Revolutions - 10.97- The Trial of the SRs

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

There's no business like show business.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.97, The Trial of the SRs. Last week, we talked about the Russian famine of 1921 to 22, a famine that represented a true nadir of Russian fortunes following a long list of nadiers of their fortunes since 1914. Now, had the Tsar been in power, the famine was exactly the kind of thing, socialists, have blamed on the bad old system that needed to be overthrown by revolution.

I mean, look, tens of millions of people are starving to death. What are we supposed to do? Not overthrow the regime that was allowing it to happen? But the revolution had already come and gone. The Communist Party has been in charge of things since 1917, and you can't very well blame Nikki and Alexandra for this one, especially as the Soviet government's own policies played such a huge causal role in the disaster. So as I mentioned last week, the social and economic crisis came with huge political dangers for the Communist Party. And if you go back a few episodes before that to when we were talking about the 10th Party Congress, we know that the liberalizing economic reforms of the NEP were not going to be matched by liberalizing political reforms. Quite

the opposite. More economic freedom had to be paired with less political freedom. Otherwise, people might get it into their heads to overthrow the Communist Party and give someone else a chance. And there were potential alternatives out there. not just reactionary monarchists or liberal bourgeois types, who could be easily dismissed at this point, but other socialist parties, other revolutionary socialist parties, like the party of the socialist revolutionaries, the SRs.

Now, as everyone knows, the SRs had been the most popular political party in Russia back in 1917. They ascended rapidly after the February Revolution, occupied key positions in the Soviets and the provisional governments, and in terms of raw numbers, they were by far the largest political organization in Russia. The leaders of the SRs initially treated the October Revolution as an annoying setback that would be easily overcome when the Democratic elections were held for the Constituent Assembly. But then the Bolsheviks had simply dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 after the

SRs won the most seats, which flummox the leadership of the SRs, as no one rose to defend them or the sanctity of the assembly. But we must remember that this is largely because Lenin and the Boy simply copied and pasted the SR Land Redistribution Program and issued it as their decree on land. So there seemed little reason to rise up and overthrow them in early 1918. They were promising what everybody wanted. In the year since the October Revolution, the SRs had fought a steadily losing battle for relevance, influence, and power. When the Civil War got going in earnest, The party split between those willing to take up arms against the Bolsheviks and those who refused on the assumption that conflict between socialists

would only wind up helping the white forces of reaction. Those who did take up arms in 1918 found themselves mostly marginalized by the end of the year. On the one hand, the Bolshevik land decree made it nearly impossible to convince Russian peasants that the Bolsheviks needed to be fought to the death. And on the other hand, the admirals and generals of the white armies and their allies, and their allied backers in the West had no interest in letting revolutionary socialists have any power inside their anti-communist coalition.

By 1919, the Civil War had become a true either-or choice between reds and whites, and most SR simply could not justify supporting the whites. The communists made their choice easier by offering amnesty to SRs who renounced armed opposition to the Soviet government. Those who did not switch their party allegiance outright, either dropped out of politics.

or went into exile abroad. This general political amnesty was incredibly conditional, though, and during the decisive deathmatches of the civil war in late 1919 and early 1920, the Cheka actively hunted down known senior SRs. Among the most prominent was Abram Gautz, former member of the SR Combat Organization during the Revolution of 1905, who had only emerged from Siberian exile in 1917, whereupon he became chairman of the all-Russian Soviet Executive Committee, one of the Inner Circle members against whom the Bolshevik staged the October Revolution. Gottz was in the room for all the showdowns at the Smolny Institute,

and was a leader of the Committee of Salvation of the Homeland and the Revolution, which attempted to resist the Bolshevik takeover of the Soviets. Despite all this, when faced with the choice of reds or whites, Gott's renounced military opposition to the communists, as it would only help counter-revolutionary reactionaries. but even though he had at least temporarily reconciled himself to the Soviet regime, Gots and other members of the SR Central Committee were swept up in late 1919 and early 1920 by the police. Some of their comrades, most notably Victor Chernoff, managed to avoid the sweep and flee into exile,

but by mid-1921, every prominent SR leader was either in jail or in exile, and the party organization was totally shattered. After allowing them all to languish in prison for the better part of two years, in December 1921, the leaders of the Communist Party decided it was high time to put the SRs on public trial. This decision is a bit surprising for two reasons. First, the SRs as a party did not pose any kind of immediate threat to the Soviet regime. In October 1920, members of a much diminished reconstituted SR Central Committee voted against armed resistance to the communists. as they simply did not have the means, manpower, or weaponry.

Even though veteran SRs like Alexander Antonoff in Tambov were involved in various peasant uprisings, the official party line condemned the uprisings and told anyone still loyal to the party not to participate. And then second, the communists had plans for several big public revolutionary trials over the years. That was originally the plan for both Tsar Nicholas and then later Admiral Colchuk, which makes a certain amount of sense, the revolution putting the old regime on trial. Those plans never win anywhere, so as it turns out, the first big public revolutionary trial

the communists elected to stage was against other revolutionary socialists. It's like if the Jacobins had skipped right over the trial of the king to the trial of the Gerondins. In his book, A Show Trial Under Lennon, a book which I'm getting a ton of details for today's episode, from. Mark Jensen makes the case for understanding the trial in the immediate context of the ongoing Russian famine and the larger context of what post-revolutionary political life was supposed to look like. The Communist Party wanted to short circuit any revival of SR fortunes given the ongoing social and economic conditions and prevent Russians from believing any other party could possibly represent a legitimate alternative to the communist version of revolutionary socialists.

whatever bumps, hiccups, and, you know, famines might occur along the way. In modern parlance, the Communist Party hoped to destroy the brand of the SRs, so that even people dissatisfied with conditions in Russia would see the SRs not as a legitimate alternative, but a discredited group that nobody wanted to associate with. The clever way they planned to go about doing this was by narrowly targeting the leadership, painting them as perfidious judices of the revolution, while simultaneously making a big show of forgiveness, understanding, and sympathy for rank-and-file SRs

if they were ready to put their unfortunate mistakes of the past behind them. In this way, leaders would be cleaved from followers, and the SRs as a party would be dealt a final fatal blow from which they would never recover. When word started leaking out in early 1922 that the cops communists were planning to prosecute senior SRs, their comrades in exile rallied to their defense. Though the Russian Communist Party was triumphant inside Russia, in the wider world of revolutionary socialism, they were still just one faction among many. The big rift between social Democrats and communists

was widening, and many leading members of the international socialist movement oppose Bolshevism, and were appalled at the intended persecution of SRs, who were still concerned. considered perfectly legitimate revolutionary socialists outside of Russia. They were still full comrades in the wider, greater movement. This was fratricide of the worst kind. Now we're going to talk much more about this next week, but after World War I, there were two rival organizations, the common turns claim, to being the international.

The second international was trying to get the old band back together and reconstitute themselves after the disasters of World War I. Then there was another group, sometimes called the Two and a Half International or the Vienna International, composed of more radical socialists who broke with the discredited Second International, but were not themselves full-blown communists. Now, like I said, we'll talk more about this next week, but at this moment, all three organizations were presently in negotiations about the viability of a united front against imperialism and capitalism. SR's in exile appealed to leaders of the other two international groups, who in turn put pressure on the communists to explain why they were about to put good Russian socialists on trial. Sensitive to their image during these negotiations, the common-turn leader said they had nothing to hide and would allow representatives of the other internationals to come to Moscow to not only observe the trial but even serve as members of the legal defense team if they wanted. the attitude being that evidence proving the SR defendants had betrayed the revolution would be so overwhelming that everyone would be not just allowed to watch, but encouraged to watch.

Meanwhile, in Russia, though the decision to prosecute had been made in December, the public announcement was not made until the end of March 1922, and the official investigation did not begin until April 1st. Investigators then spent the next seven weeks gathering up all the alleged overwhelming evidence they had now promised the world. They looked for anything that showed the SR leadership working against the revolution. Communications and alliances with the whites or the allies.

Their destruction of bridges, roads, and buildings. Terrorist activities against either the Soviet government or the Red Army. Any orders to destroy crops or tools or other essentials of life? Anything that painted them as being little more than a front for the reactionary whites and the Western Allies who back them. Acumulating this evidence meant canvassing party members or former party members in a position to have heard or seen things from the inside. This involved police sweeps,

interrogations, and interviews with prisoners already in custody. Some of these people were coaxed into providing testimony with various rewards or promises to let them go on with their lives in peace and freedom. Others had to be threatened with prison, exile, or execution if they did not provide the kind of evidence the prosecution needed. Either way, the message was pretty clear. Life will be much better for you if you testify than if you don't. Concurrently with this investigation, former SRs who had already reconciled with the communists

wrote pieces in the newspaper, admitting their former errors, denouncing their former leaders, and generally encouraging their former comrades to abandon the old party. The forthcoming trial of the SRs, one of them wrote, will open the eyes of the workers of the world to the miserable part which it had played during the revolution, and will thus ease the shift to the revolutionary camp of all those among its present or former members, who, for one reason or another, still hesitate. And that, right there, is the point of all this.

On May 23rd, 1922, the seven-week investigation concluded with a 117-page indictment called the affair of the Central Committee and of certain members of other organizations of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This indictment read far more like a political polemic than a legal document. The indictment started with a survey the history of the SR since the October Revolution and peppered this story with allegations of their counter-revolutionary activities at every step of the way. The SRs had taken the side of the bourgeois against the workers and the peasants. They engaged in clandestestine. in attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime.

They conducted open civil war against that regime, during which they cooperated with the whites, the bourgeoisie, and the Western powers, from whom they had taken money and supplies. In league with the Czechoslovak Legion, they had let a chunk of Russia fall out of Soviet hands. More recently, the indictment laid on the SR's full responsibility for the run of peasant uprisings, which had manifested in 1920 and 1921,

and accused them of subordinate. the Kronstadt Rebellion. In the end, the indictment named 34 total defendants, 30 men and four women, with Abram Gatz as the most widely recognizable name on the list, thanks to the prominent part he had played in 1917. But not all these defendants were the same. They were divided into two groups. The first group were the real defendants,

24 senior SR leaders, including all the members of the Central Committee in custody. The other 10 in the second group were not actually targets of the trial at all, despite being included in the indictment. They were there to take the stand and openly confess their crimes. They would paint a miserable picture of the real defendants in the first group, and in return be forgiven for their own crimes. This was meant to reinforce the idea that the communists were sincere in their claim that confession and repentance would lead to forgiveness and reconciliation.

There was no reason for anyone to cling to the SR Party anymore, especially not after the duplicitous crimes of leadership had been publicly revealed. And so the defendants in that second group, lower-ranking members who would confess their crimes and then be forgiven, would be living proof of the forward-looking decency of the Communist Party. The trial began in Moscow on June 8, 1922. It was held in the pillar hall of the House of Unions in Moscow. It was a ballroom that had been used by the nobility during the old regime. The trial was purposely meant to be a public event, and 1,500 spectators were allowed to cram inside under heavy guard by armed soldiers.

Three judges of the court sat on an elevated platform at one end of the hall, under a huge banner that read Workers of the World Unite. This was meant to be the revolution putting its enemies on trial. The court would meet six days a week with an early session running from noon until 5 p.m. And an evening session convening at 7 o'clock and running to midnight. Now because this was meant to be a real trial and not just drumhead justice, the accused all had lawyers and would be allowed to mount to defense. A delegation representing the other Western internationals were indeed allowed to come and participate, and they met daily with their clients to review evidence and work out a defense.

Once things got going, though, they all concluded the trial was so heavily stacked against them that it was hardly an exercise in impartiality. All three of the judges were members of the Communist Party, and the audience was packed with raucously vocal partisans. Whenever defense counsels or defendants attempted to speak, the spectators subjected them to jeering and cat calls. They were correct in their assessment. The trial was not in fact an exercise in impartiality. justice, but instead the centerpiece of a sweeping propaganda campaign. Lenin and other senior communists repeatedly referred to the trial as an opportunity for mass public education, that is, to educate the people on how terrible the SRs had been during the revolution. The SRs would be portrayed not as sincere socialists, but as dupes, patsies, and collaborators

with the enemies of the revolution. They were allies not of the workers and the peasants, but of cadets and Mensheviks and monarchists, who, despite their wildly different ideologies, were now all lumped into a single amorphous counter-revolutionary blob. In this depiction, the SRs were, quote, a paid military espionage agency of the Entente. They were, quote, an agency of foreign governments. According to Trotsky, they were a division of the, quote, French Czechoslovakian intelligence service, that the French general staff was the real leader of the politics of the social Socialist Revolutionaries and the source of their finance. Beyond painting a broad picture that the SRs were simply a front for the enemies of the revolution during the Civil War,

they were also blamed for ongoing troubles. Particularly they were blamed for the famine. According to a declaration of one Communist Align Workers Group, the hunger is also the fault of the socialist revolutionaries. Another resolution said, Our chaotic conditions and hunger are the result of the criminal adventurism of the Socialist Revolution. They have set fire to the foodstuffs and grain in the Russian storage depots. So in all of this, the SRs are spies, saboteurs, and turncoats who attempted to derail the

revolution at every turn. This propaganda campaign of public education, driven by daily revelations from the trial, used a variety of media. Written pamphlets, articles, and newspaper stories were often written by former SRs admitting the error of their ways and denouncing their former leaders. There were also mass meetings and demonstrations and public gatherings where similar messages were disseminated. The SRs on trial were denounced as tools of the bourgeoisie and Western capitalism. Workers often heard from former SRs who said, I have seen the error of my ways. I hope all my former comrades do too. The communists also set up public exhibitions for people to come and see for themselves all the horrors the SRs had wrought. Most famously,

A public exhibition was set up right next door to the courtroom in Moscow called The Crimes of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries against the Workers of Soviet Russia in photos and documents. Inside, a visitor would find a collection of enlarged photographs showing destroyed buildings and bridges, corpses, graves, all the victims of the SRs. There were individual portraits of murdered Bolsheviks. It even included the gun Fanny Kaplan had used to try to kill Lenin. This being the early days of cinema, the party also commissioned a newsreel called the trial of the socialist revolutionaries to be shown in movie houses. And more than anything, this flood of media and press and public events was meant to produce a trial of the century atmosphere that would dominate shop talk, gossip, and everyday conversation.

Just days into the trial, 1SR noted how successful this campaign was. He said, the trial of the socialist revolutionaries has pushed. decide all other life in Russia. Apart from this trial, the Bolsheviks appear to have no needs, no cares at all. Such matters as the famine, industry, transport, the sewing of fields, etc., etc., have all been relegated to the background or are given no attention at all. Tens of thousands of newspapers in the center and in the provinces carry out the orders of the Bolshevik provincial committees, executive committees, and all other party branches, and from the first to the last page are filled with, quote-unquote, facts about the traitorous and villainous activities of the socialist revolutionary bandits.

In short, the Leviathan has thrown itself into the fight against the quote-unquote handful of socialist revolutionary bandits, with all its impressive penal and coercive apparatus, with technical means such as the post, the telegraph, the telephone, the railways, the aeroplane, the printing press, the newspapers, and the journals. The combined atmosphere of all this, both inside the courtroom and outside it, convinced the Western socialist observers who had been led in that this was a parody of justice. Despite what they had been told before the trial, this was not a regular legal proceeding in the sense of trying to prove guilt or innocence. It was a spectacle, with an almost certainly preordained outcome deployed in the service of political propaganda.

On June 14th, the Western Socialist delegation met with the defendants, and agreed to boycott all further proceedings to deny the trial any further legitimacy. They then made a plan to leave Russia, to return to their homes in the West and report what they had seen in scathing detail. For a moment, the communist leadership attempted to prevent them from leaving the country, and it was only after they went on a 24-hour hunger strike that the government issued an exit visa and allowed them to leave Russia on June 19th. The very next day, the propaganda machine reached its fever pitch. On June 20, 1922, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 people marched through Red Square in a mass anti-SR demonstration.

Now, though this is a huge crowd, there is some evidence that hints went out to the workers of Moscow that if they did not show up for this march, they needn't bother showing up for work in the morning. if you catch our drift. The marchers carried ominous banners that read Death to the Traders of the Revolution and Death to the Social Democrats in what appeared to be a spontaneous grassroots call for the death penalty. But in terms of general atmosphere,

the march was generally light and buoyant. Men, women, and children were just out enjoying a nice June day. After the march, the crowd gathered outside the House of the Trade Unions, where a bunch of government officials addressed them. And this included most of the officials involved in the trial. The courtroom session that day was cut short so that officers of the court, members of the prosecution, the judges themselves, and even some of the Russian members of the

legal defense team could give rousing speeches to the crowd promising to deliver revolutionary justice. Following this demonstration, the court held an evening session where the judges allowed two delegations representing the proletariat of Moscow and Petrograd to appear. This was way outside of any regular rules of order, and these delegations were allowed to simply spend two and a half hours denouncing the accused as killers and enemies of the working class and urging the death penalty as a justified response. Now, after this demonstration, a kind of prolonged two-minute hate of the SRs, the legal defense team for the first group of defendants, the real defendants, concluded that they two could not go on

participating in this charade. They stopped attending sessions on June 23rd. At this ground proceedings to a halt for a few days, but then the trial recommenced and remained ongoing for another full month. In total, the prosecution called 58 witnesses. These witnesses included not only those defendants in Group 2, who were technically on trial, but were really there just to present evidence against Group 1, but also another group of 19 former party members who had been arrested prior to the trial and threatened with prosecutions unless they presented evidence useful to the prosecution's case. The most important of the witnesses were a man called Gregori Seminoff and a woman called Lydia Koneppleva, both of whom were former SR terrorists,

and both of whom had published denunciations of their former comrades the previous winter as part of the initial groundwork laid for the trial. They testified that the Central Committee of the SRs coordinated an armed struggle against the Soviet state and ordered the assassination of Lenin in 1918. And if you remember when we talked about the attempted assassination of Lenin by Fannie Kaplan, I hinted that there are some conspiracy theories surrounding all of this. And part of that is because most of the direct statements of evidence

against Fannie Kaplan we have, which are simply taken as fact, come from Seminoff's testimony at the trial of the SRs. We have no idea how reliable these statements actually are. When the defense attempted to call counter-witnesses, most of them were rejected by the judges for a variety of pretexts, and they were ultimately able to summon only nine. The final phase of the trial began on July 27th, with various summations and closing arguments on each side.

The defendants all gave their own, speeches since their lawyers had been boycotting the proceedings for a month. They hammered the note that this was an illegitimate farce. One of them, a woman called Yevgenia Ratner, said the spiritual rape which you are exercising here under the label of the educative role of the trial is your greatest crime. Abram Gott said the Bolsheviks considered themselves entitled to judge the SRs only because they had won the civil war. He said that he would face his sentence with a clear conscience, because the victors are often later judged by history's court.

He said he couldn't go on with this mockery of justice and instead was ready to martyr himself to their cruelty. Unable to enter what he called an agreement with the victors, they now had to enter an agreement with death. But they remained courageous revolutionaries and they knew how to look death in the eyes. On August 7, 1922, the long since four ordained verdict was handed down. The tribunal delivered death sentences to 12 of the accused in the first group,

eight members of the Central Committee plus four others. The other ten got long prison sentences. Then, for that second group, they too received a mix of death sentences and imprisonments. But the tribunal pointedly asked the presidium of the all-Russian-Soviet Congress Congress, to pardon all the accused of the second group because they acknowledged and repented their activities and had broken completely with their past. The next day, August 8th, the Presidium of the Soviet issued their own final statement. The SRs represented, quote, an embittered enemy, which, notwithstanding the insignificance of its

political influence in the country, can imply a great danger even in the future as a tool in the hands of the still powerful world capitalism. Any opposition to the trial represented nothing but, quote, a new crusade by imperialism with its social democratic support against the Soviet Republic and its friends all over the world. They said, in the name of justice, humanity, and mercy, the lackeys of the bourgeoisie want to defend the right of its agents to organize revolts, to murder the leaders of the Soviet Republic, to blow up bridges and warehouses, to poison and to disorganize the Red Army and the Red Fleet, and to carry out military espionage on the instructions of the staffs of imperialism.

They then confirmed the judgments of death that had been handed out to everyone. But then there was a twist. Not only would they take the tribunal's recommendation to pardon the convicted of the second group, they also announced that in the name of true justice, true humanity, and true mercy, they would suspend enforcement of the death sentences even against the first group. Nobody was going to be executed. At least, you know, not yet. So what can we make of the trial of the SRs?

Well, first, it's obviously a harbinger of things to come. Political show trials are going to be a hallmark of Stalin's personal consolidation of power in the 1930s. It's not going to be enough for him to just get rid of. his enemies in a basement in the middle of the night. The public needed to see, hear, and feel their guilt. And this would require not mere accusation or denunciation or declaration, but as with the trial of the SRs, the appearance of objective justice,

usually arranged to culminate with the accused confessing all their crimes, no matter how absurd or false the charges. So here we basically have the prototype of a show. trial. And in this show trial of the SRs, the case laid out by the prosecution failed basic tests of legal ethics. The entire trial was purposely bent towards finding the accused guilty. The prosecution almost certainly suborn perjury. To say they tampered with witnesses would be the understatement of the century. And the prosecution judge's audience and many of the defendants were simply there to play parts in a theatrical performance, not engage in an adversarial criminal

trial where the defendants had a right to truly defend themselves. And the thing that was going on in the trial of the SRs is that the prosecution had witnesses making direct connections between the individual defendants and various events that were a matter of public record without really allowing the defense to meaningfully cross-examine the witnesses or present counter testimony that challenged the narratives built by the prosecution. That is why it was a parody of justice and not actual justice. But all that said, it is worth pointing out that the prosecution was not just making stuff up out of thin air. All the stuff laid out in the initial indictment was mostly true.

Since 1918, the SRs had engaged in various forms of sedition and terrorism. They had raised an army to fight a civil war against the Bolsheviks. They had been in contact with foreign powers who supplied them with money and weapons and supplies. In March 1921, they had contacted the Kronstadt sailors in the hopes of sparking an anti-Nesteader. anti-communist uprising. All of those things had happened. What makes this a parody of justice is the connections made between the individual defendants themselves and these events that were a matter of public record. Witnesses accused the defendants of secretly orchestrating all of this, but those witnesses had been heavily coerced by the prosecution to say those things. The reality

is that most of the defendants had nothing specifically to do with the incidents under direct consideration. Were they the leaders of a political party who had many members who had spilled communist blood? Yes. But as often as not, their own posture, especially after 1918, is we need to cool that stuff off because the worst thing that could possibly happen is the whites winning the civil war. And as a reward for their cautious circumspection in those decisive days which had helped the communist win is to now be held responsible for activities that they themselves had renounced. Now finally, the last thing I'll say is that all of the things the SRs were accused of were only crimes against the revolution because the communists had won.

And frankly, with a little light editing, the indictment against the SRs would have read like a history of the Bolshevik since 1917. Armed rebellion against the government, check, murder, assassination and torture, check, check, even the business about being in league with foreign powers. We're talking about a party who had returned to Russia thanks to train tickets provided by the Kaiser and who had taken German cash all through 1917 to fund their activities, this during a time when Russia was at war with Germany. Then when everything flipped in 1918, Lenin is on record pushing for his comrades

to accept money and aid and support from the French and the British. So, as Abram Gatz hinted in his final summation, The real crime the SRs committed was losing. Had they won everything listed in the indictment, would have been glorified as the heroic deeds of the men and women who had saved the revolution from the dastardly Bolsheviks. But they didn't win. They lost.

And so they wound up going down as villains instead of heroes. So it goes. Next week, we'll pick up with the international thread to talk about how the increasingly cemented Soviet regime was going to make its way in the world. The show trial had not earned them any favors in the international socialist community, and their relations with the other socialist parties after World War I were increasingly strained. The victorious Russian communists took it for granted that they would be the new leaders of international socialism, but they found many international socialists not particularly interested in being led by communist Russia.

closer to home, their permanent ascendancy did make them the dominant regional force in Eastern Europe, and here their power and authority matched their ambitions, as they embarked on a plan to create a tighter union of Soviet, socialist, republics.