However, we cannot do without a brief review. It is our duty, anyway, to probe some of the charred ruins which go all the way back to that gentle, misty, rose-colored dawn.
In those dynamic years, the sabers of war were not rusting in their scabbards, nor did the executioners’ revolvers have time to grow cold in their holsters. Only later on did the custom develop of hiding executions in cellars under cover of night and of shooting the victims in the back of the head. In 1918, the famous Ryazan Chekist Stelmakh had those sentenced to death shot in the courtyard, during the day, so that prisoners awaiting execution could watch from the prison windows.
There was an official term current then: extrajudicial reprisal… not because there weren’t any courts at the time, but because there was the Cheka.[156] Because it was more efficient. Certainly, there were courts, and they tried and convicted and executed people, but we need to remember that, parallel to them and independently of them, extrajudicial reprisal went on at the same time. How can one depict its scale? M. Latsis, in his popular review of the Cheka’s activity,[157] gives us material for only a year and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces of Central Russia (“The figures presented here are far from complete,”[158] in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389 persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine);[159] counterrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic figure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization throughout our history and also the general isolation of individuals in those years and the general psychological depression); the total of those arrested—87,0005 (and this figure smells of understatement).
What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In 1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays entitled Against Capital Punishment,[160] in which are listed by name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to 1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that there were some additional victims, whose names remain unknown, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly not so incomplete as Latsis’ materials compiled during the Civil War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an additional 270, who were sentenced in absentia and never caught (for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That leaves 894, a figure covering eighty years, which is not even close to Latsis’ total for only one and a half years, and not including all the provinces of Russia either. True, the editors of the collection cite another presumed statistic of 1,310 for those sentenced to death (although perhaps not executed) in 1906 alone, and a total of 3,419 for 1826 through 1906. But this, mind you, was right in the midst of the notorious Stolypin reaction, a period for which an additional figure is available: 950 executions over a period of six months.7 (In fact, the Stolypin military field tribunals were in existence for six months all told.) It sounds awful, and yet it does not make much of an impression on our hardened nerves: even if we multiply by three this figure of 950 for six months, in order to compare it with the Latsis figure for eighteen months in the postrevolutionary period, we still come up with the fact that the terror after the Revolution was at least three times more intense than Stolypin’s. And that was for just twenty provinces and excluded courts and tribunals.
And from November, 1917, on, the courts acted on their own. Despite all the difficulties at the time, Guiding Principles of the Criminal Law of the R.S.F.S.R. were issued for their use in 1919. (We have not read this work, could not obtain it, and know only that it included “imprisonment for an indefinite term”—in other words, pending a special order.)
The courts were of three kinds: the people’s courts, the circuit courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the Revtribunals.
The people’s courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and non-political criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people’s court could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding two years. Up to July, 1918, the heritage of the Left SR’s still endured in our judicial proceedings. Only by special intervention of the government and only individually were impermissibly lenient sentences raised to twenty years.[161] From July, 1918, on, the people’s courts were given the right to hand down sentences of up to five years. And in 1922, when all threats of war had died down, the people’s courts got the right to impose sentences of up to ten years and lost the right to sentence anyone to less than six months.
From the beginning, the circuit courts and the Revtribunals had the power to impose the death sentence, but they lost it for a brief period: the circuit courts in 1920, and the Revtribunals in 1921. There were many tiny ups and downs in this period which only a historian pursuing all the details of those years would be able to trace.
Perhaps that historian will seek out the documents and unroll for us the scroll of tribunal sentences and also the statistics. (Though probably not. Whatever time and events failed to destroy was destroyed by persons interested in having such material disappear.) We know only that the Revtribunals were not asleep. They were handing down sentences right and left. And we know, too, that every time a city was captured during the Civil War the event was marked not only by gunsmoke in the courtyards of the Cheka, but also by sleepless sessions of the tribunal. And you did not have to be a White officer, a senator, a landowner, a monk, a Cadet, an SR, or an Anarchist in order to get your bullet. Soft white uncallused hands alone were sufficient in those years. But one can also hazard the guess that in Izhevsk or Votkinsk, Yaroslavl or Murom, Kozlov or Tambov, the uprisings were very costly as well to those who had callused workers’ hands. And if those scrolls—of both the extrajudicial executions and those by tribunal—are unrolled for us someday, the most surprising thing will be the number of ordinary peasants we find on them. Because there was no end to the number of peasant uprisings and revolts from 1918 to 1921, even though they did not adorn the colored pages of the official History of the Civil War, and even though no one photographed them, and no one filmed motion pictures of those furious crowds attacking machine guns with clubs, pitchforks, and axes and, later, lined up for execution with their arms tied behind their backs—ten for one! The revolt in Sapozhok is remembered only in Sapozhok; the one in Pitelino only in Pitelino. We learn from Latsis the number of peasant rebellions that were suppressed during that same year and a half in twenty provinces—344.[162] (From 1918 on, peasant revolts were already being called “kulak” revolts, for how could the peasants revolt against the workers’ and peasants’ power! But how then could one explain that in every instance it was not just three peasant huts that revolted but the whole village? Why did the masses of poor peasants not kill the insurgent “kulaks” with those same pitchforks and axes, instead of marching with them against the machine guns? Latsis claims: “The kulaks compelled the rest of the peasants to take part in these revolts by promises, slander, and threats.”[163] But what could have been more laden with promises than the slogans of the Committees of the Poor? And what could have been more loaded with threats than the machine guns of the Special Purpose Detachments, the CHON?
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1. This fledgling whose beak had not yet hardened was warmed and encouraged by Trotsky: “Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this.” And Zinoviev rejoiced too, not yet foreseeing his own end: “The letters GPU, like the letters VChK, are the most popular in the world.”
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6. M. N. Gernet (editor), Protiv Smertnoi Kazni (Against Capital Punishment), second edition, 1907, pp. 385-423.