Wherever you look you see dialectics! And Krylenko burst out: “The Revtribunal is being called on to replace the Extraordinary Commission.” (To replace???) Meanwhile, it “must be . . . no less fierce in implementing the system of terror, intimidation, and threat than was the Extraordinary Commission—the Cheka.”46
Than it was? The past tense? Has he already buried it? Come now, you are going to replace it, and where are the Chekists supposed to go? Ominous days! That was reason enough to hurry to the tribunal, in a greatcoat down to one’s heels, to testify as a witness.
But perhaps your sources of information, Comrade Krylenko, are false?
Yes, the heavens darkened over the Lubyanka in those days. And this whole book might have been very different. But I suppose that what happened was that iron Feliks Dzerzhinsky went to see Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and talked it over and explained. And the skies cleared. And although two days later, on February 17, 1919, the Cheka was deprived of its judicial rights by special decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee—it was “not for long.”47
Our day in court was further complicated by the fact that the objectionable Uspenskaya behaved abominably. From the defendants’ bench she “threw mud at” leading Chekists who had not previously been touched by the trial, including Comrade Peters! (She turned out to have used his pure name in her blackmailing operations; she used to sit right in his office, without any ceremony, during his conversations with other intelligence agents.) Now she hinted at some dark prerevolutionary past of his in Riga. That’s the kind of snake she had turned into in eight months, despite the fact that she had been with Chekists during those eight months! What was to be done with such a woman? Here Krylenko’s position jibed completely with that of the Chekists: “Until a firm regime has been established, and we are a long way from that being the case [Are we really???] . . . in the interests of the defense of the Revolution . . . there is not and cannot be any sentence for citizeness Uspenskaya other than her annihilation.” He did not say “to be shot”—what he said was “annihilation”! But after all, Citizen Krylenko, she’s just a young girl! Come on now, give her a “tenner,” or maybe a “twenty-five,” and maybe the system will be firmly established by then? How about it? But alas: “In the interests of society and of the Revolution there is no other answer, nor can there be one—and the question cannot be put any other way. In the given case, detention isn’t going to bear any fruit!”
She had sure rubbed the salt in. . . . She knew too much. . . .
And Kosyrev had to be sacrificed too. They shot him. It was for the health of the others.
Can it really be that someday we will read the old Lubyanka archives? No, they will burn them. They already have.
As the reader can see for himself, this was a very unimportant case. We didn’t have to dwell on it. But here is a different one.
D.The Case of the “Churchmen”—January 11–16, 1920
This case, in Krylenko’s opinion, is going to have a “suitable place in the annals of the Russian Revolution.” Right there in the annals, indeed! It took one day to wring Kosyrev’s neck, but in this case they dragged things out for five whole days.
The principal defendants were: A. D. Samarin (a famous man in Russia, the former chief procurator of the Synod; a man who had tried to liberate the church from the Tsar’s yoke, an enemy of Rasputin whom Rasputin had forced out of office);48 Kuznetsov, Professor of Church Law at Moscow University; the Moscow archpriests Uspensky and Tsvetkov. (The accuser himself had this to say about Tsvetkov: “An important public figure, perhaps the best that the clergy could produce, a philanthropist.”)
Their guilt lay in creating the “Moscow Council of United Parishes,” which had in turn recruited, from among believers forty to eighty years old, a voluntary guard for the Patriarch (unarmed, of course), which had set up permanent day and night watches in his residence, who were charged with the responsibility, in the event of danger from the authorities to the Patriarch, of assembling the people by ringing the church alarm bells and by telephone, so that a whole crowd might follow wherever the Patriarch might be taken and beg—and there’s your counterrevolution for you!—the Council of People’s Commissars to release him!
What an ancient Russian—Holy Russian—scheme! To assemble the people by ringing the alarm bells . . . and proceed in a crowd with a petition!
And the accuser was astonished. What danger threatened the Patriarch? Why had plans been made to defend him?
Well, of course, it was really no more than the fact that the Cheka had for two years been conducting extrajudicial reprisals against undesirables, the fact that only a short while before four Red Army men in Kiev had killed the Metropolitan, the fact that the Patriarch’s “case had already been worked up and completed, and all that remained was to bring it before the Revtribunal,” and “it was only out of concern for the broad masses of workers and peasants, still under the influence of clerical propaganda, that we have left these, our class enemies, alone for the time being.”49 How could Orthodox believers possibly be alarmed on the Patriarch’s account? During those two years Patriarch Tikhon had refused to keep silent. He had sent messages to the People’s Commissars, to the clergy, and to his flock. His messages were not accepted by the printers but were copied on typewriters (the first samizdat). They exposed the annihilation of the innocents, the ruin of the country. How, therefore, could anyone really be concerned for the Patriarch’s life?
A second charge was brought against the defendants. Throughout the country, a census and requisition of church property was taking place (this was in addition to the closing of monasteries and the expropriation of church lands and properties; in question here were liturgical vessels, cups, and candelabra). And the Council of Parishes had disseminated an appeal to believers to resist the requisition, sounding the alarm on the church bells. (And that was natural, after all! That, after all, was how they had defended the churches against the Tatars too!)
And the third charge against them was their incessant, impudent dispatching of petitions to the Council of People’s Commissars for relief from the desecration of the churches by local authorities, from crude blasphemy and violations of the law which guaranteed freedom of conscience. Even though no action was taken on these petitions (according to the testimony of Bonch-Bruyevich, administrative officer of the Council of People’s Commissars), they had discredited the local authorities.
Taking into consideration all the violations committed by these defendants, what punishment could the accuser possibly demand for these awful crimes? Will not the reader’s revolutionary conscience prompt the answer? To be shot, of course. And that is just what Krylenko did demand—for Samarin and Kuznetsov.
But while they were fussing around with these damned legal formalities, and listening to too many long speeches from too many bourgeois lawyers (speeches which “for technical reasons” we will not cite here), it turned out that capital punishment had been . . . abolished! What a fix! It just couldn’t be! What had happened? It developed that Dzerzhinsky had issued this order to the Cheka (the Cheka, without capital punishment?). But had it been extended to the tribunals by the Council of People’s Commissars? Not yet. Krylenko cheered up. And he continued to demand execution by shooting, on the following grounds:
“Even if we suppose that the consolidation of the Republic has removed the immediacy of threat from such persons, it seems nonetheless indubitable that in this period of creative effort . . . a purge . . . of the old turncoat leaders . . . is required by revolutionary necessity.” And further: “Soviet power is proud of the decree of the Cheka abolishing the death penalty.” But this “still does not force us to conclude that the question of the abolition of capital punishment has been decided once and for all . . . for the entire period of Soviet rule.”50
That was quite prophetic! Capital punishment would return—and very soon too! After all, what a long line still remained to be rubbed out! (Yes, including Krylenko too, and many of his class
brothers as well.)
And, indeed, the tribunal was submissive and sentenced Samarin and Kuznetsov to be shot, but they did manage to tack on a recommendation for clemency: to be imprisoned in a concentration camp until the final victory over world imperialism! (They would still be sitting there today!) And as for “the best that the clergy could produce”—his sentence was fifteen years, commuted to five.
Other defendants as well were dragged into this trial in order to add at least a little substance to the charges. Among them were some monks and teachers of Zvenigorod, involved in the Zvenigorod affair in the summer of 1918, but for some reason not brought to trial for a year and a half (or they might have been, but were now being tried again, since it was expedient). That summer some Soviet officials had called on Father Superior Ion51 at the Zvenigorod monastery and ordered him (“Step lively there!”) to turn over to them the holy relics of St. Savva. The officials not only smoked inside the church and evidently behind the altar screen as well, and, of course, refused to take off their caps, but one of them took Savva’s skull in his hands and began to spit into it, to demonstrate that its sanctity was an illusion. And there were further acts of desecration. This led to the alarm bell being sounded, a popular uprising, and the killing of one or two of the officials. (The others denied having committed any acts of desecration, including the spitting incident, and Krylenko accepted their denials.)52 Were these officials the ones on trial now? No, the monks.
We beg the reader, throughout, to keep in mind: from 1918 on, our judicial custom determined that every Moscow trial, except, of course, the unjust trial of the Chekists, was by no means an isolated trial of an accidental concatenation of circumstances which had converged by accident; it was a landmark of judicial policy; it was a display-window model whose specifications determined what product was good for the provinces too; it was a standard; it was like that one-and-only model solution up front in the arithmetic book for the schoolchildren to follow for themselves.
Thus, when we say, “the trial of the churchmen,” this must be understood in the multiple plural . . . “many trials.” And, in fact, the supreme accuser himself willingly explains: “Such trials have rolled along through almost all the tribunals of the Republic.” (What language!) They had taken place not long before in the tribunals in North Dvina, Tver, and Ryazan; in Saratov, Kazan, Ufa, Solvychegodsk, and Tsarevokokshaisk, trials were held of the clergy, the choirs, and the active members of the congregation—representatives of the ungrateful “Orthodox church, liberated by the October Revolution.”53
The reader will be aware of a conflict here: why did many of these trials occur earlier than the Moscow model? This is simply a shortcoming of our exposition. The judicial and the extrajudicial persecution of the liberated church had begun well back in 1918, and, judging by the Zvenigorod affair, it had already reached a peak of intensity by that summer. In October, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon had protested in a message to the Council of People’s Commissars that there was no freedom to preach in the churches and that “many courageous priests have already paid for their preaching with the blood of martyrdom. . . . You have laid your hands on church property collected by generations of believers, and you have not hesitated to violate their posthumous intent.” (The People’s Commissars did not, of course, read the message, but the members of their administrative staff must have had a good laugh: Now they’ve really got something to reproach us with—posthumous intent! We sh-t on your ancestors! We are only interested in descendants.) “They are executing bishops, priests, monks, and nuns who are guilty of nothing, on the basis of indiscriminate charges of indefinite and vaguely counterrevolutionary offenses.” True, with the approach of Denikin and Kolchak, this was stopped, so as to make it easier for Orthodox believers to defend the Revolution. But hardly had the Civil War begun to die down than they took up their cudgels against the church again, and the cases started rolling through the tribunals once more. In 1920 they struck at the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery and went straight to the holy relics of that chauvinist Sergius of Radonezh, and hauled them off to a Moscow museum.54
The People’s Commissariat of Justice issued a directive, dated August 25, 1920, for the liquidation of relics of all kinds, since they were a significant obstacle to the resplendent movement toward a new, just society.
Pursuing further Krylenko’s own selection of cases, let us also examine the case tried in the Verkhtrib—in other words, the Supreme Tribunal. (How affectionately they abbreviated words within their intimate circle, but how they roared out for us little insects: “Rise! The court is in session!”)
E.The Case of the “Tactical Center”—August 16–20, 1920
In this case there were twenty-eight defendants present, plus additional defendants who were being tried in absentia because they weren’t around.
At the very beginning of his impassioned speech, in a voice not yet grown hoarse and in phrases illumined by class analysis, the supreme accuser informs us that in addition to the landowners and the capitalists “there existed and there continues to exist one additional social stratum, the social characteristics of which have long since been under consideration by the representatives of revolutionary socialism. [In other words: to be or not to be?] This stratum is the so-called ‘intelligentsia’ In this trial, we shall be concerned with the judgment of history on the activity of the Russian intelligentsia”55 and with the verdict of the Revolution on it.
The narrow limits of our investigation prevent our comprehending exactly the particular manner in which the representatives of revolutionary socialism were taking under consideration the fate of the so-called intelligentsia and what specifically they were planning for it. However, we take comfort in the fact that these materials have been published, that they are accessible to everyone, and that they can be assembled in any required detail. Therefore, solely to understand the over-all atmosphere of the Republic, we shall recall the opinion of the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in the years when all these tribunal sessions were going on.
In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919—which we have already cited—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky’s attempts to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, commenting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia of those years (the “close-to-the-Cadets intelligentsia”), he wrote: “In actual fact they are not [the nation’s ] brains, but shit.”56 On another occasion he said to Gorky: “If we ]break too many pots, it will be its [the intelligentsia’s] fault.”57 If the intelligentsia wants justice, why doesn’t it come over to us? “I’ve gotten one bullet from the intelligentsia myself.”58 (In other words, from Kaplan.)
On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; “pious”; “the slovenliness so customary among ‘educated’ people”;59 he believed the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intelligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers?)
This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intelligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the publicists and the newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thoughtlessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and their hopeless lagging behind the times.
And this was just! The voice of the accusing power echoed and re-echoed beneath the vaults of the Verkhtrib, returning us to the defendants’ bench.
“This social stratum . . . has, during recent years, undergone the trial of universal re-evaluation.” Yes, yes, re-evaluation, as was so often said at the time. And how did that re-evaluation occur? Here’s how: “The Russian intelligentsia which entered the crucible of the Revolution with slogans of power for the people [so, it had something to it after all!] emerged from it an ally
of the black [not even White!] generals, and a hired [!] and obedient agent of European imperialism. The intelligentsia trampled on its own banners [as in the army, yes?] and covered them with mud.”60
How, indeed, can we not cry out our hearts in repentance? How can we not lacerate our chests with our fingernails?
And the only reason why “there is no need to deal out the death blow to its individual representatives” is that “this social group has outlived its time.”61
Here, at the start of the twentieth century! What power of foresight! Oh, scientific revolutionaries! (However, the intelligentsia had to be finished off anyway. Throughout the twenties they kept finishing them off and finishing them off.)
We examine with hostility the twenty-eight individual allies of the black generals, the hirelings of European imperialism. And we are especially aroused by the stench of the word Center. Now we see a Tactical Center, now a National Center, and now a Right Center. (And in our recollection of the trials of two decades, Centers keep creeping in all the time, Centers and Centers, Engineers’ Centers, Menshevik Centers, Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centers, Rightist-Bukharinite Centers, but all of them are crushed, all crushed, and that is the only reason you and I are still alive.) Wherever there is a Center, of course, the hand of imperialism can be found.
True, we feel a measure of relief when we learn that the Tactical Center on this occasion was not an organization; that it did not have: (1) statutes; (2) a program; (3) membership dues. So, what did it have? Here’s what: They used to meet! (Goose-pimples up and down the back!) And when they met, they undertook to familiarize themselves with one another’s point of view! (Icy chills!)
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 37