We beg the reader, throughout, to keep in mind: from 1918 on, our judicial custom determined that every Moscow trial, except, of course, the unjust trial of the Chekists, was by no means an isolated trial of an accidental concatenation of circumstances which had converged by accident; it was a landmark of judicial policy; it was a display-window model whose specifications determined what product was good for the provinces too; it was a standard; it was like that one-and-only model solution up front in the arithmetic book for the schoolchildren to follow for themselves.
Thus, when we say, “the trial of the churchmen,” this must be understood in the multiple plural… “many trials.” And, in fact, the supreme accuser himself willingly explains: “Such trials have rolled along through almost all the tribunals of the Republic.” (What language!) They had taken place not long before in the tribunals in North Dvina, Tver, and Ryazan; in Saratov, Kazan, Ufa, Solvychegodsk, and Tsarevokokshaisk, trials were held of the clergy, the choirs, and the active members of the congregation—representatives of the ungrateful “Orthodox church, liberated by the October Revolution.”[194]
The reader will be aware of a conflict here: why did many of these trials occur earlier than the Moscow model? This is simply a shortcoming of our exposition. The judicial and the extrajudicial persecution of the liberated church had begun well back in 1918, and, judging by the Zvenigorod affair, it had already reached a peak of intensity by that summer. In October, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon had protested in a message to the Council of People’s Commissars that there was no freedom to preach in the churches and that “many courageous priests have already paid for their preaching with the blood of martyrdom…. You have laid your hands on church property collected by generations of believers, and you have not hesitated to violate their posthumous intent.” (The People’s Commissars did not, of course, read the message, but the members of their administrative staff must have had a good laugh: Now they’ve really got something to reproach us with—posthumous intent! We sh-t on your ancestors! We are only interested in descendants.) “They are executing bishops, priests, monks, and nuns who are guilty of nothing, on the basis of indiscriminate charges of indefinite and vaguely counterrevolutionary offenses.” True, with the approach of Denikin and Kolchak, this was stopped, so as to make it easier for Orthodox believers to defend the Revolution. But hardly had the Civil War begun to die down than they took up their cudgels against the church again, and the cases started rolling through the tribunals once more. In 1920 they struck at the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery and went straight to the holy relics of that chauvinist Sergius of Radonezh, and hauled them off to a Moscow museum.[195]
The People’s Commissariat of Justice issued a directive, dated August 25, 1920, for the liquidation of relics of all kinds, since they were a significant obstacle to the resplendent movement toward a new, just society.
Pursuing further Krylenko’s own selection of cases, let us also examine the case tried in the Verkhtrib—in other words, the Supreme Tribunal. (How affectionately they abbreviated words within their intimate circle, but how they roared out for us little insects: “Rise! The court is in session!”)
E. The Case of the “Tactical Center”—August 16-20, 1920
In this case there were twenty-eight defendants present, plus additional defendants who were being tried in absentia because they weren’t around.
At the very beginning of his impassioned speech, in a voice not yet grown hoarse and in phrases illumined by class analysis, the supreme accuser informs us that in addition to the landowners and the capitalists “there existed and there continues to exist one additional social stratum, the social characteristics of which have long since been under consideration by the representatives of revolutionary socialism. [In other words: to be or not to be?] This stratum is the so-called ‘intelligentsia.’ In this trial, we shall be concerned with the judgment of history on the activity of the Russian intelligentsia”[196] and with the verdict of the Revolution on it.
The narrow limits of our investigation prevent our comprehending exactly the particular manner in which the representatives of revolutionary socialism were taking under consideration the fate of the so-called intelligentsia and what specifically they were planning for it. However, we take comfort in the fact that these materials have been published, that they are accessible to everyone, and that they can be assembled in any required detail. Therefore, solely to understand the over-all atmosphere of the Republic, we shall recall the opinion of the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in the years when all these tribunal sessions were going on.
In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919—which we have already cited—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky’s attempts to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, commenting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia of those years (the “close-to-the-Cadets intelligentsia”), he wrote: “In actual fact they are not [the nation’s] brains, but shit.”[197] On another occasion he said to Gorky: “If we break too many pots, it will be its [the intelligentsia’s] fault.”[198] If the intelligentsia wants justice, why doesn’t it come over to us? “I’ve gotten one bullet from the intelligentsia myself.”[199] (In other words, from Kaplan.)
On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; “pious”; “the slovenliness so customary among ‘educated’ people”;59 he believed the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intelligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers?)
This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intelligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the publicists and the newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thoughtlessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and their hopeless lagging behind the times.
And this was just! The voice of the accusing power echoed and re-echoed beneath the vaults of the Verkhtrib, returning us to the defendants’ bench.
“This social stratum… has, during recent years, undergone the trial of universal re-evaluation.” Yes, yes, re-evaluation, as was so often said at the time. And how did that re-evaluation occur? Here’s how: “The Russian intelligentsia which entered the crucible of the Revolution with slogans of power for the people [so, it had something to it after all!] emerged from it an ally of the black [not even White!] generals, and a hired [!] and obedient agent of European imperialism. The intelligentsia trampled on its own banners [as in the army, yes?] and 1 covered them with mud.”[200]
How, indeed, can we not, cry out our hearts in repentance? How can we not lacerate our chests with our fingernails?
And the only reason why “there is no weed to deal out the death blow to its individual representatives” is that “this social group has outlived its time.”[201]
195
54. The Patriarch cited Klyuchevsky: “The gates of the monastery of the Saint will shut and the ikon lamps will be extinguished over his sepulcher only when we shall have lost every vestige of that spiritual and moral strength willed to us by such great builders of the Russian land as Saint Sergius.” Klyuchevsky did not imagine that the loss would occur almost in his own lifetime. The Patriarch asked for an appointment with the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, in the hope of persuading him not to touch the holy monastery and the relics… for after all the church was separate from the state! The answer came back that the Chairman was occupied in discussing important business, and that the appointment could not be arranged for the near future.
Nor for the distant future either.
198
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