This was the perfect time to question Libert and Rottenberg, and they were subpoenaed, but they didn’t appear! Just like that! They didn’t show up. They declined to. All right, in that case question Meshcherskaya-Grevs! And—can you imagine it?—this broken-down aristocrat, too, was so brazen as not to appear before the Revtribunal! And there was no way to force her to! Godelyuk had recanted—and was dying. Kosyrev refused to admit anything! Solovyev was not guilty of anything! So there was no one to question.
What witnesses, on the other hand, did indeed appear before the tribunal, and of their own free will! The Deputy Chief of the Cheka, Comrade Peters. And even Feliks Edmundovich Dzer-zhinsky himself. He arrived in a state of alarm. His long, burning zealot’s face confronted the tribunal—whose members sat with sinking hearts—and he testified passionately in defense of the totally innocent Kosyrev and his high moral, revolutionary, and professional qualities. This testimony, alas, has not been preserved for us, but Krylenko refers to it this way: “Solovyev and Dzerzhinsky portrayed Kosyrev’s wonderful qualites.”[185] (Alas, you careless shavetail, you! In twenty years’ time, in the Lubyanka, they are going to remind you of that trial!) It is easy to guess what Dzerzhinsky could have said: that Kosyrev was an iron Chekist, merciless to their enemies; that he was a good comrade. A hot heart, a cool head, clean hands.
And from the garbage heap of slander, the bronze knight Kosyrev rises before our eyes. Furthermore, his whole biography testifies to his remarkable will. Before the Revolution he was convicted several times—most often for murder. In the city of Kostroma, he was convicted of worming his way by deception into the house of an old woman named Smirnova and strangling her with his own hands; then of an attempt to kill his own father; and then of killing a comrade in order to use his passport. The rest of Kosyrev’s convictions were for swindling, and in all he spent many years at hard labor. (One could understand his desire for a luxurious life.) And he had only been freed by the Tsarist amnesties.
At that point, the stern and righteous voices of the major Chekists interrupted the chief accuser; they pointed out to him that those courts which had convicted Kosyrev were courts of the bourgeoisie and landowners and did not merit being noticed in our new society. But what happened? The shavetail, going overboard, poured forth from the chief accuser’s rostrum a tirade so ideologically faulty that in our exposition of this harmonious series of cases tried by the tribunals, citing it is to strike a discordant note.
“If there was anything good in the old Tsarist court system, it was only trial by jury…. One could always have confidence in the jurors’ decisions and a minimum of judicial error was to be found in them.”[186]
It was all the more vexing to hear this sort of thing from Comrade Krylenko because just three months before, at the trial of the provocateur R. Malinovsky, a former favorite of the Communist Party leadership, who, notwithstanding his four criminal convictions in the past, had been co-opted into the Central Committee by the leadership and appointed to the Duma, the accusing power had taken an impeccable class stand.
“Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all…. We know of many examples of persons in our ranks branded by such facts in the past, but we have never drawn the conclusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our milieu. A person who knows our principles cannot fear that the existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolutionaries.”42
That is how Comrade Krylenko could speak when in a Party vein. But in this other case, as a result of his mistaken judgment, the image of the knight in shining armor, Kosyrev, was being bespattered. And it created a situation in the tribunal wherein Comrade Dzerzhinsky was forced to say: “For just one second [Just one second!] the thought crossed my mind that citizen Kosyrev might be falling victim to the political passions which in recent times have blazed up around the Extraordinary Commission.”[187]
And Krylenko suddenly took thought: “I do not wish, and I never have wished, that the present trial should turn into a trial of the Cheka rather than a trial of Kosyrev and Uspenskaya. Not only am I unable to desire such an outcome: I am obliged to fight against it with all available means!” And he went on: “The most responsible, honest, and self-controlled comrades were put at the head of the Extraordinary Commission, and they took on themselves the difficult task of striking down the enemy, even though this involved the risk of error…. For this the Revolution is obliged to say thank you…. I underline this aspect so that… no one can ever say to me later: ‘He turned out to be an instrument of political treason!’”[188] (But that’s what they will say!)
What a razor edge the supreme accuser was walking! But he evidently had certain contacts, going back to his days in the underground, through which he learned how things were going to move on the morrow. This is conspicuous in several trials, and came out here too. At the beginning of 1919, there were certain trends toward saying: “It is enough! It is time to bridle the Cheka!” And this moment was “beautifully caught in Bukharin’s essay, in which he said that revolutionary legality must give way to legalized revolutionality.”[189]
Wherever you look you see dialectics! And Krylenko burst out: “The Revtribunal is being called on to replace the Extraordinary Commission.” (To replace???) Meanwhile, it “must be… no less fierce in implementing the system of terror, intimidation, and threat than was the Extraordinary Commission—the Cheka.”46
Than it was? The past tense? Has he already buried it? Come now, you are going to replace it, and where are the Chekists supposed to go? Ominous days! That was reason enough to hurry to the tribunal, in a greatcoat down to one’s heels, to testify as a witness.
But perhaps your sources of information, Comrade Krylenko, are false?
Yes, the heavens darkened over the Lubyanka in those days. And this whole book might have been very different. But I suppose that what happened was that iron Feliks Dzerzhinsky went to see Vladimir Dyich Lenin, and talked it over and explained. And the skies cleared. And although two days later, on February 17, 1919, the Cheka was deprived of its judicial rights by special decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee—it was “not for long”.47
Our day in court was further complicated by the fact that the objectionable Uspenskaya behaved abominably. From the defendants’ bench she “threw mud at” leading Chekists who had not previously been touched by the trial, including Comrade Peters! (She turned out to have used his pure name in her blackmailing operations; she used to sit right in his office, without any ceremony, during his conversations with other intelligence agents.) Now she hinted at some dark prerevolutionary past of his in Riga. That’s the kind of snake she had turned into in eight months, despite the fact that she had been with Chekists during those eight months! What was to be done with such a woman? Here Krylenko’s position jibed completely with that of the Chekists: “Until a firm regime has been established, and we are a long way from, that being the case [Are we really???]… in the interests of the defense of the Revolution… there is not and cannot be any sentence for citizeness Uspenskaya other than her annihilation.” He did not say “to be shot”—what he said was “annihilation”! But after all, Citizen Krylenko, she’s just a young girl! Come on now, give her a “tenner,” or maybe a “twenty-five,” and maybe the system will be firmly established by then? How about it? But alas: “In the interests of society and of the Revolution there is no other answer, nor can there be one—and the question cannot be put any other way. In the given case, detention isn’t going to bear any fruit!”