But it was a rare thing for such accidents to take place in the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. For that matter, it was in general rare for it to rub clear its clouded eyes and take a look at any individual little tin soldier of a prisoner. In 1937, A.D.R., an electrical engineer, was taken up to the fourth floor, running upstairs with a convoy guard on either side of him. (In all probability, the elevator was working, but there were so many prisoners pouring in and out that the officials and employees would not have been able to use the elevator if the prisoners had been permitted to.) Meeting a convicted prisoner who had just left, they dashed into the court. The Military Collegium was in such a hurry they hadn’t sat down yet, and all three members remained standing. Catching his breath with difficulty, for he had been weakened by his long interrogation, R. blurted out his full name. They muttered something, exchanged glances, and Ulrikh—the very same, no less—proclaimed: “Twenty years!” And they dragged R. out at a gallop and, at a gallop, dragged in the next prisoner.
It was all like a dream. In February, 1963,1, too, got to climb those stairs, but I was courteously accompanied by a colonel who was also a Communist Party organizer. And in that room with the circular colonnade, in which, they say, the Plenary Sessions of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. meet—with an enormous horseshoelike table that had another round table inside it and seven antique chairs—seventy officials of the Military Collegium heard me out—that same Military Collegium which once sentenced Karetnikov, and R. and others and others, and so on and so forth. And I said to them: “What a remarkable day this is! Although I was first sentenced to camp and then to eternal exile, I never before saw a single judge face to face. And now I see all of you assembled here together!” (And they, rubbing their eyes open, for the first time saw a living zek.)
But it turned out that it had not been they! Yes. They said it had not been they. They assured me that those others were no longer present. Some had retired honorably on pensions. A few had been removed. (Ulrikh, the outstanding executioner of all, had been removed, it turned out, back in Stalin’s time, in 1950, for, believe it or not, leniency.) Some of them—there were only a few of these—had even been tried under Khrushchev, and, in their role as defendants, they had threatened: “Today you are trying us. Tomorrow we will try you. Watch out!” But like all the starts made under Khrushchev, this effort, too, which had been very active at first, was soon abandoned. He dropped it before it got far enough to produce an irreversible change; which meant that things were left where they had been.
On that occasion, several veterans of the bench, all speaking up at the same time, gave voice to their recollections, unwittingly providing me with material for this chapter. (Oh, if only they had undertaken to remember and to publish! But the years pass; another five have gone by; and it has not become any brighter or lighter.) They recalled how certain judges, at conferences of their judicial colleagues, took pride when they spoke from the rostrum of having succeeded in not applying Article 51 of the Criminal Code, which specifies those circumstances that extenuate guilt, and thus had succeeded in handing down sentences of twenty-five years instead of ten. And how the courts had been humiliatingly subservient to the Organs. A certain judge was trying a case. A Soviet citizen who had returned from the United States had made the slanderous statement that there were good automobile roads in America—and nothing else. That was all there was to the case. The judge ventured to send the case back for further investigation for the purpose of getting “genuine anti-Soviet materials”—in other words, so that the accused could be beaten and tortured. But his praiseworthy intention wasn’t taken into account. The angry answer came back: “You mean you don’t trust our Organs?” And, in the upshot, the judge was exiled to the post of secretary of a military tribunal on Sakhalin! (Under Khrushchev, reproof was not so severe; judges who “made mistakes” were sent—where do you think?—to work as lawyers.)[155] The prosecutor’s office was just as subservient to the Organs. When, in 1942, Ryumin’s flagrant abuses in the counterintelligence section of the Northern Fleet became known, the prosecutor’s office did not dare interfere on its own, but only reported respectfully to Abakumov that his boys were acting up. Abakumov had good reason to consider the Organs the salt of the earth! (This was the occasion when he called in Ryumin and promoted him—to his own eventual undoing.)
There just wasn’t enough time that February day, or they would have told me ten times as much as they did. But this, too, provides food for thought. If both the courts and the prosecutor’s office were simply pawns of the- Minister of State Security, then maybe there isn’t any need for a separate chapter to describe them.
They vied with each other in telling me things, and I kept looking around me in astonishment. They were people! Real people! They were smiling! They were explaining that their intentions were of the best. Well, and what if things turn full circle and it is once again up to them to try me? Maybe even in that very hall—and they were showing me the main hall.
Well, so they will convict me.
Which comes, first—the chicken or the egg? The people or the system?
For several centuries we had a proverb: “Don’t fear the law, fear the judge.”
But, in my opinion, the law has outstripped people, and people have lagged behind in cruelty. It is time to reverse the proverb: “Don’t fear the judge, fear the law.”
Abakumov’s kind of law, of course.
They stepped onto the rostrum and talked about Ivan Deniso-vich. They said happily that the book had eased their consciences (that’s what they said…). They admitted that the picture I painted was decidedly on the bright side, that every one of them knew of camps worse than that. (Ah, so they did know?) Of the seventy people seated around that horseshoe, several turned out to be knowledgeable in literature, even to be readers of Novy Mir. They were eager for reform. They spoke forcefully about our social ulcers, about our neglect of our rural areas.
And I sat there and thought: If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?
And they will burst forth. It has to happen.
Chapter 8
The Law as a Child
We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people, And it is a vexing one. It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless. It makes us an easy prey for liars.
Therefore, if they demand that we forget even the public trials, we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in our newspapers, but they didn’t drill a hole in our brains to make us remember—and so we’ve forgotten them. Only things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain. I am not even talking about young people, since they, of course, know nothing of all this, but about people who were alive at the time of those trials. Ask any middle-aged person to enumerate the highly publicized open trials. He will remember those of Bukharin and Zinoviev. And, knitting his brow, that of the Promparty too. And that’s all. There were no other public trials.
Yet in actual fact they began right after the October Revolution. In 1918, quantities of them were taking place, in many different tribunals. They were taking place before there were either laws or codes, when the judges had to be guided solely by the requirements of the revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ power. At the same time, they were regarded as blazing their own trail of bold legality. Their detailed history will someday be written by someone, and it’s not for us even to attempt to include it in our present investigation.
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