She had sure rubbed the salt in…. She knew too much….
And Kosyrev had to be sacrificed too. They shot him. It was for the health of the others.
Can it really be that someday we will read the old Lubyanka archives? No, they will burn them. They already have.
As the reader can see for himself, this was a very unimportant case. We didn’t have to dwell on it. But here is a different one.
D. The Case of the “Churchmen”—January 11-16, 1920
This case, in Krylenko’s opinion, is going to have a “suitable place in the annals of the Russian Revolution.” Right there in the annals, indeed! It took one day to wring Kosyrev’s neck, but in this case they dragged things out for five whole days.
The principal defendants were: A. D. Samarin (a famous man in Russia, the former chief procurator of the Synod; a man who had tried to liberate the church from the Tsar’s yoke, an enemy of Rasputin whom Rasputin had forced out of office);[190] Kuznetsov, Professor of Church Law at Moscow University; the Moscow archpriests Uspensky and Tsvetkov. (The accuser himself had this to say about Tsvetkov: “An important public figure, perhaps the best that the clergy could produce, a philanthropist.”)
Their guilt lay in creating the “Moscow Council of United Parishes,” which had in turn recruited, from among believers forty to eighty years old, a voluntary guard for the Patriarch (unarmed, of course), which had set up permanent day and night watches in his residence, who were charged with the responsibility, in the event of danger from the authorities to the Patriarch, of assembling the people by ringing the church alarm bells and by telephone, so that a whole crowd might follow wherever the Patriarch might be taken and beg—and there’s your counterrevolution for you!—the Council of People’s Commissars to release him!
What an ancient Russian—Holy Russian—scheme! To assemble the people by ringing the alarm bells… and proceed in a crowd with a petition!
And the accuser was astonished. What danger threatened the Patriarch? Why had plans been made to defend him?
Well, of course, it was really no more than the fact that the Cheka had for two years been conducting extrajudicial reprisals against undesirables, the fact that only a short while before four Red Army men in Kiev had killed the Metropolitan, the fact that the Patriarch’s “case had already been worked up and completed, and all that remained was to bring it before the Rev-tribunal,” and “it was only out of concern for the broad masses of workers and peasants, still under the influence of clerical propaganda, that we have left these, our class enemies, alone for the time being.”[191] How could Orthodox believers possibly be alarmed on the Patriarch’s account? During those two years Patriarch Tikhon had refused to keep silent. He had sent messages to the People’s Commissars, to the clergy, and to his flock. His messages were not accepted by the printers but were copied on typewriters (the first samizdat). They exposed the annihilation of the innocents, the ruin of the country. How, therefore, could anyone really be concerned for the Patriarch’s life?
A second charge was brought against the defendants. Throughout the country, a census and requisition of church property was taking place (this was in addition to the closing of monasteries and the expropriation of church lands and properties; in question here were liturgical vessels, cups, and candelabra). And the Council of Parishes had disseminated an appeal to believers to resist the requisition, sounding the alarm on the church bells. (And that was natural, after all! That, after all, was how they had defended the churches against the Tatars too!)
And the third charge against them was their incessant, impudent dispatching of petitions to the Council of People’s Commissars for relief from the desecration of the churches by local authorities, from crude blasphemy and violations of the law which guaranteed freedom of conscience. Even though no action was taken on these petitions (according to the testimony of Bonch-Bruyevich, administrative officer of the Council of People’s Commissars), they had discredited the local authorities.
Taking into consideration all the violations committed by these defendants, what punishment could the accuser possibly demand for these awful crimes? Will not the reader’s revolutionary conscience prompt the answer? To be shot, of course. And that is just what Krylenko did demand—for Samarin and Kuznetsov.
But while they were fussing around with these damned legal formalities, and listening to too many long speeches from too many bourgeois lawyers (speeches which “for technical reasons” we will not cite here), it turned out that capital punishment had been… abolished! What a fix! It just couldn’t be! What had happened? It developed that Dzerzhinsky had issued this order to the Cheka (the Cheka, without capital punishment?). But had it been extended to the tribunals by the Council of People’s Commissars? Not yet. Krylenko cheered up. And he continued to demand execution by shooting, on the following grounds:
“Even if we suppose that the consolidation of the Republic has removed the immediacy of threat from such persons, it seems nonetheless indubitable that in this period of creative effort… a purge… of the old turncoat leaders… is required by revolutionary necessity.” And further: “Soviet power is proud of the decree of the Cheka abolishing the death penalty.” But this “still does not force us to conclude that the question of the abolition of capital punishment has been decided once and for all… for the entire period of Soviet rule.” 50
That was quite prophetic! Capital punishment would return—and very soon too! After all, what a long line still remained to be rubbed out! (Yes, including Krylenko too, and many of his class brothers as well.)
And, indeed, the tribunal was submissive and sentenced Samarin and Kuznetsov to be shot, but they did manage to tack on a recommendation for clemency: to be imprisoned in a concentration camp until the final victory over world imperialism! (They would still be sitting there today!) And as for “the best that the clergy could produce”—his sentence was fifteen years, commuted to five.
Other defendants as well were dragged into this trial in order to add at least a little substance to the charges. Among them were some monks and teachers of Zvenigorod, involved in the Zvenigorod affair in the summer of 1918, but for some reason not brought to trial for a year and a half (or they might have been, but were now being tried again, since it was expedient).
That summer some Soviet officials had called on Father Superior Ion[192] at the Zvenigorod monastery and ordered him (“Step lively there!”) to turn over to them the holy relics of St. Sawa. The officials not only smoked inside the church and evidently behind the altar screen as well, and, of course, refused to take off their caps, but one of them took Sawa’s skull in his hands and began to spit into it, to demonstrate that its sanctity was an illusion. And there were further acts of desecration. This led to the alarm bell being sounded, a popular uprising, and the killing of one or two of the officials. (The others denied having committed any acts of desecration, including the spitting incident, and Krylenko accepted their denials.)[193] Were these officials the ones on trial now? No, the monks.
192
51. Firguf, a former guards officer of the Tsar’s household cavalry, who had “suddenly undergone a spiritual conversion, given all his goods to the poor, and entered a monastery, but I do not in fact know whether he actually did distribute his goods to the poor.” Yes, and if one admits the possibility of spiritual conversion, what then remains of class theory?
193
52. But which of us doesn’t remember similar scenes? My first memory is of an event that took place when I was, probably, three or four: The peaked-heads (as they called the Chekists in their high-peaked Budenny caps) invaded a Kislovodsk church, sliced through the dumbstruck crowd of worshipers, and, in their pointed caps, went straight through the altar screen to the altar and stopped the service.