The charges were extremely serious and were supported by the evidence. There were two (2) pieces of evidence to corroborate the charges against twenty-eight accused individuals.62 These were two letters from people who were not present in court because they were abroad: Myakotin and Fyodorov. They were absent, but until the October Revolution they had been members of the same committees as those who were present, a circumstance that gave us the right to equate those who were absent with those who were present. And their letters dealt with their disagreements with Denikin on certain trivial questions: the peasant question (we are not told what these differences were, but they were evidently advising Denikin to give the land to the peasants); the Jewish question (they were evidently advising him not to return to the previous restrictions); the federated nationalities question (enough said: clear); the question of the structure of the government (democracy rather than dictatorship); and similar matters. And what conclusion did this evidence suggest? Very simple. It proved the fact of correspondence, and it also proved the agreement, the unanimity, of those present with Denikin! (Grrr! Grrrr!)
But there were also direct accusations against those present: that they had exchanged information with acquaintances who lived in outlying areas (Kiev, for example) which were not under the control of the central Soviet authorities! In other words, this used to be Russia, let’s say, but then in the interests of world revolution we ceded this one piece to Germany. And people continued to exchange letters. How are you doing there, Ivan Ivanich? Here’s how things are going with us. N. M. Kishkin, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadets, was so brazen as to try to justify himself right from the defendants’ bench: “A man doesn’t want to be blind. He tries to find out everything he can about what’s going on everywhere.”
To find out everything about what’s going on everywhere? He doesn’t want to be blind? Well, all one can say is that the accuser correctly described their actions as treason, treason to Soviet power!
But their most heinous acts were something else again. In the midst of the Civil War they wrote books, composed memoranda and projects. Yes, as experts in constitutional law, financial science, economic relationships, the system of justice, and education, they wrote works! (And, as one might easily guess, their works were not based on earlier works by Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin.) Professor Kotlyarevsky wrote on the federal structure of Russia; V. I. Stempkovsky on the agrarian question (no doubt, without collectivization); V. S. Muralevich on education in the future Russia; N. N. Vinogradsky on economics. And the (great) biologist N. K. Koltsov (who never received anything from the Motherland except persecution and execution) allowed all those bourgeois big shots to get together in his institute for their discussions. (N. D. Kondratyev was included here also. In 1931 he was condemned once and for all in connection with TKP—the fictitious Working Peasants Party.)
Our accuser’s heart jumps right out of our chest, outrunning the sentence. Well, what punishment was adequate for these assistants to the general? Just one, of course—to be shot! That was not merely what the accuser demanded—it was the sentence of the tribunal. (Alas, it was later commuted to concentration camp until the end of the Civil War.)
And indeed the defendants’ guilt consisted in the fact that they hadn’t sat in their own corners, sucking on their quarter-pound of bread; that “they had talked things over and reached agreements as to what the state structure should be after the fall of the Soviet regime.”
In contemporary scientific language, this is known as the study of the alternative possibility.
The voice of the accuser thundered, but we hear some kind of crack in it. As if his eyes were searching the rostrum, looking for another piece of paper? A quotation, perhaps? Give it to him on tiptoe, quick, quick! Give him one at random! From some other trial? It’s not important! Wasn’t this the one, Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko?
“For us . . . the concept of torture inheres in the very fact of holding political prisoners in prison. . . .”
So that’s it! It is torture to keep political prisoners in prison! And the accuser said so! What a generous view! A new jurisprudence is arising! And further:
“. . . Struggle against the Tsarist government was second nature to them [the politicals] and not to struggle against Tsarism was something of which they were incapable.”63
What’s that? They were incapable of not studying alternative possibilities? Perhaps thinking was first nature to the intellectual?
Alas, through stupidity, they had shoved the wrong quotation at him. Now wasn’t that a mix-up for you! But Nikolai Vasilyevich was already off to the races.
“And even if the defendants here in Moscow did not lift a finger [and it looks very much as though that’s the way it was] at such a moment, nevertheless . . . even a conversation over a teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary act. . . . During the Civil War not only is any kind of action [against Soviet power] a crime . . . but the fact of inaction is also criminal.”64
Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear. They are being sentenced to death—for inaction. For a cup of tea.
The Petrograd intellectuals, for example, decided that in the event of Yudenich’s taking the city, they would first of all “concern themselves with convening a democratic municipal Duma.” (In other words, to safeguard the city against a possible dictatorship.)
Krylenko: “I would like to shout at them: ‘It was your duty to think first of all how you might die in battle, so as not to allow Yudenich into the city!’”
But they didn’t die in battle.
(Nor, in fact, did Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko.)
In addition, there were certain defendants who knew about all this talk and yet kept silent, did not write denunciations. (In our contemporary lingo: “He knew, but he didn’t tell.”)
And here is another real example not merely of inaction but of actively criminal action. Through L. N. Khrushcheva, a member of the Political Red Cross (and there she was, on the defendants’ bench), some of the other defendants had raised money to help the Butyrki prisoners. (One can just picture that flood of capital—pouring into the prison commissary!) And they had supplied various articles too. (Yes, indeed. Just look. Woolens, too, perhaps?)
There were no bounds to their evil-doing! Nor would there be any limits to their proletarian punishment!
As when a cinema projector starts slowing down, twenty-eight prerevolutionary male and female faces flicker past us in a film that’s fuzzy and askew. We didn’t notice their expressions! Were they frightened? Contemptuous? Proud?
We don’t have their answers! Their last words are missing—because of “technical considerations.” But, making up for this lack, the accuser croons to us: “From beginning to end, it was self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed. The political instability and the interim nature of the intelligentsia . . . [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature] completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks.”65
I don’t know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the passion to save one’s life at any cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of the intelligentsia had still been maintained. . . . I don’t know.
Who was that young woman flashing past?
That was Tolstoi’s daughter, Alexandra. Krylenko asked her: “What did you do during these conversations?” And she answered: “I attended to the samovar.” Three years of concentration camp!
And who was that man over there? His face was familiar. It was Savva Morozov. But listen here: after all, he gave the Bolsheviks all that money! And now he has handed a little to these people? Three years in prison, but released on probation. Let that be a lesson to him!66
And that’s how the sun of our freedom rose. It was as just such a well-nourished little imp that our Octobrist child—Law—began to grow.
>
Today we don’t remember this at all.
Chapter 9
The Law Becomes a Man
Our review has already grown. Yet we have in fact hardly begun. All the big and famous trials are still ahead of us. But their basic lines have already been indicated.
So let us stick with our Law while it is still in its boy scout stage.
Let us recall one long-forgotten case which was not even political.
F.The Case of Glavtop—May, 1921
This case was important because it involved engineers—or, as they had been christened in the terminology of the times, “specialists,” or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee.)
Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories—strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame?
Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the “comrades who were often brought in from outside”—i.e., the Communist leaders—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem.”1 And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had refigured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated! If the planning turned out to be inflated, the spetsy were the ones to blame. Because the figures did not jibe, “this was the fault of the spetsy, not of the Council of Labor and Defense” and “not even of the responsible men in charge of Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee.”2
If there was no coal, firewood, or petroleum, it was because the spetsy had “brought about a mixed-up, chaotic situation.” And it was their own fault that they hadn’t resisted the urgent telephonograms from Rykov and the government—and had issued and allotted fuels outside the scope of the plan.
The spetsy were to blame for everything. But the proletarian court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient. Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed spetsy remains in proletarian hearts—but one can’t get along without them; everything goes to rack and ruin. And the tribunal doesn’t persecute them, and Krylenko even says that from 1920 on “there is no question of any sabotage.” The spetsy are to blame, but not out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept; they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers.
And so, at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a surprising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to the engineers.
The year 1922, the first year of peace, was rich in public trials, so rich that almost this entire chapter will be devoted to that year alone. (People are surprised: the war has ended, and yet there is an increase in court activity? But in 1945, too, and in 1948, the Dragon became very, very energetic. Is there not, perhaps, a simple sort of law in this?)
Although in December, 1921, the Ninth Congress of the Soviets decreed that the authority of the Cheka be narrowed3 and, in consequence, its authority was indeed narrowed and it was renamed the GPU, as early as October, 1922, the powers of the GPU were broadened again, and in December Dzerzhinsky told a Pravda correspondent: “Now we need to keep watch with particular vigilance over anti-Soviet currents and groupings. The GPU has reduced its apparatus but strengthened it in terms of quality”4
And, at the beginning of 1922, we must not bypass:
G.The Case of the Suicide of Engineer Oldenborger (Tried before the Verkhtrib—the Supreme Tribunal—in February, 1922)
This case is forgotten, insignificant, and totally atypical. It was atypical because its entire scale was that of a single life that had already ended. And if that life hadn’t ended, it would have been that very engineer, yes, and ten more with him, forming a Center, who would have sat before the Verkhtrib; in that event the case would have been altogether typical. But as it was, an outstanding Party comrade, Sedelnikov, sat on the defendants’ bench and, with him, two members of the RKI—the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection—and two trade-union officials.
But, like Chekhov’s far-off broken harp-string, there was something plaintive in this trial; it was, in its own way, an early predecessor of the Shakhty and Promparty trials.
V. V. Oldenborger had worked for thirty years in the Moscow water-supply system and had evidently become its chief engineer back at the beginning of the century. Even though the Silver Age of art, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger’s water. The Acmeists and the Futurists, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, the military cadets and the Red Guards, the Council of People’s Commissars, the Cheka, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection—all had drunk Oldenborger’s pure cold water. He had never married and he had no children. His whole life had consisted of that one water-supply system. In 1905 he refused to permit the soldiers of the guard near the water-supply conduits—“because the soldiers, out of clumsiness, might break the pipes or machinery.” On the second day of the February Revolution he said to his workers that that was enough, the revolution was over, and they should all go back to their jobs; the water must flow. And during the October fighting in Moscow, he had only one concern: to safeguard the water-supply system. His colleagues went on strike in answer to the Bolshevik coup d’etat and invited him to take part in the strike with them. His reply was: “On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on strike. . . . In everything else, I—well, yes, I am on strike.” He accepted money for the strikers from the strike committee, and gave them a receipt, but he himself dashed off to get a sleeve to repair a broken pipe.
But despite this, he was an enemy! Here’s what he had said to one of the workers: “The Soviet regime won’t last two weeks.” (There was a new political situation preceding the announcement of the New Economic Policy, and in this context Krylenko could allow himself some frank talk before the Verkhtrib: “It was not only the spetsy who thought that way at the time. That is what we ourselves thought more than once.”)
But despite this, Oldenborger was an enemy! Just as Comrade Lenin had told us: to keep watch over the bourgeois specialists we need a watchdog—the RKI—the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.
They began by assigning two such watchdogs to Oldenborger on a full-time basis. (One of them, Makarov-Zemlyansky, a swindler and a former clerk in the water system, had been fired “for improper conduct” and had entered the service of the RKI “because they paid better.” He got promoted to the Central People’s Commissariat because “the pay there was even better”—and, from that height, he had returned to check up on his former chief and take hearty vengeance on the man who had wronged him.) Then, of course, the local Party committee—that matchless defender of the workers’ interests—wasn’t dozing either. And Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only Communists at leadership level; and the wisdom of this view was confirmed by the given trial.”5
The Moscow Party organization also kept its eyes on the water-supply system. (And behind it stood the Cheka.) “In our own time we built our army on the basis of a healthy feeling of class enmity; in its name, we do not entrust even one responsible position to people who do not belong to our camp, without assigning them . . . a commissar.”6 And so, they all immediately began to order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around without his knowledge. (“They broke up the whole nest of businessmen.”)
But they did not, even so, safeg
uard the water-supply system. Things didn’t go better with it, but worse! So slyly had that gang of engineers contrived to carry out an evil scheme. Even more: overcoming his intellectual’s interim nature, as a result of which he had never in his life expressed himself sharply, Oldenborger made so bold as to describe as stupid stubbornness the actions of the new chief of the water-supply system, Zenyuk (to Krylenko, “a profoundly likable person on the basis of his internal structure”).
It was at this point that it became clear that “engineer Oldenborger was consciously betraying the interests of the workers and that he was a direct and open enemy of the dictatorship of the working class.” They started bringing inspection commissions into the water-supply system, but the commissions found that everything was in good order and that water was being supplied on a normal basis. The RKI men, the “rabkrinovtsy,” refused to be satisfied with this. They kept pouring report after report into the RKI. Oldenborger simply wanted to “ruin, spoil, break down the water-supply system for political purposes,” but he was unable to. Well, they put what obstacles in his way that they could; they prevented wasteful boiler repairs and replacing the wooden tanks with concrete ones. At meetings of the water-supply-system workers, the leaders began saying openly that their chief engineer was the “soul of organized technical sabotage” and that he should not be believed, that he should be resisted at every point.
Despite all this, the operation of the water-supply system not only didn’t improve, but deteriorated.
What was particularly offensive to the “hereditary proletarian psychology” of the officials of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and of the trade unions was that the majority of the workers at the pumping stations “had been infected with petty-bourgeois psychology” and, unable to recognize Oldenborger’s sabotage, had come to his defense. At this point, elections to the Moscow Soviet were being held and the workers nominated Oldenborger as the candidate of the water-supply system, against whom, of course, the Party cell backed its own Party candidate. However, this turned out to be futile because of the chief engineer’s fraudulent authority with the workers. Nonetheless, the Party cell brought up the question with the District Party Committee, on all levels, and announced at a general meeting that “Oldenborger is the center and soul of sabotage, and will be our political enemy in the Moscow Soviet!” The workers responded with an uproar and shouts of “Untrue! Lies!” And at that point the secretary of the Party Committee, Comrade Sedelnikov, flung right in the faces of the thousand-headed proletariat there: “I am not even going to talk to such Black Hundred, reactionary pogrom-makers.” That is to say: We’ll talk to you somewhere else.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 38