High treason! That is another club with two ends. It all depends 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?)
From this fourth charge a fifth followed inexorably: the SR’s had intended to procure the technical equipment for such an explosion with money received from Allied representatives. (They had wanted to take money from the Entente in order not to give gold away to Kaiser Wilhelm.) And this was the extreme of treason! (Just in case, Krylenko did mutter something about the SR’s also having connections with Ludendorff’s General Staff, but this stone had indeed landed in the wrong vegetable garden, and he quickly dropped the whole thing.)
From this it was only a very short step to the sixth charge: that the SR’s had been Entente spies in 1918. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries, and today they were spies. At the time, this accusation probably sounded explosive. But since then, and after many, many trials, the whole thing makes one want to vomit.
Well, then, the seventh and tenth points concerned collaboration with Savinkov, or Filonenko, or the Cadets, or the “Union of Rebirth” (had it really ever existed?), and even with aristocratic, reactionary, dilettante—so-called “white-lining”—students, or even the White Guards.
This series of linked charges was well expounded by the prosecutor.21 As a result of either hard thinking in his office, or a sudden stroke of genius on the rostrum, he managed in this trial to come up with that tone of heartfelt sympathy and friendly criticism which he would make use of in subsequent trials with increasing self-assurance and in ever heavier doses, and which, in 1937, would result in dazzling success. This tone created a common ground—against the rest of the world—between those doing the judging and those who were being judged, and it played on the defendant’s particular soft spot. From the prosecutor’s rostrum, they said to the SR’s: “After all, you and we are revolutionaries! [We! You and we—that adds up to us!] And how could you have fallen so low as to join with the Cadets? [Yes, no doubt your heart is breaking!] Or with the officers? Or to teach the aristocratic, reactionary, dilettante students your brilliantly worked-out scheme of conspiratorial operation?”
None of the defendants’ replies is available to us. Did any of them point out that the particular characteristic of the October coup had been to declare war immediately on all the other parties and forbid them to join forces? (“They’re not hauling you in, so don’t you dare peep!”) But for some reason one gets the feeling that some of the defendants sat there with downcast eyes and that some of them truly had divided hearts: just how could they have fallen so low? After all, for the prisoner who’d been brought in from a dark cell, the friendly, sympathetic attitude of the prosecutor in the big bright hall struck home very effectively.
And Krylenko discovered another very, very logical little path which was to prove very useful to Vyshinsky when he applied it against Kamenev and Bukharin: On entering into an alliance with the bourgeoisie, you accepted money from them. At first you took it for the cause, only for the cause, and in no wise for Party purposes. But where is the boundary line? Who can draw that dividing line? After all, isn’t the cause a Party cause also? And so you sank to the level—you, the Socialist Revolutionary Party—of being supported by the bourgeoisie! Where was your revolutionary pride?
A full quota of charges—and then some—had been piled up. And the tribunal could have gone out to confer and thereupon nailed each of the prisoners with his well-merited execution—but, alas, there was a big mix-up:
a. Everything the Socialist Revolutionary Party had been accused of related to 1918.
b. Since then, on February 27, 1919, an amnesty had been declared for SR’s exclusively, which pardoned all their past belligerency against the Bolsheviks on the sole stipulation that they would not continue the struggle into the future.
c. And they had not continued the struggle since that time.
d. And it was now 1922!
How could Krylenko get around that one?
Some thought had been given to this point. When the Socialist International asked the Soviet government to drop charges and not put its socialist brothers on trial, some thought had been given to it.
In fact, at the beginning of 1919, in the face of threats from Kolchak and Denikin, the SR’s had renounced their task of revolt against the Bolsheviks and had abandoned all armed struggle against them. (And to aid their Communist brethren, the Samara SR’s had even opened up a section of the Kolchak front. . . which was, in fact, why the amnesty had been granted.) And right at the trial the defendant Gendelman, a member of the Central Committee, said: “Give us the chance to make use of the whole gamut of so-called civil liberties, and we will not break the law.” (Give it to them! The “whole gamut,” to boot! What loud-mouths!)
And it wasn’t just that they weren’t engaged in any opposition: they had recognized the Soviet government! In other words, they had renounced their former Provisional Government, yes, and the Constituent Assembly as well. And all they asked was a new election for the soviets, with freedom for all parties to engage in electoral campaigning.
Now did you hear that? Did you hear that? That’s where the hostile bourgeois beast poked his snout through. How could we? After all, this is a time of crisis! After all, we are encircled by the enemy. (And in twenty years’ time, and fifty years’ time, and a hundred years’ time, for that matter, it will be exactly the same.) And you want freedom for the parties to engage in electoral campaigning, you bastards?
Politically sober people, said Krylenko, could only laugh in reply and shrug their shoulders. It had been a just decision “immediately and by all measures of state suppression to prevent these groups from conducting propaganda against the government.”22 And specifically: in reply to the renunciation by the SR’s of armed opposition and to their peaceful proposals, they had put the entire Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in prison! (As many of them as they could catch.)
That’s how we do it!
But to keep them in prison—and hadn’t it already been three years?—wasn’t it necessary to try them? And what should they be charged with? “This period had not been sufficiently investigated in the pretrial examination,” our prosecutor complained.
But in the meanwhile one charge was correct. In that same February, 1919, the SR’s had passed a resolution which they had not put into effect, though in terms of the new Criminal Code that didn’t matter at all: to carry on secret agitation in the ranks of the Red Army in order to induce the soldiers to refuse to participate in reprisals against the peasants.
And that was a low-down, foul betrayal of the Revolution—to try to persuade men not to take part in reprisals.
And they could also be charged with everything that the so-called “Foreign Delegation of the Central Committee” of the SR’s—those prominent SR’s who had fled to Europe—had said, written, and done (mostly words).
But all that wasn’t enough. So here’s what they thought up: “Many defendants sitting here would
not deserve to be indicted in the given case, were it not for the charge of having planned terrorist acts” Allegedly, when the amnesty of 1919 had been published, “none of the leaders of Soviet Justice had imagined” that the SR’s had also planned to use terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state! (Well, indeed, who could possibly have imagined that! The SR’s! And terrorism, all of a sudden? And if it had come to mind, it would have been necessary to include it in the amnesty too! Or else not accept the gap in the Kolchak front. It was really very, very fortunate indeed that no one had thought of it. Not until it was needed—then someone thought of it.) So this charge had not been amnestied (for, after all, struggle was the only offense that had been amnestied). And so Krylenko could now make the charge!
And, in all likelihood, they had discovered so very much! So very much!
In the first place, they had discovered what the SR leaders had said23 back in the first days after the October seizure of power. Chernov, at the Fourth Congress of the SR’s, had said that the Party would “counterpose all its forces against any attack on the rights of the people, as it had” under Tsarism. (And everyone remembered how it had done that.) Gots had said. “If the autocrats at Smolny also infringe on the Constituent Assembly . . . the Socialist Revolutionary Party will remember its old tried and true tactics.”
Perhaps it did remember, but it didn’t make up its mind to act. Yet apparently it could be tried for it anyway.
“In this area of our investigation,” Krylenko complained, because of conspiracy “there will be little testimony from witnesses.” And he continued: “This has made my task extremely difficult. . . . In this area [i.e., terrorism] it is necessary, at certain moments, to wander about in the shadows.”24
What made Krylenko’s task difficult was the fact that the use of terrorism against the Soviet government was discussed at the meeting of the SR Central Committee in 1918 and rejected. And now, years later, it was necessary to prove that the SR’s had been engaged in self-deception.
The SR’s had said at the time that they would not resort to terrorism until and unless the Bolsheviks began to execute socialists. Or, in 1920, they had said that if the Bolsheviks were to threaten the lives of SR hostages, then the party would take up arms.25
So the question then was: Why did they qualify their renunciation of terrorism? Why wasn’t it absolute? And how had they even dared to think about taking up arms! “Why were there no statements equivalent to absolute renunciation?” (But, Comrade Krylenko, maybe terrorism was their “second nature”?)
The SR Party carried out no terrorist acts whatever, and this was clear even from Krylenko’s summing up of the charges. But the prosecution kept stretching such facts as these: One of the defendants had in mind a plan for blowing up the locomotive of a train carrying the Council of People’s Commissars to Moscow. That meant the Central Committee of the SR’s was guilty of terrorism. And the terrorist Ivanova had spent one night near the railroad station with one charge of explosives—which meant there had been an attempt to blow up Trotsky’s train—and therefore the SR Central Committee was guilty of terrorism. And further: Donskoi, a member of the Central Committee, warned Fanya Kaplan that she would be expelled from the Party if she fired at Lenin. But that wasn’t enough! Why hadn’t she been categorically forbidden to? (Or perhaps: why hadn’t she been denounced to the Cheka?)
It was feathers of this sort that Krylenko kept plucking from the dead rooster—that the SR’s had not taken measures to stop individual terrorist acts by their unemployed and languishing gunmen. That was the whole of their terrorism. (Yes, and those gunmen of theirs didn’t do anything either. In 1922, two of them, Konopleva and Semyonov, with suspicious eagerness, enriched the GPU and the tribunal with their voluntary evidence, but their evidence couldn’t be pinned on the SR Central Committee—and suddenly and inexplicably these inveterate terrorists were released scot-free.)
All the evidence was such that it had to be bolstered up with props. Krylenko explained things this way in regard to one of the witnesses: “If this person had really wanted to make things up, it is unlikely he would have done so in such a way as to hit the target merely by accident.”26 (Strongly put, indeed! This could be said about any piece of fabricated testimony whatever.) Or else, about Donskoi: Could one really “suspect him of possessing the special insight to testify to what the prosecution wanted”? It was just the other way around with Konopleva: the reliability of her testimony was evidenced by the fact that she had not testified to everything the prosecution needed. (But enough for the defendants to be shot.) “If we ask whether Konopleva concocted all this, then it is . . . clear: if one is going to concoct, one must really concoct [He should know!], and if one is going to expose someone, one should really expose him.”27 But she, you see, did not carry it through to the end. Then things are put still another way: “After all, it is unlikely that Yefimov needed to put Konopleva in danger of execution without cause.”28 Once more correct, once more strongly put! Or, even more strongly: “Could this encounter have taken place? Such a possibility is not excluded.” Not excluded? That means it did take place. Off to the races!
Then, too, the “subversive group.” They talked about this for a long time, and then suddenly: “Dissolved for lack of activity.” So what was all the fuss about? There had been several expropriations of money from Soviet institutions (the SR’s had nothing with which to work, to rent apartments, to move from city to city). But previously these had been the lovely, noble “exes”—as all the revolutionists called them. And now, in a Soviet court? They were “robbery and concealment of stolen goods.”
Through the material adduced by the prosecution in this trial, the dull, unblinking, yellow streetlamps of the Law throw light on the whole uncertain, wavering, deluded history of this pathetically garrulous, essentially lost, helpless, and even inactive party which never was worthily led. And its every decision or lack of decision, its every casting about, upsurge, or retreat, was transformed into and regarded as total guilt. . . guilt and more guilt.
And if in September, 1921, ten months before the trial, the SR Central Committee, already sitting in the Butyrki, had written to the newly elected Central Committee that it did not agree to the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship by any available means, but only through rallying the working masses and the dissemination of propaganda—all of which meant that, even as they languished in prison, they did not agree to being liberated through either terrorism or conspiracy—then that, too, was converted into their primary guilt: Aha! so that means that you did agree to its overthrow.
And what if they were, nevertheless, not guilty of overthrowing the government, and not guilty of terrorism, and if there had been hardly any “expropriations” at all, and if they had long since been forgiven for all the rest? Our favorite prosecutor pulled out his canonical weapon of last resort: “Ultimately, failure to denounce is a category of crime applying to all the defendants without exception, and it must be considered as having been proved.”29
The Socialist Revolutionary Party was guilty of not having squealed on itself! Now there’s something that couldn’t miss! This represented a discovery that juridical thought had made in the new Code. It was a paved highway along which they would keep driving and driving grateful descendants into Siberia!
And Krylenko burst out in a temper: “Hardened eternal enemies”—that’s who the defendants are! In that case it’s quite clear even without any trial what has to be done with them.
The Code was still so new that Krylenko could not even remember the main counterrevolutionary articles by their numbers—but how he slashed about with those numbers! How profoundly he cited and interpreted them! Just as if the blade of the guillotine had for decades hinged and dropped only on those articles. And especially new and important was the fact that we did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either on the classification of the charges or on the penalties impose
d! For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution had been passed—we would try them for that. And whether it “was carried out or not had no essential significance.”30 Whether a man whispered to his wife in bed that it would be a good thing to overthrow the Soviet government or whether he engaged in propaganda during elections or threw a bomb, it was all one and the same! And the punishment was identical!!!
And just as a foresighted painter proceeds from his first few brusquely drawn, angular strokes to create the whole desired portrait, so, for us, the entire panorama of 1937, 1945, and 1949 becomes ever clearer and more visible in the sketches of 1922.
But no, one thing is missing! What’s missing is the conduct of the defendants. They have not yet become trained sheep. They are still people! We have been told little, very little, but from that little we can understand a great deal. Sometimes through carelessness, Krylenko cites what they said right at the trial. For example, the defendant Berg “accused the Bolsheviks of responsibility for the deaths of January 5”—shooting down those who were demonstrating on behalf of the Constituent Assembly. And what Liberov said was even more direct: “I admit I was guilty of failing to work hard enough at overthrowing the Bolshevik government in 1918.31 Yevgeniya Ratner adhered to the same line, and Berg also declared: “I consider myself guilty before the workers’ Russia for having been unable to fight with all my strength against the so-called workers’ and peasants’ government, but I hope that my time has not yet gone.”32 (It has gone, darling, all gone!)
Of course, there is in all this an element of the ancient passion for the resounding phrase, but there is firmness too.
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1 Page 41