The Bolsheviks gave institutional form to the mob trials through the new People’s Courts, where ‘revolutionary justice’ was summarily administered in all criminal cases. The old criminal justice system, with its formal rules of law, was abolished as a relic of the ‘bourgeois order’. The twelve elected judges who made up the People’s Courts did not have to have any formal legal training — they were to be guided by their ‘revolutionary conscience’ — and were mainly drawn from the workers, the peasants and the petty officials of the old law courts. Half of them had not been educated beyond primary level, and one in five belonged to the Bolshevik Party. The sessions of the People’s Courts were little more than formalized mob trials. There were no set legal procedures or rules of evidence, which in any case hardly featured. Convictions were usually secured on the basis of denunciations, often arising from private vendettas, and sentences tailored to fit the mood of the crowd, which freely voiced its opinions from the public gallery.
The system of revolutionary justice administered by the People’s Courts was similar in many ways to the old peasant customary law, with its rough and ready system of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Here is the Penal Code introduced by the People’s Court in the village of Lubny, in Tambov province, in May 1918:
If one strikes another fellow, the sufferer shall strike the offender ten times. If one strikes another fellow causing thereby a wound or a broken bone, the offender shall be deprived of life. If one commits theft or receives stolen articles he shall be deprived of life. If one commits arson and is caught, he shall be deprived of life.
It had long been a basic tenet of peasant legal consciousness that a rich man stealing from the poor was many times more guilty than a poor one stealing from the rich — and this same principle of ‘class justice’ was applied in the People’s Courts. Judgements were reached according to the social status of the accused and their victims. In one People’s Court the jurors made it a practice to inspect the hands of the defendant and, if they were clean and soft, to find him guilty. Speculative traders were heavily punished and sometimes even sentenced to death, whereas robbers — and sometimes even murderers — of the rich were often given only a very light sentence, or even acquitted altogether, if they pleaded poverty as the cause of their crime.78 The looting of the looters had been legalized and, in the process, law as such abolished: there was only lawlessness.
Lenin had always been insistent that the legal system should be used as a weapon of mass terror against the bourgeoisie. The system of mob law which evolved through the People’s Courts gave him that weapon of terror. So too did the Revolutionary Tribunals, modelled on their Jacobin namesakes, which dealt with a whole new range of ‘crimes against the state’. In February 1918, at the time of the German invasion of Russia, Lenin issued a decree — ‘The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!’ — ordering the Revolutionary Tribunals to shoot ‘on the spot’ all ‘enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators’.79 To his disappointment, the Revolutionary Tribunals turned out to be highly inefficient instruments of the Bolshevik Terror: too many of its judges could be easily bribed, which is hardly surprising given the fact that most of them came directly from the factory floor. But this was only the start of a new state machinery of mass terror, and the work of the tribunals was gradually taken over by the local Chekas, which were not wanting in revolutionary zeal. Latsis, one of the Cheka’s leaders, instructed his officials:
not to look for evidence as proof that the accused has acted or spoken against the Soviets. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.80
