It is of interest that all the witnesses in this trial, beginning with the unfortunate wife, tried to give testimony helpful to the accused and to befuddle the prosecution. (Which would have been impossible in a political trial!) Krylenko explained their conduct as the result of a narrow-minded, philistine attitude, because they felt like outsiders as far as the Revtribunal was concerned. (And might we ourselves be so audacious as to advance the philistine hypothesis that in the course of a year and a half the witnesses had already learned to be afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat? After all, it took a lot of nerve to turn in the interrogators of the Revtribunal. What would happen to you after that?)
The accuser’s line of argument is also of interest. After all, just a month earlier the defendants had been his associates, his comrades in arms, his assistants. They were people who had been inalienably dedicated to the interests of the Revolution, and one of them, Leist, was even “a stern accuser, capable of hurling thunder and lightning at anyone who attacked the foundations.” What was he to say about them now? Where was he to look for the causes of their fall? (A bribe was not enough in itself.) And, of course, it is clear where he looked: in their pasts, in their bioggraphies!
Declared Krylenko: “If we look closely” at this Leist, “we will find highly interesting information.” This is intriguing. Was he an inveterate adventurer? No, but he was the son of a professor at Moscow University! And not an ordinary professor, but one who had survived twenty years of reaction by his indifference to political activity! (And who, notwithstanding that reaction, had been accepted by Krylenko as a consultant.) Was it surprising, then, that the son turned out to be a double-dealer?
As for Podgaisky, he was the son of an official in the law courts . . . beyond doubt one of the reactionary, pogrom-organizing Black Hundreds; otherwise how could he have served the Tsar for twenty years? And the son, too, had prepared for a career in the law courts, but then the Revolution had come—and he had wormed his way into the Revtribunal. Just yesterday all this had been depicted in a very favorable light, but it had suddenly become repulsive!
More repulsive than them both was, of course, Gugel. He had been a publisher. And what intellectual food had he been offering the workers and peasants? He was “nourishing the broad masses with low-quality literature,” not Marx but, instead, books by bourgeois professors with world-famous names. (And we shall soon encounter these professors as defendants too.)
Krylenko is enraged and marvels at the kind of people who have sneaked into the tribunal. (Neither do we understand: What kind of people are the workers’ and peasants’ tribunals composed of? Why had the proletariat entrusted the task of striking down their enemies to people of this particular kind?)
And as for Grin, the lawyer, a man with an “in” on the investigating commission, who was quite able to get anybody off scot-free, he was a typical representative of that subspecies of the human race which Marx called “leeches on the capitalist structure”—a category including, in addition, all lawyers, gendarmes, priests, and also . . . notaries.33
It appears that Krylenko spared no effort in demanding mercilessly severe sentences, without reference to “the individual shadings of guilt.” But some kind of lethargy, some sort of torpor, overcame the eternally vigorous tribunal, and it just barely managed to mumble six months in jail for the interrogators, and a fine for the lawyer. And only by availing himself of the authority of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “to punish without limitation,” did Krylenko, there in the Metropole, continue to hang ten-year sentences on the interrogators and five on the lawyer, plus full confiscation of his property. Krylenko thundered on about vigilance, and he almost managed, but not quite, to get the title of Tribune he so coveted.
We recognize that among the revolutionary masses at the time, as among our readers today, this unfortunate trial could not but undermine faith in the sanctity of the tribunal. And we therefore proceed with even greater timidity to the next case, which concerned an even loftier institution.
C.The Case of Kosyrev—February 15, 1919
F. M. Kosyrev and his pals Libert, Rottenberg, and Solovyev had first served on the Commission for Supply of the Eastern Front (back before Kolchak, when the enemy forces were the armies of the Constituent Assembly). It was discovered that there they had found ways to siphon into their own pockets from seventy thousand to a million rubles at a time; they rode around on fine horses and engaged in orgies with the nurses. Their Commission had acquired a house and an automobile, and their major-domo lived it up in the Yar Restaurant. (We aren’t accustomed to picturing 1918 in this light, but all this was in the testimony of the Revtribunal.)
But none of this, to be sure, was the case against them. No charge had been brought against any of them in connection with their activities on the Eastern Front; they had even been forgiven all that. But wonder of wonders! Hardly had their Commission for Supply been disbanded than all four of them, with the addition of Nazarenko, a former Siberian tramp and convict pal of Kosyrev in criminal hard labor, were invited to constitute . . . the Control and Auditing Collegium of the VChK—the Cheka!
Here’s what this Collegium was: it had plenipotentiary powers to verify the legality of the actions of all the remaining organs of the Cheka, the right to demand and review any case at any stage of its processing, and to reverse the decisions of all the remaining organs of the VChK, excepting only the Presidium of the Cheka!”34 This was no small thing. This Collegium was second-in-command in the Cheka after the Presidium itself—it ranked immediately below Dzerzhinsky-Uritsky-Peters-Latsis-Menzhin-sky-Yagoda!
The way of life of this comradely group remained just what it had been before. They didn’t get swelled heads; they didn’t get carried away. With certain individuals named Maximych, Lenka, Rafailsky, and Mariupolsky, “who had no connection at all with the Communist Party,” they set up—in private apartments and in the Hotel Savoy—“lavish establishments where card games with table stakes as high as a thousand rubles a throw were the order of the day, along with heavy drinking and women.” Kosyrev acquired a rich establishment of his own (costing 70,000 rubles) and, in fact, did not even draw the line at hauling off silver spoons and goblets, and even ordinary glassware, from the Cheka. (And how did all these objects get to the Cheka?) “And this was where his attention was concentrated, rather than in the direction of ideas and ideology, and this was what he took from the revolutionary movement.” (In the very act of repudiating the bribes he had accepted, this leading Chekist, without blinking, volunteered the lie that he possessed 200,000 rubles from an inheritance in a Chicago bank! Evidently, as far as he was concerned, there was no conflict between such a circumstance and world revolution!)
Now how did he propose to make proper use of his superhuman right to arrest anyone at all and release anyone at all? Clearly, one had to find a fish with golden roe—and in 1918 there were not a few such fish in the nets. (After all, the Revolution had been carried out too quickly; they hadn’t found everything—how many precious stones, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings the bourgeois ladies had managed to hide away!) Then one had to make contact with the relatives of those who had been arrested through some reliable middleman.
Such characters also pass before us at the trial. There was Uspenskaya, a woman of twenty-two. She had graduated from the St. Petersburg Gymnasium, but hadn’t gone on to the university—the Soviets had come to power—and so, in the spring of 1918, Uspenskaya appeared at the Cheka to offer her services as an informer. She qualified on the basis of her appearance, and they accepted her.
Krylenko has this to say about informing, which in those days had a different label: “For ourselves, we see nothing shameful in it, we consider this to be our duty . . . the work itself is not disgraceful; once a person admits that this work is necessary in the interests of the Revolution, then he must do it.”35 But, alas, it turned out that Uspenskaya had no political credo! That’s what was awful. She declared: “I agreed in order to b
e paid a fixed percentage” on the cases which were turned up, and, beyond that, “to split 50-50” with someone else . . . whom the court protected and instructed her not to identify. Krylenko put it in his own words: “Uspenskaya was not a staff member of the Cheka but worked at piece rates.”36 And, incidentally, the accuser, understanding her in a very human way, explains that she had grown used to having plenty of money, and that her insignificant salary of 500 rubles from the Supreme Council of the Economy was nothing at all, considering that one exercise in extortion—for example, helping a merchant get the seal removed from his store—would net her 5,000 rubles, and another—from Meshcherskaya-Grevs, wife of a prisoner—would bring in 17,000. For that matter, Uspenskaya served only briefly as a mere stool pigeon. Thanks to the help of certain big Chekists, in a few months she became a member of the Communist Party and an interrogator.
However, we don’t seem to be getting to the essence of the case. Uspenskaya had arranged a meeting between this Meshcherskaya-Grevs and a certain Godelyuk, a bosom pal of Kosyrev, in order to reach an agreement on her husband’s ransom. (They had initially demanded 600,000 rubles!) But unfortunately, by some still unexplained means, the arrangements for that secret meeting became known to the same attorney, Yakulov, who had already done in the three bribe-taking interrogators and who, evidently, felt a class hatred for the whole proletarian system of judicial and extrajudicial processing. Yakulov denounced them to the Moscow Revtribunal,37 and the presiding judge of the tribunal, recalling perhaps the wrath of the Council of People’s Commissars in connection with the three interrogators, also blundered in terms of class premises. Instead of simply warning Comrade Dzerzhinsky and working it all out in the family, he hid a stenographer behind the curtain. And the stenographer took down all Godelyuk’s references to Kosyrev, and to Solovyev and to other commissars, and all his stories about who in the Cheka takes how many thousands. Then, as per the stenographic record, Godelyuk received an advance payment of 12,000 rubles, and Meshcherskaya-Grevs was given a pass to enter the Cheka that had already been filled out by the Control and Auditing Collegium, by Libert and Rottenberg. (The bargaining was to continue there, inside the Cheka.) Then and there Godelyuk was caught! In his confusion, he gave testimony against them! (And Meshcherskaya-Grevs had already gotten to the Control and Auditing Collegium, and they had already ordered her husband’s case transferred there for verification.)
But just a moment! After all, an expose like this sullies the heavenly blue uniforms of the Cheka! Was the presiding judge of the Moscow Revtribunal in his right mind? Was he really tending to his own business?
But it turns out that that was the nature of the moment—a moment totally hidden from us in the folds of our majestic history! It seems that the Cheka’s first year of work had produced a somewhat repellent impression even on the Party of the proletariat, which still hadn’t gotten used to it. Only its first year had passed; the Cheka had taken only the first step on its glorious path; and already, as Krylenko writes, although not very clearly, a “dispute” had arisen “between the court and its functions and the extrajudicial functions of the Cheka . . . a dispute which, at the time, split the Party and the workers’ districts into two camps.”38 And that is how the Kosyrev case could come up—whereas everything had gone smoothly before—and reach all the way up to the topmost level of the whole state apparatus.
The Cheka had to be saved! Help! Save the Cheka! Solovyev asked the tribunal to allow him inside the Taganka Prison to visit Godelyuk (who, alas, was not in the Lubyanka) so as to chat with him. The tribunal declined the request. Then Solovyev managed to penetrate into Godelyuk’s cell without the help of any tribunal, and—what a coincidence!—at that very point Godelyuk became seriously ill. (“One can hardly speak of evil intentions on Solovyev’s part,” Krylenko bows and scrapes.) Feeling the approach of death, Godelyuk shakily repented having slandered the Cheka and asked for a sheet of paper on which to write his recantation: it was all untrue; he had slandered Kosyrev and the other commissars of the Cheka, and everything the stenographer had taken down behind the curtain was also untrue!39
“And who filled out the passes for Meshcherskaya-Grevs?” Krylenko insisted. They hadn’t materialized out of thin air, certainly? No, the chief accuser “does not wish to say that Solovyev was an accessory in this case, because . . . because there is insufficient evidence,” but he advances the hypothesis that “citizens still at liberty who were in danger of being caught with their hands in the till” might have sent Solovyev to the Taganka jail.
This was the perfect time to question Libert and Rottenberg, and they were subpoenaed, but they didn’t appear! Just like that! They didn’t show up. They declined to. All right, in that case question Meshcherskaya-Grevs! And—can you imagine it?—this broken-down aristocrat, too, was so brazen as not to appear before the Revtribunal! And there was no way to force her to! Godelyuk had recanted—and was dying. Kosyrev refused to admit anything! Solovyev was not guilty of anything! So there was no one to question.
What witnesses, on the other hand, did indeed appear before the tribunal, and of their own free will! The Deputy Chief of the Cheka, Comrade Peters. And even Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky himself. He arrived in a state of alarm. His long, burning zealot’s face confronted the tribunal—whose members sat with sinking hearts—and he testified passionately in defense of the totally innocent Kosyrev and his high moral, revolutionary, and professional qualities. This testimony, alas, has not been preserved for us, but Krylenko refers to it this way: “Solovyev and Dzerzhinsky portrayed Kosyrev’s wonderful qualites.”40 (Alas, you careless shavetail, you! In twenty years’ time, in the Lubyanka, they are going to remind you of that trial!) It is easy to guess what Dzerzhinsky could have said: that Kosyrev was an iron Chekist, merciless to their enemies; that he was a good comrade. A hot heart, a cool head, clean hands.
And from the garbage heap of slander, the bronze knight Kosyrev rises before our eyes. Furthermore, his whole biography testifies to his remarkable will. Before the Revolution he was convicted several times—most often for murder. In the city of Kostroma, he was convicted of worming his way by deception into the house of an old woman named Smirnova and strangling her with his own hands; then of an attempt to kill his own father; and then of killing a comrade in order to use his passport. The rest of Kosyrev’s convictions were for swindling, and in all he spent many years at hard labor. (One could understand his desire for a luxurious life.) And he had only been freed by the Tsarist amnesties.
At that point, the stern and righteous voices of the major Chekists interrupted the chief accuser; they pointed out to him that those courts which had convicted Kosyrev were courts of the bourgeoisie and landowners and did not merit being noticed in our new society. But what happened? The shavetail, going overboard, poured forth from the chief accuser’s rostrum a tirade so ideologically faulty that in our exposition of this harmonious series of cases tried by the tribunals, citing it is to strike a discordant note.
“If there was anything good in the old Tsarist court system, it was only trial by jury. . . . One could always have confidence in the jurors’ decisions and a minimum of judicial error was to be found in them.”41
It was all the more vexing to hear this sort of thing from Comrade Krylenko because just three months before, at the trial of the provocateur R. Malinovsky, a former favorite of the Communist Party leadership, who, notwithstanding his four criminal convictions in the past, had been co-opted into the Central Committee by the leadership and appointed to the Duma, the accusing power had taken an impeccable class stand.
“Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all. . . . We know of many examples of persons in our ranks branded by such facts in the past, but we have never drawn the conclusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our mi
lieu. A person who knows our principles cannot fear that the existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolutionaries.”42
That is how Comrade Krylenko could speak when in a Party vein. But in this other case, as a result of his mistaken judgment, the image of the knight in shining armor, Kosyrev, was being bespattered. And it created a situation in the tribunal wherein Comrade Dzerzhinsky was forced to say: “For just one second [Just one second!] the thought crossed my mind that citizen Kosyrev might be falling victim to the political passions which in recent times have blazed up around the Extraordinary Commission.”43
And Krylenko suddenly took thought: “I do not wish, and I never have wished, that the present trial should turn into a trial of the Cheka rather than a trial of Kosyrev and Uspenskaya. Not only am I unable to desire such an outcome: I am obliged to fight against it with all available means!” And he went on: “The most responsible, honest, and self-controlled comrades were put at the head of the Extraordinary Commission, and they took on themselves the difficult task of striking down the enemy, even though this involved the risk of error. . . . For this the Revolution is obliged to say thank you. . . . I underline this aspect so that . . . no one can ever say to me later: ‘He turned out to be an instrument of political treason!’”44 (But that’s what they will say!)
What a razor edge the supreme accuser was walking! But he evidently had certain contacts, going back to his days in the underground, through which he learned how things were going to move on the morrow. This is conspicuous in several trials, and came out here too. At the beginning of 1919, there were certain trends toward saying: “It is enough! It is time to bridle the Cheka!” And this moment was “beautifully caught in Bukharin’s essay, in which he said that revolutionary legality must give way to legalized revolutionality”45
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