in the same city two months earlier.

On 21 October 2013, a suicide bombing took place on a bus in the city of Volgograd, in the Volgograd Oblast of Southern Russia. The attack was carried out by a female perpetrator named Naida Sirazhudinovna Asiyalova (Russian: Наида Сиражудиновна Асиялова) who was converted to Islam by her husband, she detonated an explosive belt containing 500–600 grams of TNT inside a bus carrying approximately 50 people, killing seven civilians and injuring at least 36 others.

2014

Main articles: 2014 Grozny bombing and 2014 Grozny clashes

On 5 October 2014 a 19-year-old man named Opti Mudarov went to the town hall where an event was taking place to mark Grozny City Day celebrations in Grozny coinciding with the birthday of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. Police officers noticed him acting strangely and stopped him. The officers began to search him and the bomb which Mudarov had been carrying exploded. Five officers, along with the suicide bomber, were killed, while 12 others were wounded.

On 4 December 2014, a group of Islamist militants, in three vehicles, killed three traffic policemen, after the latter had attempted to stop them at a checkpoint in the outskirts of Grozny. The militants then occupied a press building and an abandoned school, located in the center of the city. Launching a counter-terrorism operation, security forces, with the use of armored vehicles, attempted to storm the buildings and a firefight ensued.

14 policemen, 11 militants and 1 civilian were killed. Additionally 36 policemen were wounded in the incident. The Press House was also burned and severely damaged in the incident.

2015

Main article: Metrojet Flight 9268

Metrojet Flight 9268 was an international chartered passenger flight operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia (branded as Metrojet). On 31 October 2015 at 06:13 local time EST (04:13 UTC), an Airbus A321-231 operating the flight disintegrated above the northern Sinai following its departure from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport, Egypt, in route to Pulkovo Airport, Saint Petersburg, Russia. All 217 passengers and seven crew members who were on board were killed.

Shortly after the crash, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)'s Sinai Branch, previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, claimed responsibility for the incident, which occurred in the vicinity of the Sinai insurgency. ISIL claimed responsibility on Twitter, on video, and in a statement by Abu Osama al-Masri, the leader of the group's Sinai branch. ISIL posted pictures of what it said was the bomb in Dabiq, its online magazine.

By 4 November 2015, British and American authorities suspected that a bomb was responsible for the crash. On 8 November 2015, an anonymous member of the Egyptian investigation team said the investigators were "90 percent sure" that the jet was brought down by a bomb. Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam said that other possible causes of the crash included a fuel explosion, metal fatigue, and lithium batteries overheating. The Russian Federal Security Service announced on 17 November that they were sure that it was a terrorist attack, caused by an improvised bomb containing the equivalent of up to 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of TNT that detonated during the flight. The Russians said they had found explosive residue as evidence. On 24 February 2016, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi acknowledged that terrorism caused the crash.

2017

Main article: 2017 Saint Petersburg Metro bombing

On 3 April 2017, a terrorist attack using an explosive device took place on the Saint Petersburg Metro between Sennaya Ploshchad and Tekhnologichesky Institut stations. Seven people (including the perpetrator) were initially reported to have died, and eight more died later from their injuries, bringing the total to 15. At least 45 others were injured in the incident. The explosive device was contained in a briefcase. A second explosive device was found and defused at Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro station. The suspected perpetrator was named as Akbarzhon Jalilov, a Russian citizen who was an ethnic Uzbek born in Kyrgyzstan. Prior to the attack, Chechen separatists had been responsible for several terrorist attacks in Russia. In 2016, ISIS had plotted to target St. Petersburg due to Russia's military involvement in Syria, resulting in arrests. No public transport system in Russia had been bombed since the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings.ISIS propaganda was being circulated prior to this incident. It encouraged supporters to launch strikes on Moscow. ISIS propaganda showed bullet holes through Putin's head and a poster circulated before the attack of a falling Kremlin and included the message "We Will Burn Russia."

On 22 April 2017, two people were shot and killed in an attack in a Federal Security Service office in the Russian city of Khabarovsk. The gunman was also killed. The Russian Federal Security Service said that the native 18-year-old perpetrator was a known member of a neo-nazi group.

On 27 December 2017 a bomb exploded in a supermarket in St Petersburg, injuring thirteen people. Vladimir Putin described this as a terrorist attack.

2019

Several terrorist incidents occurred in Russia during the year of 2019:

On March 13, two perpetrators opened attacked Federal Security Service (FSB) officers with automatic weapons and grenades when stopped for questioning in Stavropol of the Shpakovsky district. Both Perpetrators where killed in the confrontation. Later, Russian authorities reported they were planning a terrorist attack in accordance to their affiliation with ISIS.

On April 8, ISIS (claimed to have) set off an explosion at Kolomna, a city near Moscow. The attack did not result in any casualties.

On July 1, ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack on a police officer at a checkpoint in the Achkhoy-Martonovsky district of Chechnya, who was stabbed to death. The attacker was shot and killed as he threw a grenade at the other officers.

On December 19, someone living in the Moscow region opened fire near the FSB headquarters in Moscow and caused 6 casualties; 2 killed and 4 wounded. Subsequently, the shooter, later identified as Yevgeny Manyurov, a 39-year-old ex-security guard, was killed onsite.

2021

A German court sentenced Russian agent Vadim Krasikov to life imprisonment for the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili which the judge called "state terrorism".

2022

On April 14, the Ukrainian parliament endorsed a bill recognizing Russia as a terrorist state, whose political regime's aims include genocide, physical destruction, mass killings, international crimes against civilians, use of prohibited methods of war, destruction of infrastructure, and artificial humanitarian catastrophes in certain regions of Ukraine.

On May 10, Lithuania's parliament designated the Russian Federation a terrorist state and its actions in Ukraine a genocide.

On August 11, Latvia's parliament recognised Russia as a terrorist state.

The US Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution to this effect on July 27, 2022, calling on the State Department to recognize Russia as a state-sponsor of terrorism for its invasions of Ukraine, as well as of Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, that caused "the deaths of countless innocent men, women and children." The US House of Congress is considering such legislation. A large international legal effort intends to use the international definition of terrorism to help win reparations from the Russian state, mercenaries, and business people for war damage in Ukraine.

Darya Dugina was killed on 20 August 2022, in a car-bombing in the settlement of Bolshiye Vyazyomy outside Moscow.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution declaring the Russian Federation a terrorist regime, by a vote of 99 to 0, with 1 abstaining, on 13 October 2022. The European Parliament resolved to discuss the topic in November.

On October 18, parliament of Estonia declares Russia a terrorist state.

On October 25, the Polish senate recognized the Russian government as a terrorist regime.

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Czech lower house of parliament declared the Russian regime terrorist on November 3, after resolutions condemning large-scale Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians and critical infrastructure. On November 16, the deputies of the house passed a resolution calling Russia terrorist.

On 21 November the NATO Parliamentary Assembly unanimously passed a resolution declaring Russia a terrorist state and calling for a Special International Tribunal to investigate its crimes, and also approving of various other measures supporting Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

On 23 November, the European Parliament declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism and a state that uses means of terrorism.

The parliament of the Netherlands declared Russia a state sponsor of terrorism on 24 November.

On December 14, 2022, the Sejm of the Republic of Poland recognized the Russian Federation as a state sponsoring terrorism by a vote of 231:2:1. 226 deputies did not take part in the vote.

2023

On 16 February, the Slovakia's National Council recognized the Russian government as terrorist and Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, by a vote of 78 to 12, with 7 abstaining.

International cooperation

In December 2019 President of Russia Vladimir Putin thanked his American counterpart Donald Trump for a tip which allowed the prevention of a terrorist attack in St. Petersburg.