The prosecutor argued: the accused are dangerous to Soviet Russia because they consider everything they did to have been a good thing. “Perhaps certain of the defendants find their own consolation in the hope that some future chronicler will praise them or their conduct at the trial”33
And a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued after the trial declared: “At the trial itself they reserved to themselves the right to continue” their former activity.
The defendant Gendelman-Grabovsky (a lawyer himself) was conspicuous during the trial for his arguments with Krylenko on tampering with the testimony of witnesses and on “special methods of treating witnesses before the trial”—in other words, the obvious working-over they had gotten from the GPU. (It is all there! All the elements are there! There was only a little way to go before attaining the ideal.) Apparently the preliminary interrogation had been conducted under the supervision of the prosecutor—that same Krylenko. And during that process individual instances of a lack of consistency in testimony had been ironed out. Yet some testimony was presented for the first time only at the trial itself.
Well, so what! So there were some rough spots. So it wasn’t perfect. But in the last analysis, “We have to declare altogether clearly and coldly that. . . we are not concerned with the question of how the court of history is going to view our present deed.”34
And as far as the rough spots are concerned, we will take them under advisement and correct them.
But as it was, Krylenko, squirming, had to bring up—probably for the first and last time in Soviet jurisprudence—the matter of the inquiry, the initial inquiry required before investigation. And here’s how cleverly he handled this point: The proceeding which took place in the absence of the prosecutor and which you considered the investigation was actually the inquiry. And the proceeding in the presence of the prosecutor which you regarded as the reinvestigation, when all the loose ends were gathered up and all the bolts tightened, was really the investigation. The disorganized “materials provided by the Organs for inquiry and unverified by the investigation have much less value as proof than the materials provided by the skillfully directed investigation.”35
Clever, wasn’t it? Just try grinding that up in your mortar!
To be practical about it, Krylenko no doubt resented having to spend half a year getting ready for this trial, then another two months barking at the defendants, and then having to drag out his summation for fifteen hours, when all these defendants “had more than once been in the hands of the extraordinary Organs at times when these Organs had extraordinary powers; but, thanks to some circumstances or other, they had succeeded in surviving”36 So now Krylenko had to slave away to try and get them executed legally.
There was, of course, “only one possible verdict—execution for every last one of them”!37 But Krylenko qualifies this generously. Because this case is being watched by the whole world, the prosecutor’s demand “does not constitute a directive to the court” which the latter would “be obliged to accept immediately for consideration or decision.”38
What a fine court, too, that requires such an explanation!
And, indeed, the tribunal did demonstrate its daring in the sentences it imposed: it did not hand down the death penalty for “every last one of them,” but for fourteen only. Most of the rest got prison and camp sentences, while sentences in the form of productive labor were imposed on another hundred.
And just remember, reader, remember: “All the other courts of the Republic watch what the Supreme Tribunal does. It provides them with guidelines.”39
The sentences of the Verkhtrib are used “as directives for their guidance.”40 As to how many more would now be railroaded in the provinces, you can figure that out for yourself.
And, probably, on appeal the decision of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee was worth the whole trial: the death sentences were to remain in effect, but not to be carried out for the time being. The further fate of those condemned would depend, then, on the conduct of those SR’s who had not yet been arrested, apparently including those abroad as well. In other words: If you move against us, we’ll squash them.
In the fields of Russia they were reaping the second peacetime harvest. There was no shooting except in the courtyards of the Cheka. (Perkhurov in Yaroslavl, Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd. And always, always, always.) Beneath the azure sky our first diplomats and journalists sailed abroad across the blue waters. And the Central Executive Committee of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies thrust into its pockets eternal hostages.
The members of the ruling Party read all sixty issues of Pravda devoted to the trial—for they all read the papers—and all of them said: “Yes, yes, yes” No one mumbled: “No!”
What, then, were they surprised at in 1937? What was there to complain about? Hadn’t all the foundations of lawlessness been laid—first by the extrajudicial reprisals of the Cheka, and then by these early trials and this young Code? Wasn’t 1937 also expedient (expedient for Stalin’s purposes and, perhaps, History’s, too, for that matter)?
Prophetically, Krylenko let it slip that they were judging not the past but the future.
Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.
* * *
On or about August 20, 1924, Boris Viktorovich Savinkov crossed the Soviet border. He was immediately arrested and taken to the Lubyanka.41 In all, the interrogation lasted for just one session, which consisted solely of voluntary testimony and an evaluation of his activity. The official indictment was ready by August 23. The speed was totally unbelievable, but it had impact. (Someone had estimated the situation quite accurately: to have forced false and pitiful testimony out of Savinkov by torture would only have wrecked the authenticity of the picture.)
In the official indictment, couched in already-well-developed terminology that turned everything upside down, Savinkov was charged with just about everything imaginable: with being a “consistent enemy of the poorest peasantry”; with “assisting the Russian bourgeoisie in carrying out its imperialist ambitions” (in other words, he was in favor of continuing the war with Germany); with “maintaining relations with representatives of the Allied command” (this would have been when he was in charge of the Ministry of War!); with “becoming a member of soldiers’ committees for purposes of provocation” (i.e., he was elected by the soldiers’ committees); and, last but not least, something to make even the chickens cackle with laughter—with having had “monarchist sympathies.”
But all that was old hat. There were some new items too—the standard charges for all future trials: money from the imperialists; espionage for Poland (they left out Japan, believe it or not); yes, and he had also wanted to poison the Red Army with potassium cyanide (but for some reason he did not poison even one Red Army soldier).
On August 26 the trial began. The presiding judge was Ulrikh—this being our earliest encounter with him. And there was no prosecutor at all, nor any defense lawyer.
Savinkov was lackadaisical in defending himself, and he raised hardly any objection at all to the evidence. He conceived of this trial in a lyrical sense. It was his last encounter with Russia and his last opportunity to explain himself in public. And to repent. (Not of these imputed sins, but of others.)
(And that theme song fitted well here, and greatly confused the defendant: “After all, we are all Russians together. You and we adds up to us. You love Russia beyond a doubt, and we respect your love—and do we not love Russia too? In fact, are we not at present the fortress and the glory of Russia? And you wanted to fight against us? Repent!”)
But it was the sentence that was most wonderful: “Imposition of the death penalty is not required in the interests of preserving revolutionary law and order, and, on the grounds that motives of vengeance should not influence the sense of justice of the proletarian masses”—the death penalty was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment.
Now that was a sensation! And it confused man
y minds too. Did it mean a relaxation? A transformation? Ulrikh even published in Pravda an apologetic explanation of why Savinkov had not been executed.
You see how strong the Soviet government has become in only seven years! Why should it be afraid of some Savinkov or other! (On the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, it is going to get weaker, and don’t be too hard on us because we are going to execute thousands.)
And so, on the heels of the first riddle of his return, there would have been the second riddle of his being spared capital punishment had it not been overshadowed in May, 1925, by a third riddle: in a state of depression, Savinkov jumped from an unbarred window into the interior courtyard of the Lubyanka, and the gaypayooshniki, his guardian angels, simply couldn’t manage to stop him and hold on to his big, heavy body. However, just in case—so that there wouldn’t be any scandal in the service—Savinkov left them a suicide letter in which he explained logically and coherently why he was killing himself—and this letter was so authentically phrased, so clearly written in Savinkov’s style and vocabulary, that even Lev Borisovich, the son of the deceased, was fully convinced of its genuineness and explained to everyone in Paris that no one except his father could have written it and that he had ended his life because he realized his political bankruptcy.42
And all the major and most famous trials are still ahead of us.
Chapter 10
The Law Matures
But where were those mobs insanely storming the barbed-wire barricades on our western borders whom we were going to shoot, under Article 71 of the Criminal Code, for unauthorized return to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic? Contrary to scientific prediction, there were no such crowds, and that article of the Code dictated by Lenin to Kursky remained useless. The only Russian crazy enough to do it was Savinkov, and they had ducked applying that article even to him. On the other hand, the opposite penalty—exile abroad instead of execution—was tried out immediately on a large scale.
In those days when he was composing the Criminal Code, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, developing his brilliant idea, wrote in the heat of the moment, on May 19:
Comrade Dzerzhinsky! On the question of exiling abroad writers and professors who aid the counterrevolution: this is a measure which must be prepared most carefully. Unless we prepare well, we can commit stupidities. . . . We must arrange the business in such a way as to catch these “military spies” and keep on catching them constantly and systematically and exiling them abroad. I beg you to show this secretly, and without making any copies of it, to members of the Politburo.1
The extreme secrecy was natural in view of the importance and instructive impact of the measure. The crystal-clear line-up of forces on the class front in Soviet Russia was, to put it simply, spoiled by the presence of this shapeless, jellylike stain of the old bourgeois intelligentsia, which in the ideological area genuinely played the role of military spies—and the very best solution one could imagine was to scrape off that stagnant scum of ideas and toss it out abroad.
Comrade Lenin had already been stricken by his illness, but the members of the Politburo had apparently given their approval, and Comrade Dzerzhinsky had done the catching. At the end of 1922, about three hundred prominent Russian humanists were loaded onto—a barge, perhaps? No, they were put on a steamer and sent off to the European garbage dump. (Among those who settled down in exile and acquired reputations were the philosophers N. O. Lossky, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyayev, F. A. Stepun, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, L. P. Karsavin, S. L. Frank, I. A. Ilin; the historians S. P. Melgunov, V. A. Myakotin, A. A. Kizevetter, I. I. Lapshin, and others; the writers and publicists Y. I. Aikhenvald, A. S. Izgoyev, M. A. Osorgin, A. V. Peshekhonov. At the beginning of 1923, additional small groups were sent off, including for example V. F. Bulgakov, the secretary of Lev Tolstoi. And because of questionable associations some mathematicians also shared this fate, including D. F. Selivanov.)
However, it didn’t work out constantly and systematically. Perhaps the roar with which the émigrés announced that they regarded it as a “gift” made it apparent that this punishment left something to be desired, that it was a mistake to have let go good material for the executioner, and that poisonous flowers might grow on that garbage dump. And so they abandoned this form of punishment. And all subsequent purging led to either the executioner or the Archipelago.
The improved Criminal Code promulgated in 1926, which, in effect, continued right into Khrushchev’s times, tied all the formerly scattered political articles into one durable dragnet—Article 58—and the roundup was under way. The catch swiftly expanded to include the engineering and technical intelligentsia; it was especially dangerous because it occupied a firm position in the economy and it was hard to keep an eye on it with the help of the Progressive Doctrine alone. It now became clear that the trial in defense of Oldenborger had been a mistake—after all, a very nice little center had been organized there. And Krylenko’s declaration that “there was no question of sabotage on the part of the engineers in 1920 and 1921”2 had granted an all too hasty absolution. Now it was not sabotage but worse—wrecking, a word discovered, it appears, by a rank-and-file interrogator in the Shakhty case.
It had no sooner been established that wrecking was what had to be tracked down—notwithstanding the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind—than they began to discover it without any trouble in all branches of industry and in all individual enterprises. However, there was no unity of plan, no perfection of execution, in all these hit-or-miss discoveries, although Stalin, by virtue of his character, and of course the entire investigative branch of our judicial apparatus, evidently aspired to just that. But our Law had finally matured and could show the world something really perfect—a big, coordinated, well-organized trial, this time a trial of engineers. And that is how the Shakhty case came about.
K.The Shakhty Case—May 18-July 15, 1928
This case was tried before a Special Assize of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., under Presiding Judge A. Y. Vyshinsky (who was still the Rector of First Moscow University); the chief accuser was N. V. Krylenko (what a significant encounter!—rather like a handing over of the juridical relay-baton).3 There were fifty-three defendants and fifty-six witnesses. How spectacular!
Alas, in its spectacular aspect lay the weakness of this case. If one were to tie to each of the defendants only three threads of evidence, there would still have to be 159 of them. And meanwhile Krylenko had only ten fingers and Vyshinsky another ten. Of course, the “defendants strove to expose their heinous crimes to society”—but not all of them did, only sixteen; thirteen wiggled back and forth, and twenty-four didn’t admit their guilt at all.4 This introduced an impermissible discord, and the masses could certainly not understand it. Along with its positive aspects—which had, incidentally, already been displayed in earlier trials—such as the helplessness of the defendants and of the defense attorneys, and their inability either to budge or to deflect the implacable boulder of the sentence—the shortcomings of the new trial were fully apparent. Someone less experienced than Krylenko might have been forgiven them—but not he.
On the threshold of the classless society, we were at last capable of realizing the conflictless trial—a reflection of the absence of inner conflict in our social structure—in which not only the judge and the prosecutor but also the defense lawyers and the defendants themselves would strive collectively to achieve their common purpose.
Anyway, the whole scale of the Shakhty case, comprising as it did the coal industry alone and the Donets Basin alone, was disproportionately paltry for this era.
It appears that then and there, on the day the Shakhty case ended, Krylenko began to dig a new, capacious pit. (Even two of his own colleagues in the Shakhty case—the public accusers Osadchy and Shein—fell into it.) And it goes without saying that the entire apparatus of the OGPU, which had already landed in Yagoda’s firm hands, aided him willingly and adroitly. It was necessary to create and uncover an engi
neers’ organization which encompassed the entire country. And for this purpose it was essential to have several strong, prominent “wreckers” at its head. And what engineer was unaware of just such an unequivocally strong and impatiently proud leader—Pyotr Akimovich Palchinsky? An important mining engineer from as far back as the beginning of the century, he had been the Deputy Chairman of the War Industry Committee during World War I—in other words, he had directed the war efforts of all Russian industry, which had managed, during the course of the war, to make up for the failures in Tsarist preparations. After February, 1917, he became the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry. He had been persecuted under the Tsar for revolutionary activity. He had been imprisoned three times after October—in 1917, 1918, and 1922. From 1920 on, he had been a professor at the Mining Institute and a consultant to the Gosplan—the State Planning Commission. (For more details about him see Part III, Chapter 10.)
They picked this Palchinsky to be the chief defendant in a grandiose new trial. However, the thoughtless Krylenko, stepping into what was for him a new field—engineering—not only knew nothing about the resistance of materials but could not even conceive of the potential resistance of souls . . . despite ten years of already sensational activity as a prosecutor. Krylenko’s choice turned out to be a mistake. Palchinsky resisted every pressure the OGPU knew—and did not surrender; in fact, he died without signing any sort of nonsense at all. N. K. von Meck and A. F. Velichko were subjected to torture with him, and they, too, appear not to have given in. We do not yet know whether they died while under torture or whether they were shot. But they proved it was possible to resist and that it was possible not to give in—and thus they left behind a spotlight of reproach to shine on all the famous subsequent defendants.
To cover up his defeat, on May 24, 1929, Yagoda published a brief GPU communique on the execution of the three for large-scale wrecking, which also announced the condemnation of many other unidentified persons.5
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 42
