The Gulag Archipelago (50 page)

This was the perfect time to question Libert and Rottenberg, and they were subpoenaed, but they didn't appear! Just like that! They didn't show up. They declined to. All right, in that case question Meshcherskaya-Grevs! And—can you imagine it?— this broken-down aristocrat, too, was so brazen as not to appear before the Revtribunal! And there was no way to force her to! Godelyuk had recanted—and was dying. Kosyrev refused to admit anything! Solovyev was not guilty of anything! So there was no one to question.

What witnesses, on the other hand, did indeed appear before the tribunal, and of their own free will! The Deputy Chief of the Cheka, Comrade Peters. And even Feliks Edmundovich Dzer- zhinsky himself. He arrived in a state of alarm. His long, burning zealot's face confronted the tribunal—whose members sat with sinking hearts—and he testified passionately in defense of the totally innocent Kosyrev and his high moral, revolutionary, and professional qualities. This testimony, alas, has not been pre- served for us, but Krylenko refers to it this way: "Solovyev and Dzerzhinsky portrayed Kosyrev's wonderful qualites." (Alas, you careless shavetail, you! In twenty years' time, in the Lub- yanka, they are going to remind you of that trial! ) It is easy to guess what Dzerzhinsky could have said: that Kosyrev was an iron Chekist, merciless to their enemies; that he was a good
comrade
. A hot heart, a cool head, clean hands.

And from the garbage heap of slander, the bronze knight Kosyrev rises before our eyes. Furthermore, his whole biography testifies to his remarkable will. Before the Revolution he was convicted several times—most often for murder. In the city of Kostroma, he was convicted of worming his way by deception into the house of an old woman named Smirnova and
strangling her with his own hands
; then of an attempt to kill his own father; and then of killing a comrade in order to use his passport. The rest of Kosyrev's convictions were for swindling, and in all he spent many years at hard labor. (One could understand his desire for a luxurious life.) And he had only been freed by the Tsarist amnesties.

At that point, the stern and righteous voices of the major Chekists interrupted the chief accuser; they pointed out to him that those courts which had convicted Kosyrev were courts of the bourgeoisie and landowners and did not merit being noticed in our new society. But what happened? The shavetail, going overboard, poured forth from the chief accuser's rostrum a tirade so ideologically faulty that in our exposition of this harmonious series of cases tried by the tribunals, citing it is to strike a dis- cordant note.

"If there was anything good in the old Tsarist court system, it was only trial by jury. . . . One could always have confidence in the jurors' decisions and a minimum of judicial error was to be found in them."

It was all the more vexing to hear this sort of thing from Comrade Krylenko because just three months before, at the trial of the provocateur R. Malinovsky, a former favorite of the Com- munist Party leadership, who, notwithstanding his four criminal convictions in the past, had been co-opted into the Central Committee by the leadership and appointed to the Duma, the accusing power had taken an impeccable class stand.

"Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all. . . . We know of
many examples
of persons
in our ranks
branded by
such facts in the past
, but we have
never
drawn the con- clusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our milieu.
A person who knows our principles
cannot fear that the existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolution- aries."

That is how Comrade Krylenko could speak when in a Party vein. But in this other case, as a result of his mistaken judgment, the image of the knight in shining armor, Kosyrev, was being bespattered. And it created a situation in the tribunal wherein Comrade Dzerzhinsky was forced to say: "For just one second [Just one second!] the thought crossed my mind that citizen Kosyrev might be falling victim to the political passions which
in recent times have blazed up around the Extraordinary Commis- sion.
"

And Krylenko suddenly took thought: "I do not wish, and I never have wished, that the present trial should turn into a trial of the Cheka rather than a trial of Kosyrev and Uspenskaya. Not only am I
unable to desire
such an outcome: I am obliged to fight against it with all available means!" And he went on: "The most responsible, honest, and self-controlled comrades were put at the head of the Extraordinary Commission, and they took on themselves the difficult task of striking down the enemy,
even though this involved the risk of error
. . . . For this the Revolution is obliged to say thank you. ... I underline this aspect so that ... no one can ever say to me later: 'He turned out to be an instrument of political treason!' "" (But that's what they will say!)

What a razor edge the supreme accuser was walking! But he evidently had certain contacts, going back to his days in the underground, through which he learned how things were going to move on the morrow. This is conspicuous in several trials, and came out here too. At the beginning of 1919, there were certain trends toward saying: "
It is enough!
It is time to bridle the Cheka!" And this moment was "beautifully caught in Bukharin's essay, in which he said that
revolutionary legality
must give way to
legalized revolutionary
."

Wherever you look you see dialectics! And Krylenko burst out: "The Revtribunal is being called on to replace the Extraor- dinary Commission." (
To replace???
) Meanwhile, it "must be ... no less fierce in implementing the system of terror, intimida- tion, and threat than was the Extraordinary Commission—the Cheka."

Than it
was?
The past tense? Has he already buried it? Come now, you are going to replace it, and where are the Chekists supposed to go? Ominous days! That was reason enough to hurry to the tribunal, in a greatcoat down to one's heels, to testify as a witness.

But perhaps your sources of information, Comrade Krylenko, are false?

Yes, the heavens darkened over the Lubyanka in those days. And this whole book might have been very different. But I sup- pose that what happened was that iron Feliks Dzerzhinsky went to see Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and talked it over and explained. And the skies cleared. And although two days later, on Feb- ruary 17, 1919, the Cheka was deprived of its judicial rights by special decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee— it was "
not for long
."

Our day in court was further complicated by the fact that the objectionable Uspenskaya behaved abominably. From the de- fendants' bench she "threw mud at" leading Chekists who had not previously been touched by the trial, including Comrade Peters! (She turned out to have used his pure name in her black- mailing operations; she used to sit right in his office, without any ceremony, during his conversations with other intelligence agents.) Now she hinted at some dark prerevolutionary past of his in Riga. That's the kind of snake she had turned into in eight months, despite the fact that she had been with Chekists during those eight months! What was to be done with such a woman? Here Krylenko's position jibed completely with that of the Chekists : "Until a firm regime has been established, and we are a long way from that being the case [Are we really???] ... in the interests of the defense of the Revolution . . . there is not and cannot be any sentence for citizeness Uspenskaya other than her
annihilation.
" He did not say "to be shot"—what he said was "annihilation"! But after all, Citizen Krylenko, she's just a young girl! Come on now, give her a "tenner," or maybe a "twenty- five," and maybe the system will be firmly established by then? How about it? But alas: "In the interests of society and of the Revolution there is no other answer, nor can there be one—and the question cannot be put any other way.
In the given case
, detention isn't going to bear any fruit!"

She had sure rubbed the salt in. ... She knew too much. . . .

And Kosyrev had to be sacrificed too. They shot him. It was for the health of the others.

Can it really be that someday we will read the old Lubyanka archives? No, they will burn them. They already have.

As the reader can see for himself, this was a very unimportant case. We didn't have to dwell on it. But here is a different one.

D. The Case of the "Churchmen"—January 11-16, 1920

This case, in Krylenko's opinion, is going to have a "suitable place in the annals of the Russian Revolution." Right there in the annals, indeed! It took one day to wring Kosyrev's neck, but in this case they dragged things out for five whole days.

The principal defendants were: A. D. Samarin (a famous man in Russia, the former chief procurator of the Synod; a man who had tried to liberate the church from the Tsar's yoke, an enemy of Rasputin whom Rasputin had forced out of office);

[But accuser Krylenko saw no difference whatever between Samarin and Rasputin.]

Kuznetsov, Professor of Church Law at Moscow University; the Moscow archpriests Uspensky and Tsvetkov. (The accuser him- self had this to say about Tsvetkov: "An important public figure, perhaps the best that the clergy could produce, a philanthropist.")

Their guilt lay in creating the "Moscow Council of United Parishes," which had in turn recruited, from among believers forty to eighty years old, a voluntary guard for the Patriarch (unarmed, of course), which had set up permanent day and night watches in his residence, who were charged with the responsi- bility, in the event of danger from the authorities to the Patriarch, of assembling the people by ringing the church alarm bells and by telephone, so that a whole crowd might follow wherever the Patriarch might be taken and
beg
—and there's your counter- revolution for you!—the Council of People's Commissars to re- lease him!

What an ancient Russian—Holy Russian—scheme! To as- semble the people by ringing the alarm bells . . . and proceed in a crowd with a petition!

And the accuser was astonished. What danger threatened the Patriarch? Why had plans been made to defend him?

Well, of course, it was really no more than the fact that the Cheka had for two years been conducting extrajudicial reprisals against undesirables, the fact that only a short while before four Red Army men in Kiev had killed the Metropolitan, the fact that the Patriarch's "case had already been worked up and com- pleted, and all that remained was to bring it before the Rev- tribunal," and "it was only out of concern for the broad masses of workers and peasants, still under the influence of clerical propaganda, that we have left these, our class enemies,
alone for the time being
." How could Orthodox believers possibly be alarmed on the Patriarch's account? During those two years Patriarch Tikhon had refused to keep silent. He had sent messages to the People's Commissars, to the clergy, and to his flock. His messages were not accepted by the printers but were copied on typewriters (the first samizdat). They exposed the annihilation of the innocents, the ruin of the country. How, therefore, could anyone really be concerned for the Patriarch's life?

A second charge was brought against the defendants. Through- out the country, a census and requisition of church property was taking place (this was in addition to the closing of monasteries and the expropriation of church lands and properties; in question here were liturgical vessels, cups, and candelabra). And the Council of Parishes had disseminated an appeal to believers to resist the requisition, sounding the alarm on the church bells. (And that was natural, after all! That, after all, was how they had defended the churches against the Tatars too!)

And the third charge against them was their incessant, im- pudent
dispatching of petitions
to the Council of People's Com- missars for relief from the desecration of the churches by local authorities, from crude blasphemy and violations of the law which guaranteed freedom of conscience. Even though no action was taken on these petitions (according to the testimony of Bonch- Bruyevich, administrative officer of the Council of People's Com- missars), they had discredited the local authorities.

Taking into consideration all the violations committed by these defendants, what punishment could the accuser possibly demand for these awful crimes? Will not the reader's revolutionary con- science prompt the answer?
To be shot
, of course. And that is just what Krylenko did demand—for Samarin and Kuznetsov.

But while they were fussing around with these damned legal formalities, and listening to too many long speeches from too many bourgeois lawyers (speeches which "for technical reasons" we will not cite here), it turned out that capital punishment had been . . . abolished! What a fix! It just couldn't be! What had happened? It developed that Dzerzhinsky had issued this order to the Cheka (the Cheka, without capital punishment?). But had it been extended to the tribunals by the Council of People's Com- missars? Not yet. Krylenko cheered up. And he continued to de- mand execution by shooting, on the following grounds:

"Even if we suppose that the consolidation of the Republic has removed the immediacy of threat from such persons, it seems nonetheless indubitable that in this period of creative effort . . . a purge ... of the old turncoat leaders ... is required by revolu- tionary necessity." And further: "Soviet power is proud of the decree of the Cheka abolishing the death penalty." But this "still does not force us to conclude that the question of the abolition of capital punishment has been decided once and for all ... for the entire period of Soviet rule."

That was quite prophetic! Capital punishment would return— and very soon too! After all, what a long line still remained to be rubbed out! (Yes, including Krylenko too, and many of his class brothers as well.)