The Great Terror

A law of 7 August 1932 introduced the death penalty for a wide range of offenses against State property, and the courts seem to have been invited to extend it still further in practical action.²¹⁶ Again, to take an example from the field of sabotage,²¹⁷ a law of August 1935 established as such the gleaning of wheat by peasant women, who had hitherto been able to save a certain amount in this way. Peasant women were commonly given ten years for this offense.²¹⁸

Vyshinsky strengthened such tendencies by a simple interpretive method:

He proposed that the deliberate burning of State or public property be adjudicated, regardless of motive and intent, under Article 58, paragraph 9, of the Russian Republic Criminal Codex (Sabotage). Consequently, acts committed without counterrevolutionary intent (for instance, arson for reasons of personal enmity, revenge, etc.) had to be adjudicated under the articles on State crimes. Vyshinsky declared that there are no ordinary criminal offenses, that these offenses now became crimes of a political order. He recommended that ordinary criminal cases be reviewed for the purpose of imparting a political character to them.²¹⁹

To take a specific crime:

Vyshinsky demanded that counter-revolutionary intent must mandatorily be sought in all criminal cases linked with shortcomings connected with the harvesting campaign. In his view shortcomings in the harvesting campaign were in many cases caused by the activity of saboteurs, who had to be “rendered harmless.” For example, during the harvesting campaign of 1937 it was revealed that a number of crops had become infested with ticks. This infection was ascribed to the activity of hostile counterrevolutionary elements, and in connection with this a great number of criminal cases were instituted. Many of the indictments linked with tick infection in grain crops were completely unfounded. Yet Vyshinsky demanded that the prosecutors insist on severe punishment in all criminal cases instituted in connection with crops infested with ticks.²²⁰

When it came to the actual trial, “he repeatedly maintained that in a criminal trial probability of guilt was perfectly adequate. Instructing prosecutors in the ‘art of identifying saboteurs,’ Vyshinsky maintained that this is achieved not by comprehensive, full and objective evaluation of the evidence gathered in a criminal case, but by so-called ‘political flair.²²¹

And the legal processes were eased by his ruling that “it is pointless to repeat without particular need what has already been established in the preliminary investigation.”²²²

As a result, we get such extraordinary results as a woman who got ten years under Article 58, Section 10, for saying, after his arrest, that Tukhachevsky was handsome,²²³ or an artist getting five years for adding to the slogan “Life has become better, life has become more joyful: Stalin” the letter u, changing the meaning of “Life has become better … for Stalin.”²²⁴

Failure to inform, treated as complicity, was severely dealt with. In a minor case, only producing a six-year sentence even for the principal, the noninformer got three years under Article 58 (xii).²²⁵ Under the same Article, a man was sentenced to three years for “smiling in sympathy” while some drunken dockers at another table in Odessa were telling one another anti-Soviet anecdotes.²²⁶ A Tatar woman, originally listed as a Trotskyite, was reallocated as a bourgeois nationalist by the NKVD official concerned, on the grounds that “they’d exceeded the quota for Trotskyites, but were short on nationalists, even though they’d taken all the Tatar writers they could think of.”²²⁷ A twenty-year-old mathematician, with no political interests, was sentenced simply because his mother, an old Socialist Revolutionary, was rounded up in 1937. He had actually been born in a Tsarist jail.²²⁸

Court procedures were at best formalities. Still, the Supreme Court and its Military Collegium at least required the presence of the accused, though as a leading Bulgarian Communist victim notes of a session of the Collegium which sentenced him, “No prosecutor. No witnesses. No co-accused. No defender.^„229

But comparatively few cases were dealt with by a court. Article 8 of the Corrective Labor Codex states, “Persons are directed to corrective labor who have been sentenced thereto by (a) sentence in a court of law; (b) decree of an administrative organ.” This latter was usually the NKVD “Special Board,” as set up by laws of 10 July and 5 November 1934 (replacing the Judicial Collegium of the OGPU).

The Special Board consisted of the Deputy Head of the NKVD, the Plenipotentiary of the NKVD of the RSFSR, the Head of the Main Administration of Militia, and the Head of the Union Republic NKVD where the case had arisen. The Prosecutor-General of the USSR or his deputy was also to participate.²³⁰