The Gulag Archipelago

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Accuser: "So you call the representatives of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, thieves?"

  The Patriarch: "I am citing only church law."

  Then there is a discussion of the term "blasphemy." While they were requisitioning the valuables from the church of St. Basil the Great of Caesarea, the ikon cover would not fit into a box, and at that point they trampled it with their feet. But the Patri- arch himself had not been present.

  The Accuser: "How do you know that? Give us the name of the priest who told you that. [And we will arrest him immedi- ately!]"

  The Patriarch does not give the name.

  That means it was a lie!

  The Accuser presses on triumphantly: "No, who spread that repulsive slander?"

  The Presiding Judge: "Give us the names of those who trampled the ikon cover! [One can assume that after doing it they left their visiting cards!] Otherwise the tribunal cannot believe you!"

  The Patriarch cannot name them.

  The Presiding Judge: "That means you have made an unsub- stantiated assertion."

  It still remained to be proved that the Patriarch wanted to overthrow the Soviet government. And here is how it was proved:

  "Propaganda is an attempt to prepare a mood preliminary to preparing a revolt in the future."

  The tribunal ordered criminal charges to be brought against the Patriarch.

  On May 7 sentence was pronounced: of the seventeen defen- dants, eleven were to be shot. (They actually shot five.)

  As Krylenko said: "We didn't come here just to crack jokes."

  One week later the Patriarch was removed from office and arrested. (But this was not the very end. For the time being he was taken to the Donskoi Monastery and kept there in strict in- carceration, so that the believers would grow accustomed to his absence. Remember how just a short while before Krylenko had been astonished: what danger could possibly threaten the Patri- arch? Truly, when the danger really does come, there's no help for it, either in alarm bells or in telephone calls.)

  Two weeks after that, the Metropolitan Veniamin was arrested in Petrograd. He had not been a high official of the church before the Revolution. Nor had he even been appointed, like almost all Metropolitans. In the spring of 1917, for the first time since the days of ancient Novgorod the Great, they had elected a Metro- politan in Moscow and in Petrograd. A gentle, simple, easily accessible man, a frequent visitor in factories and mills, popular with the people and with the lower clergy, Veniamin had been elected by their votes. Not understanding the times, he had seen as his task the liberation of the church from politics "because it had suffered much from politics in the past." This was the Metro- politan who was tried in:

  I. The Petrograd Church Trial—June 9-July 5, 1922

  The defendants, charged with resisting the requisition of church valuables, numbered several dozen in all, including a professor of theology and church law, archimandrites, priests, and laymen. Semyonov, the presiding judge of the tribunal, was twenty-five years old and, according to rumor, had formerly been a baker. The chief accuser was a member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Justice, P. A. Krasikov—a man of Lenin's age and a friend of Lenin when he was in exile in the Krasnoyarsk region and, later on, in emigration as well. Vladimir Ilyich used to enjoy hearing him play the violin.

  Out on Nevsky Prospekt, and at the Nevsky turn-off, a dense crowd waited every day of the trial, and when the Metropolitan was driven past, many of them knelt down and sang: "Save, O Lord, thy people!" (It goes without saying that they arrested overzealous believers right on the street and in the court building also.) Most of the spectators in the court were Red Army men, but even they rose every time the Metropolitan entered in his white ecclesiastical hood. Yet the accuser and the tribunal called him an enemy of the people. Let us note that this term already existed.

  From trial to trial, things closed in on the defense lawyers, and their humiliating predicament was already very apparent. Kry- lenko tells us nothing about this, but the gap is closed by an eye- witness. The tribunal roared out a threat to arrest Bobrishchev- Pushkin himself—the principal defense lawyer—and this was already so in accord with the spirit of the times, and the threat was so real that Bobrishchev-Pushkin made haste to hand over his gold watch and his billfold to lawyer Gurovich. And right then and there the tribunal actually ordered the imprisonment of a witness, Professor Yegorov, because of his testimony on behalf of the Metropolitan. As it turned out, Yegorov was quite pre- pared for this. He had a thick briefcase with him in which he had packed food, underwear, and even a small blanket.

  The reader can observe that the court was gradually assuming forms familiar to us.

  Metropolitan Veniamin was accused of entering, with evil intent, into an agreement with . . . the Soviet government, no less, and thereby obtaining a relaxation of the decree on the requisition of valuables. It was charged that his appeal to Pomgol had been maliciously disseminated among the people. (Samizdat! —self-publication!) And he had also acted in concert with the world bourgeoisie.

  Priest Krasnitsky, one of the principal "Living Church" schis- matics, and GPU collaborator, testified that the priests had con- spired to provoke a revolt against the Soviet government on the grounds of famine.

  The only witnesses heard were those of the prosecution. De- fense witnesses were not permitted to testify. (Oh, how familiar it all is! More and more!)

  Accuser Smirnov demanded "sixteen heads." Accuser Krasikov cried out: "The whole Orthodox Church is a subversive organiza- tion. Properly speaking, the entire church ought to be put in prison."

  (This was a very realistic program. Soon it was almost realized. And it was a good basis for a dialogue.)

  Let us make use of a rather rare opportunity to cite several sentences that have been preserved from the speech of S. Y. Gurovich, who was the Metropolitan's defense attorney.

  "There are no proofs of guilt. There are no facts. There is not even an indictment. . . . What will history say? [Oh, he certainly had discovered how to frighten them! History will forget and say nothing!] The requisition of church valuables in Petrograd took place in a complete calm, but here the Petrograd clergy is on the defendants' bench, and somebody's hands keep pushing them toward death. The basic principle which you stress is the good of the Soviet government. But do not forget that the church will be nourished by the blood of martyrs. [Not in the Soviet Union, though!] There is nothing more to be said, but it is hard to stop talking. While the debate lasts, the defendants are alive. When the debate comes to an end, life will end too."

  The tribunal condemned ten of them to death. They waited more than a month for their execution, until the trial of the SR's had ended. (It was as though they had processed them in order to shoot them at the same time as the SR's.) And after that, VTsIK, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, pardoned six of them. And four of them—the Metropolitan Veniamin; the Archimandrite Sergius, a former member of the State Duma; Professor of Law Y. P. Novitsky; and the barrister Kovsharov— were shot on the night of August 12-13.

  We insistently urge our readers not to forget the principle of provincial multiplicity. Where two church trials were held in Moscow and Petrograd, there were twenty-two in the provinces.

  They were in a big hurry to produce a Criminal Code in time for the trial of the SR's—the Socialist Revolutionaries. The time had come to set in place the granite foundation stones of the Law. On May 12, as had been agreed, the session of VTsIK convened, but the projected Code had not yet been completed. It had only just been delivered for analysis to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his Gorki estate outside Moscow. Six articles of the Code provided for execution by shooting as the maximum punishment. This was unsatisfactory. On May 15, on the margins of the draft Code, Lenin added six more articles requiring execution by shooting (including—under Article 69—propaganda and agitation, par- ticularly in the form of an appeal for passive resistance to the government and mass rejection of the obligations of military servic
e or tax payments).

  [In other words, like the Vyborg appeal, for which the Tsar's government had imposed sentences of three months' imprisonment.]

  And one other crime that called for execution by shooting: unauthorized return from abroad (my, how the socialists all used to bob back and forth incessantly!). And there was one punishment that was the equivalent of execu- tion by shooting: exile abroad. Vladimir Ilyich foresaw a time not far distant when there would be a constant rush of people to the Soviet Union from Europe, and it would be impossible to get anyone voluntarily to leave the Soviet Union for the West. Lenin went on to express his principal conclusion to the People's Commissar of Justice:

  "Comrade Kursky! In my opinion we ought to extend the use of execution by shooting (allowing the substitution of exile abroad) to all activities of the Mensheviks, SR's, etc. We ought to find a formulation that would connect these activities with the international bourgeoisie." (Lenin's italics.)

  To extend the use of execution by shooting! Nothing left to the imagination there! (And did they exile very many?) Terror is a method of persuasion. This, too, could hardly be misunderstood.

  But Kursky, nonetheless, still didn't get the whole idea. In all probability, what he couldn't quite work out was a way of formu- lating that formulation, a way of working in that very matter of connection. The next day, he called on the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Lenin, for clarification. We have no way of knowing what took place during their conversation. But following it up, on May 17, Lenin sent a second letter from Gorki:

  COMRADE KURSKY!

  As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code. . . . The basic concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.

  The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.

  With Communist greetings,

  LENIN

  We will not undertake to comment on this important docu- ment. What it calls for is silence and reflection.

  The document is especially important because it was one of Lenin's last directives on this earth—he had not yet fallen ill— and an important part of his political testament. Ten days after this letter, he suffered his first stroke, from which he recovered only incompletely and temporarily in the autumn months of 1922. Perhaps both letters to Kursky were written in that light and airy white marble boudoir-study at the corner of the second floor, where the future deathbed of the leader already stood waiting.

  Attached to this letter is the rough draft mentioned in it, con- taining two versions of the supplementary paragraph, out of which would grow in a few years' time both Article 58-4 and all of our dear little old mother, Article 58. You read it and you are carried away with admiration: that's what it really means to formulate it as broadly as possible! That's what is meant by extending its use. You read and you recollect how broad was the embrace of that dear little old mother.

  ". . . propaganda or agitation, or participation in an organiza- tion, or assistance (objectively assisting or being capable of assist- ing) . . . organizations or persons whose activity has the charac- ter . . ."

  Hand me St. Augustine, and in a trice I can find room in that article for him too.

  Everything was inserted as required; it was retyped; execution by shooting was extended—and the session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the new Criminal Code shortly after May 20 and decreed it to be in effect from June 1, 1922, on.

  And so began, on the most legal basis, the two-month-long

  J. Trial of the SR's—June 8-August 7, 1922

  The court was the Supreme Tribunal, the Verkhtrib. The usual presiding judge, Comrade Karklin (a good name for a judge- derived from the word meaning to "croak" or "caw"), was re- placed for this important trial, which was being watched closely by the entire socialist world, by the resourceful Georgi Pyatakov. (Provident fate enjoys its little jokes—but it also leaves us time to think things over! It left Pyatakov fifteen years.) There were no defense lawyers. The defendants, all leading SR's, undertook their own defense. Pyatakov bore himself harshly, and interfered with the defendants' having their say.

  If my readers and I were not already sufficiently informed to know that what was important in every trial was not the charges brought nor guilt, so called, but expediency, we would perhaps not be prepared to accept this trial wholeheartedly. But expedi- ency works without fail: the SR's, as opposed to the Mensheviks, were considered still dangerous, not yet dispersed and broken up, not yet finished off. And on behalf of the fortress of the newly created dictatorship (the proletariat), it was expedient to finish them off.

  Someone unfamiliar with this principle might mistakenly view the entire trial as an act of Party vengeance.

  Involuntarily one ponders the charges set forth in this trial, placing them in the perspective of the long-drawn-out and still unfolding history of nations. With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

  The Criminal Code had been adopted only one week earlier, but five whole years of postrevolutionary experience had been compressed into it. Twenty, ten, and five years earlier, the SR's had been the party next door in the effort to overthrow Tsarism, the party which had chiefly taken upon itself, thanks to the particular character of its terrorist tactics, the burden of hard- labor imprisonment, which had scarcely touched the Bolsheviks.

  Now the first charge against them was that the SR's had in- itiated the Civil War! Yes, they began it, they had begun it. They were accused of armed resistance to the October seizure of power. When the Provisional Government, which they supported and which was in part made up of their members, was lawfully swept out of office by the machine-gun fire of the sailors, the SR's tried altogether illegally to defend it, and even returned shot for shot, and even called into battle the military cadets of that deposed government.

  [The fact that their efforts in defending it were very feeble, that they were beset by hesitations, and that they renounced it right away is another matter. For all that, their guilt was no less.]

  Defeated in battle, they did not repent politically. They did not get down on their knees to the Council of People's Com- missars, which had declared itself to be the government. They continued to insist stubbornly that the only legal government was the one which had been overthrown. They refused to admit right away that what had been their political line for twenty years was a failure, [And it had indeed been a failure, although this did not become clear immediately.] and they did not ask to be pardoned, nor to have their party dissolved and cease to be considered a party.

  [In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outly- ing areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine, the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all de- clared themselves to be governments after the Council of People's Commissars had declared itself to be the government.]

  The second charge against them was that they had deepened the abyss of the Civil War by taking part in dem
onstrations—by this token, rebellions—on January 5 and 6, 1918, against the lawful authority of the workers' and peasants' government. They were supporting their illegal Constituent Assembly (elected by universal, free, equal, secret, and direct voting) against the sailors and the Red Guards, who legally dispersed both the Assembly and the demonstrators. (And what good could have come of peaceable sessions of the Constituent Assembly? Only the con- flagration of a three-year-long Civil War. And that is why the Civil War began, because not all the people submitted simul- taneously and obediently to the lawful decrees of the Council of People's Commissars.)

  The third charge was that they had not recognized the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that lawful, lifesaving peace of Brest- Litovsk, which had cut off not Russia's head but only parts of its torso. By this token, declared the official indictment, there were present "all the signs of high treason and criminal activity directed to drawing the country into war."

  High treason! That is another club with two ends. It all de- pends on which end you have hold of.

  From this followed the serious fourth charge: in the summer and fall of 1918, those final months and weeks when the Kaiser's Germany was scarcely managing to hold its own against the Allies, and the Soviet government, faithful to the Brest treaty, was supporting Germany in its difficult struggle with trainloads of foodstuffs and a monthly tribute in gold, the SR's traitorously prepared (well, they didn't actually prepare anything but, as was their custom, did more talking about it than anything—but what if they really had!) to blow up the railroad tracks in front of one such train, thus keeping the gold in the Motherland. In other words, they "prepared criminal destruction of our public wealth, the railroads."

  (At that time the Communists were not yet ashamed of and did not conceal the fact that, yes, indeed, Russian gold had been shipped off to Hitler's future empire, and it didn't seem to dawn on Krylenko despite his study in two academic departments— history and law—nor did any of his assistants whisper the notion to him, that if steel rails are public wealth, then maybe gold ingots are too?)