The Cheka is founded to defend the revolution
Lenin creates a secret police within weeks of taking power. Within two years it employs 200,000 people.
Quick facts
- Founded
- 20 December 1917
- First head
- Felix Dzerzhinsky
- Size by 1920
- About 200,000 personnel
What happened
On 20 December 1917, the Council of People's Commissars established the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation, known by its Russian abbreviation as the Cheka. The UK government's history blog notes the Cheka was in many ways a reincarnation of the tsarist secret service, the Okhrana, reusing some of its methods and even some of its personnel. Its first head, the Polish revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky, had spent years in tsarist prisons and exile and had learned his own tradecraft from the Okhrana he now replaced. The Cheka started small, with just a few hundred agents in early 1918, but grew to roughly 200,000 employees within two years as the civil war escalated.
Why it matters
The Cheka gave the Bolshevik government an instrument of internal security independent of the courts almost from its first weeks in power, well before the Red Terror made that instrument a byword for political violence. It evolved directly into the GPU, then the NKVD, then eventually the KGB, an institutional lineage that Soviet security officers themselves celebrated, receiving their pay each month on the 20th in honor of the Cheka's founding date.
How we know
The UK government's official history blog documents the Cheka's founding date, Dzerzhinsky's Okhrana-trained background, and its direct institutional descent through the GPU to the KGB.
Sources
- UK Government History Blog (National Archives / FCDO). What's the Context? 20 December 1917: formation of the Cheka · Reputable sourcehistory.blog.gov.uk · The domain "history.blog.gov.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- UK Government History Blog (National Archives / FCDO). What's the Context? 20 December 1917: formation of the Cheka · Reputable sourcehistory.blog.gov.uk · The domain "history.blog.gov.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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