The Great Terror

The Special Board’s sentences were originally limited to five years, but this was either abolished or ignored fairly soon; terms of eight and ten years are soon mentioned. But in any case, while a man who served out a term imposed by a court was often released, one sentenced by the Board was simply resentenced to a further period when his sentence expired. The formalities were completed in Moscow, and the new sentence was announced to the accused in camp by a local representative of the NKVD.

The Special Board was usually given “cases for which the evidence was not sufficient for turning the defendant over to a court.”²³² The defendant had no right to defense, and cases were tried in absentia, which—as a Soviet law journal has remarked—“created the preconditions for deliberately passing unjustified, harsh sentences.”²³³

And if the Criminal Code was interpreted with great elasticity by the courts, even that was found too restrictive for most cases before the Special Board. Article 58 was generally cited as a basis, but the accused were liable under the following heads:

K.R.T.D.

Counter-revolutionary Trotskyite Activity

Usual sentence five to ten years

K.R.D.

Counter-revolutionary Activity

Usual sentence five years or more

K. R. A .

Counter-revolutionary Agitation

Usual sentence five years or more

Ch.S.I.R.

Member of the Family of a Traitor to the Fatherland

Usual sentence five to eight years

P.Sh.

Suspicion of Espionage

Usual sentence eight years

The last an offense perhaps unique in the world’s legal history.

In addition, those in the following categories could be simply labeled by the Prosecutor and sent to camp without even the Special Board routine:

S.O.E.

Socially Dangerous Element

Usual sentence five years

S.V.E.

Socially Harmful Element (that is, common criminals)

Usual sentence five years

²³⁴

This power to inflict punishment when there was admittedly no crime was provided for in Article 22 of the “Principles of Criminal Jurisdiction,” given in the Basic Criminal Code, which reads as follows:

Punishment in the form of exile can be applied by a sentence of the State Prosecutor against persons recognized as being socially dangerous, without any criminal proceedings being taken against these persons on charges of committing a specific crime or of a specific offense and, also, even in those cases where these persons are acquitted by a court of the accusation of committing a specific crime.

In early 1937, sentences were still on the light side. A typical K.R.T.D. case is of an electrician arrested at that time, who had formerly known some Trotskyites and in whose room there was found, on his arrest, a copy of the first edition of The History of the Civil War (which, of course, gave many of the facts of Trotsky’s role in the period covered). For this, he got three years.²³⁵ Another man, a former Trotskyite, was sentenced to a longer term because he had traveled from Moscow to Leningrad on 1 December 1934.²³⁶ Another got three years for possession of a K.R.A. rhyme about Feuchtwanger and Gide.²³⁷

For copying Lenin’s Testament, the usual sentence was ten years, under Article 58, Section 10, for anti-Soviet agitation, though sometimes death was imposed.²³⁸ A professor of astronomy got five years (K.R.A.) for having objected to his daughter marrying an NKVD man.²³⁹ A typical P.Sh. case was of a professor who had been a prisoner of war in Austria in 1915—his sole offense.²⁴⁰ The decree of 14 September 1937²⁴¹ established what amounted to completely extrajudicial procedures for counter-revolutionary crimes, and sentences grew greater. Moreover, those arrested in 1933 or 1935 were now retried, and the comparatively mild sentences of three or five years of those earlier days were “translated … into the language of 1937.”²⁴²

After a Special Board “trial” (in his absence), the accused eventually received the sentence, on some convenient occasion. One prisoner mentions simply being handed a grubby typewritten sheet in his cell by a woman trusty, an ex-prostitute, to the effect that the Special Board of the NKVD had condemned him to five years in camp.²⁴³

In spite of the vast amount of paperwork, loose ends proliferated. It is said that in the Butyrka a whole block was occupied by prisoners who could not be sent to camps because not only were there no warrants against them, but no papers of any sort existed in connection with them. They had been condemned as groups, and the judges had not been able to compile dossiers, while the labor camps would only accept prisoners with papers.²⁴⁴