On the walls of the waiting room messages had been scratched with nails and scrawled in pencil: “I got execution,” “I got twenty-five,” “I got a ‘tenner!’” They didn’t clean off these graffiti; they served an educational purpose. Be scared; bow down; don’t think that you can change anything by your behavior. Even if you were to speak in your own defense with the eloquence of Demosthenes, in a hall empty except for a handful of interrogators—like Olga Sliozberg in 1936, at the Supreme Court—it would not help you in the slightest. All you could do would be to increase your sentence from ten years to execution. For instance, if you were to shout: “You are fascists! I am ashamed to have been a member of your Party for several years!” (Nikolai Semyonovich Daskal did it in 1937, at the Special Collegium of the Azov-Black Sea Province at Maikop, presided over by Kholik.) In that situation what they did was fabricate a new case and do you in once and for all.
Chavdarov has described an incident in which the accused suddenly repudiated at their trial all the false testimony they had given during the interrogation. And what happened? If there was any hesitation while glances were exchanged, it lasted no more than a few seconds. The prosecutor asked for a recess, without explaining why. The interrogators and their tough-boy helpers dashed in from the interrogation prison. All the prisoners, distributed among separate boxes, were given a good beating all over again and promised another after the next recess. The recess came to an end. Once again the judges questioned all of them—and this time they all confessed.
Aleksandr Grigoryevich Karetnikov, the Director of the Textile Research Institute, provided an example of outstanding astuteness. Just before the session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court was to begin, he sent word through the guard that he wanted to give supplementary testimony. This, of course, provoked curiosity. He was received by the prosecutor. Karetnikov displayed his infected collarbone, broken by the interrogator who had struck him with a stool, and declared: “I signed everything under torture.” By this time the prosecutor was cursing himself for having been so greedy to get “supplementary” testimony, but it was too late. Each of them is fearless only as long as he is an anonymous cog in the whole machine. But just as soon as the responsibility has become personalized, individualized, concentrated on him, just as soon as the searchlight is on him, he grows pale and realizes that he is nothing and can slip on any chance banana peel. So Karetnikov caught the prosecutor, and the latter was unwilling to suppress the whole business. The session of the Military Collegium began and Karetnikov repeated his statement in front of them. Now there was a case in which the Military Collegium went out and really conferred! But the only verdict they could have brought in was acquittal, which would have meant releasing Karetnikov on the spot. Therefore they brought in no verdict at all!
As if nothing at all had happened, they took Karetnikov back to prison, treated his collarbone, and kept him another three months. A very polite new interrogator entered the case, who wrote out a new warrant for Karetnikov’s arrest. (If the Collegium had not twisted things, he might at least have spent those three months as a free man.) The interrogator asked the same questions as the first interrogator. Karetnikov, sensing freedom in the offing, conducted himself staunchly and refused to admit any guilt whatever. And what happened next? He got eight years from an OSO.
This example shows well enough the possibilities available to the prisoner and the possibilities available to the OSO. It was the poet Derzhavin who wrote:
A partial court is worse than banditry.
Judges are enemies; there sleeps the law.
In front of you the citizen’s neck
Lies stretched out, quiet and without defense.
But it was a rare thing for such accidents to take place in the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. For that matter, it was in general rare for it to rub clear its clouded eyes and take a look at any individual little tin soldier of a prisoner. In 1937, A.D.R., an electrical engineer, was taken up to the fourth floor, running upstairs with a convoy guard on either side of him. (In all probability, the elevator was working, but there were so many prisoners pouring in and out that the officials and employees would not have been able to use the elevator if the prisoners had been permitted to.) Meeting a convicted prisoner who had just left, they dashed into the court. The Military Collegium was in such a hurry they hadn’t sat down yet, and all three members remained standing. Catching his breath with difficulty, for he had been weakened by his long interrogation, R. blurted out his full name. They muttered something, exchanged glances, and Ulrikh—the very same, no less—proclaimed: “Twenty years!” And they dragged R. out at a gallop and, at a gallop, dragged in the next prisoner.
It was all like a dream. In February, 1963, I, too, got to climb those stairs, but I was courteously accompanied by a colonel who was also a Communist Party organizer. And in that room with the circular colonnade, in which, they say, the Plenary Sessions of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. meet—with an enormous horseshoelike table that had another round table inside it and seven antique chairs—seventy officials of the Military Collegium heard me out—that same Military Collegium which once sentenced Karetnikov, and R. and others and others, and so on and so forth. And I said to them: “What a remarkable day this is! Although I was first sentenced to camp and then to eternal exile, I never before saw a single judge face to face. And now I see all of you assembled here together!” (And they, rubbing their eyes open, for the first time saw a living zek.)
But it turned out that it had not been they! Yes. They said it had not been they. They assured me that those others were no longer present. Some had retired honorably on pensions. A few had been removed. (Ulrikh, the outstanding executioner of all, had been removed, it turned out, back in Stalin’s time, in 1950, for, believe it or not, leniency.) Some of them—there were only a few of these—had even been tried under Khrushchev, and, in their role as defendants, they had threatened: “Today you are trying us. Tomorrow we will try you. Watch out!” But like all the starts made under Khrushchev, this effort, too, which had been very active at first, was soon abandoned. He dropped it before it got far enough to produce an irreversible change; which meant that things were left where they had been.
On that occasion, several veterans of the bench, all speaking up at the same time, gave voice to their recollections, unwittingly providing me with material for this chapter. (Oh, if only they had undertaken to remember and to publish! But the years pass; another five have gone by; and it has not become any brighter or lighter.) They recalled how certain judges, at conferences of their judicial colleagues, took pride when they spoke from the rostrum of having succeeded in not applying Article 51 of the Criminal Code, which specifies those circumstances that extenuate guilt, and thus had succeeded in handing down sentences of twenty-five years instead of ten. And how the courts had been humiliatingly subservient to the Organs. A certain judge was trying a case. A Soviet citizen who had returned from the United States had made the slanderous statement that there were good automobile roads in America—and nothing else. That was all there was to the case. The judge ventured to send the case back for further investigation for the purpose of getting “genuine anti-Soviet materials”—in other words, so that the accused could be beaten and tortured. But his praiseworthy intention wasn’t taken into account. The angry answer came back: “You mean you don’t trust our Organs?” And, in the upshot, the judge was exiled to the post of secretary of a military tribunal on Sakhalin! (Under Khrushchev, reproof was not so severe; judges who “made mistakes” were sent—where do you think?—to work as lawyers.)12 The prosecutor’s office was just as subservient to the Organs. When, in 1942, Ryumin’s flagrant abuses in the counterintelligence section of the Northern Fleet became known, the prosecutor’s office did not dare interfere on its own, but only reported respectfully to Abakumov that his boys were acting up. Abakumov had good reason to consider the Organs the salt of the earth! (This was the occasion when he called in Ryumin and promoted hi
m—to his own eventual undoing.)
There just wasn’t enough time that February day, or they would have told me ten times as much as they did. But this, too, provides food for thought. If both the courts and the prosecutor’s office were simply pawns of the Minister of State Security, then maybe there isn’t any need for a separate chapter to describe them.
They vied with each other in telling.me things, and I kept looking around me in astonishment. They were people! Real people! They were smiling! They were explaining that their intentions were of the best. Well, and what if things turn full circle and it is once again up to them to try me? Maybe even in that very hall—and they were showing me the main hall.
Well, so they will convict me.
Which comes first—the chicken or the egg? The people or the system?
For several centuries we had a proverb: “Don’t fear the law, fear the judge.”
But, in my opinion, the law has outstripped people, and people have lagged behind in cruelty. It is time to reverse the proverb: “Don’t fear the judge, fear the law.”
Abakumov’s kind of law, of course.
They stepped onto the rostrum and talked about Ivan Denisovich. They said happily that the book had eased their consciences (that’s what they said . . .). They admitted that the picture I painted was decidedly on the bright side, that every one of them knew of camps worse than that. (Ah, so they did know?) Of the seventy people seated around that horseshoe, several turned out to be knowledgeable in literature, even to be readers of Novy Mir. They were eager for reform. They spoke forcefully about our social ulcers, about our neglect of our rural areas.
And I sat there and thought: If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?
And they will burst forth. It has to happen.
Chapter 8
The Law as a Child
We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people, And it is a vexing one. It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless. It makes us an easy prey for liars.
Therefore, if they demand that we forget even the public trials, we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in our newspapers, but they didn’t drill a hole in our brains to make us remember—and so we’ve forgotten them. Only things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain. I am not even talking about young people, since they, of course, know nothing of all this, but about people who were alive at the time of those trials. Ask any middle-aged person to enumerate the highly publicized open trials. He will remember those of Bukharin and Zinoviev. And, knitting his brow, that of the Promparty too. And that’s all. There were no other public trials.
Yet in actual fact they began right after the October Revolution. In 1918, quantities of them were taking place, in many different tribunals. They were taking place before there were either laws or codes, when the judges had to be guided solely by the requirements of the revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ power. At the same time, they were regarded as blazing their own trail of bold legality. Their detailed history will someday be written by someone, and it’s not for us even to attempt to include it in our present investigation.
However, we cannot do without a brief review. It is our duty, anyway, to probe some of the charred ruins which go all the way back to that gentle, misty, rose-colored dawn.
In those dynamic years, the sabers of war were not rusting in their scabbards, nor did the executioners’ revolvers have time to grow cold in their holsters. Only later on did the custom develop of hiding executions in cellars under cover of night and of shooting the victims in the back of the head. In 1918, the famous Ryazan Chekist Stelmakh had those sentenced to death shot in the courtyard, during the day, so that prisoners awaiting execution could watch from the prison windows.
There was an official term current then: extrajudicial reprisal . . . not because there weren’t any courts at the time, but because there was the Cheka.1 Because it was more efficient. Certainly, there were courts, and they tried and convicted and executed people, but we need to remember that, parallel to them and independently of them, extrajudicial reprisal went on at the same time. How can one depict its scale? M. Latsis, in his popular review of the Cheka’s activity,2 gives us material for only a year and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces of Central Russia (“The figures presented here are far from complete,”3 in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389 persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine);4 counterrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic figure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization throughout our history and also the general isolation of individuals in those years and the general psychological depression); the total of those arrested—87,0005 (and this figure smells of understatement).
What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In 1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays entitled Against Capital Punishment,6 in which are listed by name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to 1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that there were some additional victims, whose names remain unknown, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly not so incomplete as Latsis’ materials compiled during the Civil War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an additional 270, who were sentenced in absentia and never caught (for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That leaves 894, a figure covering eighty years, which is not even close to Latsis’ total for only one and a half years, and not including all the provinces of Russia either. True, the editors of the collection cite another presumed statistic of 1,310 for those sentenced to death (although perhaps not executed) in 1906 alone, and a total of 3,419 for 1826 through 1906. But this, mind you, was right in the midst of the notorious Stolypin reaction, a period for which an additional figure is available: 950 executions over a period of six months.7 (In fact, the Stolypin military field tribunals were in existence for six months all told.) It sounds awful, and yet it does not make much of an impression on our hardened nerves: even if we multiply by three this figure of 950 for six months, in order to compare it with the Latsis figure for eighteen months in the postrevolutionary period, we still come up with the fact that the terror after the Revolution was at least three times more intense than Stolypin’s. And that was for just twenty provinces and excluded courts and tribunals.
And from November, 1917, on, the courts acted on their own. Despite all the difficulties at the time, Guiding Principles of the Criminal Law of the R.S.F.S.R. were issued for their use in 1919. (We have not read this work, could not obtain it, and know only that it included “imprisonment for an indefinite term”—in other words, pending a special order.)
The courts were of three kinds: the people’s courts, the circuit courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the Revtribunals.
The people’s courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and nonpolitical criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people’s court could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding two years. Up to July, 1918, the heritage of the Left SR’s still endured in our judicial proceedings. Only by special intervention of the government and only individually were impermissibly lenient sentences raised to twenty years.8 From July, 1918, on, the people’s courts were given the right to hand down sentences of up to five years. And in 1922, when all threats of war had died down, the people’s courts got the right to impose sentences of up to ten years and lost the right to sentence anyone to less than six months.
From the beginning,
the circuit courts and the Revtribunals had the power to impose the death sentence, but they lost it for a brief period: the circuit courts in 1920, and the Revtribunals in 1921. There were many tiny ups and downs in this period which only a historian pursuing all the details of those years would be able to trace.
Perhaps that historian will seek out the documents and unroll for us the scroll of tribunal sentences and also the statistics. (Though probably not. Whatever time and events failed to destroy was destroyed by persons interested in having such material disappear.) We know only that the Revtribunals were not asleep. They were handing down sentences right and left. And we know, too, that every time a city was captured during the Civil War the event was marked not only by gunsmoke in the courtyards of the Cheka, but also by sleepless sessions of the tribunal. And you did not have to be a White officer, a senator, a landowner, a monk, a Cadet, an SR, or an Anarchist in order to get your bullet. Soft white uncallused hands alone were sufficient in those years. But one can also hazard the guess that in Izhevsk or Votkinsk, Yaroslavl or Murom, Kozlov or Tambov, the uprisings were very costly as well to those who had callused workers’ hands. And if those scrolls—of both the extrajudicial executions and those by tribunal—are unrolled for us someday, the most surprising thing will be the number of ordinary peasants we find on them. Because there was no end to the number of peasant uprisings and revolts from 1918 to 1921, even though they did not adorn the colored pages of the official History of the Civil War, and even though no one photographed them, and no one filmed motion pictures of those furious crowds attacking machine guns with clubs, pitchforks, and axes and, later, lined up for execution with their arms tied behind their backs—ten for one! The revolt in Sapozhok is remembered only in Sapozhok; the one in Pitelino only in Pitelino. We learn from Latsis the number of peasant rebellions that were suppressed during that same year and a half in twenty provinces—344.9 (From 1918 on, peasant revolts were already being called “kulak” revolts, for how could the peasants revolt against the workers’ and peasants’ power! But how then could one explain that in every instance it was not just three peasant huts that revolted but the whole village? Why did the masses of poor peasants not kill the insurgent “kulaks” with those same pitchforks and axes, instead of marching with them against the machine guns? Latsis claims: “The kulaks compelled the rest of the peasants to take part in these revolts by promises, slander, and threats.”10 But what could have been more laden with promises than the slogans of the Committees of the Poor? And what could have been more loaded with threats than the machine guns of the Special Purpose Detachments, the CHON?
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 34
