First People's Commissar of Justice under Lenin: the Left SR who defended revolutionary legality against the Cheka
"Then why bother with a Commissariat for Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination!" — to Lenin, protesting a Cheka summary-execution clause, February 1918
Left SR lawyer, first People's Commissar of Justice in Lenin's coalition government. He championed revolutionary legality against the Cheka and resigned over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In exile he was a Yiddish writer and territorialist activist.
Career Timeline
- 1906Joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party while at Moscow University
- 1908Arrested, exiled to Tobolsk province for 2 years; later earned law master's at Heidelberg
- 1915Arrested for anti-war work, exiled to Ufa; practiced law and led Ufa Left SRs
- 1917Elected to Constituent Assembly (Ufa), Left SR Central Committee, executive of All-Russian Council of Peasant Deputies
- 1917.12–1918.3People's Commissar of Justice: restricted Cheka powers, freed political prisoners, issued Revolutionary Tribunal rules; resigned over Brest-Litovsk
- 1918Organized partisan detachments in Kursk and Taganrog; detained by Cheka for 4.5 months in 1919
- 1923Emigrated to Berlin, stripped of Soviet citizenship; co-founded 'Skify' publishing, joined Vienna International
- 1933–1957Co-founded Freeland League in London, pursued Kimberley Plan; edited Yiddish journal Afn Shvel; died in New York
Related historical events
Crystals of Power — The Dangers Lurking Even in a Stateless Society
Steinberg's political thought was an anarchist-leaning Left Narodnik vision of a radically decentralized federation of worker syndicates, soviets, and cooperatives, governed by direct democracy with immediately revocable delegates. What made him original, however, was his insight that power can regenerate even in a stateless society. What he called 'crystals of power' (кристаллы власти) were the informal hierarchies (doctor and patient, teacher and student, expert and novice) that, however voluntarily formed, could over time harden into new pyramids of authority.
He likened a free society to a solution in which small crystals float, arguing that it must be constantly stirred to prevent total crystallization into dictatorship. Institutionally, he proposed splitting power between political soviets (defence and public order) and economic soviets (syndicates managing production and consumption) so that each branch would check the other. Unlike most anarchists, he also held that a political party tasked with destroying the state from within was both possible and necessary. Because he understood 'anarchism' not as a fixed end-goal but as the perpetual spirit and principle driving revolutionary socialism, he refused even to label his syndicalist vision 'anarchism'. The concept of crystals of power became the doctrinal core of Left SR political theory.