Here’s what this Collegium was: it had plenipotentiary powers to verify the legality of the actions of all the remaining organs of the Cheka, the right to demand and review any case at any stage of its processing, and to reverse the decisions of all the remaining organs of the VChK, excepting only the Presidium of the Cheka!”34 This was no small thing. This Collegium was second-in-command in the Cheka after the Presidium itself—it ranked immediately below Dzerzhinsky-Uritsky-Peters-Latsis-Menzhinsky-Yagoda!
The way of life of this comradely group remained just what it had been before. They didn’t get swelled heads; they didn’t get carried away. With certain individuals named Maximych, Lenka, Rafailsky, and Mariupolsky, “who had no connection at all with the Communist Party,” they set up—in private apartments and in the Hotel Savoy—“lavish establishments where card games with table stakes as high as a thousand rubles a throw were the order of the day, along with heavy drinking and women.” Kosyrev acquired a rich establishment of his own (costing 70,000 rubles) and, in fact, did not even draw the line at hauling off silver spoons and goblets, and even ordinary glassware, from the Cheka. (And how did all these objects get to the Cheka?) “And this was where his attention was concentrated, rather than in the direction of ideas and ideology, and this was what he took from the revolutionary movement.” (In the very act of repudiating the bribes he had accepted, this leading Chekist, without blinking, volunteered the lie that he possessed 200,000 rubles from an inheritance in a Chicago bank! Evidently, as far as he was concerned, there was no conflict between such a circumstance and world revolution!)
Now how did he propose to make proper use of his superhuman right to arrest anyone at all and release anyone at all? Clearly, one had to find a fish with golden roe—and in 1918 there were not a few such fish in the nets. (After all, the Revolution had been carried out too quickly; they hadn’t found everything—how many precious stones, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings the bourgeois ladies had managed to hide away!) Then one had to make contact with the relatives of those who had been arrested through some reliable middleman.
Such characters also pass before us at the trial. There was Uspenskaya, a woman of twenty-two. She had graduated from the St. Petersburg Gymnasium, but hadn’t gone on to the university—the Soviets had come to power—and so, in the spring of 1918, Uspenskaya appeared at the Cheka to offer her services as an informer. She qualified on the basis of her appearance, and they accepted her.
Krylenko has this to say about informing, which in those days had a different labeclass="underline" “For ourselves, we see nothing shameful in it, we consider this to be our duty… the work itself is not disgraceful; once a person admits that this work is necessary in the interests of the Revolution, then he must do it.”[181] But, alas, it turned out that Uspenskaya had no political credo! That’s what was awful. She declared: “I agreed in order to be paid a fixed percentage” on the cases which were turned up, and, beyond that, “to split 50-50” with someone else… whom the court protected and instructed her not to identify. Krylenko put it in his own words: “Uspenskaya was not a staff member of the Cheka but worked at piece rates.”36 And, incidentally, the accuser, understanding her in a very human way, explains that she had grown used to having plenty of money, and that her insignificant salary of 500 rubles from the Supreme Council of the Economy was nothing at all, considering that one exercise in extortion—for example, helping a merchant get the seal removed from his store—would net her 5,000 rubles, and another—from Meshcherskaya-Grevs, wife of a prisoner—would bring in 17,000. For that matter, Uspenskaya served only briefly as a mere stool pigeon. Thanks to the help of certain big Chekists, in a few months she became a member of the Communist Party and an interrogator.
However, we don’t seem to be getting to the essence of the case. Uspenskaya had arranged a meeting between this Meshcherskaya-Grevs and a certain Godelyuk, a bosom pal of Kosyrev, in order to reach an agreement on her husband’s ransom. (They had initially demanded 600,000 rubles!) But unfortunately, by some still unexplained means, the arrangements for that secret meeting became known to the same attorney, Yakulov, who had already done in the three bribe-taking interrogators and who, evidently, felt a class hatred for the whole proletarian system of judicial and extrajudicial processing. Yakulov denounced them to the Moscow Revtribunal,[182] and the presiding judge of the tribunal, recalling perhaps the wrath of the Council of People’s Commissars in connection with the three interrogators, also blundered in terms of class premises. Instead of simply warning Comrade Dzerzhinsky and working it all out in the family, he hid a stenographer behind the curtain. And the stenographer took down all Godelyuk’s references to Kosyrev, and to Solovyev and to other commissars, and all his stories about who in the Cheka takes how many thousands. Then, as per the stenographic record, Godelyuk received an advance payment of 12,000 rubles, and Meshcherskaya-Grevs was given a pass to enter the Cheka that had already been filled out by the Control and Auditing Collegium, by Libert and Rottenberg. (The bargaining was to continue there, inside the Cheka.) Then and there Godelyuk was caught! In his confusion, he gave testimony against them! (And Meshcherskaya-Grevs had already gotten to the Control and Auditing Collegium, and they had already ordered her husband’s case transferred there for verification.)
But just a moment! After all, an expose like this sullies the heavenly blue uniforms of the Cheka! Was the presiding judge of the Moscow Revtribunal in his right mind? Was he really tending to his own business?
But it turns out that that was the nature of the moment—a moment totally hidden from us in the folds of our majestic history! It seems that the Cheka’s first year of work had produced a somewhat repellent impression even on the Party of the proletariat, which still hadn’t gotten used to it. Only its first year had passed; the Cheka had taken only the first step on its glorious path; and already, as Krylenko writes, although not very clearly, a “dispute” had arisen “between the court and its functions and the extrajudicial functions of the Cheka… a dispute which, at the time, split the Party and the workers’ districts into two camps.”[183] And that is how the Kosyrev case could come up—whereas everything had gone smoothly before—and reach all the way up to the topmost level of the whole state apparatus.
The Cheka had to be saved! Help! Save the Cheka! Solovyev asked the tribunal to allow him inside the Taganka Prison to visit Godelyuk (who, alas, was not in the Lubyanka) so as to chat with him. The tribunal declined the request. Then Solovyev managed to penetrate into Godelyuk’s cell without the help of any tribunal, and—what a coincidence!—at that very point Godelyuk became seriously ill. (“One can hardly speak of evil intentions on Solovyev’s part,” Krylenko bows and scrapes.) Feeling the approach of death, Godelyuk shakily repented having slandered the Cheka and asked for a sheet of paper on which to write his recantation: it was all untrue; he had slandered Kosyrev and the other commissars of the Cheka, and everything the stenographer had taken down behind the curtain was also untrue![184]
“And who filled out the passes for Meshcherskaya-Grevs?” Krylenko insisted. They hadn’t materialized out of thin air, certainly? No, the chief accuser “does not wish to say that Solovyev was an accessory in this case, because… because there is insufficient evidence,” but he advances the hypothesis that “citizens still at liberty who were in danger of being caught with their hands in the till” might have sent Solovyev to the Taganka jail.
182
37. In order to temper the reader’s indignation against this leechlike snake, Yakulov, we should point out that by the time of Kosyrev’s trial he had already been arrested and was in custody. They had found a case to take care of him. He was brought in to testify accompanied by convoy, and we are certainly entitled to hope that he was shot soon afterward. (Today we are surprised: How did things reach such a pitch of illegality? Why did no one mount an offensive against it?)
184
39. Oh, how many themes we have here! Oh, where is Shakespeare? Solovyev passes through the walls, flickering shadows in the cell, Godelyuk recants with failing hand. And all we hear about the years of the Revolution in our plays and our films is the street singing of “Hostile Whirlwinds.”