The Hitler and Stalin Trials

Hitler operated from the premise that the big lie needed a dash of truth to give it the flavor of credibility, but, given that, the people would more easily swallow a big lie than a little lie.

In the trials following the Russian Revolution, continuing throughout the Stalin era, the courts operated on the premise that under the new revolutionary order the question of guilt was irrelevant. Guilt was itself declared to be a bourgeois concept, unworthy of the new order of justice. N.V. Krylenko, the prosecutor general, sculptured, as he put it, “a new law and new ethical norms.” The tribunal became “an organ of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies,” acting in the “interests of the revolution…having in mind the most desirable results for the masses of workers and peasants.” Defendants are “carri-ers of specific ideas,” and the court must recognize this fact in judging a defendant: “Only one method of evaluating him is to be applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expediency.” Individual guilt is replaced by class expediency.

Roland Freisler in Nazi Germany and N.V. Krylenko in Stalin’s USSR were mistaken if they thought that their jurisprudence was new or that their courts could create a new order. It is more accurate to say that their legal standard, expediency, was the oldest law. In a crisis or tyranny it is the most commonplace. In all circumstances it is the most tedious. It is not new, however. Freisler and Krylenko do not give us a creative idea about law, only a restatement of the operative motto of all tyrannies: justice is the interest of the stronger. The people of the small island of Melos faced this standard when powerful Athens demanded that they submit or be destroyed. The Athenians state the principle of Freisler and Krylenko advocated with flat clarity: “The standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”³¹

The one-sidedness of a partisan trial and its lack of contradiction encloses it within an ideological wonderland, not too different from what Alice found. In challenging the prosecution at a partisan trial, the accused stands no chance of seriously contesting the indictment, much less persuading the court. Nikolai Bukharin, for example, was charged with leading a conspiratorial group (the bloc of rightists and Trotskyites) to sabotage and dismember the USSR and undermine its defense capacity. In the 1938 show trial, Bukharin challenged public prosecutor Andri Vyshinsky’s strategy of using those in the dock to verify the “evi-dence” presented during the preliminary investigation. Bukharin wedged his protest between the demand that he cooperate as a condition for being allowed to appear in court and his desire that he set his political ideas on record for future generations. Although he was cut short by Vyshinsky whenever, by way of his confession, he explained his heretical views, he was the only defendant who refused to play the evil conspirator role cast for him.

The legacy of partisan justice under Stalin, part of the long tradition from the czars, continued on in Soviet psycho-prisons. Trials, after all, can result in courtroom challenges such as at Bukharin’s trial or at the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (Nicolai Arzhak) in 1966.³³ Much safer for the police state is partisan psychology. A sane person who opposes the system puts his or her word against the state’s. One side is wrong or at fault, and it might be the state. But if the dissident is mad, no one can be blamed, certainly not the state. Challenging the authorities over a question of truth or justice becomes a symptom of a paranoid personality. A leading Soviet psychiatrist suggested that “dissidence may be caused by brain disease.”³⁴ Zhores Medvedev, a biochemist, was diagnosed as suffering from “incipient schizophrenia” and “paranoid delusions of reforming society.” His split personality was manifested in his combining scientific and publicist work, in his overestimation of his personality, and in his poor adaptation to the social environment.³⁵ Andrei Sakharov, Soviet officials declared in 1984, is “a talented, but sick man.” The evidence, of course, is in his article published in America urging a buildup of nuclear weapons in the West. He was sent into exile to Gorky “for his own peace of mind.” There he will receive the proper Soviet medical attention: “So-viet medics are taking all necessary measures to restore his health.”³⁶

Soon after Sakharov was sent into exile his wife, Yelena Bonner, was tried for “slandering the Soviet state.” Her defense lawyer was selected by the KGB, and the trial was in a courtroom from which her friends and relatives were excluded but which was packed with KGB personnel who uttered abuse about her.³⁷ Whether dissidents are declared mentally ill and punished by partisan psycho-treatment or are sent through partisan courts and punished as political offenders, the result is the same.