Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The GULag Archipelago Volume 1 - An Experiment in Literary Investigation

And just as it took them a long time to compose the verdict, it took them a long time to read it, piling up on top of one another all kinds of fantastic wrecking activities, contacts, and plans. Smirnov, Univer, Saburov, and Vlasov were sentenced to be shot; two others to ten years; one to eight years. In addition, the verdict of the court led to the exposure of an additional wrecking organization in the Komsomol in Kady (whose members were, of course, immediately arrested. Remember the young merchandise manager?). And of a center of underground organizations in Ivanovo, which was, of course, in its turn, subordinate to Moscow. (One more nail in Bukharin’s coffin.)

After the solemn words “To be shot!” the judges paused for applause. But the mood in the hall was so gloomy, with the sighs and tears of people who had no connection with the defendants, and the screams and swooning of their relatives, that no applause was to be heard even from the first two benches, where the Party members were sitting. This, indeed, was totally improper. “Oh, good Lord, what have you done?” someone in the hall shouted at the members of the court. Univer’s wife dissolved in tears. In the half-darkness, the crowd began to stir. Vlasov shouted at the front benches:

“Come on, you bastards, why aren’t you clapping? Some Communists you are!”

The political commissar of the guards platoon ran up to him and shoved his revolver in his face. Vlasov reached out to grab the revolver, but a policeman ran up and pushed back his political commissar, who had been guilty of a blunder. The chief of the convoy gave the command: “Arms at the ready!” And thirty police carbines and the pistols of the local NKVD men were aimed at the defendants and at the crowd. (It seemed at the time as though the crowd would rush forward to free the defendants.)

The hall was lit only by a few kerosene lamps, and the semi-darkness heightened the general confusion and fear. The crowd, finally convinced, not so much by the trial as by the carbines now leveled at it, pushed in a panic against the doors and windows. The wood cracked and broke; glass tinkled. Univer’s wife, in a dead faint, was almost trampled to death and was left lying beneath the chairs until morning.

And there never was any applause. [256]

And not only couldn’t the condemned prisoners be shot then and there, but they had to be kept under even stricter guard, because now they really had nothing at all to lose, and they had to be taken to the provincial capital for execution.

They managed to cope with the first problem—sending them off by night to the NKVD along the main street—by having each condemned man guarded by five men. One of the guards carried a lantern. One went ahead with a pistol at the ready. Two held the condemned prisoner by the arms and kept their pistols in their free hands. The fifth brought up the rear, with his pistol pointed at the condemned man’s back.

The rest of the police were ranged in formation in order to prevent any attack by the crowd.

Every reasonable man will now agree that the NKVD could never have carried out its great assignment if they had fussed about with open trials.

And that is why public political trials never really put down roots in our country.

Capital punishment has had an up-and-down history in Russia. In the Code of the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov there were fifty crimes for which capital punishment could be imposed. By the time of the Military Statutes of Peter the Great there were two hundred. Yet the Empress Elizabeth, while she did not repeal those laws authorizing capital punishment, never once resorted to it. They say that when she ascended the throne she swore an oath never to execute anyone—and for all twenty years of her reign she kept that oath. She fought the Seven Years’ War! Yet she still got along without capital punishment. It was an astounding record in the mid-eighteenth century—fifty years before the guillotine of the Jacobins. True, we have taught ourselves to ridicule all our past; we never acknowledge a good deed or a good intention in our history. And one can very easily blacken Elizabeth’s reputation too; she replaced capital punishment with flogging with the knout; tearing out nostrils; branding with the word “thief; and eternal exile in Siberia. But let us also say something on behalf of the Empress: how could she have changed things more radically than she did in contravention of the social concepts of her time? And perhaps the prisoner condemned to death today would voluntarily consent to that whole complex of punishments if only the sun would continue to shine on him; but we, in our humanitarianism, don’t offer him that chance. And perhaps the reader will come to feel in the course of this book that twenty or even ten years in our camps are harder to bear than were the punishments of Elizabeth?

In today’s terms, Elizabeth had a universally human point of view on all this, while the Empress Catherine the Great had, on the contrary, a class point of view (which was consequently more correct). Not to execute anyone at all seemed to her appalling and indefensible. She found capital punishment entirely appropriate to defending herself, her throne, and her system—in other words, in political cases, such as those of Mirovich, the Moscow plague mutiny, and Pugachev. But for habitual criminals, for nonpolitical offenders, why not consider capital punishment abolished?

Under Paul, the abolition of capital punishment was confirmed. (Despite his many wars, there were no military tribunals attached to military units.) And during the whole long reign of Alexander I, capital punishment was introduced only for war crimes that took place during a campaign (1812). (Right at this point, some people will say to us: What about deaths from running the gantlet? Yes, indeed, there were, of course, hidden executions—for that matter, one can literally drive a person to death with a trade-union meeting!) But the yielding up of one’s God-given life because others, sitting in judgment, have so voted simply did not take place in our country even for crimes of state for an entire half-century—from Pugachev to the Decembrists.

The blood of the five Decembrists whetted the appetite of our state. From then on, execution for crimes of state was no longer prohibited nor was it forgotten, right up to the February Revolution in 1917. It was confirmed by the Statutes of 1845 and 1904, and further reinforced by the criminal statutes of the army and navy.

And how many people were executed in Russia during that period? We have already, in Chapter 8 above, cited the figures given by liberal leaders of 1905-1907. Let us add to them the verified figures of N. S. Tagantsev, the expert on Russian criminal law. [257]Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia. For a period of thirty years—from 1876 to 1904 (the period of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries and the use of terrorism—a terrorism which did not consist merely of intentions murmured in the kitchen of a communal apartment—a period of mass strikes and peasant revolts; the period when the parties of the future revolution were created and grew in strength)—486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country. (This figure includes executions of ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!) [258]During the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an abrupt end.