The Gulag Archipelago (47 page)

And I sat there and thought: If the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?

And they will burst forth. It has to happen.

Chapter 8
The Law as a Child

We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant ham- mering.

I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people, And it is a vexing one. It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless. It makes us an easy prey for liars.

Therefore, if they demand that we forget even the public trials, we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in our newspapers, but they didn't drill a hole in our brains to make us remember—and so we've forgotten them. Only things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain. I am not even talking about young people, since they, of course, know nothing of all this, but about people who were alive at the time of those trials. Ask any middle-aged person to enumerate the highly publicized open trials. He will remember those of Bukharin and Zinoviev. And, knitting his brow, that of the Promparty too. And that's all. There were no other public trials.

Yet in actual fact they began right after the October Revolu- tion. In 1918, quantities of them were taking place, in many dif- ferent tribunals. They were taking place before there were either laws or codes, when the judges had to be guided solely by the requirements of the revolutionary workers' and peasants' power. At the same time, they were regarded as blazing their own trail of bold legality. Their detailed history will someday be written by someone, and it's not for us even to attempt to include it in our present investigation.

However, we cannot do without a brief review. It is our duty, anyway, to probe some of the charred ruins which go all the way back to that gentle, misty, rose-colored dawn.

In those dynamic years, the sabers of war were not rusting in their scabbards, nor did the executioners' revolvers have time to grow cold in their holsters. Only later on did the custom de- velop of hiding executions in cellars under cover of night and of shooting the victims in the back of the head. In 1918, the famous Ryazan Chekist Stelmakh had those sentenced to death shot in the courtyard, during the day, so that prisoners awaiting execu- tion could watch from the prison windows.

There was an official term current then:
extrajudicial reprisal
. . . not because there weren't any courts at the time, but because there was the Cheka.

[This fledgling whose beak had not yet hardened was warmed and encour- aged by Trotsky: "Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to be a hypocrite not to understand this." And Zinoviev rejoiced too, not yet fore- seeing his own end: "The letters GPU, like the letters VChK, are the most popular in the world."]

Because it was more efficient. Certainly, there were courts, and they tried and convicted and executed people, but we need to remember that, parallel to them and inde- pendently of them, extrajudicial reprisal went on at the same time. How can one depict its scale? M. Latsis, in his popular review of the Cheka's activity, gives us material for only a year and a half (1918 and half of 1919 ) and for only twenty provinces of Central Russia ("The figures presented here are
far from com- plete
," in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389 persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine); coun- terrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic fig- ure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization throughout our history and also the general isolation of indi- viduals in those years and the general psychological depression); the total of those arrested—87,000 (and this figure smells of understatement).

What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In 1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays entitled
Against Capital Punishment
, in which are listed by name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to 1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that there were some additional victims, whose names remain un- known, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly not so incomplete as Latsis' materials compiled during the Civil War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an additional 270, who were sentenced
in absentia
and never caught (for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That leaves 894, a figure covering eighty years, which is not even close to Latsis' total for only one and a half years, and not including all the provinces of Russia either. True, the editors of the collection cite another presumed statistic of 1,310 for those sentenced to death (although perhaps not executed) in 1906 alone, and a total of 3,419 for 1826 through 1906. But this, mind you, was right in the midst of the notorious Stolypin reaction, a period for which an additional figure is available: 950 executions over a period of six months. (In fact, the Stolypin military field tribunals were in existence for six months all told.) It sounds awful, and yet it does not make much of an impression on our hardened nerves: even if we multiply by three this figure of 950 for six months, in order to compare it with the Latsis figure for eighteen months in the postrevolutionary period, we still come up with the fact that the terror after the Revolution was at least
three times more in- tense
than Stolypin's. And that was for just twenty provinces and
excluded courts and tribunals
.

And from November, 1917, on, the courts acted on their own. Despite all the difficulties at the time,
Guiding Principles of the Criminal Law of the R.S.F.S.R.
were issued for their use in 1919. (We have not read this work, could not obtain it, and know only that it included "imprisonment for an indefinite term"—in other words, pending a special order.)

The courts were of three kinds: the people's courts, the circuit courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the
Revtribunals
.

The people's courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and non- political criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people's court could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding
two
years. Up to July, 1918, the heritage of the Left SR's still endured in our ju- dicial proceedings. Only by special intervention of the govern- ment and only individually were impermissibly lenient sentences raised to
twenty
years.

[See Part III, Chapter 1.]

From July, 1918, on, the people's courts were given the right to hand down sentences of up to
five
years. And in 1922, when all threats of war had died down, the people's courts got the right to impose sentences of up to
ten
years and lost the right to sentence anyone to
less
than six months.

From the beginning, the circuit courts and the
Revtribunals
had the power to impose the death sentence, but they lost it for a brief period: the circuit courts in 1920, and the
Revtribunals
in 1921. There were many tiny ups and downs in this period which only a historian pursuing all the details of those years would be able to trace.

Perhaps that historian will seek out the documents and un- roll for us the scroll of tribunal sentences and also the statistics. (Though probably not. Whatever time and events failed to destroy was destroyed by persons interested in having such ma- terial disappear.) We know only that the
Revtribunals
were not asleep. They were handing down sentences right and left. And we know, too, that every time a city was captured during the Civil War the event was marked not only by gunsmoke in the court- yards of the Cheka, but also by sleepless sessions of the tribunal. And you did not have to be a White officer, a senator, a land- owner, a monk, a Cadet, an SR, or an Anarchist in order to get your bullet. Soft white uncallused hands alone were sufficient in. those years. But one can also hazard the guess that in Izhevsk or Votkinsk, Yaroslavl or Murom, Kozlov or Tambov, the uprisings were very costly as well to those who had callused workers' hands. And if those scrolls—of both the
extrajudicial
executions and those by tribunal—are unrolled for us someday, the most surpris- ing thing will be the number of ordinary peasants we find on them. Because there was no end to the number of peasant up- risings and revolts from 1918 to 1921, even though they did not adorn the colored pages of the official
History of the Civil War
, and even though no one photographed them, and no one filmed motion pictures of those furious crowds attacking machine guns with clubs, pitchforks, and axes and, later, lined up for execution with their arms tied behind their backs—
ten for one!
The revolt in Sapozhok is remembered only in Sapozhok; the one in Pitelino only in Pitelino. We learn from Latsis the number of peasant rebellions that were suppressed during that same year and a half in twenty provinces—344. (From 1918 on, peasant revolts were already being called "kulak" revolts, for how could the
peasants
revolt against the workers' and peasants' power! But how then could one explain that in every instance it was not just three peasant huts that revolted but the whole village? Why did the masses of poor peasants not kill the insurgent "kulaks" with those same pitchforks and axes, instead of marching with them against the machine guns? Latsis claims: "The kulaks compelled the rest of the peasants to take part in these revolts by promises, slander, and threats." But what could have been more laden with promises than the slogans of the Committees of the Poor? And what could have been more loaded with threats than the machine guns of the Special Purpose Detachments, the CHON?

And how many wholly random people, completely random, whose destruction inevitably accounts for half the casualties of every real, shooting revolution, were caught between those mill- stones?

Here is an eyewitness description of a session of the Ryazan
Revtribunal
which met in 1919 to hear the case of the Tolstoyan I. Ye------v.

With the proclamation of universal and compulsory conscrip- tion into the Red Army (just one year after the slogans: "Down with the wan"; "Stick your bayonets in the ground!"; "Go home!"), "54,697 deserters were caught and sent to the front" by September, 1919, in Ryazan Province alone. (And how many others were shot on the spot as examples?) Ye------v was not a deserter at all but a man who simply and openly refused to enter military service because of his religious convictions. He was con- scripted by main force, but in the barracks he refused to take up arms or undergo training. The enraged Political Commissar of the unit turned him over to the Cheka, saying: "He does not recognize the Soviet government." There was an interrogation. Three Chekists sat behind the desk, each with a Naguan revolver in front of him. "We have seen heroes like you before. You'll be on your knees to us in a minute! Either agree to fight immediately, or we'll shoot you!" But Ye------v was firm. He couldn't fight. He was a believer in free Christianity. And his case was sent to the
Revtribunal
.

It was an open session, with a hundred spectators in the hall. There was a polite elderly defense lawyer. The learned "accuser" —the term "prosecutor" was forbidden until 1922—was Nikol- sky, another old jurist. One of the members of the
Revtribunal
— a juror—tried to elicit the views of the accused. (How can you, a representative of the working people, share the opinions of the aristocrat Count Tolstoi?) But the presiding judge in- terrupted the questioning and refused to permit it to continue. There was a quarrel.

Juror: "You do not want to kill people, and you try to persuade others to refrain from killing. But the Whites began the war, and you are preventing us from defending ourselves. We will send you to Kolchak, and you can preach your nonresistance there!"

Ye------v: "I will go wherever you send me."

Accuser: "This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people's court."

Presiding Judge: "Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!"

Accuser: "I insist that you include my demand in the record."

Defense Attorney: "I support the accuser. The case should be heard in an ordinary court."

Presiding Judge: "There's an old fool for you! Where did they manage to find him?"

Defense Attorney: "I have been a practicing lawyer for forty years and this is the first time I have heard such an insult. Enter it in the record."

Presiding Judge (laughing): "We'll enter it, we'll enter it!" Laughter in the hall. The court exits in order to confer. The sounds of a noisy argument come from the conference room.

They return with the sentence:
to be shot
.

Loud indignation in the hall.

Accuser: "I protest against the sentence and will complain to the Commissariat of Justice!"

Defense Lawyer: "I join my voice to that of the accuser."

Presiding Judge: "Clear the hall!"

The convoy came and led Ye------v to jail, saying to him: "If everyone was like you, brother, how good it would be! There would be no war, and no Whites and no Reds!" They went back to their barracks and called a Red Army meeting. It condemned the sentence and sent a protest to Moscow.

In daily expectation of death, Ye------v waited for thirty-seven days, while, from the prison window, he watched executions taking place. They commuted his sentence to fifteen years of
strict detention
.