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'Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko' (Russian: Николай Васильевич Крыленко) (May 2 1885, Bekhteevo (Бехтеево), Smolensk region, Russian Empire – July 29 1938, Moscow) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become Commissar of Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
Krylenko was an exponent of socialist legality and the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment. Although a participant in the Show Trials and political repression of the late 1920's and early 1930's, Krylenko was ultimately arrested himself during the Great Purge. Following interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko confessed to extensive involvement in wrecking and anti-Soviet agitation. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, in a trial lasting 20 minutes, and executed immediately thereafter.

Contents

Biography

Before the Revolution

1917

Head of the Russian Army

Legal Career (1918-1934)

Krylenko and Sports

Theorist of the Soviet Justice System

Fall from Power and Execution

Notes

Works (in English)

References

Biography

Before the Revolution

Krylenko, son of a populist revolutionary, joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1904 while studying history and literature at St. Petersburg University. He was a member of the short lived St. Petersburg Soviet during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and a member of the Bolshevik St. Petersburg Committee. He had to flee Russia in June 1906, but returned later that year. Arrested by the Tsar's secret police in 1907, he was released for lack of evidence, but soon exiled to Lublin without trial.
Krylenko returned to St. Petersburg in 1909 and finished his degree. He briefly left the RSDLP in 1911, but soon rejoined it. He was drafted in 1912 and made Second Lieutenant before he was discharged in 1913. After working as an assistant editor of ''Pravda'' and a liaison to the Bolshevik faction in the Duma for a few months, Krylenko was again arrested in 1913 and exiled to Kharkiv, where he received a law degree. In early 1914 Krylenko learned that he may be re-arrested and fled to Austria. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, he had to move to Switzerland as a Russian national. In the summer of 1915 Vladimir Lenin sent Krylenko back to Russia to help rebuild the Bolshevik underground organization. In November 1915 Krylenko was arrested in Moscow as a draft dodger and, after a few months in prison, sent to the South West Front in April 1916.

1917

After the February Revolution of 1917 and the introduction of elected committees in the Russian armed forces, Krylenko was elected chairman of his regiment's and then division's committee. On April 15 he was elected chairman of the 11th Army's committee. After Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917, Krylenko adopted the new Bolshevik policy of irreconcilable opposition to the Provisional Government. He consequently had to resign his post on May 26 1917 for lack of support from non-Bolshevik members of the Army committee.
In June 1917 Krylenko was made a member of the Bolshevik Military Organization and was elected to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets. At the Congress, he was elected to the permanent All-Russian Central Executive Committee from the Bolshevik faction. Krylenko left Petrograd for the High Command HQ in Mogilev on July 2, but was arrested there by the Provisional government after the Bolsheviks staged an abortive uprising on July 4. He was kept in prison in Petrograd, but was released in mid-September after the Kornilov Affair.
Krylenko took an active part in the preparation of the October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd as newly elected chairman of the Congress of Northern Region Soviets and a leading member of the Military Revolutionary Committee. On October 16, 10 days before the uprising, he reported to the Bolshevik Central Committee that the Petrograd military would support the Bolsheviks in case of an uprising. During the mostly peaceful Bolshevik takeover on October 24 and 25, Krylenko was one of the uprising's leaders along with Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko and others.

Head of the Russian Army

At the Second All Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25, Krylenko was made a People's Commissar (minister) and member of the triumvirate (with Pavel Dybenko and Nikolai Podvoisky) responsible for military affairs. In early November (Old Style) 1917, immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Krylenko helped Trotsky suppress an attempt by Provisional Government loyalists led by Alexander Kerensky and General Peter Krasnov to retake Petrograd.
After the provisional Commander in Chief (and Chief of General Staff), General Nikolai Dukhonin, refused to open peace negotiations with the Germans, Krylenko was appointed Commander in Chief on November 9. He started negotiations with the German army on November 12-13. Krylenko arrived at the High Command HQ in Mogilev on November 20 and arrested Dukhonin, who was lynched by revolutionary soldiers while in Krylenko's custody. After the formation of the Red Army on January 15, 1918, Krylenko was also a member of the All-Russian Collegium that oversaw its buildup. He proved to be an excellent public speaker, able to win over hostile mobs with words alone . His organizational talents, however, lagged far behind his oratorial ones.
Krylenko was an active supporter of the policy of democratization of the Russian military, including abolishing subordination, election of officers by enlisted men, and using propaganda to win over enemy units. Although the Red Army had some successes in early 1918 against small and poorly armed anti-Bolshevik detachments, the policy proved unsuccessful when Soviet forces were roundly defeated by the German Army in late February 1918 after the breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations.
In the wake of the defeats, Trotsky pushed for the formation of a military council of former Russian generals that would function as a Red Army advisory body. Lenin and the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed to create a Supreme Military Council, with former chief of the imperial General Staff Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich at its head, on March 4. At that point the entire Bolshevik leadership of the Red Army, including People's Commissar (defense minister) Nikolai Podvoisky and Krylenko, protested vigorously and eventually resigned. The office of the "Commander in Chief" was formally abolished by the Soviet government on March 13 and Krylenko was reassigned to the Collegium of the Commissariat of Justice.

Legal Career (1918-1934)

From May 1918 and until 1922 Krylenko was Chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He simultaneously served as a member of the Collegium of Prosecutors of the Revolutionary Tribunal. On June 23, 1918, he famously explained that there had been no discrepancy between the execution of Admiral Shchastny and the prior abolition of the death penalty by the Bolshevik government in October 1917 since the admiral had not been condemned "to death" but "to be shot". He was an enthusiastic exponent of the Red Terror, whatever his differences with the Cheka, exclaiming, "We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."
In early 1919, Krylenko was involved in a dispute with the Cheka (the Soviet secret police) and was instrumental in taking away its right to execute people without a trial . In 1922 Krylenko became deputy Commissar (minister) of Justice and assistant Prosecutor General of the RSFSR. In 1931 he became Commissar of Justice and Prosecutor General of the RSFSR. In this capacity he served as the chief prosecutor at the Moscow show trials of the 1920s and the early 1930s and was widely seen as the public face of the Soviet justice system. In 1927-1934 he was a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party.

Krylenko and Sports

In the 1930s Krylenko headed the Soviet chess, checkers and mountain climbing associations. He was one of the pioneers of the Pamirs mountain climbing, leading the Soviet half of a joint Soviet-German expedition in 1928 as well as expeditions to the Eastern Pamirs in 1931 and to the Lenin Peak in 1934 . Krylenko used his positions to carry out the Stalinist line of total control and politicization of all areas of public life:
:We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess', like the formula 'art for art's sake'. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.

Theorist of the Soviet Justice System

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Krylenko wrote dozens of books and articles in support of the theory that under the system of "socialist legality" political considerations and not criminal ones should play the decisive role in deciding questions of guilt, innocence and punishment. He theorized that confession was the ultimate proof of the defendant's guilt and that precise definitions of crime and exact sentences (the so-called "dosage" system) were not needed under socialism. He promoted his views during the work on two drafts of the Soviet Penal Code, one in 1930 and one in 1934. His views were opposed by some Soviet theoreticians, including the Soviet Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky, who argued that Krylenko's imprecise definition of crimes and his refusal to define terms of punishment introduced legal instability and arbitrariness and were, therefore, against the interests of the Soviet state. The debate continued throughout 1935 and was inconclusive.
With the start of the Great Purge after Sergei Kirov's assassination on December 1, 1934, Krylenko's star began to fade and he was gradually eclipsed by Vyshinsky. Notably, it was Vyshinsky and not Krylenko who prosecuted the first two high profile Moscow show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936 and January 1937. Krylenko's ally, the Marxist theoretician Eugen Pashukanis, was subjected to severe criticism in late 1936 and arrested in January 1937 (he was shot in September). Soon after Eugen Pashukanis' arrest, Krylenko had to "admit his mistakes" and publicly concede that Vyshinsky and his other critics had been right all along.
In 1936 Krylenko justified the inclusion of a law against male homosexuality in the 1934 Soviet penal code as a measure directed against subversive activities:
:So who are the bulk of our clients in these sorts of cases? Is it the working class? No! It's classless hoodlums. Classless hoodlums, either from the dregs of the society, or from the remains of the exploiters' class. They have no place to go. So they take to -- pederasty. Together with them, next to them, under this excuse, in stinky secretive bordellos another kind of activity takes place as well -- counter-revolutionary work.

Fall from Power and Execution

Krylenko was promoted to Commissar of Justice of the USSR (i.e. the whole Soviet Union as opposed to just the Russian Federation) on July 20, 1936 and wasn't directly affected by the first waves of the Great Purges in 1935-1937. However, at the first session of the newly reorganized Supreme Soviet in January 1938 he was attacked by an up and coming Stalinist M. D. Bagirov:
:Comrade Krylenko concerns himself only incidentally with the affairs of his commissariat. But to direct the Commissariat of Justice, great initiative and a serious attitude toward oneself is required. Whereas Comrade Krylenko used to spend a great deal of time on mountain-climbing and traveling, now he devotes a great deal of time to playing chess. [...]
:We need to know what we are dealing with in the case of Comrade Krylenko -- the commissar of justice? or a mountain climber? I don't know which Comrade Krylenko thinks of himself as, but he is without doubt a poor people's commissar. I am sure that [Soviet prime minister] Comrade Molotov will take that into account in presenting the slate of nominees for the new Council of People's Commissars of the Supreme Soviet.
The attack had been clearly coordinated and Krylenko was removed from his post on January 19, 1938. After turning the Commissariat over to his replacement, N. M. Rychkov, Krylenko was arrested late at night on January 31, 1938. After 3 days in an NKVD prison, he "confessed" that he had been a wrecker since 1930. On April 3 he made an additional "confession" explaining that he had been an enemy of Lenin's even before the 1917 revolution. At his last questioning on June 28, 1938, he "confessed" that he had recruited 30 Commissariat of Justice employees to his anti-Soviet organization.
Krylenko was tried by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court on July 29, 1938. The trial lasted 20 minutes, just enough for Krylenko to retract his "confessions". He was found guilty and immediately shot. The NKVD officer who had taken Krylenko's testimony, one Kogan, was, in turn, shot in 1939 for "anti-Soviet activity". Krylenko's sentence was annulled by the Soviet government during the first wave of destalinization in 1955.
Krylenko's wife and fellow Old Bolshevik Elena Rozmirovich survived the purges by keeping a low profile and working in the Party archives. Krylenko's sister Elena married American writer Max Eastman and moved to America, escaping the purges.

Notes

★ See Arthur Ransome. ''In 1919'', Kessinger Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1-4191-6717-0 p. 49

★ See Israel Getzler. ''Martov: A Political Biography of a Russian Social Democrat'', Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-52602-7 p. 177

★ See Arthur Ransome, op. cit, p.46

★ See Audrey Salkeld. ''On the Edge of Europe: Mountaineering in the Caucasus'', London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1993, ISBN 0-89886-388-0 p. 164

★ Quoted in Robert Conquest. ''The Great Terror: A Reassessment'', Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-19-507132-8 p. 249

★ See David Tuller. ''Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia'', University of Chicago Press, 1996, ISBN 0-226-81568-4 p. 6

★ See Hiroshi Oda. "Criminal Law Reform in the Soviet Union under Stalin", in ''The Distinctiveness of Soviet Law'', Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, ISBN 90-247-3576-9 p. 90-92

★ Quoted from the official protocols published in 1938 by Roy A. Medvedev in "New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin" published in ''Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation'', edited by Robert C. Tucker, originally published by W.W. Norton and Co in 1977, revised edition published by Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, New Jersey) in 1999, ISBN 0-7658-0483-2 p.217

★ See Donald D. Barry and Yuri Feofanov. ''Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era'', New York, M. E. Sharpe, 1996, ISBN 1-56324-344-X, p. 233.

★ See Barbara Evans Clements. ''Bolshevik Women'', Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-59920-2 p. 287.

★ See, e.g., Richard Kennedy. ''Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings'', New York, W. W. Norton and Co., 1980, ISBN 0-87140-155-X (2nd, 1994 edition) p. 382

Works (in English)

★ N. V. Krylenko. ''A blow at Intervention. Final indictment in the case of the counter-revolutionary Organisation of the Union of Engineers’ Organisations (the Industrial Party) whereby Ramzin, Kalinnikof, Larichef, Charnowsky, Fedotof, Kupriyánof, Ochkin and Sitnin, the accused, are charged in accordance with article 58, paragraphs 3, 4, and 6 of the Criminal code of the RSFSR''. Pref. by Karl Radek. Moscow, State Publishers, 1931.

★ N. V. Krylenko. ''Red and white terror'', London, Communist Party of Great Britain, 1928.

★ N. V. Krylenko. ''Revolutionary law''. Moscow, Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1933.

References

★ Anatolii Pavlovich Shikman (А.П. Шикман). ''Important Figures of Russian History: A Biographical Dictionary'' (''Деятели отечественной истории. Биографический справочник.'') in 2 volumes. Moscow, AST, 1997, ISBN 5-15-000087-6 (vol 1) ISBN 5-15-000089-2 (vol 2)

★ Konstantin Aleksandrovich Zalesskii (К.А. Залесский). Stalin's Empire: A Biographical Encyclopedic Dictionary. (''Империя Сталина. Биографический энциклопедический словарь.'') Moscow, Veche, 2000, ISBN 5-7838-0716-8

★ ''Russian Politicians, 1917: A Biographical Dictionary'' (Политические деятели России 1917. Биографический словарь.) Edited by Pavel Vasil'evich Volobuev. Moscow, "Bol'shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia", 1993, ISBN 5-85270-137-8