c. And they had not continued the struggle since that time.
d. And it was now 1922!
How could Krylenko get around that one?
Some thought had been given to this point. When the Socialist International asked the Soviet government to drop charges and not put its socialist brothers on trial, some thought had been given to it.
In fact, at the beginning of 1919, in the face of threats from Kolchak and Denikin, the SR’s had renounced their task of revolt against the Bolsheviks and had abandoned all armed struggle against them. (And to aid their Communist brethren, the Samara SR’s had even opened up a section of the Kolchak front… which was, in fact, why the amnesty had been granted.) And right at the trial the defendant Gendelman, a member of the Central Committee, said: “Give us the chance to make use of the whole gamut of so-called civil liberties, and we will not break the law.” (Give it to them! The “whole gamut,” to boot! What loud-mouths!)
And it wasn’t just that they weren’t engaged in any opposition: they had recognized the Soviet government! In other words, they had renounced their former Provisional Government, yes, and the Constituent Assembly as well. And all they asked was a new election for the Soviets’ with freedom for all parties to engage in electoral campaigning.
Now did you hear that? Did you hear that? That’s where the hostile bourgeois beast poked his snout through. How could we? After all, this is a time of crisis! After all, we are encircled by the enemy. (And in twenty years’ time, and fifty years’ time, and a hundred years’ time, for that matter, it will be exactly the same.) And you want freedom for the parties to engage in electoral campaigning, you bastards?
Politically sober people, said Krylenko, could only laugh in reply and shrug their shoulders. It had been a just decision “immediately and by all measures of state suppression to prevent these groups from conducting propaganda against the government.”[218] And specifically: in reply to the renunciation by the SR’s of armed opposition and to their peaceful proposals, they had put the entire Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in prison! (As many of them as they could catch.)
That’s how we do it!
But to keep them in prison—and hadn’t it already been three years?—wasn’t it necessary to try them? And what should they be charged with? “This period had not been sufficiently investigated in the pretrial examination,” our prosecutor complained.
But in the meanwhile one charge was correct. In that same February, 1919, the SR’s had passed a resolution which they had not put into effect, though in terms of the new Criminal Code that didn’t matter at alclass="underline" to carry on secret agitation in the ranks of the Red Army in order to induce the soldiers to refuse to participate in reprisals against the peasants.
And that was a low-down, foul betrayal of the Revolution—to try to persuade men not to take part in reprisals.
And they could also be charged with everything that the so-called “Foreign Delegation of the Central Committee” of the SR’s—those prominent SR’s who had fled to Europe—had said, written, and done (mostly words).
But all that wasn’t enough. So here’s what they thought up: “Many defendants sitting here would not deserve to be indicted in the given case, were it not for the charge of having planned terrorist acts” Allegedly, when the amnesty of 1919 had been published, “none of the leaders of Soviet Justice had imagined” that the SR’s had also planned to use terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state! (Well, indeed, who could possibly have imagined that! The SR’s! And terrorism, all of a sudden? And if it had come to mind, it would have been necessary to include it in the amnesty too! Or else not accept the gap in the Kolchak front. It was really very, very fortunate indeed that no one had thought of it. Not until it was needed—then someone thought of it.) So this charge had not been amnestied (for, after all, struggle was the only offense that had been amnestied). And so Krylenko could now make the charge!
And, in all likelihood, they had discovered so very much! So very much!
In the first place, they had discovered what the SR leaders had said[219] back in the first days after the October seizure of power.
Chernov, at the Fourth Congress of the SR’s, had said that the Party would “counterpose all its forces against any attack on the rights of the people, as it had” under Tsarism. (And everyone remembered how it had done that.) Gots had said. “If the autocrats at Smolny also infringe on the Constituent Assembly… the Socialist Revolutionary Party will remember its old tried and true tactics.”
Perhaps it did remember, but it didn’t make up its mind to act. Yet apparently it could be tried for it anyway.
“In this area of our investigation,” Krylenko complained, because of conspiracy “there will be little testimony from witnesses.” And he continued: “This has made my task extremely difficult…. In this area [i.e., terrorism] it is necessary, at certain moments, to wander about in the shadows.”[220]
What made Krylenko’s task difficult was the fact that the use of terrorism against the Soviet government was discussed at the meeting of the SR Central Committee in 1918 and rejected. And now, years later, it was necessary to prove that the SR’s had been engaged in self-deception.
The SR’s had said at the time that they would not resort to terrorism until and unless the Bolsheviks began to execute socialists. Or, in 1920, they had said that if the Bolsheviks were to threaten the lives of SR hostages, then the party would take up arms.25
So the question then was: Why did they qualify their renunciation of terrorism? Why wasn’t it absolute? And how had they even dared to think about taking up arms! “Why were there no statements equivalent to absolute renunciation?” (But, Comrade Krylenko, maybe terrorism was their “second nature”?)
The SR Party carried out no terrorist acts whatever, and this was clear even from Krylenko’s summing up of the charges. But the prosecution kept stretching such facts as these: One of the defendants had in mind a plan for blowing up the locomotive of a train carrying the Council of People’s Commissars to Moscow. That meant the Central Committee of the SR’s was guilty of terrorism. And the terrorist Ivanova had spent one night near the railroad station with one charge of explosives—which meant there had been an attempt to blow up Trotsky’s train—and therefore the SR Central Committee was guilty of terrorism. And further: Donskoi, a member of the Central Committee, warned Fanya Kaplan that she would be expelled from the Party if she fired at Lenin. But that wasn’t enough! Why hadn’t she been categorically forbidden to? (Or perhaps: why hadn’t she been denounced to the Cheka?)
It was feathers of this sort that Krylenko kept plucking from the dead rooster—that the SR’s had not taken measures to stop individual terrorist acts by their unemployed and languishing gunmen. That was the whole of their terrorism. (Yes, and those gunmen of theirs didn’t do anything either. In 1922, two of them, Konopleva and Semyonov, with suspicious eagerness, enriched the GPU and the tribunal with their voluntary evidence, but their evidence couldn’t be pinned on the SR Central Committee—and suddenly and inexplicably these inveterate terrorists were released scot-free.)
All the evidence was such that it had to be bolstered up with props. Krylenko explained things this way in regard to one of the witnesses: “If this person had really wanted to make things up, it is unlikely he would have done so in such a way as to hit the target merely by accident.”[221] (Strongly put, indeed! This could be said about any piece of fabricated testimony whatever.) Or else, about Donskoi: Could one really “suspect him of possessing the special insight to testify to what the prosecution wanted”? It was just the other way around with Konopleva: the reliability of her testimony was evidenced by the fact that she had not testified to everything the prosecution needed. (But enough for the defendants to be shot.) “If we ask whether Konopleva concocted all this, then it is… clear: If one is going to concoct, one must really concoct [He should know!], and if one is going to expose someone, one should really expose him.”[222] But she, you see, did not carry it through to the end. Then things are put still another way: “After all, it is unlikely that Yefimov needed to put Konopleva in danger of execution without cause.”28 Once more correct, once more strongly put! Or, even more strongly: “Could this encounter have taken place? Such a possibility is not excluded.” Not excluded? That means it did take place. Off to the races!