Here, at the start of the twentieth century! What power of foresight! Oh, scientific revolutionaries! (However, the intelligentsia had to be finished off anyway. Throughout the twenties they kept finishing them off and finishing them off.)
We examine with hostility the twenty-eight individual allies of the black generals, the hirelings of European imperialism. And we are especially aroused by the stench of the word Center. Now we see a Tactical Center, now a National Center, and now a Right Center. (And in our recollection of the trials of two decades, Centers keep creeping in all the time, Centers and Centers, Engineers’ Centers, Menshevik Centers, Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centers, Rightist-Bukharinite Centers, but all of them are crushed, all crushed, and that is the only reason you and I are still alive.) Wherever there is a Center, of course, the hand of imperialism can be found.
True, we feel a measure of relief when we learn that the Tactical Center on this occasion was not an organization’, that it did not have: (1) statutes; (2) a program; (3) membership dues. So, what’ did it have? Here’s what: They used to meet! (Goose-pimples up and down the back!’) And when they met, they undertook to familiarize themselves with one another’s point of view! (Icy chills!)
The charges were extremely serious and were supported by the evidence. There were two (2) pieces of evidence to corroborate the charges against twenty-eight accused individuals.62 These were two letters from people who were not present in court because they were abroad: Myakotin and Fyodorov. They were absent, but until the October Revolution they had been members of the same committees as those who were present, a circumstance that gave us the right to equate those who were absent with those who were present. And their letters dealt with their disagreements with Denikin on certain trivial questions: the peasant question (we are not told what these differences were, but they were evidently advising Denikin to give the land to the peasants); the Jewish question (they were evidently advising him not to return to the previous restrictions); the federated nationalities question (enough said: clear); the question of the structure of the government (democracy rather than dictatorship); and similar matters. And what conclusion did this evidence suggest? Very simple. It proved the fact of correspondence, and it also proved the agreement, the unanimity, of those present with Denikin! (Grrr! Grrrr!)
But there were also direct accusations against those present: that they had exchanged information with acquaintances who lived in outlying areas (Kiev, for example) which were not under the control of the central Soviet authorities! In other words, this used to be Russia, let’s say, but then in the interests of world revolution we ceded this one piece to Germany. And people continued to exchange letters. How are you doing there, Ivan Ivanich? Here’s how things are going with us. N. M. Kishkin, a member of the Central Committee of the Cadets, was so brazen as to try to justify himself right from the defendants’ bench: “A man doesn’t want to be blind. He tries to find out everything he can about what’s going on everywhere.”
To find out everything about what’s going on everywhere? He doesn’t want to be blind? Well, all one can say is that the accuser correctly described their actions as treason, treason to Soviet power!
But their most heinous acts were something else again. In the midst of the Civil War they wrote books, composed memoranda and projects. Yes, as experts in constitutional law, financial science, economic relationships, the system of justice, and education, they wrote works! (And, as one might easily guess, their works were not based on earlier works by Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin.) Professor Kotlyarevsky wrote on the federal structure of Russia; V. I. Stempkovsky on the agrarian question (no doubt, without collectivization); V. S. Muralevich on education in the future Russia; N. N. Vinogradsky on economics. And the (great) biologist N. K. Koltsov (who never received anything from the Motherland except persecution and execution) allowed all those bourgeois big shots to get together in his institute for their discussions. (N. D. Kondratyev was included here also. In 1931 he was condemned once and for all in connection with TKP—the fictitious Working Peasants Party.)
Our accuser’s heart jumps right out of our chest, outrunning the sentence. Well, what punishment was adequate for these assistants to the general? Just one, of course—to be shot! That was not merely what the accuser demanded—it was the sentence of the tribunal. (Alas, it was later commuted to concentration camp until the end of the Civil War.)
And indeed the defendants’ guilt consisted in the fact that they hadn’t sat in their own corners, sucking on their quarter-pound of bread; that “they had talked things over and reached agreements as to what the state structure should be after the fall of the Soviet regime.”
In contemporary scientific language, this is known as the study of the alternative possibility.
The voice of the accuser thundered, but we hear some kind of crack in it. As if his eyes were searching the rostrum, looking for another piece of paper? A quotation, perhaps? Give it to him on tiptoe, quick, quick! Give him one at random! From some other trial? It’s not important! Wasn’t this the one, Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko?
“For us… the concept of torture inheres in the very fact of holding political prisoners in prison….”
So that’s it! It is torture to keep political prisoners in prison! And the accuser said so! What a generous view! A new jurisprudence is arising! And further:
“…Struggle against the Tsarist government was second nature to them [the politicals] and not to struggle against Tsarism was something of which they were incapable.” 63
What’s that? They were incapable of not studying alternative possibilities? Perhaps thinking was first nature to the intellectual?
Alas, through stupidity, they had shoved the wrong quotation at him. Now wasn’t that a mix-up for you! But Nikolai Vasilyevich was already off to the races.
“And even if the defendants here in Moscow did not lift a finger [and it looks very much as though that’s the way it was] at such a moment, nevertheless… even a conversation over a teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary act…. During the Civil War not only is any kind of action [against Soviet power] a crime… but the fact of inaction is also criminal.’ 964
Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear. They are being sentenced to death—for inaction. For a cup of tea.
The Petrograd intellectuals, for example, decided that in the event of Yudenich’s taking the city, they would first of all “concern themselves with convening a democratic municipal Duma.” (In other words, to safeguard the city against a possible dictatorship.)
Krylenko: “I would like to shout at them: ‘It was your duty to think first of all how you might die in battle, so as not to allow Yudenich into the city!’”
But they didn’t die in battle.
(Nor, in fact, did Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko.)
In addition, there were certain defendants who knew about all this talk and yet kept silent, did not write denunciations. (In our contemporary lingo: “He knew, but he didn’t tell.”)
And here is another real example not merely of inaction but of actively criminal action. Through L. N. Khrushcheva, a member of the Political Red Cross (and there she was, on the defendants’ bench), some of the other defendants had raised money to help the Butyrki prisoners. (One can just picture that flood of capital—pouring into the prison commissary!) And they had supplied various articles too. (Yes, indeed. Just look. Woolens, too, perhaps?)