There were no bounds to their evil-doing! Nor would there be any limits to their proletarian punishment!
As when a cinema projector starts slowing down, twenty-eight prerevolutionary male and female faces flicker past us in a film that’s fuzzy and askew. We didn’t notice their expressions! Were they frightened? Contemptuous? Proud?
We don’t have their answers! Their last words are missing—because of “technical considerations.” But, making up for this lack, the accuser croons to us: “From beginning to end, it was self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed. The political instability and the interim nature of the intelligentsia… [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature] completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia made by the Bolsheviks.”[202]
I don’t know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the passion to save one’s life at any cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of the intelligentsia had still been maintained…. I don’t know.
Who was that young woman flashing past?
That was Tolstoi’s daughter, Alexandra. Krylenko asked her: “What did you do during these conversations?” And she answered: “I attended to the samovar.” Three years of concentration camp!
And who was that man over there? His face was familiar. It was Sawa Morozov. But listen here: after all, he gave the Bolsheviks all that money! And now he has handed a little to these people? Three years in prison, but released on probation. Let that be a lesson to him!66
And that’s how the sun of our freedom rose. It was as just such a well-nourished little imp that our Octobrist child—Law—began to grow.
Today we don’t remember this at all.
Chapter 9
The Law Becomes a Man
Our review has already grown. Yet we have in fact hardly begun. All the big and famous trials are still ahead of us. But their basic lines have already been indicated.
So let us stick with our Law while it is still in its boy scout stage.
Let us recall one long-forgotten case which was not even political.
F. The Case of Glavtop—May, 1921
This case was important because it involved engineers—or, as they had been christened in the terminology of the times, “specialists,” or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee.)
Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories—strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous question: Who is to blame?
Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even the local leadership. That was important. If the “comrades who were often brought in from outside”—i.e., the Communist leaders—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them the correct approach to the problem.”[203] And this meant that “it was not the leaders who were to blame…. Those who had worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had re-figured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros. Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones who calculated! If the planning turned out to be inflated, the spetsy were the ones to blame. Because the figures did not jibe, “this was the fault of the spetsy, not of the Council of Labor and Defense” and “not even of the responsible men in charge of Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee.”2
If there was no coal, firewood, or petroleum, it was because the spetsy had “brought about a mixed-up, chaotic situation.” And it was their own fault that they hadn’t resisted the urgent telephonograms from Rykov and the government—and had issued and allotted fuels outside the scope of the plan.
The spetsy were to blame for everything. But the proletarian court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient. Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed spetsy remains in proletarian hearts—but one can’t get along without them; everything goes to rack and ruin. And the tribunal doesn’t persecute them, and Krylenko even says that from 1920 on “there is no question of any sabotage.” The spetsy are to blame, but not out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept; they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers.
And so, at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a surprising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to the engineers.
The year 1922, the first year of peace, was rich in public trials, so rich that almost this entire chapter will be devoted to that year alone. (People are surprised: the war has ended, and yet there is an increase in court activity? But in 1945, too, and in 1948, the Dragon became very, very energetic. Is there not, perhaps, a simple sort of law in this?)
Although in December, 1921, the Ninth Congress of the Soviets decreed that the authority of the Gheka be narrowed[204] and, in consequence, its authority was indeed narrowed and it was renamed the GPU, as early as October, 1922, the powers of the GPU were broadened again, and in December Dzerzhinsky told a Pravda correspondent: “Now we need to keep watch with particular vigilance over anti-Soviet currents and groupings. The GPU has reduced its apparatus but strengthened it in terms of quality”.4
And, at the beginning of 1922, we must not bypass:
G. The Case of the Suicide of Engineer Oldenborger (Tried before the Verkhtrib—the Supreme Tribunal—in February, 1922)
This case is forgotten, insignificant, and totally atypical. It was atypical because its entire scale was that of a single life that had already ended. And if that life hadn’t ended, it would have been that very engineer, yes, and ten more with him, forming a Center, who would have sat before the Verkhtrib; in that event the case would have been altogether typical. But as it was, an outstanding Party comrade, Sedelnikov, sat on the defendants’ bench and, with him, two members of the RKI—the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection—and two trade-union officials.
But, like Chekhov’s far-off broken harp-string, there was something plaintive in this trial; it was, in its own way, an early predecessor of the Shakhty and Promparty trials.
V. V. Oldenborger had worked for thirty years in the Moscow water-supply system and had evidently become its chief engineer back at the beginning of the century. Even though the Silver Age of arts, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger’s water. The Acmeists and the Futurists, the reactionaries and the revolutionaries, the military cadets and the Red Guards, the Council of People’s Commissars, the Cheka, and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection—all had drunk Oldenborger’s pure cold water. He had never married and he had no children. His whole life had consisted of that one water-supply system. In 1905 he refused to permit the soldiers of the guard near the water-supply conduits—“because the soldiers, out of clumsiness, might break the pipes or machinery.” On the second day of the February Revolution he said to his workers that that was enough, the revolution was over, and they should all go back to their jobs; the water must flow. And during October fighting in Moscow, he had only one concern: to safeguard the water-supply system. His colleagues went on strike in answer to the Bolshevik coup d’etat and invited him to take part in the strike with them. His reply was: “On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on strike…. In everything else, I—well, yes, I am on strike.” He accepted money for the strikers from the strike committee, and gave them a receipt, but he himself dashed off to get a sleeve to repair a broken pipe.
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