One cannot really say that the OSO had been conceived after the Revolution. Catherine the Great had sentenced the journalist Novikov, whom she disliked, to fifteen years on, one might say, an OSO basis, since she didn’t turn him over to a court. And all the Tsars once in a while, in a fatherly way, exiled without any trial those who had incurred their displeasure. In the 1860’s, a basic court reform took place. It seemed as if rulers and subjects had both begun to develop something like a juridical view of society. And yet in the seventies and eighties Korolenko tracked down cases where administrative repression had usurped the role of judicial judgment. In 1872, he himself and two other students were exiled without trial, on the orders of the Deputy Minister of State Properties—a typical case of an OSO. Another time, he and his brother were exiled without trial to Glazov. Korolenko has also given us the name of one Fyodor Bogdan, an emissary from the peasants—a khodok—who got right up to the Tsar himself and was then exiled. And of Pyankov, too, who was acquitted by a court and yet exiled by order of the Tsar. And there were several others as well. And Vera Zasulich explained in a letter sent after she emigrated that she had not run away from the ^court .and a trial but from nonjudicial administrative repression.
Thus the tradition of the “dotted line”—the administratively issued sentence—dragged on. But it was too lax; it was suitable for a drowsy Asiatic country, but not for a country that was rapidly advancing…. Moreover, it lacked any definite identity: who was the OSO? Sometimes it was the Tsar, sometimes the governor, sometimes the deputy minister. And if it was still possible to enumerate names and cases, this was not, begging your pardon, real scope.
Real scope entered the picture with the twenties, when permanently operating Troikas—panels of three, operating behind closed doors—were created to bypass the courts permanently. In the beginning they even flaunted it proudly—the Troika of the GPU. Not only did they not conceal the names of the members; they publicized them. Who on the Solovetsky Islands did not know the names of the famous Moscow Troika—Gleb Boky,
Vul, and Vasilyev? Yes, and what a word it was, in fact—troika! It bore a slight hint of sleigh bells on the shaft bow; the celebration of Shrovetide; and, interwoven with all this, a mystery. Why “troika”? What did it mean? After all, a court wasn’t a quartet either! And a Troika wasn’t a court! And the biggest mystery of all lay in the fact that it was kept out of sight. We hadn’t been there. We hadn’t seen it. All we got was a piece of paper. Sign here! The Troika was even more frightening than a Revolutionary Tribunal. It set itself even farther apart, muffled itself up, locked itself in a separate room, and—soon—concealed the names of its members. Thus we grew used to the idea that the Troika members didn’t eat or drink or move about among ordinary people. Once they had isolated themselves in order to go into session, they were shut off for good, and all we knew of them were the sentences handed out through typists. (And they had to be returned too. Such documents couldn’t be left in the hands of individuals!)
These Troikas (we use the plural just in case, because—as with a deity—we never know where or in what form it exists) satisfied a persistent need that had arisen: never to allow those arrested to return to freedom (This was like an OTK—a Department for Quality Control in industry—but in this case it was attached to the GPU—to prevent any spoiled goods.) If it turned out that someone was innocent and could therefore not be tried at all, then let him have his “minus 32” via the Troika—which meant he couldn’t live in any of the provincial capitals—or let him spend two or three years in exile, after which he would have a convict’s clipped ear, would always be a marked man, and, from then on, a recidivist.
(Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with this rightist opportunism—this concept of “guilt,” and of the guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly. But lacking legal training, we can be forgiven, for the 1926 Code, according to which, my good fellow, we lived for twenty-five years and more, was itself criticized for an “impermissible bourgeois approach,” for an “insufficiently class-conscious approach,” and for some kind of “bourgeois weighing of punishments in relation to the gravity of what had been committed.”)[146]
Alas, it is not for us to write the absorbing history of this particular Organ: how the Troikas turned into OSO’s; or when they got renamed; or whether there were OSO’s in provincial centers, or just one of them in the Great Palace; or which of our great and proud leaders were members; or how often they met and how long their sessions lasted; whether or not they were served tea while they worked, and if they were, what was served with the tea; and how the work itself proceeded—did they converse while it was going on or not? We are not the ones who will write this history—because we don’t know. All that we have heard is that the essence of the OSO was triune. And even though it is still impossible to name its industrious members, yet we do know the three organs permanently represented there: one member represented the Central Committee of the Party, one the MVD, and one the Chief Prosecutor’s office. However, it would not be a miracle if we should learn someday that there were never any sessions, and that there was only a staff of experienced typists composing extracts from nonexistent records of proceedings, and one general administrator who directed the typists. As for typists, there were certainly typists. That we can guarantee.
Up to 1924, the authority of the Troika was limited to sentences of three years, maximum. From 1924 on, they moved up to five years of camp; from 1937 on, the OSO could turn out “ten-ruble bills”; after 1948, they could rivet a “quarter”—twenty-five years—on you. And there are people—Chavdarov, for example—who know that during the war years the OSO even sentenced prisoners to execution by shooting. Nothing unusual about this.
The OSO was nowhere mentioned in either the Constitution or the Code. However, it turned out to be the most convenient kind of hamburger machine—easy to operate, undemanding, and requiring no legal lubrication. The Code existed on its own, and the OSO existed on its own, and it kept on deftly grinding without all the Code’s 205 articles, neither invoking them nor even mentioning them.
As they used to joke in camp: “There is no court for nothing—for that there is an OSO.”
Of course, the OSO itself also needed for convenience some kind of operational shorthand, but for that purpose it worked out on its own a dozen “letter” articles which made operations very much simpler. It wasn’t necessary, when they were used, to cudgel your brains trying to make things fit the formulations of the Code. And they were few enough to be easily remembered by a child. Some of them we have already described:
ASA—Anti-Soviet Agitation
KRD—Counter-Revolutionary Activity
KRTD—Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity (And that “T” made the life of a zek in camp much harder.)
PSh—Suspicion of Espionage (Espionage that went beyond the bounds of suspicion was handed over to a tribunal.)
SVPSh—Contacts Leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage
KRM—Counter-Revolutionary Thought
VAS—Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments
SOE—Socially Dangerous Element
SVE—Socially Harmful Element
PD—Criminal Activity (a favorite accusation against former camp inmates if there was nothing else to be used against them)