The formal charge did not include Savinkov’s phrase: “One has to be criminally insane to affirm seriously that the international proletariat will come to our aid”—because it still would come to our aid.
For attempting to influence people’s minds, the newspaper, which had been published since 1864 and had survived the most fiercely reactionary periods—those of Loris-Melikov, Pobedonostsev, Stolypin, Kasso, and all the rest—was ordered closed down forever! And Yegorov, the editor—and this is a shameful thing to have to say—was given only three months of solitary—just as though we were in Greece or some such place. (It is not so shamefully lenient, however, if one stops to think that it was only 1918! And if the old man managed to survive, he would be imprisoned again, and many more times too!)
It may seem strange to us now, but it is a fact that in those thunderous years bribes were given and taken just as tenderly as they had been from time immemorial in Old Russia and as they will be in the Soviet Union from here to eternity. Bribery was particularly rife in the judicial organs. And, though we blush to say it, in the Cheka. The official histories in their red, gold-stamped bindings are silent about this, but the old folks and eyewitnesses remember that the fate of political prisoners in the first years of the Revolution, as distinct from Stalinist times, often depended on bribes: they were accepted uninhibitedly, and prisoners were honestly released as a result. Although Krylenko picked out only a dozen cases for the five-year period his book covers, he reports two cases of bribery. Alas, even the Moscow Tribunal and the Supreme Tribunal squeezed their way through to perfection along a crooked path, muddied themselves in improprieties.
B. The Case of the Three Interrogators of the Moscow Revtribunal—April, 1918
In March, 1918, a speculator in gold bars named Beridze was arrested. His wife tried to find a way to ransom her husband, which was the accepted thing to do. Through a series of connections she succeeded in getting to one of the interrogators, who brought two others in with him. Meeting secretly, they demanded a bribe of 250,000 rubles, but, after some bargaining, they reduced it to 60,000, half in advance. The deal was to be made through the lawyer Grin. Everything would have gone off without a fuss, as hundreds of similar deals had, and the case would have gotten into neither Krylenko’s chronicle nor ours, nor even become a matter of concern to the Council of People’s Commissars, had it not been that Beridze’s wife began to get miserly, and brought Grin only 15,000 as an advance payment, instead of 30,000. But the main thing was that, in consequence of female fickleness, she changed her mind overnight, decided her lawyer wasn’t good enough for her, and went off the next morning to find another, the attorney Yakulov. It is not stated anywhere, but it was evidently Yakulov who decided to turn in the interrogators.
It is of interest that all the witnesses in .this trial, beginning with the unfortunate wife, tried to give testimony helpful to the accused and to befuddle the prosecution. (Which would have been impossible in a political trial!) Krylenko explained their conduct as the result of a narrow-minded, philistine attitude, because they felt like outsiders as far as the Revtribunal was concerned. (And might we ourselves be so audacious as to advance the philistine hypothesis that in the course of a year and a half the witnesses had already learned to be afraid of the dictatorship of the proletariat? After all, it took a lot of nerve to turn in the interrogators of the Revtribunal What would happen to you after that?)
The accuser’s line of argument is also of interest. After all, just a month earlier the defendants had been his associates, his comrades in arms, his assistants. They were people who had been inalienably dedicated to the interests of the Revolution, and one of them, Leist, was. even “a stern accuser, capable of hurling thunder and lightning at anyone who attacked the foundations.” What was he to say about them now? Where was he to look for the causes of their fall? (A bribe was not enough in itself.) And, of course, it is clear where he looked: in their pasts, in their biographies!
Declared Krylenko: “If we look closely” at this Leist, w we will find highly interesting information.” This is intriguing. Was he an inveterate adventurer? No, but he was the son of a professor at Moscow University! And not an ordinary professor, but one who had survived twenty years of reaction by his indifference to political activity! (And who, notwithstanding that reaction, had been accepted by Krylenko as a consultant.) Was it surprising, then, that the son turned out to be a double-dealer?
As for Podgaisky, he was the son of an official in the law courts… beyond doubt one of the reactionary, pogrom-organizing Black Hundreds; otherwise how could he have served the Tsar for twenty years? And the son, too, had prepared for a career in the law courts, but then the Revolution had come—and he had wormed his way into the Revtribunal. Just yesterday all this had been depicted in a very favorable light, but it had suddenly become repulsive!
More repulsive than them both was, of course, Gugel. He had been a publisher. And what intellectual food had he been offering the workers and peasants? He was “nourishing the broad masses with low-quality literature,” not Marx but, instead, books by bourgeois professors with world-famous names. (And we shall soon encounter these professors as defendants too.)
Krylenko is enraged and marvels at the kind of people who have sneaked into the tribunal. (Neither do we understand: What kind of people are the workers’ and peasants 7 tribunals composed of? Why had the proletariat entrusted the task of striking down their enemies to people of this particular kind?)
And as for Grin, the lawyer, a man with an “in” on the investigating commission, who was quite able to get anybody off scot-free, he was a typical representative of that subspecies of the human race which Marx called “leeches on the capitalist structure”—a category including, in addition, all lawyers, gendarmes, priests, and also… notaries.33
It appears that Krylenko spared no effort in demanding mercilessly severe sentences, without reference to “the individual shadings of guilt.” But some kind of lethargy, some sort of torpor, overcame the eternally vigorous tribunal, and it just barely managed to mumble six months in jail for the interrogators, and a fine for the lawyer. And only by availing himself of the authority of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “to punish without limitation,” did Krylenko, there in the Metropole, continue to hang ten-year sentences on the interrogators and five on the lawyer, plus full confiscation of his property. Krylenko thundered on about vigilance, and he almost managed, but not quite, to get the title of Tribune he so coveted.
We recognize that among the revolutionary masses at the time, as among our readers today, this unfortunate trial could not but undermine faith in the sanctity of the tribunal. And we therefore proceed with even greater timidity to the next case, which concerned an even loftier institution.
C. The Case of Kosyrev—February 15, 1919
F. M. Kosyrev and his pals Libert, Rottenberg, and Solovyev had first served on the Commission for Supply of the Eastern Front (back before Kolchak, when the enemy forces were the armies of the Constituent Assembly). It was discovered that there they had found ways to siphon into their own pockets from seventy thousand to a million rubles at a time; they rode around on fine horses and engaged in orgies with the nurses. Their Commission had acquired a house and an automobile, and their majordomo lived it up in the Yar Restaurant. (We aren’t accustomed to picturing 1918 in this light, but all this was in the testimony of the Revtribunal.)
But none of this, to be sure, was the case against them. No charge had been brought against any of them in connection with their activities on the Eastern Front; they had even been forgiven all that. But wonder of wonders! Hardly had their Commission for Supply been disbanded than all four of them, with the addition of Nazarenko, a former Siberian tramp and convict pal of Kosyrev in criminal hard labor, were invited to constitute… the Control and Auditing Collegium of the VChK—the Cheka!