Well, it’s a fact, the workers who testified against Comrade Sedelnikov and the RKI men were “easily brushed off” by the tribunal. And the defendant Sedelnikov replied brazenly to the threats of the accuser. “Comrade Krylenko! I know all those articles. But after all, no one is judging class enemies here, and those articles relate to class enemies.”
However, Krylenko laid it on good and thick. Deliberately false denunciations to state institutions… in circumstances aggravating guilt, such as a personal grudge and the settling of personal accounts… the abuse of an official position… political irresponsibility… abuse of power and of the authority of government officials and members of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)… disorganization of the work of the water-supply system… injury done the Moscow Soviet and Soviet Russia, because there were few such specialists, and it was impossible to find replacements for them. “And we won’t even begin to speak of the individual, personal loss…. In our time, when struggle is the chief content of our lives, we have somehow grown used to not counting these irrevocable losses.”9 The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal must utter its weighty word: “Punishment must be assessed with all due severity!… We didn’t come here just to crack jokes.”
Good Lord, now what are they going to get? Could it really be? My reader has gotten used to prompting: all of them to be sh…
And that is absolutely correct. All of them were to be publicly shamed—bearing in mind their sincere repentance! All of them to be sentenced to—ostracism and ridicule.
Two truths…
And Sedelnikov, allegedly, got one year in jail.
You will just have to forgive me if I don’t believe it.
Oh, you bards of the twenties, painting your pictures of their bright and bubbling happiness! Even those who touched only their farthest edge, who touched them only in childhood, will never forget them. And those plug-uglies, those fat faces, busy persecuting engineers—in the twenties, too, they ate their bellies full.
And now we see also that they had been busy from 1918 on.
In the two trials following we will take leave of our favorite supreme accuser for a while: he is occupied with his preparations for the major trial of the SR’s.[207] This spectacular trial aroused a great deal of emotion in Europe beforehand, and the People’s Commissariat of Justice was suddenly taken aback: after all, we had been trying people for four years without any code, neither a new one nor an old one. And in all probability Krylenko himself was concerned about the code too. Everything had to be neatly tied up ahead of time.
The coming church trials were internal. They didn’t interest progressive Europe. And they could be conducted without a code.
We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separation of church and state was so construed by the state that the churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was installed in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance with the Scriptures, lay within the heart. And in 1918, when political victory seemed to have been attained faster and more easily than had been expected, they had pressed right on to confiscate church property. However, this leap had aroused too fierce a wave of popular indignation. In the heat of the Civil War, it was not very intelligent to create, in addition, an internal front against the believers. And it proved necessary to postpone for the time being the dialogue between the Communists and the Christians.
At the end of the Civil War, and as its natural consequence, an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area. They give it only two lines in the official histories because it doesn’t add a very ornamental touch to the wreaths of the victors in that war. But the famine existed nonetheless—to the point of cannibalism, to the point at which parents ate their own children—such a famine as even Russia had never known, even in the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century. (Because at that time, as the historians testify, unthreshed ricks of grain survived intact beneath the snow and ice for several years.) Just one film about famine might throw a new light on everything we saw and everything we know about the Revolution and the Civil War. But there are no films and no novels and no statistical research—the effort is to forget it. It does not embellish. Besides, we have come to blame the kulaks as the cause of every famine—and just who were the kulaks in the midst of such collective death? V. G. Korolenko, in his Letters to Lunacharsky (which, despite Lunacharsky’s promise, were never officially published in the Soviet Union),[208] explains to us Russia’s total, epidemic descent into famine and destitution. It was the result of productivity having been reduced to zero (the working hands were all carrying guns) and the result, also, of the peasants’ utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest part of the harvest might be left for them. Yes, and someday someone will also count up those many carloads of food supplies rolling on and on for many, many months to Imperial Germany, under the terms of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk—from a Russia which had been deprived of a protesting voice, from the very provinces where famine would strike—so that Germany could fight to the end in the West.
There was a direct, immediate chain of cause and effect. The Volga peasants had to eat their children because we were so impatient about putting up with the Constituent Assembly.
But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous!
1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the church.
2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.
3. In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious metals.
Yes, and the idea was probably inspired by the actions of the church itself. As Patriarch Tikhon himself had testified, back in August, 1921, at the beginning of the famine, the church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starving and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any direct help to go straight from the church into the mouths of those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. The committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state treasury. The Patriarch had also appealed to the Pope in Rome and to the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance—but he was rebuked for this, too, on the grounds that only the Soviet authorities had the right to enter into discussions with foreigners. Yes, indeed. And what was there to be alarmed about? The newspapers wrote that the government itself had all the necessary means to cope with the famine.
Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the soles of shoes, and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in December, 1921, Pomgol—the State Commission for Famine Relief—proposed that the churches help the starving by donating church valuables—not all, but those not required for liturgical rites. The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must be strictly voluntary! On Febraury 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued a pastoral letter permitting the parish councils to make gifts of objects that did not have liturgical and ritual significance.
207
10. The provincial trials of the SR’s took place even earlier, such as the one in Saratov in 1919.