The Gulag Archipelago (55 page)

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.
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 formu- lating 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.

With Communist greetings,

LENIN

We will not undertake to comment on this important docu- ment. 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, con- taining 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 organiza- tion, or assistance (objectively assisting
or being capable of assist- ing
) . . . organizations or persons whose activity has the charac- ter . . ."

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 re- placed 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
expedi- ency
works without fail: 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.

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 in- itiated 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, and even returned shot for shot, and even called into battle the military cadets of that deposed government.

[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.]

Defeated in battle, they did not repent politically. They did not get down on their knees to the Council of People's Com- missars, 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, [And it had indeed been a failure, although this did not become clear immediately.] and they did not ask to be pardoned, nor to have their party dissolved and cease to be considered a party.

[In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outly- ing areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine, the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all de- clared themselves to be governments
after
the Council of People's Commissars had declared itself to be the government.]

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 con- flagration of a three-year-long Civil War. And that is why the Civil War began, because not all the people submitted simul- taneously 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 de- pends 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 collabora- tion 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 prose- cutor.

[The title of "prosecutor" had by now been restored to him.]

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 com- mon 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 ros- trum, they said to the SR's:
"After all, you and we are revolu- tionaries!
[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 pur- poses.
But where is the boundary line? Who can draw that divid- ing 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 ac- cused 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.

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.