The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  And how many wholly random people, completely random, whose destruction inevitably accounts for half the casualties of every real, shooting revolution, were caught between those millstones?

  Here is an eyewitness description of a session of the Ryazan Revtribunal which met in 1919 to hear the case of the Tolstoyan I. Ye—v.

  With the proclamation of universal and compulsory conscription into the Red Army (just one year after the slogans: “Down with the war!”; “Stick your bayonets in the ground!”; “Go home!”), “54,697 deserters were caught and sent to the front” by September, 1919, in Ryazan Province alone.11 (And how many others were shot on the spot as examples?) Ye—v was not a deserter at all but a man who simply and openly refused to enter military service because of his religious convictions. He was conscripted by main force, but in the barracks he refused to take up arms or undergo training. The enraged Political Commissar of the unit turned him over to the Cheka, saying: “He does not recognize the Soviet government.” There was an interrogation. Three Chekists sat behind the desk, each with a Naguan revolver in front of him. “We have seen heroes like you before. You’ll be on your knees to us in a minute! Either agree to fight immediately, or we’ll shoot you!” But Ye—v was firm. He couldn’t fight. He was a believer in free Christianity. And his case was sent to the Revtribunal.

  It was an open session, with a hundred spectators in the hall. There was a polite elderly defense lawyer. The learned “accuser”—the term “prosecutor” was forbidden until 1922—was Nikolsky, another old jurist. One of the members of the Revtribunal—a juror—tried to elicit the views of the accused. (How can you, a representative of the working people, share the opinions of the aristocrat Count Tolstoi?) But the presiding judge interrupted the questioning and refused to permit it to continue. There was a quarrel.

  Juror: “You do not want to kill people, and you try to persuade others to refrain from killing. But the Whites began the war, and you are preventing us from defending ourselves. We will send you to Kolchak, and you can preach your nonresistance there!”

  Ye—v: “I will go wherever you send me.”

  Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”

  Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!”

  Accuser: “I insist that you include my demand in the record.”

  Defense Attorney: “I support the accuser. The case should be heard in an ordinary court.”

  Presiding Judge: “There’s an old fool for you! Where did they manage to find him?”

  Defense Attorney: “I have been a practicing lawyer for forty years and this is the first time I have heard such an insult. Enter it in the record.”

  Presiding Judge (laughing): “We’ll enter it, we’ll enter it!” Laughter in the hall. The court exits in order to confer. The sounds of a noisy argument come from the conference room. They return with the sentence: to be shot.

  Loud indignation in the hall.

  Accuser: “I protest against the sentence and will complain to the Commissariat of Justice!”

  Defense Lawyer: “I join my voice to that of the accuser.”

  Presiding Judge: “Clear the hall!”

  The convoy came and led Ye—v to jail, saying to him: “If everyone was like you, brother, how good it would be! There would be no war, and no Whites and no Reds!” They went back to their barracks and called a Red Army meeting. It condemned the sentence and sent a protest to Moscow.

  In daily expectation of death, Ye—v waited for thirty-seven days, while, from the prison window, he watched executions taking place. They commuted his sentence to fifteen years of strict detention.

  This is an instructive example. Although “revolutionary legality” won a partial victory, how enormous an effort it required on the part of the presiding judge! How much disorganization, lack of discipline, lack of political consciousness there still was! The prosecution stood firmly with the defense. The convoy guards stuck their noses into something that wasn’t their business in order to send off a protest. Whew, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the new kind of court were not having things easy by any means! Of course, not all the sessions were anything like so turbulent, but this wasn’t the only one of its kind. How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!

  To pursue this enterprise of many years’ duration is the rewarding task of the historian. As for us—how are we to make our way through that rosy mist? Whom are we to ask about it? Those who were shot aren’t talking, and neither are those who have been scattered to the four winds. Even if the defendants, and the lawyers, and the guards, and the spectators have survived, no one will allow us to seek them out.

  Evidently, the only help we will get is from the prosecution.

  In this connection, I was given by well-wishers an intact copy of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by that fierce revolutionary, the first People’s Commissar of Military Affairs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the Commander in Chief, and later the organizer of the Department of Exceptional Courts of the People’s Commissariat of Justice—where the personal rank of tribune was being readied for him, until Lenin vetoed the title12—the glorious accuser in the greatest trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people, N. V. Krylenko.13 And if, despite everything, we want to attempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first postrevolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and everything that happened in the provinces too.

  Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those Revtribunal members as well.

  However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of technical reasons “it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic records”14 It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals, which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the demands of the accuser-prosecutor.

  Krylenko claims that the archives of the Moscow Revtribunal and the Supreme Revtribunal turned out (by 1922) to be “far from orderly. . . . In a whole series of cases the stenographic records. . . were so incomprehensible that it was necessary either to cross out entire pages or else to try to restore the text from memory”! And a “series of the biggest trials”—including the trial which followed the revolt of the Left SR’s, and the case of Admiral Shchastny—“were conducted entirely without stenographic records.”15

  This is strange. The condemnation of the Left SR’s was not a trivial matter. It was, after the February and October revolutions, the third turning point in our history, signaling the transition to a one-party system in the state. Not a few of them were shot. And no stenographic record was made.

  And the “Military Plot” of 1919 was “liquidated by the Cheka in an extrajudicial reprisal,”16 which “was further proof of its existence.”17 (In this case more than one thousand people were arrested altogether,18 and, really, how could trials have been set up for them all?)

  So just try to produce a neat, orderly report on the trials of those years!

  Nevertheless we can learn the important principles involved in them. For example, the supreme accuser—in other words, the Prosecutor General—informs us
that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had the right to intervene in any judicial proceeding. “VTsIK pardons and punishes, at its own discretion without any limitation whatever.”19 For example, a six-month sentence was changed to ten years. (And, as the reader understands, it was not necessary for the entire All-Russian Central Executive Committee to assemble at a plenary meeting to this end, since its Chairman, Sverdlov, for example, could correct a sentence without leaving his office.) All of this, Krylenko explains, “shows the superiority of our system over the false theory of the separation of powers,”20 that is, the theory of the independence of the judiciary. (True, Sverdlov also said: “It is very good that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly.” Especially on the phone.)

  Krylenko formulated even more frankly and precisely the general tasks of the Soviet courts in his speeches before those tribunals, when the court was “at one and the same time both the creator of the law [Krylenko’s italics] . . . and a political weapon”21 (My italics.)

  Creator of the law because, for four years, there were no codes. They had thrown out the Tsarist codes, and they had not composed their own. “Don’t tell me our criminal courts ought to act exclusively on the basis of existing written norms. We live in the process of Revolution.”22 “A tribunal is not the kind of court in which fine points of jurisprudence and clever stratagems are to be restored. . . . We are creating a new law and new ethical norms”23 And also: “No matter how much is said here about the eternal law of truth, justice, etc., we know . . . how dearly these have cost us.”24

  (But if your prison terms are compared with ours, maybe it didn’t cost you so dearly after all? Maybe eternal justice was somewhat more comfortable?)

  The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary is that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted.25

  And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was not that kind of court! On another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at all: “A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies” and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution . . . having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants.”26 People are not people, but “carriers of specific ideas.”27 “No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency”28

  In other words, you can exist only if it’s expedient for the working class. And if “this expediency should require that the avenging sword should fall on the head of the defendants, then no . . . verbal arguments can help.”29 (Such as arguments by lawyers, etc.) “In our revolutionary court we are guided not by articles of the law and not by the degree of extenuating circumstances; in the tribunal we must proceed on the basis of considerations of expediency.”30

  That was the way it was in those years: people lived and breathed and then suddenly found out that their existence was inexpedient.

  And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant’s burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. “We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”31

  Comrade Krylenko’s pronouncements are clear and all-inclusive. They bring alive for us that whole period of the law in sharp relief. The clarity of autumn suddenly pierces the mists of spring and reaches us. And is it perhaps unnecessary to go further? Perhaps we aren’t required to page through trial after trial. These pronouncements will be henceforth inexorably applied.

  Close your eyes tight for a minute and picture a tiny courtroom—not yet gilded. Earnest members of the tribunal in simple field jackets, lean, not yet fat-faced. The accusing power—as Krylenko loved to style himself—wears an unbuttoned civilian jacket, with a glimpse of a sailor’s striped undershirt just visible at the open throat.

  The supreme accuser expresses himself in this sort of language: “The question of fact is interesting to me!”; “Define concretely the aspect of the tendency!”; “We are operating on the plane of analysis of objective truth.” Sometimes, as you read, a quotation from the Latin shines out. (It is true that the same quotation turns up in case after case, but, after several years, a different one does appear.) And no wonder—he did, after all, complete the course in two faculties despite all his revolutionary running around. What attracts one to him are his frank opinions about the defendants: “Professional scoundrels!” And he isn’t hypocritical in the least. If he didn’t like the defendant’s smile, he didn’t hesitate to blurt out a threat, even before any sentence was imposed. “And as for you and your smile, Citizeness Ivanova, we’ll make you pay for it, and we’ll find a way to fix it so that you never laugh again!”32

  So, shall we begin?

  A.The Case of “Russkiye Vedomosti”

  In this case, one of the earliest, free speech was on trial. On March 24, 1918, this famous “professorial” newspaper published an article by Savinkov entitled “En Route.” They would have much preferred to arrest Savinkov himself, but he really was en route, damn it, and where was he to be found? So instead they closed down the paper and brought the elderly editor, P. V. Yegorov, to court as a defendant, insisting that he explain how he had dared to publish the article. After all, the New Era was four months old, and it was time to get used to it!

  Yegorov naively defended himself by saying that the article had been written by a “leading political figure whose opinion was of general interest whether or not the editors shared it.” Furthermore, he saw nothing slanderous in Savinkov’s having said: “Let us not forget that Lenin, Natanson, and Co. arrived in Russia via Berlin; i.e., that the German authorities helped them return to the homeland”—because that in actual fact was what had happened; Kaiser Wilhelm’s embattled Germany had helped Comrade Lenin to return.

  Krylenko retorted that he would not conduct a prosecution for slander (why not?), and that the newspaper was on trial for attempting to influence people’s minds! (And how could any newspaper dare have such a purpose!?)

  The formal charge did not include Savinkov’s phrase: “One has to be criminally insane to affirm seriously that the international proletariat will come to our aid”—because it still would come to our aid.

  For attempting to influence people’s minds, the newspaper, which had been published since 1864 and had survived the most fiercely reactionary periods—those of Loris-Melikov, Pobedonostsev, Stolypin, Kasso, and all the rest—was ordered closed down forever! And Yegorov, the editor—and this is a shameful thing to have to say—was given only three months of solitary—just as though we were in Greece or some such place. (It is not so shamefully lenient, however, if one stops to think that it was only 1918! And if the old man managed to survive, he would be imprisoned again, and many more times too!)

  It may seem strange to us now, but it is a fact that in those thunderous years bribes were given and taken just as tenderly as they had been from time immemorial in Old Russia and as they will be in the Soviet Union from here to eternity. Bribery was particularly rife in the judicial organs. And, though we blush to say it, in the Cheka. The official histories in their red, gold-stamped bindings are silent about this, but the old folks and eyewitnesses remember that the fate of political prisoners in the first years of the Revolution, as distinct from Stalinist times, often depended on bribes: they were accepted uninhibitedly, and prisoners were honestly released as a result. Although Krylenko picked out only a dozen cases for the five-year period his book covers, he reports two cases of bribery. Alas, even the Moscow Tribunal and the Supreme Tribunal squeezed their way through to perfection along a crooked path, muddied themselves in improprieties.

  B.The Case of the Three Interrogators of the Moscow Revtribunal—April, 1918

  In M
arch, 1918, a speculator in gold bars named Beridze was arrested. His wife tried to find a way to ransom her husband, which was the accepted thing to do. Through a series of connections she succeeded in getting to one of the interrogators, who brought two others in with him. Meeting secretly, they demanded a bribe of 250,000 rubles, but, after some bargaining, they reduced it to 60,000, half in advance. The deal was to be made through the lawyer Grin. Everything would have gone off without a fuss, as hundreds of similar deals had, and the case would have gotten into neither Krylenko’s chronicle nor ours, nor even become a matter of concern to the Council of People’s Commissars, had it not been that Beridze’s wife began to get miserly, and brought Grin only 15,000 as an advance payment, instead of 30,000. But the main thing was that, in consequence of female fickleness, she changed her mind overnight, decided her lawyer wasn’t good enough for her, and went off the next morning to find another, the attorney Yakulov. It is not stated anywhere, but it was evidently Yakulov who decided to turn in the interrogators.