Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko (, ; 2 May 1885 – 29 July 1938) was an Old Bolshevik and Soviet politician, military commander, and jurist. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. He was executed during the Great Purge.
Krylenko was an exponent of socialist legality and the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment. Although participating in the show trials and political repression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in the initial phase of the Great Purge, Krylenko was removed from his post as Commissar of Justice and arrested in January 1938. Following interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko confessed to extensive involvement in wrecking and anti-Soviet agitation. After a trial of 20 minutes, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, and executed immediately afterwards.
Krylenko was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955.
Biography Early life and education Krylenko was born in Bekhteyevo, in Sychyovsky Uyezd of Smolensk Governorate,<ref name=Zalesskii>K.A. Zalesskii, "Nikolai Vasilevich Krylenko," in Imperiia Stalina: biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar''' [The Empire of Stalin: Biographical Encyclopedic Dictionary]. Moscow: Veche, 2000; pp. 248–249. Machine translation edited by Tim Davenport.</ref> 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.Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch (New York: Random House, 1964.pp.338–9
The young Krylenko joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904 while studying history and literature at St. Petersburg University, where he was known to fellow students as Comrade Abram. He was a member of the short-lived Saint Petersburg Soviet during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and a member of the Bolshevik Saint Petersburg Committee. He was forced to flee Russia in June 1906, but returned later that year. Arrested by the Tsar's secret police in 1907, Krylenko was released for lack of evidence, but soon exiled to Lublin (present-day Poland) without trial.
Krylenko returned to Saint Petersburg in 1909 and finished his degree. He left the RSDLP in 1911, but soon rejoined it. He was drafted in 1912 and was promoted to second lieutenant before being discharged in 1913. After working as an assistant editor of Pravda and a liaison to the Bolshevik faction in the Duma for a few months, Krylenko was arrested again in 1913 and exiled to Kharkiv. There he studied and earned a law degree. In early 1914, Krylenko learned that he might be re-arrested and fled to Austria.
At the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, where he was regarded as a member of an enemy nation, and moved to neutral Switzerland. In mid-1915, Vladimir Lenin sent Krylenko back to Russia to help rebuild the Bolshevik underground organization. In November 1915, Krylenko was arrested in Moscow for avoiding conscriptions and, after a few months in prison, sent to the South West Front in April 1916. During the war he attained the rank of ensign [praporshchik].
1917 revolutions
After the February Revolution of 1917 and the introduction of elected committees in the Russian armed forces, Krylenko was elected chairman of his regiment's and then division's committee. On 15 April, he was elected chairman of the 11th Army's committee. After Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917, Krylenko adopted the new Bolshevik policy of irreconcilable opposition to the Provisional Government. He had to resign his post on 26 May 1917 for lack of support from non-Bolshevik members of the Army committee.
In June 1917, Krylenko was made a member of the Bolshevik Military Organization and was elected to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets. At the Congress, he was elected to the permanent All-Russian Central Executive Committee from the Bolshevik faction. Krylenko left Petrograd for the High Command HQ in Mogilev on 2 July, but was arrested there by the Provisional government after the abortive July Days uprising. He was kept in prison in Petrograd, but was released in mid-September after the Kornilov Affair.
Krylenko took an active part in preparing the October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd as newly elected chairman of the Congress of Northern Region Soviets and a leading member of the Military Revolutionary Committee. On 16 October, ten days before the uprising, he reported to the Bolshevik Central Committee that the Petrograd military would support the Bolsheviks in case of an uprising. During the Bolshevik takeover on 24–25 October (o.s.), Krylenko was one of the uprising's leaders, along with Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, and Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko.
Head of the Red Army
At the Second All Russian Congress of Soviets on 25 October, Krylenko was made a People's Commissar (minister) and member of a triumvirate (with Pavel Dybenko and Nikolai Podvoisky) responsible for military affairs. In early November (Old Style) 1917, immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Krylenko helped Leon Trotsky suppress an attempt by Provisional Government loyalists, led by Alexander Kerensky and General Peter Krasnov, to retake Petrograd.
After the Provisional Commander in Chief (and Chief of General Staff), General Nikolai Dukhonin, refused to open peace negotiations with the Germans, Krylenko (an Ensign at this point) was appointed as Commander in Chief on 9 November. He started negotiations with representatives of the German army on 12–13 November. Krylenko arrived at the High Command HQ in Mogilev on 20 November and arrested General Dukhonin, who was bayoneted and shot to death by Red Guards answering to Krylenko.An eye-witness, Captain George Hill, described it in his memoir, Go Spy the Land (London: Cassell, 1932), p.110 After the formation of the Red Army on , Krylenko was a member of the All-Russian Collegium that oversaw its buildup. He proved to be an excellent public speaker, able to win over hostile mobs with words alone.Arthur Ransome, Russia in 1919. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919; p. 49. His organizational talents, however, lagged far behind his oratorical ones.
Krylenko supported the policy of democratization of the Russian military, including abolishing subordination, providing for election of officers by enlisted men, and using propaganda to win over enemy units. Although the Red Army had some successes in early 1918 against small and poorly armed anti-Bolshevik detachments, the policy proved unsuccessful when Soviet forces were roundly defeated by the Imperial German Army in late February 1918 after the breakdown of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations.
In his 1918 essay Scythians?, Yevgeny Zamyatin, an Old Bolshevik who is now considered the first Soviet dissident cited Krylenko as an example of the ugliness and repression within the new Soviet Union. Zamyatin wrote, "Christ on Golgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death drop by drop, is the victor – because he has been crucified, because, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ victorious in practical terms is the Grand Inquisitor. And worse, Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk-lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand and collects donations with his left. The Fair Lady, in legal marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night and a migraine in the morning. And Marx, having come down to earth, is simply a Krylenko. Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement forward. The realization, materialisation, practical victory of an idea immediately gives it a philistine hue. And the true Scythian will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock, the odor of Krylenko – and will hasten away from the dwellings, into the steppe, to freedom."A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. trans. Mirra Ginsberg (London: Quartet Books, 1970). p. 22.
Later in the same essay, Zamyatin quoted a recent poem by Andrei Bely and used it to further criticize Krylenko and those like him, for having, "covered Russia with a pile of carcasses," and for, "dreaming of socialist–Napoleonic wars in Europe – throughout the world, throughout the universe! But let us not jest incautiously. Bely is honest, and did not intend to speak about the Krylenkos."Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: The Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin. Mirra Ginsberg, trans. London: Quartet Books, 1970; p. 25.
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.
Revolutionary legality
From May 1918 and until 1922, Krylenko was Chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. He simultaneously served as a member of the Collegium of Prosecutors of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
In May 1918, Leon Trotsky ordered that Soviet Navy Admiral Alexei Shchastny be put on trial for having refused to scuttle the Baltic Fleet. After a trial prosecuted by Krylenko, the presiding judge, Karklin, sentenced the Admiral, "To be shot within twenty four hours." Attendees reacted with dismay as Lenin had abolished the death penalty on 28 October 1917. Krylenko said to those present, "What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot." The sentence was carried out soon after.Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume I, pp. 434–435.
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."Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution; p. 822
In early 1919, Krylenko was involved in a dispute with the Cheka and was instrumental in taking away its right to execute people without a trial.Ransome, Russia in 1919, p. 46. In 1922, Krylenko became Deputy Commissar of Justice and assistant Prosecutor General of the RSFSR, in which capacity he served as the chief prosecutor at the Moscow show trials of the 1920s.
From 1927 to 1934, Krylenko was a member of the Communist Party's discipline committee, the Central Control Commission.
Procurator of show trials
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Krykenko wrote dozens of books and articles in support of his philosophy of "socialist legality." 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.