And how many wholly random people, completely random, whose destruction inevitably accounts for half the casualties of every real, shooting revolution, were caught between those millstones?
Here is an eyewitness description of a session of the Ryazan Revtribunal which met in 1919 to hear the case of the Tolstoyan I. Ye-v. With the proclamation of universal and compulsory conscription into the Red Army (just one year after the slogans: “Down with the war!”; “Stick your bayonets in the ground!”; “Go home!”), “54,697 deserters were caught and sent to the front” by September, 1919, in Ryazan Province alone.11 (And how many others were shot on the spot as examples?) Ye-v was not a deserter at all but a man who simply and openly refused to enter military service because of his religious convictions. He was con- scripted by main force, but in the barracks he refused to take up arms or undergo training. The enraged Political Commissar of the unit turned him over to the Cheka, saying: “He does not recognize the Soviet government.” There was an interrogation. Three Chekists sat behind the desk, each with a Naguan revolver in front of him. “We have seen heroes like you before. You’ll be on your knees to us in a minute! Either agree to fight immediately, or we’ll shoot you!” But Ye v was firm. He couldn’t fight.
He was a believer in free Christianity. And his case was sent to the Revtribunal.
It was an open session, with a hundred spectators in the hall. There was a polite elderly defense lawyer. The learned “accuser”—the term “prosecutor” was forbidden until 1922—was Nikolsky, another old jurist. One of the members of the Revtribunal—a juror—tried to elicit the views of the accused. (How can you, a representative of the working people, share the opinions of the aristocrat Count Tolstoi?) But the presiding judge interrupted the questioning and refused to permit it to continue. There was a quarrel.
Juror: “You do not want to kill people, and you try to persuade others to refrain from killing. But the Whites began the war, and you are preventing us from defending ourselves. We will send you to Kolchak, and you can preach your nonresistance there!”
Ye-v: “I will go wherever you send me.”
Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”
Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!”
Accuser: “I insist that you include my demand in the record.”
Defense Attorney: “I support the accuser. The case should be heard in an ordinary court.”
Presiding Judge: “There’s an old fool for you! Where did they manage to find him?”
Defense Attorney: “I have been a practicing lawyer for forty years and this is the first time I have heard such an insult. Enter it in the record.”
Presiding Judge (laughing): “We’ll enter it, we’ll enter it!” Laughter in the hall. The court exits in order to confer. The sounds of a noisy argument come from the conference room. They return with the sentence: to be shot.
Loud indignation in the hall.
Accuser: “I protest against the sentence and will complain to the Commissariat of Justice!”
Defense Lawyer: “I join my voice to that of the accuser.”
Presiding Judge: “Clear the hall!”
The convoy came and led Ye-v to jail, saying to him: “If everyone was like you, brother, how good it would be! There would be no war, and no Whites and no Reds!” They went back to their barracks and called a Red Army meeting. It condemned the sentence and sent a protest to Moscow.
In daily expectation of death, Ye-v waited for thirty-seven days, while, from the prison window, he watched executions taking place. They commuted his sentence to fifteen years of strict detention.
This is an instructive example. Although “revolutionary legality” won a partial victory, how enormous an effort it required on the part of the presiding judge! How much disorganization, lack of discipline, lack of political consciousness there still was! The prosecution stood firmly with the defense. The convoy guards stuck their noses into something that wasn’t their business in order to send off a protest. Whew, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the new kind of court were not having things easy by any means! Of course, not all the sessions were anything like so turbulent, but this wasn’t the only one of its kind. How many years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!
To pursue this enterprise of many years’ duration is the rewarding task of the historian. As for us—how are we to make our way through that rosy mist? Whom are we to ask about it? Those who were shot aren’t talking, and neither are those who have been scattered to the four winds. Even if the defendants, and the lawyers, and the guards, and the spectators have survived, no one will allow us to seek them out.
Evidently, the only help we will get is from the prosecution.
In this connection, I was given by well-wishers an intact copy of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by that fierce revolutionary, the first People’s Commissar of Military Affairs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the Commander in Chief, and later the organizer of the Department of Exceptional Courts of the People’s Commissariat of Justice—where the personal rank of tribune was being readied for him, until Lenin vetoed the title[164]—the glorious accuser in the greatest trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people, N. V. Krylenko.[165] And if, despite everything, we want to attempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first post-revolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and everything that happened in the provinces too.
Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those Revtribunal members as well.
However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of technical reasons “it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic records”[166] It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals, which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the demands of the accuser-prosecutor.
Krylenko claims that the archives of the Moscow Revtribunal and the Supreme Revtribunal turned out (by 1922) to be “far from orderly…. In a whole series of cases the stenographic records… were so incomprehensible that it was necessary either to cross out entire pages or else to try to restore the text from memory”! And a “series of the biggest trials”—including the trial which followed the revolt of the Left SR’s, and the case of Admiral Shchastny—“were conducted entirely without stenographic records.”[167]
This is strange. The condemnation of the Left SR’s was not a trivial matter. It was, after the February and October revolutions, the third turning point in our history, signaling the transition to a one-party system in the state. Not a few of them were shot. And no stenographic record was made.
165
13. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922). Edition 7,000 copies. Prosecution speeches in the most important trials held before the Moscow and the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunals.