When Nikolay Gumilyov died in August 1921, his friends didn’t dare mourn him in public. The prominent Russian poet and dissident had been arrested and falsely accused of plotting an uprising against the Bolsheviks, the radical left-wing movement founded by Vladimir Lenin that took power in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gumilyov was convicted without a trial and executed by firing squad.

The poet was just one of many victims of the Red Terror, a state-sponsored wave of brutality that was decreed in Russia on September 5, 1918, and lasted until 1922. Intent on maintaining their control of a country in the throes of a civil war, the Bolsheviks used terror tactics to silence their enemies and dissuade others