The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1

by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

  The prosecutor petitioned the court to have Stavrov’s testimony, given before his death in prison, read to the court and accepted as evidence. In fact, the whole charge against the group was based on Stavrov’s evidence. The court agreed to include the testimony of the deceased, just as if he were alive. (With the advantage, however, that none of the defendants could refute it.)

  But darkest Kady did not appreciate these scholarly fine points. It waited to see what came next. The testimony of Stavrov, who had been killed under interrogation, was read to the court and once again became part of the record. The questioning of the defendants began—and immediately there was chaos. All of them repudiated the testimony they had given during the interrogation.

  It is not clear how, in such an event, things would have been arranged in the October Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow—but here, at any rate, it was decided shamelessly to continue. The judge rebuked the defendants: How could you have given different testimony during the interrogation? Univer, very weak, replied in a barely audible voice: “As a Communist I cannot, in a public trial, describe the interrogation methods of the NKVD.” (Now there was a model for the Bukharin trial! Now that’s what keeps them together! More than anything else, they are worried that people might think ill of the Party. Their judges had long since stopped worrying about that.)

  During the recess, Klyugin visited the cells of the defendants. He said to Vlasov: “You’ve heard how Smirnov and Univer played the whore, the bastards? You’ve got to admit your guilt and tell the whole truth!” “The truth and nothing but the truth,” willingly agreed Vlasov, who had not yet weakened. “The truth and nothing but the truth that you are every bit as bad as the German Fascists!” Klyugin flew into a rage: “Listen here, you whore, you’ll pay with your blood!”39 From that moment Vlasov was pushed forward from a back seat among the defendants to a leading role in the trial—as the ideological leader of the group.

  The crowd jamming the aisles grew interested whenever the court fearlessly broke into questions about bread lines—about things that touched everyone present to the quick. (And, of course, bread had been put on unrestricted sale just before the trial, and there were no bread lines that day.) A question to the accused Smirnov: “Did you know about the bread lines in the district?” “Yes, of course. They stretched from the store itself right up to the building of the District Party Committee.” “And what did you do about them?” Notwithstanding the tortures he had endured, Smirnov had preserved his resounding voice and tranquil righteousness. This broad-shouldered man with a simple face and light-brown hair answered slowly, and the whole hall heard every word he said: “Since all appeals to organizations in the provincial capital had failed, I instructed Vlasov to write a report to Comrade Stalin.” “And why didn’t you write it?” (They hadn’t yet known about it! They had certainly missed that one!) “We did write it, and I sent it by courier directly to the Central Committee, bypassing the provincial leaders. A copy was kept in the District Committee files.”

  The whole courtroom held its breath. The court itself was in a commotion. They shouldn’t have continued questioning, but nonetheless someone asked: “And what happened?”

  And, indeed, that question was on the lips of everyone in the courtroom: “What happened?”

  Smirnov did not sob, did not groan over the death of his ideal (and that’s what was missing in the Moscow trials!). He replied loudly and calmly:

  “Nothing. There was no answer”

  And his tired voice seemed to say: Well, that, in fact, was just what I expected.

  There was no answer. From the Father and Teacher there was no answer! The public trial had already reached its zenith! It had already shown the masses the black heart of the Cannibal! And the trial could have been called off right then and there. But, oh no, they didn’t have sense enough for that, or tact enough for that, and they kept rubbing away at the befouled spot for three more days.

  The prosecutor raised a hue and cry: Double-dealing! That’s what it was. They engaged in wrecking with one hand and with the other they dared write Comrade Stalin. And they even expected a reply from him. Let the defendant Vlasov tell us how he pulled off such a nightmarish piece of wrecking that he stopped the sale of flour and the baking of rye bread in the district center.

  Vlasov, the bantam rooster, didn’t have to be asked to rise—he had already jumped up, and he shouted resoundingly through the hall:

  “I agree to give a full answer to the court, but on condition that you, the prosecutor, Karasik, leave the accuser’s rostrum and sit down here next to me!” It was incomprehensible. Noise, shouting. Call them to order! What was going on?

  Having gotten the floor with this maneuver, Vlasov explained willingly.

  “The prohibitions on selling flour and baking rye bread were instituted by a decree of the Provincial Executive Committee. One of the permanent members of its presidium is Provincial Prosecutor Karasik. If that’s wrecking, then why didn’t you veto it as prosecutor? That means you were a wrecker even before I was!”

  The prosecutor choked. It was a swift, well-placed blow. The court was also at a loss. The judge mumbled.

  “If necessary [?] we will try the prosecutor too. But today we are trying you.”

  (Two truths: it all depends on your rank.)

  “I demand that he be removed from the prosecutor’s rostrum,” insisted the indefatigable, irrepressible Vlasov.

  Recess.

  Now, in terms of indoctrinating the masses, just what significance could such a trial have?

  But they kept on and on. After questioning the defendants they began to question the witnesses. The bookkeeper N.

  “What do you know about Vlasov’s wrecking activities?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I was in the witnesses’ room and I didn’t hear what was said in here.”

  “You don’t have to hear! Many documents passed through your hands. You couldn’t help but know.”

  “The documents were all in proper order.”

  “But here is a stack of district newspapers, and even there they were writing about Vlasov’s wrecking activities. And you claim you don’t know anything?”

  “Well, go ask the people who wrote the articles.”

  Then there was the manager of the bread store.

  “Tell me, does the Soviet government have much bread?”

  (Well, now! Just how could you answer that? Who was going to say: “I didn’t count it”?)

  “A lot.”

  “Why are there bread lines at your store?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who was in charge?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Who was in charge of your store?”

  “Vasily Grigoryevich.”

  “What the devil! What do you mean calling him Vasily Grigoryevich? Defendant Vlasov! That means he was in charge.”

  The witness fell silent.

  The judge of the court dictated to the stenographer: “The answer: ‘As a consequence of the wrecking activity of Vlasov, bread lines resulted, notwithstanding the Soviet government’s enormous stocks of bread.’”

  Repressing his own fears, the prosecutor delivered a long and angry speech. The defense lawyer for the most part defended only himself, emphasizing that the interests of the Motherland were as dear to him as they were to any honest citizen.

  In his final words to the court, Smirnov asked for nothing and expressed no repentance for anything. Insofar as we can reconstruct it now, he was a firm person and too forthright to have lasted through 1937.

  When Saburov begged that his life be spared—“not for me, but for my little children”—Vlasov, out of vexation, pulled him back by the jacket: “You’re a fool.”

  Vlasov himself did not fail to take advantage of his last chance to talk back impudently.

  “I consider you not a court but actors pretending to be a court in a stage
farce where roles have already been written for you. You are engaged in a repulsive provocation on the part of the NKVD. You are going to sentence me to be shot no matter what I say. I believe one thing only: the time will come when you will be here in my place.”40

  The court spent from 7 P.M. to 1 A.M. composing the verdict, and all the while the kerosene lamps were burning in the hall, and the defendants sat beneath drawn sabers, and there was a hum of conversation among the spectators who had not left.

  And just as it took them a long time to compose the verdict, it took them a long time to read it, piling up on top of one another all kinds of fantastic wrecking activities, contacts, and plans. Smirnov, Univer, Saburov, and Vlasov were sentenced to be shot; two others to ten years; one to eight years. In addition, the verdict of the court led to the exposure of an additional wrecking organization in the Komsomol in Kady (whose members were, of course, immediately arrested. Remember the young merchandise manager?). And of a center of underground organizations in Ivanovo, which was, of course, in its turn, subordinate to Moscow. (One more nail in Bukharin’s coffin.)

  After the solemn words “To be shot!” the judges paused for applause. But the mood in the hall was so gloomy, with the sighs and tears of people who had no connection with the defendants, and the screams and swooning of their relatives, that no applause was to be heard even from the first two benches, where the Party members were sitting. This, indeed, was totally improper. “Oh, good Lord, what have you done?” someone in the hall shouted at the members of the court. Univer’s wife dissolved in tears. In the half-darkness, the crowd began to stir. Vlasov shouted at the front benches:

  “Come on, you bastards, why aren’t you clapping? Some Communists you are!”

  The political commissar of the guards platoon ran up to him and shoved his revolver in his face. Vlasov reached out to grab the revolver, but a policeman ran up and pushed back his political commissar, who had been guilty of a blunder. The chief of the convoy gave the command: “Arms at the ready!” And thirty police carbines and the pistols of the local NKVD men were aimed at the defendants and at the crowd. (It seemed at the time as though the crowd would rush forward to free the defendants.)

  The hall was lit only by a few kerosene lamps, and the semidarkness heightened the general confusion and fear. The crowd, finally convinced, not so much by the trial as by the carbines now leveled at it, pushed in a panic against the doors and windows. The wood cracked and broke; glass tinkled. Univer’s wife, in a dead faint, was almost trampled to death and was left lying beneath the chairs until morning.

  And there never was any applause.41

  And not only couldn’t the condemned prisoners be shot then and there, but they had to be kept under even stricter guard, because now they really had nothing at all to lose, and they had to be taken to the provincial capital for execution.

  They managed to cope with the first problem—sending them off by night to the NKVD along the main street—by having each condemned man guarded by five men. One of the guards carried a lantern. One went ahead with a pistol at the ready. Two held the condemned prisoner by the arms and kept their pistols in their free hands. The fifth brought up the rear, with his pistol pointed at the condemned man’s back.

  The rest of the police were ranged in formation in order to prevent any attack by the crowd.

  Every reasonable man will now agree that the NKVD could never have carried out its great assignment if they had fussed about with open trials.

  And that is why public political trials never really put down roots in our country.

  Chapter 11

  The Supreme Measure

  Capital punishment has had an up-and-down history in Russia. In the Code of the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov there were fifty crimes for which capital punishment could be imposed. By the time of the Military Statutes of Peter the Great there were two hundred. Yet the Empress Elizabeth, while she did not repeal those laws authorizing capital punishment, never once resorted to it. They say that when she ascended the throne she swore an oath never to execute anyone—and for all twenty years of her reign she kept that oath. She fought the Seven Years’ War! Yet she still got along without capital punishment. It was an astounding record in the mid-eighteenth century—fifty years before the guillotine of the Jacobins. True, we have taught ourselves to ridicule all our past; we never acknowledge a good deed or a good intention in our history. And one can very easily blacken Elizabeth’s reputation too; she replaced capital punishment with flogging with the knout; tearing out nostrils; branding with the word “thief”; and eternal exile in Siberia. But let us also say something on behalf of the Empress: how could she have changed things more radically than she did in contravention of the social concepts of her time? And perhaps the prisoner condemned to death today would voluntarily consent to that whole complex of punishments if only the sun would continue to shine on him; but we, in our humanitarianism, don’t offer him that chance. And perhaps the reader will come to feel in the course of this book that twenty or even ten years in our camps are harder to bear than were the punishments of Elizabeth?

  In today’s terms, Elizabeth had a universally human point of view on all this, while the Empress Catherine the Great had, on the contrary, a class point of view (which was consequently more correct). Not to execute anyone at all seemed to her appalling and indefensible. She found capital punishment entirely appropriate to defending herself, her throne, and her system—in other words, in political cases, such as those of Mirovich, the Moscow plague mutiny, and Pugachev. But for habitual criminals, for nonpolitical offenders, why not consider capital punishment abolished?

  Under Paul, the abolition of capital punishment was confirmed. (Despite his many wars, there were no military tribunals attached to military units.) And during the whole long reign of Alexander I, capital punishment was introduced only for war crimes that took place during a campaign (1812). (Right at this point, some people will say to us: What about deaths from running the gantlet? Yes, indeed, there were, of course, hidden executions—for that matter, one can literally drive a person to death with a trade-union meeting!) But the yielding up of one’s God-given life because others, sitting in judgment, have so voted simply did not take place in our country even for crimes of state for an entire half-century—from Pugachev to the Decembrists.

  The blood of the five Decembrists whetted the appetite of our state. From then on, execution for crimes of state was no longer prohibited nor was it forgotten, right up to the February Revolution in 1917. It was confirmed by the Statutes of 1845 and 1904, and further reinforced by the criminal statutes of the army and navy.

  And how many people were executed in Russia during that period? We have already, in Chapter 8 above, cited the figures given by liberal leaders of 1905–1907. Let us add to them the verified figures of N. S. Tagantsev, the expert on Russian criminal law.1 Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia. For a period of thirty years—from 1876 to 1904 (the period of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries and the use of terrorism—a terrorism which did not consist merely of intentions murmured in the kitchen of a communal apartment—a period of mass strikes and peasant revolts; the period when the parties of the future revolution were created and grew in strength)—486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country. (This figure includes executions of ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!)2 During the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an abrupt end.

  When the Provisional Government came to power, it abolished capital punishment entirely. In July, 1917, however, it was reinstated in the active army and front-line areas for military crimes, murder, rape, assault, and pillage (very widespread i
n those areas at that time). This was one of the most unpopular of the measures which destroyed the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks’ slogan before the Bolshevik coup d’etat was: “Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!”

  A story has come down to us that on the night of October 25–26 a discussion arose in Smolny as to whether one of the first decrees shouldn’t be the abolition of capital punishment in perpetuity—whereupon Lenin justly ridiculed the idealism of his comrades. He, at any rate, knew that without capital punishment there would be no movement whatever in the direction of the new society. However, in forming a coalition government with the Left SR’s, he gave in to their faulty concepts, and on October 28, 1917, capital punishment was abolished. Nothing good, of course, could come from that “goody-goody” position. (Yes, and how did they get rid of it? At the beginning of 1918, Trotsky ordered that Aleksei Shchastny, a newly appointed admiral, be brought to trial because he had refused to scuttle the Baltic Fleet. Karklin, the Chairman of the Verkhtrib, quickly sentenced him in broken Russian: “To be shot within twenty-four hours.” There was a stir in the hall: But it has been abolished! Prosecutor Krylenko explained: “What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.” And they did shoot him.)

  If we are to judge by official documents, capital punishment was restored in all its force in June, 1918. No, it was not “restored”; instead, a new era of executions was inaugurated. If one takes the view that Latsis3 is not deliberately understating the real figures but simply lacks complete information, and that the Revtribunals carried on approximately the same amount of judicial work as the Cheka performed in an extrajudicial way, one concludes that in the twenty central provinces of Russia in a period of sixteen months (June, 1918, to October, 1919) more than sixteen thousand persons were shot, which is to say more than one thousand a month.4 (This, incidentally, is when they shot both Khrustalev-Nosar, the Chairman of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet—the first Russian soviet—and the artist who designed the legendary uniform worn by the Red Army throughout the Civil War.)