The architect of revolutionary justice who got twenty minutes at his own trial
In 1918, after a defendant was sentenced to be shot at a trial held just after the death penalty had been abolished, the courtroom stirred. Krylenko said: 'What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.'
Bolshevik lawyer and military commander. In November 1917 he was appointed the first Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief and led the ceasefire with the Central Powers. From 1918 he became the chief architect of the Soviet legal system, defining law as an instrument of class struggle through his doctrine of 'revolutionary legal consciousness.' As state prosecutor he led the Shakhty, Industrial Party, and Menshevik trials while rivalling Vyshinsky for control of justice. Arrested in 1938, charged in the 'counter-revolutionary mountaineering and tourism terrorist organisation' case, sentenced to death after twenty minutes, and shot at Kommunarka that July. Rehabilitated 1955.
Career Timeline
- 1904–1917Bolshevik underground: arrests, exile, and frontline service as an army officer in WWI
- 1917.11–1918.3First Soviet Supreme Commander-in-Chief; removes Dukhonin, opens ceasefire talks
- 1918–1922Chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- 1922–1929Deputy Commissar of Justice and Senior Assistant Prosecutor of the RSFSR
- 1929–1931Prosecutor of the RSFSR; state prosecutor in the Shakhty, Industrial Party, and Menshevik trials
- 1931–1936People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR
- 1936–1938.1People's Commissar of Justice of the USSR
- 1938.7.29Tried in twenty minutes, sentenced to death, shot the same day
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionMRC memberA member of the MRC leadership during the insurrection, he was soon appointed commander-in-chief of the army.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionFirst Supreme Commander-in-Chief and chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)People's Commissar of Justice
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeTargetAn architect of revolutionary law and Commissar of Justice, himself executed in 1938 after a twenty-minute trial.
November 1917, An Ensign Becomes Commander-in-Chief
On 22 November 1917 the Council of People's Commissars dismissed General Dukhonin, who had refused the order to open armistice negotiations, and appointed Ensign Nikolai Krylenko Supreme Commander-in-Chief in his place. The promotion of one of the tsarist army's most junior officers to command over millions of soldiers was a symbol of how thoroughly the revolution had overturned the military hierarchy. Krylenko, a Bolshevik orator educated at St Petersburg University, was known among frontline soldiers by his party name "Comrade Abram".
Krylenko traveled with a detachment of sailors by rail to the general headquarters at Mogilev and took over the Stavka without bloodshed on 3 December. That same day enraged soldiers and sailors lynched Dukhonin; Krylenko tried and failed to stop them, and publicly deplored the violence that had escaped his control. He then backed the armistice negotiations with Germany while shouldering the contradictory task of dissolving the old army and building a new one.
With the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 Krylenko resigned his command and moved from the army to the revolutionary courts. As the man who had enforced the Bolshevik promise of peace at the front, he embodied the fact that October rested not merely on the seizure of a palace but on the peace hunger of the soldier masses in the trenches.
Revolutionary Tribunals, Chess, and the Pamirs
From the Civil War years Krylenko was a builder of the Soviet legal system. As chief state prosecutor he led the major political trials of the era, including the SR trial of 1922, the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930, and he became People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR in 1931 and of the USSR in 1936. His jurisprudence treated law as an instrument of class struggle and rejected procedural formalism, yet he also worked at codification and legal education, the institutionalization of justice in the new state.
Krylenko was also the greatest patron of Soviet chess and mountaineering. As chairman of the All-Union chess section he organized the Moscow international tournament of 1925 under the slogan "chess to the masses" and founded the magazine 64. In summer he left for the Pamirs, leading expeditions including the joint Soviet-German Pamir expedition of 1928, and he laid the institutional foundations of Soviet alpinism.
At the January 1938 session of the Supreme Soviet his "hobbies" were attacked as proof of a commissar neglecting his duties. Vyshinsky's rival school of law took the place of his own; Krylenko was arrested on 31 January and shot on 29 July 1938 after a trial that lasted twenty minutes. He was rehabilitated in 1956. That the founder of the revolutionary tribunals vanished without even their minimal procedure shows how the Great Terror consumed the Soviet legal order itself.