The Government on Trial

Comrade Leon Goldman, the organizer of the Russian printing house 'Iskra', said in his remarkable speech before the Odessa Chamber court: 'When the time comes that the government has to judge the people, it means that the moment is ripe for the people to put their government on trial!'

The people, i.e., the crowd, the masses, have indeed become a permanent defendant: not a week goes by without judges dealing with the so-called 'crimes of the crowd'—crimes in which, in the face of 'justice,' the rank and file of the crowd, mere individuals among their kind, are randomly selected. These are not 'heroes,' not even 'the first swallows' announcing the approaching spring; these are, in the true sense of the word, people of the masses. Each dozen such people thrown into the dock represents thousands and tens of thousands of similar 'average people.' The only reason why they have not taken a place on the same bench is that 'justice' did not have enough hands to grab them all, not enough prison cells for all the 'guilty,' and finally, because this 'criminal' crowd as a whole must walk free, if only to feed with their labor the very society and state, for the glory of which their sons are being tried and punished.

When peasants organize 'riots' in entire counties, and hundreds of thousands of workers abandon their work and flood the streets of cities, the government, by randomly picking out dozens and hundreds of accused from the crowd, judges the entire crowd, the whole people, through them.

Before the people can turn the government into a defendant, every trial of participants in any act of the political drama taking place in Russia inevitably turns into a trial of the government.

The foreign press reports on the progress of the trial of the Kishinev thugs—a grandiose trial with hundreds of defendants and witnesses, dozens of lawyers, a trial that threatens to drag on for many months. The epilogue of the tragedy that absolutism needed to stage in order to slow down the march of the revolution, this trial could not help but turn into a trial of the government. It could not be prevented by closed doors, nor by the tricks of the preliminary investigation and violations of the law during the trial.

Opposite. The more the workers of ‘justice’ tried to plug up the gaps, the more scandalous for them the truth comes out in the course of cross-examining the witnesses. In the dock are the rank and file of the mob, who, under the leadership of government agents, thrashed and murdered on 6 and 7 April. The real leaders of this night of barbarism are absent from the bench, but they have to be admitted as witnesses. The Chamber forbids, contrary to all laws, touching upon the role in the pogrom of persons who have not been brought to trial, i.e., the true leaders of the pogrom, who were deliberately excluded from prosecution. However, this prohibition cannot stop the flow of revelations: Every witness who testifies under oath would have to be stopped, and no matter how hard the Chamber tries, from behind the backs of the day laborers and beggars sitting in the dock, the gloomy shadows of the real instigators of the ignorant crowd now and then rise before the audience: the notary Pisarzhevskii who shot himself, the millionaire Pronin, the student Malay, a member of the board Sinodino, the guild elder Stepanov and his patron in the ‘Znamya’ editorial office, the infamous Krushevan. Some of them drafted proclamations in which the masses were invited to kill Jews and were guaranteed the cooperation of the troops and the patronage of the police; others distributed this ‘literature’ in taverns; others led the mob and incited it to greater atrocities; and others, by word and pen, agitated after the pogrom to distort the truth, exonerate the guilty, and shift the blame onto the victims themselves. Pronin, accused of composing one of the proclamations glorifying the heroes of the pogrom, turns out to be the very same ‘honorable citizen’ who went to see John of Kronstadt and ‘convinced’ him that the Jewish victims themselves were to blame for what had happened. The reader should remember that under the influence of this ‘honorable’ murderer’s account, the miracle worker of Kronstadt wrote a penitent letter in ‘The Banner,’ in which he retracted the sympathy he had initially expressed for the victims and declared them the true executioners and the thugs the real victims. What earthly benefits the miracle worker of Kronstadt was seduced with to sanctify the abominable violence in the name of Christ is unknown; we can only say that he sufficiently crowned the ‘work’ of the Orthodox clergy in the Kishinev pogrom: as the court found, the representatives of the church were among the instigators of the violence.

But it is the role of the police that is best elucidated by the court. One by one, police officials who were either the organizers of the pogrom, the instigators of the crowd at the scene of the riot, or condoners of the most heinous crimes passed before the judges. They all began by accusing the Jews of being the first to attack Christians, harassing them and thus causing the bloody day of April 7. Afterwards, either through confrontations with the witnesses or denunciations by one of the defendants, the true role of all these police heroes, these ‘defenders of order,’ became clear—the vile role of cold-blooded instigators of the heated mob. Assistant Bailiff Zadorozhny, Bailiff Solovkin, Assistant Police-Master Dovgal, Police-Master Khanzhenkov, Vice-Governor Ustrugov, the chief of the security department, the gendarme colonel Baron Levendal—all of them, not to mention the petty officers, constables, and custodians, were found guilty of willful inaction at the sight of the murders taking place before their eyes. Some of them, moreover, were accused of actively instigating those who stood ‘idle’ without taking part in the robbery. The chief of the 10,000-strong garrison, General Beckmann, is embarrassingly silent when asked why he did not use troops to protect those who were killed, while at the same time private citizens and even police officers testify that soldiers looted property from the destroyed apartments.

Then come the ‘justice’ practitioners. One of them—investigator Radzevich—was a sympathetic spectator in the crowd surrounding the pogromists; others—many of them—were investigating and glorifying Mr. Pleve. They systematically suppressed the truth, did not record testimony compromising the ‘intelligent’ participants in the massacre, and intimidated witnesses—investigator Freinat even interrogated some with a lash in his hand!

Everything that the opposition, revolutionary, and foreign press had said about the Kishinev pogrom was confirmed. Everything that the reactionary newspapers and the government wrote in their reports to refute it proved to be false. The torture of the victims, the abuse of the corpses: all the facts previously reported in the press were confirmed at the trial. All the fables about the defiant behavior of the Jews are disproved, partly by the testimonies of the policemen themselves. And to top it all off, the government's account of the factual aspect of the case—the beginning of the pogrom—proved to be maliciously fictitious in the very point that was immediately challenged by the Kishinev Social Democrats (see the brochure ‘The Kishinev Massacre’): namely, the story that the Jewish master of the merry-go-round hit a Christian woman and this allegedly triggered the pogrom. This was confirmed, in particular, by the testimony of the policemen themselves, as claimed by the Social Democrats, that the carousel was closed and covered with cloth by order of the police. A characteristic example of the "credibility of government reports!"

The dark, unconscious executors of the police government's schemes sit in the dock, while the true perpetrators, though exposed by the court, will, of course, remain free. But in fact, they, and through them the entire regime, are the defendants in this grandiose trial. The Kishinev trial has torn off yet another fig leaf from the government, exposing it to the country, which will recognize the details revealed by the investigation in all the hideous horror of its true nature: that of a bandit stained with the most heinous crimes.

But what is most significant about what was exposed in the Kishinev trial is, in our opinion, the political underpinnings of the massacre of April 6-7. Despite efforts to strangle the truth, it broke through in this point as well. The population was incited to the pogrom, among other things, by playing on "loyal subjects'" feelings against the revolutionaries, who, of course, turned out to be "Jews." This was directly stated at the trial by the already mentioned anti-Semitic millionaire Pronin, when he gave the following explanation for the pogrom: the people learned that Jews from different countries had gathered in Kishinev before Passover and decided at a synagogue meeting to revolt against the government; naturally, the people went after the Jews. Ingeniously clever as this explanation of the pogrom might sound from the mouth of an honorable bourgeois, it undoubtedly touches on one of the essential aspects of the harassment organized by the police that prepared the pogrom. It is no wonder (as revealed in "Liberation") that the director of this massacre was the gendarme baron Levendal, who set up a security detachment in politically peaceful Kishinev for this purpose! It is no wonder that the civil plaintiffs could present to the court a painting that circulated before the pogrom, depicting a scene of Christians being murdered by Jews for the use of their blood, with an inscription: "Deal similarly with the Jewish Social Democrats!" How vividly this picture and its inscription depict the nature of a regime that simultaneously unleashes the still-existing dark forces of the past and sows the seeds of modern "European" harassment of socialism! And how clearly before us stands the driving force of this gendarme-arranged and gendarme-inspired massacre—the political struggle of the dying regime against its principal, deadly, invincible enemy—the class movement of Russian, Jewish, and other proletarians.

For the sake of prolonging the life of the rotten regime, its priests slaughtered dozens of peaceful poor people on April 6-7 this year. In order to protect its ‘good name,’ the Russian Ministry of Justice turned the murder of a woman by agents of the authorities—a murder brought to light by the ‘revolt’ of the Tikhorets workers—into a major political case, into a battle between the bureaucracy and all honest people in Russia. To save one judicial investigator, the government spread so many filthy lies about the Zolotova case that, in the end, it was forced to promise the public a full and comprehensive disclosure of the truth.

The notorious corroboration by State Councillor Burtsev seemed to calm minds, and even the liberal newspapers admitted that Zolotova died ‘for reasons unknown’ without any direct or indirect cooperation from the local autocrats. But ‘internal policy’ imperatively demanded that, after calming the public, the proletarians who ‘revolted’ against what they undoubtedly saw as the murder of the prisoner be punished. This appeal of the offended police majesty to ‘justice’ threw the government back into the dock.

The prohibition against touching upon the circumstances of Zolotova's death—in a case about the riots caused by her death!—provoked protests and demonstrations from the defenders, nullifying all the legal finesse of State Councillor Burtsev, along with all the political wisdom of the liberal organs that assisted the government in ‘calming the minds.’ The public learned again that, although, according to the government's assurances, all was well in Zolotova's case, there was still something in the case that the government needed to conceal!

Out of the rain and into the water! This is Pleve's policy motto! Fleeing from the proletarian revolution, he incites a medieval campaign against the Jews and raises a worldwide storm of indignation; to calm this storm, he throws the dark victims of unscrupulous incitement into the dock and ends up alongside them as an exposed ringleader and organizer; to save one official, and with him the principle of bureaucratic autocracy, he tries to suppress a criminal case—only to cause such publicity that it undermines this principle better than any agitation; to cope with this agitation, he dazzles the public with the golden embroidery of the entire Justice Department's uniforms—only to end up, in a trial against seven workers, revealing the filth behind these uniforms, thereby repeatedly compromising his own principles. This is the modern internal policy of that degenerate regime, which formally still judges ‘its’ people, but in fact does not escape the role of the chief, the most criminal, and always exposed defendant!

L. Martov.