The tribunal condemned ten of them to death. They waited more than a month for their execution, until the trial of the SR’s had ended. (It was as though they had processed them in order to shoot them at the same time as the SR’s.) And after that, VTsIK, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, pardoned six of them. And four of them—the Metropolitan Veniamin; the Archimandrite Sergius, a former member of the State Duma; Professor of Law Y. P. Novitsky; and the barrister Kovsharov—were shot on the night of August 12-13.
We insistently urge our readers not to forget the principle of provincial multiplicity. Where two church trials were held in Moscow and Petrograd, there were twenty-two in the provinces.
They were in a big hurry to produce a Criminal Code in time for the trial of the SR’s—the Socialist Revolutionaries. The time had come to set in place the granite foundation stones of the Law. On May 12, as had been agreed, the session of VTsIK convened, but the projected Code had not yet been completed. It had only just been delivered for analysis to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his Gorki estate outside Moscow. Six articles of the Code provided for execution by shooting as the maximum punishment. This was unsatisfactory. On May 15, on the margins of the draft Code, Lenin added six more articles requiring execution by shooting (including—under Article 69—propaganda and agitation, particularly in the form of an appeal for passive resistance to the government and mass rejection of the obligations of military service or tax payments).[211] And one other crime that called for execution by shooting: unauthorized return from abroad (my, how the socialists all used to bob back and forth incessantly!). And there was one punishment that was the equivalent of execution by shooting: exile abroad. Vladimir Ilyich foresaw a time not far distant when there would be a constant rush of people to the Soviet Union from Europe, and it would be impossible to get anyone voluntarily to leave the Soviet Union for the West. Lenin went on to express his principal conclusion to the People’s Commissar of Justice:
“Comrade Kursky! In my opinion we ought to extend the use of execution by shooting (allowing the substitution of exile abroad) to all activities of the Mensheviks, SR’s, etc. We ought to find a formulation that would connect these activities with the international bourgeoisie.”[212] (Lenin’s italics.)
To extend the use of execution by shooting! Nothing left to the imagination there! (And did they exile very many?) Terror is a method of persuasion.[213] This, too, could hardly be misunderstood.
But Kursky, nonetheless, still didn’t get the whole idea. In all probability, what he couldn’t quite work out was a way of formulating that formulation, a way of working in that very matter of connection. The next day, he called on the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin, for clarification. We have no way of knowing what took place during their conversation. But following it up, on May 17, Lenin sent a second letter from Gorki:
Comrade Kursky!
As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code…. The basic concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.
The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.
We will not undertake to comment on this important document. What it calls for is silence and reflection.
The document is especially important because it was one of Lenin’s last directives on this earth—he had not yet fallen ill—and an important part of his political testament. Ten days after this letter, he suffered his first stroke, from which he recovered only incompletely and temporarily in the autumn months of 1922. Perhaps both letters to Kursky were written in that light and airy white marble boudoir-study at the corner of the second floor, where the future deathbed of the leader already stood waiting.
Attached to this letter is the rough draft mentioned in it, containing two versions of the supplementary paragraph, out of which would grow in a few years’ time both Article 58-4 and all of our dear little old mother, Article 58. You read it and you are carried away with admiration: that’s what it really means to formulate it as broadly as possible! That’s what is meant by extending its use. You read and you recollect how broad was the embrace of that dear little old mother.
“…propaganda or agitation, or participation in an organization, or assistance (objectively assisting or being capable of assisting)… organizations or persons whose activity has the character…”
Hand me St. Augustine, and in a trice I can find room in that article for him too.
Everything was inserted as required; it was retyped; execution by shooting was extended—and the session of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the new Criminal Code shortly after May 20 and decreed it to be in effect from June 1, 1922, on.
And so began, on the most legal basis, the two-month-long
J. Trial of the SR’s—June 8-August 7, 1922
The court was the Supreme Tribunal, the Verkhtrib. The usual presiding judge, Comrade Karklin (a good name for a judge—derived from the word meaning to “croak” or “caw”), was replaced for this important trial, which was being watched closely by the entire socialist world, by the resourceful Georgi Pyatakov. (Provident fate enjoys its little jokes—but it also leaves us time to think things over! It left Pyatakov fifteen years.) There were no defense lawyers. The defendants, all leading SR’s, undertook their own defense. Pyatakov bore himself harshly, and interfered with the defendants’ having their say.
If my readers and I were not already sufficiently informed to know that what was important in every trial was not the charges brought nor guilt, so called, but expediency, we would perhaps not be prepared to accept this trial wholeheartedly. But expediency works without faiclass="underline" the SR’s, as opposed to the Mensheviks, were considered still dangerous, not yet dispersed and broken up, not yet finished off. And on behalf of the fortress of the newly created dictatorship (the proletariat), it was expedient to finish them off.
Someone unfamiliar with this principle might mistakenly view the entire trial as an act of Party vengeance.
Involuntarily one ponders the charges set forth in this trial, placing them in the perspective of the long-drawn-out and still unfolding history of nations. With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.
211
14. In other words, like the Vyborg appeal, for which the Tsar’s government had imposed sentences of three months’ imprisonment.