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The Red Terror was a campaign of mass arrests, deportations, and executions targeted against counterrevolutionaries in Russia during the Russian Civil War. It was initiated and conducted by the Bolsheviks as retribution for the simultaneous successful assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky, and attempted assassination of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918.

The fact that these two assassination attempts happened at the same time strongly suggested that they had been coordinated by some larger counterrevolutionary organization, perhaps affiliated with the White movement, which was fighting against the Red Army in the civil war. As such, the Bolsheviks began to fear that more assassination attempts - and perhaps various acts of sabotage - were soon to follow. Therefore, they decided to respond with overwhelming force, both as retribution for the events of August 30 and as a deterrent for any similar future attempts.^{[citation needed]} The first official announcement, published in Izvestiya, "Appeal to the Working Class" on September 3, 1918 called for the workers to "crush the hydra of counterrevolution with massive terror". This was followed by the decree "On Red Terror", issued September 5, 1918 by the Cheka. Casualties in the fall of 1918 exceeded 10,000.

This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag, with 70,000 imprisoned by September, 1921.

The Bolsheviks' enemies, the White movement, adopted similar measures at roughly the same time. These are known as the "White Terror".

By extension, the term Red Terror came to refer to any acts of violence carried out by communist or communist-affiliated groups during a period of civil war or other armed conflict. Often, such acts were carried out in response to (and/or followed by) similar measures taken by the anti-communist side in the conflict. See White Terror.

Examples of these other "Red Terrors" include the executions of 590 people accused of involvement in the counterrevolutionary coup against the Hungarian Soviet Republic on June 24, 1919, as well as many acts of violence during the Cultural Revolution in China. The bloody campaign that claimed tens of thousands of lives in Eritrea and Ethiopia during the rule of the Derg is also known as the Red Terror in those countries.

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• Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7. Chapter 4: The Red Terror
• Terrorism or Communism book by Leon Trotsky on the use of Red Terror.