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Episode 10.97: The Trial of the SRs

Last week, we talked about the Russian famine of 1921 to 1922, a famine that represented a true nadir of Russian fortunes, following a long list of nadirs of their fortunes since 1914. Now had the tsar been in power, the famine was exactly the kind of thing socialists would 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 Soviet and the provisional government, 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 flummoxed 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 boys simply copied and pasted the SR land redistribution program and issued it as their Decree on Land. So, there seemed a little reason to rise up and overthrow them in early 1918. They were promising what everybody wanted.

In the years 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 Allied backers in the west had no interest in letting revolutionary socialists have any power inside thier anti-communist coalition.

By 1919, the civil war had become a true either or choice between Reds and Whites, and most SRs 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 death matches of the civil war in late 1919 and early 1920, the Cheka actively hunted down known senior SRs. Among the most prominent was Abram Gotz, 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. Gotz 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, Gotz 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, Gotz 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 Chernov, 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 Antonov 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 Kolchak, which, y’know, makes a certain amount of sense — the revolution putting the old regime on trial. Those plans never went 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 Girondins.

In his book, A Show Trial Under Lenin, a book which I’m getting a ton of details for today’s episode from, Marc Jansen 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 socialism, whatever bumps, hiccups, and y’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 Judases 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 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 opposed Bolshevism, and were appalled at the intended persecution of SRs, who were still 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 [to?] the ComIntern’s 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. SRs 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 ComIntern leaders 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 essential of life; anything that painted them as being little more than a front for the reactionary Whites and the western allies who backed them. Accumulating 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. This indictment read far more like a political polemic than a legal document. The indictment started with a survey of the history of the SRs 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 clandestine 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 SRs full responsibility for the run of peasant uprisings which had manifested in 1920 and1921 and accused them of supporting the Kronstadt Rebellion.

In the end, the indictment named 34 total defendants — 30 men and four women — with Abram Gotz 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 ten 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 the 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 8th, 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 1500 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 5:00 PM, and an evening session convening at seven 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 a 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 councils or defendants attempted to speak, the spectators subjected them to jeering and catcalls. They were correct in their assessment. The trial was not in fact, an exercise in impartial justice, but instead the centerpiece of a sweeping propaganda campaign. Lenin and other senior Communists repeatedly referred to the trial was 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 Kadets and Mensheviks and monarchists, who despite their wildly different ideologies, were now all lumped into a single amorphous counterrevolutionary 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 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 aligned 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 revolutionaries. 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.

Now 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, one SR noted how successful this campaign was. He said:

The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries has pushed aside all other life in Russia. Apart from this trial, the Bolsheviks appeared to have no needs, no cares at all. Such matters as the famine, industry, transport, the sowing of fields, et cetera, et cetera, 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 “facts” about the traitorous and villainous activities of the Socialist Revolutionary ‘bandits’…. In short, the Leviathan has thrown itself into the fight against the ‘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 let 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 20th, 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 traitors 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 a 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 in 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 Minutes Hate of the SRs — the legal defense team for the first group of defendants, the real defendants, concluded that they too could not go on participating in this charade. They stopped attending sessions on June 23rd. Now 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 two, who were technically on trial, but were really there just to present evidence against group one, 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 Grigory Semyonov and a woman called Lidia Konopleva, 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 in 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 Fanny Kaplan, I hinted that there are some conspiracy theory surrounding all of this. And part of that is because most of the direct statements of evidence against Fanny Kaplan we have — which are simply taken as fact — come from Semyonov’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 Yevgeniya 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 Gotz 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 remain courageous revolutionaries and they knew how to look death in the eyes.

On August 7th, 1922, the long since foreordained verdict was handed down. The tribunal delivered death sentences to twelve 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 imprisonment. But the tribunal pointedly asked the Presidium of the All-Russian Soviet 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, “… an embittered enemy, which, not withstanding 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 “… 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 judgment 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, y’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, right? The entire trial was purposely bent towards finding the accused guilty. The prosecution almost certainly suborned perjury — to say they tampered with witnesses would be the understatement of the century — and the prosecution judges 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 crossexamine 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-communist uprising. All 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 Communists 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 Bolsheviks since 1917: armed rebellion against the government? Check. Murder, assassination, and torture? Check, 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 in aid and support from the French and the British.

So, as Abram Gotz 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. They didn’t win. They lost. And so, they wound up going down as villains instead of heroes.

So it goes.

The 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….