The Russian Revolution полностью

With the expulsion of other parties from Soviet institutions, first the Mensheviks and SRs and then the Left SRs, the Revolutionary Tribunals turned into tribunals of the Bolshevik Party thinly disguised as public courts. In 1918, 90 percent of their staff were members of the Bolshevik Party.²⁵ To be appointed a judge on a Revolutionary Tribunal one needed no formal qualifications other than the ability to read and write. According to contemporary statistics, 60 percent of the judges on these tribunals had less than secondary schooling.²⁶ Steinberg writes, however, that some of the worst offenders were not such semi-educated proletarians but intellectuals who used the tribunals to pursue personal vendettas and who were not above taking bribes from families of the accused.²⁷

Those living under Bolshevik rule found themselves in a situation for which there was no historic precedent. There were courts for ordinary crimes and for crimes against the state, but no laws to guide them; citizens were sentenced by judges lacking in professional qualifications for crimes which were nowhere defined. The principles nullum crimen sine lege and nulla poena sine lege—no crime without a law and no punishment without a law—which had traditionally guided Western jurisprudence (and Russia’s since 1864), went overboard as so much useless ballast. The situation struck contemporaries as unusual in the extreme. One observer noted in April 1918 that in the preceding five months no one had been sentenced for looting, robbery, or murder, except by execution squads and lynching mobs. He wondered where all the criminals had disappeared to, given that the old courts had had to work around the clock.²⁸ The answer, of course, was that Russia had been turned into a lawless society. In April 1918, the novelist Leonid Andreev described what this meant for the average citizen:

We live in unusual conditions, still comprehensible to a biologist who studies the life of molds and fungi, but inadmissible for the psycho-sociologist. There is no law, there is no authority, the entire social order is defenseless.… Who protects us? Why are we still alive, unrobbed, not evicted from our homes? The old authority is gone; a band of unknown Red Guards occupies the neighborhood railroad station, learns how to shoot … carries out searches for food and weapons, and issues “permits” for travel to the city. There is no telephone and no telegraph. Who protects us? What remains of reason? Chance that no one has noticed us.… Finally, some general human cultural experiences, sometimes simple, unconscious habits: walking on the right side of the road, saying “good day” on meeting someone, tipping one’s own hat, not the other person’s. The music has long stopped, and we, like dancers, continue rhythmically to shuffle our feet and sway to the inaudible melody of law.²⁹

To Lenin’s disappointment, the Revolutionary Tribunals did not turn into instruments of terror. The judges worked lackadaisically and passed mild sentences. One newspaper noted in April 1918 that they had done little more than shut down a few newspapers and sentence a few “bourgeois.”³⁰ Even after being empowered to do so, they were reluctant to pass sentences of death. In the course of 1918, a year which included the official Red Terror, the Revolutionary Tribunals tried 4,483 defendants, one-third of whom it sentenced to hard labor, another third to the payment of fines, and only fourteen to death.³¹

This is not what Lenin intended. The judges, who in time were almost exclusively members of the Bolshevik Party, were urged to pass extreme sentences and given ever wider discretion to do so. In March 1920, the tribunals

received the authority to refuse to call and interrogate witnesses if their testimony during the preliminary inquest was clear, as well as the authority to stop at any moment the judiciary proceeding if [they] determined that the circumstances of the case had been adequately clarified. Tribunals had the authority to refuse the plaintiff and the defendant the right to appear and plead.³²

These measures returned Russian judiciary procedures to the practices of the seventeenth century.

But even thus streamlined, the Revolutionary Tribunals proved too slow and too cumbersome to satisfy Lenin’s quest for rule “unrestricted by any laws.” Hence, he increasingly came to rely on the Cheka, which he endowed with the license to kill without having to follow even the most perfunctory procedures.