Nikolai Krylenko

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Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич Крыле́нко, IPA:

Krylenko was born in Bekhteyevo, in Sychyovsky Uyezd of Smolensk Governorate, the eldest of six children (two sons and four daughters) born to a populist revolutionary and his wife. His father, needing income to support his growing family, became a tax collector for the Tsarist government.^[1]

The young Krylenko joined the Bolshevik faction of the

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 on 4 March, appointing Mikhail Bonch-Bruyevich, former chief of the imperial General Staff, as its head. 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 13 March, and Krylenko was reassigned to the Collegium of the Commissariat for Justice.

Legal career (1918–1934)

From May 1918 and until 1922, Krylenko was Chairman of the

Krylenko was an enthusiastic proponent of the Red Terror, whatever his differences with the Cheka (the Soviet secret police), exclaiming, "We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."^[6]

In early 1919, Krylenko was involved in a dispute with the

"The Bolsheviks had already orchestrated several 'show trials.' The Cheka had staged the 'Trial of the St. Petersburg Combat Organization'; its successor, the new

cherubs on the ceiling – singularly inappropriate for such a solemn event. Neither judges nor prosecutors were required to have a legal background, only a proper 'revolutionary' one. That the prominent 'No Smoking' signs were ignored by the judges themselves did not bode well for legalities."^[7]

According to New York Herald correspondent Francis MacCullagh:

Krylenko, who began to speak at 6:10 PM, was moderate enough at first, but quickly launched into an

Soviet Law," he yelled at another stage, "and by that law you must die."^[8]

Archbishop Cieplak and Monsignor Budkiewicz were both sentenced to death. The other fifteen defendants were sentenced to long terms in Solovki prison camp. The sentences touched off a massive uproar throughout the Western world.

According to Father Zugger,

"The

Lubyanka prison.^[9]

We are sometimes up against a flat refusal to apply this law rigidly. One People's Judge told me flatly that he could never bring himself to throw someone in jail for stealing four ears. What we're up against here is a deep prejudice, imbibed with their mother's milk... a mistaken belief that people should be tried in accordance not with the Party's political guidelines but with considerations of "higher justice".[11]

From 1927 to 1934, Krylenko was a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party.

Sport positions

In the 1930s, Krylenko headed the Soviet

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.[5]

It should also be noted that Krylenko himself was a strong club-level chess player.

According to British grandmaster Daniel King, Krylenko's work promoting chess was an extension of his role in the Soviet anti-religious campaigns; "The Bolsheviks' motives for promoting Chess were both ideological and political. They hoped that this logical and rational game might wean the masses away from belief in the Russian Orthodox Church; but they also wanted to prove the intellectual superiority of the Soviet people over the capitalist nations. Put simply, it was part of world domination.

"With chess,... they hit upon a winner: equipment was cheap to produce; tournaments relatively easy to organise; and they were already building on an existing tradition. Soon there were chess clubs in factories, on farms, in the army... This vast social experiment quickly bore fruit."^[12]

In 1935, Krylenko invited the former chess world champion Emanuel Lasker to Soviet Union, where he settled until 1937.

Theorist of the Soviet Justice System

According to his

According to Krylenko, political considerations rather than evidence needed to play the decisive role in deciding the verdict and sentence before trial. He further argued that even a confession obtained under torture constituted proof of a defendant's guilt; material evidence, precise definitions of a crime, or judicial sentencing guidelines were not needed under socialism.

Mikhail Yakubovich, a defendant in one of the show trials, described meeting with Krylenko after weeks of torture by the

Offering me a seat, Krylenko said: "I have no doubt that you personally are not guilty of anything. We are both performing our duty to the Party—I have considered and consider you a Communist. I will be the prosecutor at the trial; you will confirm the testimony given during the investigation. This is our duty to the Party, yours and mine. Unforeseen complications may arise at the trial. I will count on you. If the need should arise, I will ask the presiding judge to call on you. And you will find the right words."^[14]

Krylenko promoted his views on socialist legality during the work on two drafts of the Soviet Penal Code, one in 1930 and one in 1934. Krylenko's views were opposed by some Soviet theoreticians, including Soviet Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vyshinsky, 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 Party. Their debates continued throughout 1935 and were inconclusive.

With the start of the

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.^[7]

Fall from power and execution

Krylenko was promoted to Commissar of Justice of the USSR

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.[8]

The attack had been carefully prepared in advance and Molotov endorsed it. In response, Stalin removed Krylenko from his post on 19 January 1938, turning the Commissariat over to his replacement, N. M. Rychkov. Leaving the Kremlin, Krylenko and his family traveled to his dacha outside Moscow. On the evening of 31 January 1938, Krylenko received a phone call from Stalin, who told him, saying: "Don't get upset. We trust you. Keep doing the work you were assigned to on the new legal code." This phone call calmed Krylenko, but later that evening his home was raided by an NKVD squad. Krylenko and his family were arrested.^[14]

After three days of interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko "confessed" that he had been a "

Nikolai Krylenko was tried by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court on 29 July 1938. In accordance with Krylenko's own theories of socialist legality, the verdict and sentence had been decided in advance. The trial lasted only twenty minutes, just long enough for Krylenko to retract his false confessions.^[17] After being found guilty, he was taken away and immediately shot once in the back of the head.

Personality

The writer

With but an hour’s interruption for lunch, the obviously psychopathic prosecutor raved from ten in the morning until sunset. It was a stump speech delivered by a bald-headed little man with feverish grey eyes blazing with anger. Towards the end of his ten-hour harangue, the prosecutor was actually foaming at the mouth. After a day of screaming platitudes, Krylenko … was too exhausted to speak with coherence. He had reached a state of frenzy where he spat words of venom, hurling them at his victims in a fit of raving madness. As if carried away by a lust for murder, he demanded death for every defendant.[21]

Legacy

The NKVD officer who had taken Krylenko's testimony, one Kogan, probably Captain Lazar V. Kogan, who also interrogated

Krylenko's ex-wife and fellow Old Bolshevik Elena Rozmirovich survived the purges by keeping a low profile and working in the Party archives.^[10]

His sister Elena Krylenko [Wikidata] worked for Maxim Litvinov in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (although she was never a member of the Party); in 1924 she decided to leave Russia with the American writer Max Eastman (who had been in Russia for almost two years, researching and writing a life of Trotsky). To enable her to leave, Litvinov agreed to pass her off as a member of his delegation when he travelled to London for an international conference. But she could not leave the delegation and remain in a free country without a passport, which the Bolsheviks would not give her. So, in the hours before their train left, she and Max Eastman got married. They were still married and living in America when she died in 1956. Thus she escaped the purges.^[25][11]

Furthermore, Krylenko's creation of what was later dubbed "The Soviet Chess Machine" led Soviet Grandmasters to dominate the

1. ISBN 978-1-4191-6717-1
   p. 49
2. ISBN 978-0-521-52602-9
   p. 177
3. ^ See Arthur Ransome, op. cit, p. 46
4. ISBN 978-0-89886-388-8
   p. 164
5. ISBN 978-0-19-507132-0
   p. 249
6. ISBN 978-0-226-81568-8
   p. 6
7. ISBN 978-90-247-3576-1
   p. 90–92
8. ISBN 978-0-7658-0483-9
   p. 217
9. ISBN 978-1-56324-344-8
   , p. 233.
10. ISBN 978-0-521-59920-7
    p. 287.
11. ISBN 978-0-87140-155-7
    (2nd, 1994 edition) p. 382

Resources

1. ^ Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964.pp.338–9
2. ^ An eye-witness, Captain George Hill, described it in his memoir, Go Spy the Land (London: Cassell, 1932), p.110
3. ^ A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. trans. Mirra Ginsberg (London: Quartet Books, 1970). p. 22.
4. ^ A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. trans. Mirra Ginsberg (London: Quartet Books, (1970). p. 25.
5. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
   : An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume I, pp. 434–435.
6. ^ Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution; p. 822
7. ^ Father Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics in the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin, Syracuse University Press, 2001; p. 182
8. E.P. Dutton and Company
   , 1924. Page 221.
9. ^ Father Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics in the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin, Syracuse University Press, 2001; pp. 187–188
10. ^ "Krylenko & Carfare". Time. 6 February 1933. Archived from the original on 22 November 2010. Retrieved 29 September 2008.
11. ^ Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives (1997), p. 258.
12. ^ David Shenk (2006), The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, page 169.
13. ^ Eastman, p.342
14. ^
    ISBN 978-0-231-06351-7
    .
15. ^ the whole Soviet Union as opposed to just the Russian Federation
16. ^ "Записка Р.А. Руденко в ЦК КПСС о реабилитации Н.В. Крыленко. 11 мая 1955 г. (Note by R.A.Rudenko to the Central Committee of the CPSU on the rehabilitation of N.V.Krylenko)". Реабилитация: как ето было, документы президиума ЦК КПСС и другие материалы, март 1953 – февраль 1956. Международный фонд "демократияя" (Moscow). Retrieved 22 January 2023.
17. ^ Arbitrary Justice: Courts and Politics in Post Stalin Russia
18. ^ Ivanov-Razumnik, Razumnik (1965). The Memoirs of Ivanov-Razumnik. London: Oxford U.P. p. 313.
19. ^ Bruce Lockhart, R.H. (1932). Memoirs of a British Agent. London: Putnam. p. 257.
20. ^ Lyons, Eugene (n.d.). Assignment in Utopia. London: George Harrap & Co. p. 372.
21. ^ Reswick, William (1952). I Dreamt Revolution. Chicago: Henry Regnary. p. 249. Retrieved 1 April 2021.
22. ^ Nikolai Bukharin, George Shriver, Stephen F. Cohen, How It All Began, p. XVIII
23. ISBN 978-0-8179-2902-2, page 62 (chapter 3), available online at: [1] Archived 2010-11-26 at the Wayback Machine
24. ^ Michael Parrish, Sacrifice of the Generals: Soviet Senior Officer Losses, 1939–1953, p. xxii
25. ^ Eastman, pp.435–6

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

• Leoncini, Mario (2008). Scaccopoli. Le mani della politica sugli scacchi. Florence: Phasar.
  ISBN 978-88-87911-97-8
  .
• 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 978-5-15-000089-6
  (vol 2)
• Konstantin Aleksandrovich Zalesskii (К.А. Залесский). Stalin's Empire: A Biographical Encyclopedic Dictionary. (Империя Сталина. Биографический энциклопедический словарь.) Moscow, Veche, 2000,
  ISBN 978-5-7838-0716-9
• Pavel Vasil'evich Volobuev, ed. (1993). "Russian Politicians, 1917: A Biographical Dictionary (Политические деятели России 1917. Биографический словарь". Bol'shaia Rossiiskaia Entsiklopediia. Moscow.
  ISBN 978-5-85270-137-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link
  )

External links

• Newspaper clippings about Nikolai Krylenko in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Wikiquote has quotations related to Nikolai Krylenko.