On 2026-01-09 4:36 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:
Inspired by the other thread to do some reading, did you know there was
such a thing as jurisprudence in the USSR? If you were executed under
the Stalin regime, you could be confident that proper procedure was
followed.
You must be being sarcastic. The one thing you could be sure of is that
the Soviet justice system was anything BUT just. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is the gold standard on this but it's three volumes and
close to 2000 pages so that may be more than you're willing to take on.
(I've read it three times now and HIGHLY recommend it as having done
more to educate me about the real world than anything else I've ever read.)
Picture a trial that lasted just 10 or 15 minutes, with no defence
attorney present or allowed. (Show trials were the exception in that
they pretended to permit a defence attorney, although many of them
openly expressed their contempt for their clients in open court and
their desire that their client should get the maximum penalty allowed by
law.) A typical trial was in front of a "troika", a panel of three men (although there were often just two) who basically noted that you had confessed (after intensive torture, although they probably didn't
mention that bit) and announced the sentence, which might be an
immediate execution or a long stint in the camps.
It should also be mentioned that it wasn't necessary to have actually
DONE SOMETHING to be sentenced to the Gulag: merely being related to
someone who had confessed to something was sufficient. Stalin's
"justice" system had no hesitation in sending parents, grandparents,
spouses, aunts and uncles, or children of confessed criminals to the
Gulag for several years. (Very young children would get sent to brutal orphanages were they were eventually recruited to join the secret police
in many cases, often as some of the cruelest officers).
Here's a blog post talking about the guy who wrote the book that every
lawyer in training read.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2024/02/old-legal-theories-given-a-new-life/
Vyshinky was among the vilest of the vile people that surrounded Stalin.
I would like my own copy to pound the clue through the skull of anyone apologizing for socialism demanding that more and more of it be
implemented in the West. This is the most disturbing thing I've read all
day.
If you read it, Gulag Archipelago will be the most disturbing thing
you've read in your entire LIFE. My brother had little interest in
politics - although some in history - and he read the whole thing. He
wasn't one to talk much on the phone and even less so when it was long distance but he called me long distance after he read it and we had an extensive chat about it; it had moved him that much.
Robert Conquest's book, The Great Terror (especially the 30th
anniversary revision and probably the 40th anniversary revision) are considerably shorter if you want to get a sense of the times without
reading so much. Conquest was an Anglo-American historian who, as a
young man, had joined the (British) Communist Party about the same time
as Kim Philby (while also at Cambridge) but who eventually soured on
Communism and wrote many books on the history of Soviet communism. The
revised editions of the Great Terror are especially good because he was
able to confirm a lot of things that had only been informed speculation
in the original version due to the opening of the Soviet archives to
Western researchers.
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