Chapter 10
The Law Matures
But where were those mobs insanely storming the barbed-wire barricades on our western borders whom we were going to shoot, under Article 71 of the Criminal Code, for unauthorized return to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic? Contrary to scientific prediction, there were no such crowds, and that article of the Code dictated by Lenin to Kursky remained useless. The only Russian crazy enough to do it was Savinkov, and they had ducked applying that article even to him. On the other hand, the opposite penalty—exile abroad instead of execution—was tried out immediately on a large scale.
In those days when he was composing the Criminal Code, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, developing his brilliant idea, wrote in the heat of the moment, on May 19:
Comrade Dzerzhinsky! On the question of exiling abroad writers and professors who aid the counterrevolution: this is a measure which must be prepared most carefully. Unless we prepare well, we can commit stupidities…. We must arrange the business in such a way as to catch these “military spies” and keep on catching them constantly and systematically and exiling them abroad. I beg you to show this secretly, and without making any copies of it, to members of the Politburo.[230]
The extreme secrecy was natural in view of the importance and instructive impact of the measure. The crystal-clear line-up of forces on the class front in Soviet Russia was, to put it simply, spoiled by the presence of this shapeless, jellylike stain of the old bourgeois intelligentsia, which in the ideological area genuinely played the role of military spies—and the very best solution one could imagine was to scrape off that stagnant scum of ideas and toss it out abroad.
Comrade Lenin had already been stricken by his illness, but the members of the Politburo had apparently given their approval, and Comrade Dzerzhinsky had done the catching. At the end of 1922, about three hundred prominent Russian humanists were loaded onto—a barge, perhaps? No, they were put on a steamer and sent off to the European garbage dump. (Among those who settled down in exile and acquired reputations were the philosophers N. O. Lossky, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyayev, F. A. Stepun, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, L. P. Karsavin, S. L. Frank, I. A. Ilin; the historians S. P. Melgunov, V. A. Myakotin, A. A. Kizevetter, I. I. Lapshin, and others; the writers and publicists Y. I. Aikhenvald, A. S. Izgoyev, M. A. Osorgin, A. V. Peshekhonov. At the beginning of 1923, additional small groups were sent off, including for example V. F. Bulgakov, the secretary of Lev Tolstoi. And because of questionable associations some mathematicians also shared this fate, including D. F. Selivanov.)
However, it didn’t work out constantly and systematically. Perhaps the roar with which the émigrés announced that they regarded it as a “gift” made it apparent that this punishment left something to be desired, that it was a mistake to have let go good material for the executioner, and that poisonous flowers might grow on that garbage dump. And so they abandoned this form of punishment. And all subsequent purging led to either the executioner or the Archipelago.
The improved Criminal Code promulgated in 1926, which, in effect, continued right into Khrushchev’s times, tied all the formerly scattered political articles into one durable dragnet—Article 58—and the roundup was under way. The catch swiftly expanded to include the engineering and technical intelligentsia; it was especially dangerous because it occupied a firm position in the economy and it was hard to keep an eye on it with the help of the Progressive Doctrine alone. It now became clear that
the trial in defense of Oldenborger had been a mistake—after all, a very nice little center had been organized there. And Krylenko’s declaration that “there was no question of sabotage on the part of the engineers in 1920 and 1921”[231] had granted an all too hasty absolution. Now it was not sabotage but worse—wrecking, a word discovered, it appears, by a rank-and-file interrogator in the Shakhty case.
It had no sooner been established that wrecking was what had to be tracked down—notwithstanding the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind—than they began to discover it without any trouble in all branches of industry and in all individual enterprises. However, there was no unity of plan, no perfection of execution, in all these hit-or-miss discoveries, although Stalin, by virtue of his character, and of course the entire investigative branch of our judicial apparatus, evidently aspired to just that. But our Law had finally matured and could show the world something really perfect—a big, coordinated, well-organized trial, this time a trial of engineers. And that is how the Shakhty case came about.
K. The Shakhty Case—May 18-July 15, 1928
This case was tried before a Special Assize of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., under Presiding Judge A. Y. Vyshinsky (who was still the Rector of First Moscow University); the chief accuser was N. V. Krylenko (what a significant encounter!—rather like a handing over of the juridical relay-baton).[232] There were fifty-three defendants and fifty-six witnesses. How spectacular!
Alas, in its spectacular aspect lay the weakness of this case. If one were to tie to each of the defendants only three threads of evidence, there would still have to be 159 of them. And meanwhile Krylenko had only ten fingers and Vyshinsky another ten. Of course, the “defendants strove to expose their heinous crimes to society”—but not all of them did, only sixteen; thirteen wiggled back and forth, and twenty-four didn’t admit their guilt at all. 4 This introduced an impermissible discord, and the masses could certainly not understand it. Along with its positive aspects—which had, incidentally, already been displayed in earlier trials—such as the helplessness of the defendants and of the defense attorneys, and their inability either to budge or to deflect the implacable boulder of the sentence—the shortcomings of the new trial were fully apparent. Someone less experienced than Krylenko might have been forgiven them—but not he.
On the threshold of the classless society, we were at last capable of realizing the conflictless trial—a reflection of the absence of inner conflict in our social structure—in which not only the judge and the prosecutor but also the defense lawyers and the defendants themselves would strive collectively to achieve their common purpose.
Anyway, the whole scale of the Shakhty case, comprising as it did the coal industry alone and the Donets Basin alone, was disproportionately paltry for this era.
It appears that then and there, on the day the Shakhty case ended, Krylenko began to dig a new, capacious pit. (Even two of his own colleagues in the Shakhty case—the public accusers Osadchy and Shein—fell into it.) And it goes without saying that the entire apparatus of the OGPU, which had already landed in Yagoda’s firm hands, aided him willingly and adroitly. It was necessary to create and uncover an engineers’ organization which encompassed the entire country. And for this purpose it was essential to have several strong, prominent “wreckers” at its head. And what engineer was unaware of just such an unequivocally strong and impatiently proud leader—Pyotr Akimovich Pal-chinsky? An important mining engineer from as far back as the beginning of the century, he had been the Deputy Chairman of the War Industry Committee during World War I—in other words, he had directed the war efforts of all Russian industry, which had managed, during the course of the war, to make up for the failures in Tsarist preparations. After February, 1917, he became the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry. He had been persecuted under the Tsar for revolutionary activity. He had been imprisoned three times after October—in 1917, 1918, and 1922.
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3. And the members of the tribunal were the old revolutionaries Vasilyev-Yuzhin and Antonov-Saratovsky. The very simple folk sound of their family names inclines one to a favorable reaction. They are easy to remember. And when suddenly, in 1962, obituaries of certain victims of repression appeared in Izvestiya, whose signature was at the bottom? That of the long-lived Antonov-Saratovsky!