A SHOW TRIAL UNDER LENIN STUDIES IN SOCIAL HISTORY

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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL HISTORY AMSTERDAM

1. W.H. Roobol. Tsereteli - A Democrat in the Russian Revolution. A Political Biography. 1976. ISBN 90-247-1915-1

2. Zvi Rosen. Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx. The Influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx's Thought. 1977. ISBN 90-247-1948-8

3. Marian Sawer. Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production. 1977. ISBN 90-247-2027-3

4. Klaus Frohlich. The Emergence of Russian Constitutionalism. The Relationship Between Social Mobilization and Political Group Formation in Pre-Revolu tionary Russia. 1981. ISBN 90-247-2378-7

5. Fritjof Tichelman. The Social Evolution of Indonesia. The Asiatic Mode of Production and Its Legacy. 1980. ISBN 90-247-2389-2

6. Tom Nieuwenhuis. Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq. Mamluk Pashas, Tribal Shayks and Local Rule Between 1802 and 1831. 1982. ISBN 90-247-2576-3

7. Marc Jansen. A Show Trial Under Lenin. The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922. 1982. ISBN 90-247-2698-0

SERIES ISBN 90-247-2347-7 A SHOW TRIAL UNDER LENIN The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922 . by

MARC JANSEN

Translated from the Dutch by Jean Sanders

..•••• 1982

MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS THE HAGUE/BOSTON/LONDON Distributors: for the United States and Canada Kluwer Boston Inc. 190 Old Derby Street Hingham, MA 02043 USA for all other countries Kluwer Academic Publishers Group Distribution Center P.O. Box 322 3300 AH Dordrecht The Netherlands

Published with financial support from the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO).

Library of Congress Card Number: 82-14183

ISBN-I3: 97R-94-009-7608-5 c-ISBN-13: 97R-94-009-7606-1 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-7606-1

Copyright © 1982 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.o. Box 566, 2501 CN The Hague, The Netherlands. CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Preface vii List ofAbbreviations xiii

1. The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Soviet Regime 1 2. The Announcement of the Trial and the International Socialist Movement 22 3. Preparations for the Trial 47 4. The Treatment of the Accused, Defenders and Witnesses During the Trial 62 5. The Judicial Investigation 83 6. The Socialist Revolutionaries Versus the Bolsheviks 105 7. The Verdict and How It Was Brought About 119 8. The Propaganda Campaign 141 9. The Reactions 156 10. The End 170 Conclusion 186 List ofAbbreviations Used in the Notes 196 Notes 197 Bibliography 215 Index 225 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Front cover. Accused and defenders. Seated (left to right). Donskoi, Evgeniia Ratner, Vandervelde, and Gots. Standing third from left Zhdanov, fifth from left Wauters, third from right Timofeev, and second from right Rosenfeld.(IISH) Back cover. Piatakov reading the verdict. On the left some of the accused, probably of the 'second group'. (IISH) 1. Abram Gots. (IISH) 2. Evgenii Timofeev. (IISH) 3. Mikhail Gendel'man. (IISH) 4. Viktor Chernov. (IISH) 5. Accused and defenders. Middle row (left to right). Gershtein, Likhach, Timofeev, Evgeniia Ratner, and Gots. Top row second from left Donskoi, fifth from left Zhdanov, sixth from left Theodor Liebknecht, second from right Tager, and far right Rosenfeld. (IISH) 6. The Tribunal. In the centre the president, Georgii Piatakov. (Spaarnestad) 7. Defending counsel Nikolai Murav'ev talking with the accused. (IISH) 8. The demonstration of 20 June in Moscow. (IISH) 9. Abram and Sara Gots in exile, Alma Ata, 1930's. (B.I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Hoover Institution Archives) PREFACE

Soviet Russia will conquer all the millions of problems that stand in its way, on one condition: as long as the cause of the political education of the broad masses of the people continually advances. We have nothing to be afraid of, if our people fully learns to distinguish who are its friends and who are its enemies. The trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries must and shall be a great step forward in the cause of the political instruction of the very broadest masses in town and country. (Grigorii Zinov'ev, Pravda and Krasnaia gazeta, 20 June 1922)

For my part, I considered this trial to be unnecessary: the Socialist Revolu• tionaries had been beaten and represented no visible danger at all. (Charles Rappoport, Ma vie, Paris 1926-1927, Vol. 2, p. 80)

The Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917 by staging a coup d'etat, and then established a dictatorship. The new rulers sup• pressed all armed resistance in a bloody civil war, after which they made every effort to uproot and exterminate even peaceful political opposition of all kinds. Even now it is impossible in the Soviet Union to subject these developments to critical historical study. The political opponents of the Soviet regime of the time are still regarded by official Soviet his• toriography as counter-revolutionaries and the measures taken against them are seen as completely justified. Two prominent representatives of the political opposition in the early years of Soviet rule, the Socialist Revolutionary Abram Gots and the Menshevik Mark Liber, were sentenced to death in 1937 after many years of imprisonment and exile. Before being led away they asked a western fellow prisoner to try to get into touch with those of their comrades who were living outside Russia: Greet our friends for us and tell them that we have born the name of revolution• ary with pride. However difficult it is for us to be accused of being counter• revolutionaries, we know that history will pass a different judgement .... Better times will come for Russia and for the whole world. And then history will judge our actions. 1 viii PREFACE

Gots was the best-known of the Socialist Revolutionary Party leaders still in Russia. In a nutshell, the history and nature of this party, the PSR, was as follows. Established in 1901, it had originated in an older Russian tradition, that of Populism. As their name indi• cates, the 19th century Populists (Narodniki) were concerned with 'the people', which in Russia at the time meant the peasantry. In addition to Populism, Socialist Revolutionary ideology was influ• enced by western Marxism. While Populism was oriented towards the peasantry and Marxism towards the 'proletariat', i.e. the workers, the PSR was concerned with the 'toilers', i.e. the peasants and the workers, and was also oriented towards the intelligentsia. Neverthe• less, the PSR, other than the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party which had been founded in the same period and which later was divided between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, was regarded as the party of agrarian socialism. In fact, one of the most important items on its agenda was the socialization of the land. Another important point of departure for the PSR was the sover• eignty of the people (Narodovlastie), to be embodied in a Constitu• ent Assembly elected on the basis of universal suffrage. The PSR also considered it justifiable to make use of terrorism in its struggle against the Tsarist regime. It is difficult to give an exact characterization of the PSR because one of its most important elements was the fact that it united a multitude of opinions and trends of thought. In a positive sense, this was a result of the PSR's internal party democracy; negatively, it resulted from the fact that the Socialist Revolutionaries formed an incoherent movement rather than a cohesive party. Socialism and democracy were equally important in the view of the PSR, and the one could not be realized without the other. A left wing of the party stressed the social character of the revolution, while a right wing em• phasized democracy. Furthermore, as a party of violent action and one which, after the February Revolution of 1917, became influ• ential through its role in the Provisional Government and in the Soviets, the PSR attracted many elements of unsettled political con• victions. After 1917, in fact, internal dissension put the PSR at a dis• advantage versus the far more tightly organized Bolshevik Party.2 In 1917, in the most liberal elections ever held in Russia, the PSR obtained 16 million votes and, together with her national sister par• ties, realized more than half the total of 42 million (the Bolsheviks had a total of ten million). 3 According to the PSR's own data, in the PREFACE ix summer of 1917, it had more than a million members,4 and some hundreds of thousands in 1918-1919. 5 The leaders of the PSR were condemned in 1922 in the greatest political trial ever held in com• munist Russia prior to the Stalinist era, a trial with the means of which the communists sett1ed with their socialist rivals for once and for all time. 'Some of them may find solace in the idea that some future chronicler will commend them or their behaviour during this trial', said Public Prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko in his speech for the prose• cution.6 Abram Gots, one of the accused in the trial, apparently also had to console himself in this way in 1937. For a long time, however, it seemed that the accused would be committed to record as 'coun• ter-revolutionaries' and would be further forgotten. Even now, offi• cial Soviet historiography describes the 1922 trial as a measl),re that was completely justified and correct. 7 Nevertheless, it seems that 'history's final judgement' still has to be pronounced. In 1966, during the trial of the authors Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel', the accused in the 1922 trial were given favourable mention in Russia for the first time in many years. The anonymous writer of a letter published in Samizdat drew a com• parison with earlier political trials in Soviet Russia. He observed that the trial of Siniavskii and Daniel' was the first political trial to be held in public since 1922 at which the accused had carried them• selves with dignity and had not 'confessed'. 'Since the time of the trial of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries - those heroes of revolu• tionary Russia who have already become legendary - this is the first political trial of such a nature,' he wrote. 'Only the Right Socialist Revolutionaries left the courtroom without evoking pity, contempt, abhorrence and embarrassment.'8 The use of the epithet 'Right' betrays the fact that the author of this opinion was born and brought up in the Soviet Union. During the last few years the trial has been given fresh pUblicity. In discussions among Russian dissidents about whether, and if so in how far, Stalinism should be seen as a consequence of the political system established in Russia by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917, the matter of the 1922 trial has also been raised. The best-known participants in these discussions are Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Roi Medvedev. Solzhenitsyn sees no essential difference between Lenin• ist and Stalinist terror. In The Gulag Archipelago he ranks the 1922 trial together with the infamous show trials of a later period, al- x PREFACE though he observes that the earlier accused showed themselves to be somewhat less accommodating. In Solzhenitsyn's view, these social• ists deserved little more sympathy than their Bolshevikjudges.9 Med• vedev does not consider Stalinism to be the same as Leninism but, in Let History Judge, he has to acknowledge that the trial of the Social• ist Revolutionaries showed serious shortcomings. He exonerates Lenin, however, and considers that even then Stalin was to blame. 10 Historical works published in the West also show that the 1922 trial has not been forgotten. 11 It was this recent interest that made me decide to undertake further research into the trial and into the circumstances under which it was held, even though such research could only be tentative. A comprehensive treatment of the trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries requires the consultation of archives that are available only in the Soviet Union. Although both during and after the trial it was said that the trial proceedings might be pub• lished,12 these plans have never been realized. The records are pre• served in Moscow in the Tsenfral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Ok• tiabr'skoi revoliutsii (f. 1005, op.l a). A few Soviet historians have been able to examine the documents and to use excerpts for their work. These and other Archives in the Soviet Union (in particular the Tsentral'nyi partiinyi arkhiv Instituta marksizma-leninizma) also have more materials concerning the subject of this study. Western researchers are not permitted to use them, however, and I have been able only to consult such archive material that is available outside the Soviet Union. Instead of the trial records I have made use of the trial reports published in the Soviet press, although these are somewhat deceptive. The arguments of the accused, of their defenders, and of the wit• nesses for the defence, are recounted only briefly and tendentiously, interspersed with biased comment. Further, I have used those parts of the trial proceedings which have been published, namely, the In• dictment, the addresses by the prosecuting counsels, the closing ad• dresses to the court by the accused of the 'second group' (Socialist Revolutionary renegades who were thrown in with the accused under orders to 'confess'), the pleas of their defending counsels, and the verdict passed by the Tribunal. I have been able to glean supplemen• tary material from the works of those Soviet historians who have been allowed to examine the official proceedings, and from publica• tions about the trial which appeared in the Soviet Union at the time. Newspapers published by Russian emigres and by the underground PREFACE xi press in Russia also contained infonnation about the trial. Parts of the speeches by the accused of the 'first group' (the Socialist Revolu• tionaries) in their own defence and of the closing addresses to the court by these accused were smuggled out of the country and pub• lished in the PSR's journal Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia, or were pre• served in handwritten fonn. There is no reason to doubt the authen• ticity of these texts. Finally, there is a report of the first days of the trial written by the Belgian socialist, Arthur Wauters, who, together with his fellow national and party member, Emile Vandervelde, has also published a book about the trial. Further references will be found in the Bibliography and the Notes to this work. This study is concerned with the 1922 trial of the Socialist Revo• lutionaries and with everything connected with it, with the nature of the trial, the attitudes of the people concerned, and with their mo• tives. It does not represent research into PSR policy after the Oc• tober Revolution in 1917, although that will be touched upon when• ever necessary. I have not attempted to answer the question why the Socialist Revolutionaries did not succeed in realizing their ideals. The introductory chapter briefly discusses the relationship be• tween the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries after the Oc• tober Revolution. The subsequent two chapters are devoted to the preparations for the trial and to the part played by the international socialist movement. The actual trial is discussed in four chapters: the first is concerned principally with the course of the trial, with par• ticular emphasis on the attitudes and treatment of the various groups of participants; a following chapter is devoted to the judicial examin• ation; a third is concerned with the political debate that went on during the trial; while the last of these four chapters examines the sentences passed and the manner in which they were reached. Chap• ter 8 discusses the propaganda campaign with which the trial was sur• rounded, and Chapter 9 the reactions caused by the trial, particularly outside Russia; Chapter 10 then scrutinizes the outcome of the whole affair, giving special attention to the further fate of the ac• cused. An attempt is made to draw some conclusions in the closing chapter. The chronology used is that which applied in Russia in the particu• lar period. Dates prior to 1/14 February 1918, when the calendar was adjusted, are thus indicated according to the Old Style, or 13 days behind the calendar used in the West; thereafter, dates are given according to the New Style Gregorian calendar of the West. Trans- xii PREFACE literation is based on the US Library of Congress system, although diacritics are omitted. Finally, a remark about the name Socialist Revolutionaries. Simi• lar to the way in which the Russian Constitutional Democrats were named 'Kadets', the Socialist Revolutionaries were frequently re• ferred to as SRs (esery). I prefer to use the name in full, however, even in quotations in which the abbreviation was used in the original Russian text.

The material for this study has been compiled at the International Institute of Social History (IISH), the Institute for Eastern European Studies and the Library of the University of Amsterdam; the Docu• mentation Office for East European Law and the Library of the Uni• versity of Leyden; the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, in Stanford, California; the New York Public Library; the Ar• chive of Russian and Eastern European History and Culture, and other institutions of Columbia University, New York; and the Insti• tute for Jewish Research (YIVO), also in New York. Robert Abs of the Emile Vandervelde Institute in Brussels kindly sent me a copy of a document. Information on a personal basis was provided by Boris Sapir, Amsterdam; Mrs Olga Lang and Mrs Oksana latsenko, New York; Boris Souvarine, Paris; and the late Mrs Mina Svirskaia, Herzlia• Pituach, Israel. lowe thanks to many people who have contributed in some way to the finalization of this work. They include members of all the in• stitutions listed above; those who gave me personal information; Mrs Anna Bourguina who helped me to select material in the Nicolaevsky Collection of the Hoover Institution; and Mrs Vera Kovarsky and Vadim Pavlovsky in New York. Professor Jan Bezemer of the Uni• versity of Amsterdam has constantly supervised my work; without his encouragement this book would never have attained its present form. Boris Sapir has helped in many ways; he, Willem Roobol, and Bruno Naarden have read and criticized early versions of the original Dutch manuscript. I am indebted to Mrs Jean Sanders for the translation, which was made possible by the financial support of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (ZWO). LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Cheka Chrezvychainaia Komissiia (Extraordinary Commission) CPU Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie (State Political Ad• ministration) IISH International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) Inprekorr Internationale Presse Korrespondenz Komuch Komitet chlenov Uchreditel'nogo Sobraniia (Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly) LSI Labour and Socialist International MPSR Men'shinstvo Partii Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov (Minority of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries) NEP Novaia Ekonomicheskaia Politika (New Economic Policy) NKVD Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People's Commissar• iat of Internal Affairs) PSR Partiia Sotsialistov-Revoliutsionerov (Party of Socialist Revolu• tionaries) RSDRP Rossiiskaia Sotsial-Demokraticheskaia Rabochaia Partiia (Rus• sian Social Democratic Workers' Party) SAl Sozialistische Arbeiter Intemationale SPD Sozial-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands TsIK Tsentral'nyi Ispolnitel'nyi Komitet (Central Executive Com• mittee) USPD Unabhdngige Sozial-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VTsIK Vserossiiskii Tsentral'nyi Ispolnitel'nyi Komitet (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) xiv

1. Abram Gats. (IISH) 2. Evgenii Timafeev. (lISH)

3. Mikhail Gendel'man. (lISH) 4: Viktar Chernav. (lISH) xv

5. Accused and defenders. Middle row (left to right): Gershtein, Likhach, Timofeev, Evgeniia Ratner, and Gots. Top row second from left Donskoi, fifth from left Zhdanov, sixth from left Theodor Liebknecht, second from right Tager, and far right Rosenfeld. (IISH)

6. The Tribunal. In the centre the president, Georgii Piatakov. (Spaarnestad) xvi

7. Defending counsel Nikolai Murav'ev talking with the accused. (IISH)

8. The demonstration of 20 June in 9. Abram and Sara Gots in exile, Alma Ata, Moscow. (IISH) 1930's. (B.I. Nicolaevsky Collection, Hoover Institution Archives)