And the “Military Plot” of 1919 was “liquidated by the Cheka in an extrajudicial reprisal,”[168] which “was further proof of its existence.”[169] (In this case more than one thousand people were arrested altogether,[170] and, really, how could trials have been set up for them all?)
So just try to produce a neat, orderly report on the trials of those years!
Nevertheless we can learn the important principles involved in them. For example, the supreme accuser—in other words, the Prosecutor General—informs us that the All-Russian Central Executive Committee had the right to intervene in any judicial proceeding. “VTsIK pardons and punishes, at its own discretion without any limitation whatever.”[171] For example, a six-month sentence was changed to ten years. (And, as the reader understands, it was not necessary for the entire All-Russian Central Executive Committee to assemble at a plenary meeting to this end, since its Chairman, Sverdlov, for example, could correct a sentence without leaving his office.) All of this, Krylenko explains, “shows the superiority of our system over the false theory of the separation of powers,”20 that is, the theory of the independence of the judiciary. (True, Sverdlov also said: “It is very good that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided quickly.” Especially on the phone.)
Krylenko formulated even more frankly and precisely the general tasks of the Soviet courts in his speeches before those tribunals, when the court was “at one and the same time both the creator of the law [Krylenko’s italics]… and a political weapon.”[172] (My italics.)
Creator of the law because, for four years, there were no codes. They had thrown out the Tsarist codes, and they had not composed their own. “Don’t tell me our criminal courts ought to act exclusively on the basis of existing written norms. We live in the process of Revolution.”[173] “A tribunal is not the kind of court in which fine points of jurisprudence and clever stratagems are to be restored…. We are creating a new law and new ethical norms.”[174] And also: “No matter how much is said here about the eternal law of truth, justice, etc., we know… how dearly these have cost us.”[175]
(But if your prison terms are compared with ours, maybe it didn’t cost you so dearly after all? Maybe eternal justice was somewhat more comfortable?)
The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary is that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted.[176]
And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was not that kind of court! On another occasion we would hear from him that a tribunal was not a court at alclass="underline" “A tribunal is an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies” and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolution… having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants.”[177] People are not people, but “carriers of specific ideas.”[178] “No matter what the individual qualities [of the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency.”28
In other words, you can exist only if it’s expedient for the working class. And if “this expediency should require that the avenging sword should fall on the head of the defendants, then no… verbal arguments can help.”[179] (Such as arguments by lawyers, etc.) “In our revolutionary court we are guided not by articles of the law and not by the degree of extenuating circumstances; in the tribunal we must proceed on the basis of considerations of expediency.”[180]
That was the way it was in those years: people lived and breathed and then suddenly found out that their existence was inexpedient.
And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had done that constituted the defendant’s burden, but what he might do if he were not shot now. “We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future.”31
Comrade Krylenko’s pronouncements are clear and all-inclusive. They bring alive for us that whole period of the law in sharp relief. The clarity of autumn suddenly pierces the mists of spring and reaches us. And is it perhaps unnecessary to go further? Perhaps we aren’t required to page through trial after trial. These pronouncements will be henceforth inexorably applied.
Close your eyes tight for a minute and picture a tiny courtroom—not yet gilded. Earnest members of the tribunal in simple field jackets, lean, not yet fat-faced. The accusing power—as Krylenko loved to style himself—wears an unbuttoned civilian jacket, with a glimpse of a sailor’s striped undershirt just visible at the open throat.
The supreme accuser expresses himself in this sort of language: “The question of fact is interesting to me!”; “Define concretely the aspect of the tendency!”; “We are operating on the plane of analysis of objective truth.” Sometimes, as you read, a quotation from the Latin shines out. (It is true that the same quotation turns up in case after case, but, after several years, a different one does appear.) And no wonder—he did, after all, complete the course in two faculties despite all his revolutionary running around. What attracts one to him are his frank opinions about the defendants: “Professional scoundrels!” And he isn’t hypocritical in the least. If he didn’t like the defendant’s smile, he didn’t hesitate to blurt out a threat, even before any sentence was imposed. “And as for you and your smile, Citizeness Ivanova, we’ll make you pay for it, and we’ll find a way to fix it so that you never laugh again!”32
So, shall we begin?
A. The Case of “Russkiye Vedomosti”
In this case, one of the earliest, free speech was on trial. On March 24, 1918, this famous “professorial” newspaper published an article by Savinkov entitled “En Route.” They would have much preferred to arrest Savinkov himself, but he really was en route, damn it, and where was he to be found? So instead they closed down the paper and brought the elderly editor, P. V. Yegorov, to court as a defendant, insisting that he explain how he had dared to publish the article. After all, the New Era was four months old, and it was time to get used to it!
Yegorov naively defended himself by saying that the article had been written by a “leading political figure whose opinion was of general interest whether or not the editors shared it.” Furthermore, he saw nothing slanderous in Savinkov’s having said: “Let us not forget that Lenin, Natanson, and Co. arrived in Russia via Berlin; i.e., that the German authorities helped them return to the homeland”—because that in actual fact was what had happened; Kaiser Wilhelm’s embattled Germany had helped Comrade Lenin to return.
Krylenko retorted that he would not conduct a prosecution for slander (why not?), and that the newspaper was on trial for attempting to influence people’s minds! (And how could any newspaper dare have such a purpose!?)