The Criminal Code had been adopted only one week earlier, but five whole years of postrevolutionary experience had been compressed into it. Twenty, ten, and five years earlier, the SR’s had been the party next door in the effort to overthrow Tsarism, the party which had chiefly taken upon itself, thanks to the particular character of its terrorist tactics, the burden of hard-labor imprisonment, which had scarcely touched the Bolsheviks.
Now the first charge against them was that the SR’s had initiated the Civil War! Yes, they began it, they had begun it. They were accused of armed resistance to the October seizure of power. When the Provisional Government, which they supported and which was in part made up of their members, was lawfully swept out of office by the machine-gun fire of the sailors, the SR’s tried altogether illegally to defend it,[214] and even returned shot for shot, and even called into battle the military cadets of that deposed government.
Defeated in battle, they did not repent politically. They did not get down on their knees to the Council of People’s Commissars, which had declared itself to be the government. They continued to insist stubbornly that the only legal government was the one which had been overthrown. They refused to admit right away that what had been their political line for twenty years was a failure,[215] and they did not ask to be pardoned, nor to have their party dissolved and cease to be considered a party.[216]
The second charge against them was that they had deepened the abyss of the Civil War by taking part in demonstrations—by this token, rebellions—on January 5 and 6, 1918, against the lawful authority of the workers’ and peasants’ government. They were supporting their illegal Constituent Assembly (elected by universal, free, equal, secret, and direct voting) against the sailors and the Red Guards, who legally dispersed both the Assembly and the demonstrators. (And what good could have come of peaceable sessions of the Constituent Assembly? Only the conflagration of a three-year-long Civil War. And that is why the Civil War began, because not all the people submitted simultaneously and obediently to the lawful decrees of the Council of People’s Commissars.)
The third charge was that they had not recognized the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that lawful, lifesaving peace of Brest-Litovsk, which had cut off not Russia’s head but only parts of its torso. By this token, declared the official indictment, there were present “all the signs of high treason and criminal activity directed to drawing the country into war.”
High treason! That is another club with two ends. It all depends on which end you have hold of.
From this followed the serious fourth charge: in the summer and fall of 1918, those final months and weeks when the Kaiser’s Germany was scarcely managing to hold its own against the Allies, and the Soviet government, faithful to the Brest treaty, was supporting Germany in its difficult struggle with trainloads of foodstuffs and a monthly tribute in gold, the SR’s traitorously prepared (well, they didn’t actually prepare anything but, as was their custom, did more talking about it than anything—but what if they really had!) to blow up the railroad tracks in front of one such train, thus keeping the gold in the Motherland. In other words, they “prepared criminal destruction of our public wealth, the railroads.”
(At that time the Communists were not yet ashamed of and did not conceal the fact that, yes, indeed, Russian gold had been shipped off to Hitler’s future empire, and it didn’t seem to dawn on Krylenko despite his study in two academic departments—history and law—nor did any of his assistants whisper the notion to him, that if steel rails are public wealth, then maybe gold ingots are too?)
From this fourth charge a fifth followed inexorably: the SR’s had intended to procure the technical equipment for such an explosion with money received from Allied representatives. (They had wanted to take money from the Entente in order not to give gold away to Kaiser Wilhelm.) And this was the extreme of treason! (Just in case, Krylenko did mutter something about the SR’s also having connections with Ludendorff’s General Staff, but this stone had indeed landed in the wrong vegetable garden, and he quickly dropped the whole thing.)
From this it was only a very short step to the sixth charge: that the SR’s had been Entente spies in 1918. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries, and today they were spies. At the time, this accusation probably sounded explosive. But since then, and after many, many trials, the whole thing makes one want to vomit.
Well, then, the seventh and tenth points concerned collaboration with Savinkov, or Filonenko, or the Cadets, or the “Union of Rebirth” (had it really ever existed?), and even with aristocratic, reactionary, dilettante—so-called “white-lining”—students, or even the White Guards.
This series of linked charges was well expounded by the prosecutor.[217] As a result of either hard thinking in his office, or a sudden stroke of genius on the rostrum, he managed in this trial to come up with that tone of heartfelt sympathy and friendly criticism which he would make use of in subsequent trials with increasing self-assurance and in ever heavier doses, and which, in 1937, would result in dazzling success. This tone created a common ground—against the rest of the world—between those doing the judging and those who were being judged, and it played on the defendant’s particular soft spot. From the prosecutor’s rostrum, they said to the SR’s: “After all, you and we are revolutionaries! [We! You and we—that adds up to us!] And how could you have fallen so low as to join with the Cadets? [Yes, no doubt your heart is breaking!] Or with the officers? Or to teach the aristocratic, reactionary, dilettante students your brilliantly worked-out scheme of conspiratorial operation?”
None of the defendants’ replies is available to us. Did any of them point out that the particular characteristic of the October coup had been to declare war immediately on all the other parties and forbid them to join forces? (“They’re not hauling you in, so don’t you dare peep!”) But for some reason one gets the feeling that some of the defendants sat there with downcast eyes and that some of them truly had divided hearts: just how could they have fallen so low? After all, for the prisoner who’d been brought in from a dark cell, the friendly, sympathetic attitude of the prosecutor in the big bright hall struck home very effectively.
And Krylenko discovered another very, very logical little path which was to prove very useful to Vyshinsky when he applied it against Kamenev and Bukharin: On entering into an alliance with the bourgeoisie, you accepted money from them. At first you took it for the cause, only for the cause, and in no wise for Party purposes. But where is the boundary line? Who can draw that dividing line? After all, isn’t the cause a Party cause also? And so you sank to the level—you, the Socialist Revolutionary Party—of being supported by the bourgeoisie! Where was your revolutionary pride?
A full quota of charges—and then some—had been piled up. And the tribunal could have gone out to confer and thereupon nailed each of the prisoners with his well-merited execution—but, alas, there was a big mix-up:
a. Everything the Socialist Revolutionary Party had been accused of related to 1918.
b. Since then, on February 27, 1919, an amnesty had been declared for SR’s exclusively, which pardoned all their past belligerency against the Bolsheviks on the sole stipulation that they would not continue the struggle into the future.
214
18. The fact that their efforts in defending it were very feeble, that they were beset by hesitations, and that they renounced it right away is another matter. For all that, their guilt was no less.
216
20. In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outlying areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine, the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all declared themselves to be governments after the Council of People’s Commissars had declared itself to be the government.