Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people suffered political repression, which was an instrument of the state since the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the "Khrushchev Thaw", followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev era, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev's rule when it was ended in keeping with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Background

Secret police had a long history in Tsarist Russia. Ivan the Terrible used the Oprichina, while more recently the Third Section and Okhrana existed.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 started with the February Revolution. The tsar was forced to abdicate, and the monarchist government was replaced with the Russian Provisional Government, which was led by liberals and socialists. This government implemented freedom of expression and the press. There were preparations for the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly in November 1917. The industrial workers and peasants started to organise in soviets and factory committees. In these organisations there were Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, anarchists and people without ideology. From July 1917, the Provisional Government was mainly led by the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The Bolshevik communists declined to be part of the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government was violently replaced by the communist government of Vladimir Lenin during the October Revolution.

Origins and early Soviet times Early on, the Leninist view of the class conflict and the resulting notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat provided the theoretical basis of the repressions. Its legal basis was formalized into the Article 58 in the code of the Russian SFSR and similar articles for other Soviet republics.

According to the Marxist historian Marcel Liebman, Lenin's wartime measures such as banning opposition parties was prompted by the fact that several political parties either took up arms against the new Soviet government, or participated in sabotage, collaborated with the deposed Tsarists, or made assassination attempts against Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. Liebman noted that opposition parties such as the Cadets who were democratically elected to the Soviets in some areas, then proceeded to use their mandate to welcome in Tsarist and foreign capitalist military forces. In one incident in Baku, the British military, once invited in, proceeded to execute members of the Bolshevik Party who had peacefully stood down from the Soviet when they failed to win the elections. As a result, the Bolsheviks banned each opposition party when it turned against the Soviet government. In some cases, bans were lifted. This banning of parties did not have the same repressive character as later bans enforced under the Stalinist regime. Trotsky also argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of Soviet Russia had improved.

In contradiction of the interpretation of Marxists like Liebman and others, Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev made statements about deliberately working for the creation of a power monopoly for their party.Vladimir Lenin: “When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won, in the course of decades, the position of vanguard of the entire factory and industrial proletariat.” From: Vladimir Lenin: Speech at The First All-Russia Congress of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture; First published in Pravda No. 170, 5 August 1919.Grigori Zinoviev: "Soviet rule in Russia could not have been maintained for three years - not even three weeks - without the iron dictatorship of the Communist Party. Any class-conscious worker must understand that the dictatorship of the working class can be achieved only by the dictatorship of its vanguard, i.e., by the Communist Party . . . All questions of economic reconstruction, military organisation, education, food supply - all these questions, on which the fate of the proletarian revolution depends absolutely, are decided in Russia before all other matters and mostly in the framework of the party organisations . . . Control by the party over soviet organs, over the trade unions, is the single durable guarantee that any measures taken will serve not special interests, but the interests of the entire proletariat." (Quoted from Oskar Anweiler: The Soviets; p. 239-240).Zinoviev: “We have the dictatorship of the working class and for that very reason we also have the dictatorship of the Communist Party. (…) The dictatorship of the Communist Party is only a function, a characteristic, an expression of the dictatorship of the working class. What is our Party? You should not confuse it with other parties that are made up of barristers. It is made up of between 600,000 and 700,000 of the best workers, the vanguard of the proletariat. And it is clear that the affairs of the working class are well looked after by these, its best representatives. That is why the dictatorship of the proletariat is at the same time the dictatorship of the Communist Party. The supervision of the various organisations and the right to purge them belongs to the party. So it has to be during the proletarian revolution. The role of the party does not diminish after the victory, but on the contrary it increases.” Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920.Trotsky remarked in 1921 when the Workers Opposition demanded more democracy: “They [the workers' opposition] have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy! . .. The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship … regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class . . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy.” Quoted from Maurice Brinton: The Bolsheviks and workers' control: the state and counter-revolution; 1970..Leon Trotsky: “We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the apparatus of the supremacy of labor. In this “substitution” of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality, there is no substitution at all.” (Leon Trotski: Terrorism and Communism; 1920: Chapter 7)Vladimir Lenin: “That in the history of revolutionary movements the dictatorship of individuals was very often the expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes has been shown by the irrefutable experience of history. (…) There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals. (…) But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one. (…) [W]ith the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work.” (Vladimir Lenin: The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government March 1918.) The result was a dictatorship with a one-party system.

At times, the repressed were called the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary executions, sending innocent people to Gulag, forced resettlement, and stripping of citizen's rights. Repression was conducted by the Cheka secret police and its successors, and other state organs. Periods of increased repression include the Red Terror, Collectivization, the Great Purges, the Doctors' Plot, and others. The secret police forces conducted massacres of prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during and following World War II, including the Baltic states and Eastern Europe.

The Provisional Government had planned the election of the Constituent Assembly in November 1917. The Sovnarkom decided – against the opinion of Lenin – to let the elections go as planned.Robert Service: Lenin: A Biography; 2000, , p. 317 - 330. The list of the Social Revolutionaries received 16 million votes (38 percent). The Bolsheviks received 24 percent of the votes, receiving 9 million votes.Figes 1997, chapter IX, paragraph 2. The opening of the Constituent Assembly was postponed several times by the communist government. Three members of the voting commission were arrested by the Bolsheviks. The liberal party (Constitutional Democratic Party) was declared illegal. Several members of the liberal party were arrested, including people who had been elected to the assembly. Also, the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and members of the Peasants Soviet were arrested by the communists.Figes 1997, chapter XI, paragraph 2. On January 18 of 1918, the Constituent Assembly was opened. Approximately 50,000 people were protesting in favour of the Constituent Assembly. More than ten people were killed by communist troops. It was the first time since the February Revolution that government troops were shooting at unarmed protesters. On the same day, the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly was opened. The most important bill of the Bolsheviks was rejected. The main component of the proposal was that the Constituent Assembly would forfeit its legislative power.Robert Service: Lenin: A Biography; 2000, , pages 325 - 337. The following day the representatives found the entrances of the parliament building closed, which meant the end of the Constituent Assembly.

The Mensheviks and members of the Social Revolutionary Party participated in the elections of the soviets as independent candidates, because those parties were forbidden. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries won many elections during the spring and summer of 1918 in Tula, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Briansk and other cities. The most soviets in which they won were violently abolished by the Bolsheviks.Vladimir Brovkin: The Mensheviks political comeback: The elections to the provincial City Soviets in spring 1918; Russian Review 42; 1983.