The Russian Revolution полностью

True to his word, shortly after taking office, Lenin, with a stroke of the pen, liquidated Russia’s entire legal system as it had developed since the reform of 1864. This he accomplished with the decree of November 22, 1917, released after prolonged discussion in the Sovnarkom.¹⁸ The decree in the first instance dissolved nearly all existing courts, up to and including the Senate, the highest court of appeals. It further abolished the professions associated with the judiciary system, including the office of the Procurator (the Russian equivalent of the Attorney General), the legal profession, and most justices of the peace. It left intact only the “local courts” (mestnye sudy) which dealt with minor offenses.

The decree did not explicitly invalidate the laws on the statute books—this was to come one year later. But it produced the same effect by instructing judges of the local courts to be “guided in making decisions and passing sentences by the laws of the overthrown government only to the extent that these have not been annuled by the Revolution and do not contradict the revolutionary conscience and the revolutionary sense of legality.” An amendment clarifying this vague provision specified that those laws were annulled which ran contrary to Soviet decrees as well as to the “programs-minimum of the Social-Democratic Labor Party and the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionaries.” Essentially, in offenses still subject to judiciary procedures, guilt was determined by the impression gained by the judge or judges.

In March 1918, the regime replaced the local courts with People’s Courts (narodnye sudy). These were to deal with every category of crime of citizen against citizen: murder, bodily injury, theft, etc. The elected judges of these courts were not bound by any formalities concerning evidence.¹⁹ A ruling issued in November 1918 forbade judges of People’s Courts to refer to laws enacted before October 1917; it also absolved them further from having to observe any “formal” rules of evidence. In rendering verdicts, they were to be guided by the decrees of the Soviet Government and, when these were lacking, by the “socialist sense of justice” (sotsialisticheskoe pravosoznanie).²⁰

In line with the traditional Russian practice of treating crimes against the state and its representatives differently from crimes against private persons, the Bolsheviks concurrently (November 22, 1917) introduced a new type of court, modeled on a similar institution of the French Revolution, called Revolutionary Tribunals. These were to try persons charged with “counterrevolutionary crimes,” a category which embraced economic crimes and “sabotage.”²¹ To give them guidance, the Commissariat of Justice, then headed by Steinberg, issued on December 21, 1917, a supplementary instruction, which specified that “in setting the penalty, the Revolutionary Tribunal shall be guided by the circumstances of the case and the dictates of revolutionary conscience.”²² How the “circumstances of the case” were to be determined and what exactly constituted “revolutionary conscience” was left unsaid.* In effect, therefore, the Revolutionary Tribunals, from their foundation, operated as kangaroo courts, which sentenced defendants on the basis of a commonsensical impression of guilt. Initially, the Revolutionary Tribunals had no authority to mete out capital punishment. This situation was reversed with the surreptitious introduction of the death penalty. On June 16, 1918, Izvestiia published a “Resolution” signed by the new Commissar of Justice, P. I. Stuchka, which stated: “Revolutionary Tribunals are not bound by any rules in the choice of measures against the counterrevolution except in cases where the law defines the measure in terms of ‘no lower than’ such punishment.” This convoluted language meant that Revolutionary Tribunals were free to sentence offenders to death as they saw fit, but were required to do so when the government mandated such punishment. The first victim of this new ruling was the Soviet commander of the Baltic Fleet, Admiral A. M. Shchastnyi, whom Trotsky accused of plotting to surrender his ships to the Germans: his example was to serve as a lesson to the other officers. Shchastnyi was tried and sentenced on June 21 by a Special Revolutionary Tribunal of the Central Executive Committee, set up on Lenin’s orders to try cases of high treason.²³ When the Left SRs objected to this revival of the odious practice of the death penalty, Krylenko replied that the admiral “had been condemned not ‘to death’ but ‘to be shot.’ ”²⁴