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For the play by Henrik Ibsen, see An Enemy of the People.

The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation referring to political or class opponents of the group using the term, sometimes including former allies. Its usage is derogatory, and meant to imply that the "enemies" have conspired against society as a whole.

The term "enemies of the people" has an extensive history. Its earliest use may have been by the Roman Empire, where the senate used the term to apply to the Emperor Nero as a pretext for his arrest (he committed suicide). Since that time, many groups have used the phrase, including the Jacobins during the radical phase of the French Revolution (the Reign of Terror), the US government during the McCarthyist "Red Scare" era, and by the Soviet Union and other Communist Party-run countries.

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union made extensive use of the term (Russian language: враг народа, "vrag naroda"), as it fit in well with the idea that the people were in control. Indeed, so great a number of people were labeled with the term that most modern connotations of the phrase associate it with communism. The term was introduced by Vladimir Lenin who signed a decree on 28 November 1917:

"all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court."

Other similar terms were in use as well:

• enemy of the labourers (враг трудящихся, "vrag trudyashchikhsya")
• enemy of the proletariat (враг пролетариата, "vrag proletariata")
• class enemy (классовый враг, "klassovyi vrag"), etc.

In particular, the term "enemy of the workers" was formalized in the Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code), and similar articles in the codes of the other Soviet Republics.

At various times these terms were applied, in particular, to the tsar family, aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, clerics, business entrepreneurs, anarchists, kulaks, monarchists, Mensheviks, Esers, Bundists, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, the "old Bolsheviks", the army and police, emigrants, saboteurs, wreckers (вредители, "vrediteli"), "social parasites" (тунеядцы, "tuneyadtsy"), Kavezhedists (people who administered and serviced the KVZhD (China Far East Railway), particularly the Russian population of Harbin, China), those considered bourgeois nationalists (notably Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian nationalists, Zionists, Basmachi), and members of certain ethnic groups (see Population transfer: Soviet Union).

An enemy of the people could be imprisoned, expelled or executed, and his property could be confiscated. Close relatives of enemies of the people were labeled as "traitor of Motherland family members" and prosecuted. They could be sent to Gulag, punished by the involuntary settlement in unpopulated areas, or stripped of citizen's rights. Being a friend of an enemy of the people automatically placed the person under suspicion.

A significant fraction of the enemies of the people were given this label not because of their hostile actions against the workers' and peasants' state, but simply because of their social origin or profession before the revolution: those who used hired labor, high-ranking clergy, former policemen, merchants, etc. Some of them were commonly known as lishentsy (лишенцы, derived from Russian word лишение, deprivation), because by the Soviet Constitution they were deprived of the right of voting. This automatically translated into a deprivation of various social benefits, some of them, e.g., rationing, were at times critical for survival.

Since 1927, Article 20 of the Common Part of the penal code that listed possible "measures of social defence" had the following item 20a: "declaration to be an enemy of the workers with deprivation of the union republic citizenship and hence of the USSR citizenship, with obligatory expulsion from its territory". Nevertheless most "enemies of the people" suffered labor camps, rather than expulsion.

One might wonder why there were so many enemies of workers left, seemingly contrary to the initial claims of Bolsheviks that the opponents of the proletariat were crushed as a class in the Soviet Union. This was handily explained by Stalinist doctrine, which included the "theory of the aggravation of class struggle under socialism". The theory postulated that class struggle grows more intense during the dictatorship of the proletariat, thus requiring more extreme measures. Anti-Stalinist Marxists, particularly Trotskyists, reject this idea.

References

1. Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7

Further reading

Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7

See also

• Great Purge
• Dictatorship of the proletariat
• Troika (triumvirate)
• Parasitism
• Public enemy
• Enemy of the state

• Political repression in the Soviet Union
• Political repression
• Soviet phraseology