but trial in court’. But the court should not in any way be different 
“from such an organ as the Cheka”, declares Krylenko in his book Court 
and Law in U.S.S.R. (Soviet Russia), published in 1 927. Krylenko again 
refers to the testament of Lenin, recalls the words uttered by him in the 
first period of the New Economic Policy: “The revolutionary courts must 
decree execution by shooting when it is proved that the accused is a 
Menshevic”*). Fully forty-three articles of the Criminal Code give the 
revolutionary courts the possibility to sentence the accused to death in 
the Soviet Republic. 
The power of the G. P. U. extends as before to the lives of 
those arrested, and when the G. P. U. considers it useful, it 
arbitrarily finishes off its victim (the Cheka’s right of shooting in special 
circumstances was again revived in 1924). Universal espionage, penetrating 
into private homes, into individual apartments, into individual families, 
tracks down the appearance of an. anti-Soviet spirit among the various 
classes of the population. As of old, the prisons were filled with political 
prisoners. Wholesale arrests and wholesale deportations, decreed by the 
courts and by the orders of the Administration, to remote, forgotten, 
depopulated and climatically most undesirable places in. Siberia. Turkestan 
and the Solovets Islands, took place daily. 
In itself Soviet deportation is an. awful thing. It is enough to read 
the stratling diary of Malsagow (who, in 1925, escaped from the Solovets 
concentration camp) to realise the plight of the prisoners. Matters have not 
changed since 1922. People are fated to die a slow death. They have no 
human rights, they endure hunger, they are beaten, tortured and sneered at; 
now and then they are shot. It would seem verily that the inventive power 
of the Soviets is especially keen no finding the most refined methods of 
degradation. The punishments they invent have never yet before existed 
in the annals of deportation and hard labour. Nay, the “stone bags” which 
they now use were known, — in the reign of John the Terrible, in monastic 
prisons. The prisoner is thrust into a hole, so narrow that he has to be 
literally screwed in, and he remains there for a week, for a fortnight. 
Another punishment consists in placing the naked prisoner on a mosquito- 
infected spot, or — as a winter variation — on boards covered with ice. 
Thus the “victors” treat the “victims”. No wonder prisoners go on “hunger- 
strike” or commit suicide. But all those repressions are not “Red Terror” 
in the sense in which it is depicted by the communist theoricians. It is 
only “revolutionary justice”. It happens, however, now and then that 
“Quiet Terror’ suddenly flares up and takes the monsirous form of 
A “Menshevic” is an orthodox social-democrat, who. however. is of a 
different mind than the Bolshevics. 
IDA