Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko

Studying history and literature at St Petersburg University in 1904, Krylenko joined the Bolsheviks and was known among students as "Comrade Abram". During the 1905 revolution he was a member of the short-lived St Petersburg Soviet and of the Bolshevik Petersburg committee. On 13 October 1905 he chaired a meeting at the Polytechnic Institute at which Khrustalev-Nosar proposed forming a soviet of workers' deputies. He left Russia in June 1906 and returned the same year; in 1907 the tsarist secret police arrested him, and after he was released for insufficient evidence he was exiled to Lublin without trial.

From 1906 he worked illegally as a propagandist for the Moscow committee, using the false names "Leno", "Gurnyak" and "Abramov". In 1909 he wrote a brochure, In Search of Orthodoxy, marking his theoretical break with Social Democracy; in 1937 the party leadership would judge it "syndicalist in tendency". Documents differ on when he broke with the party: the Russian account dates it to this 1909 brochure, while the English account records his departure from the RSDLP in 1911 and adds that he rejoined soon afterwards. Having passed his university final examinations in spring 1909 and received his degree, he taught literature and history at private Polish schools in Lublin and Sosnowiec.

From 1911 he worked on the Bolshevik newspaper Zvezda and then moved to Pravda. In spring 1911 Lenin summoned him to Krakow in Austrian Galicia, and from then on he was close to Lenin's family; he later became legal adviser to the Bolshevik deputies of the State Duma. From 1912 to 1913 he served a year of active duty as a first-class volunteer in the 69th Ryazan Infantry Regiment at Lublin, passing through the ranks of private and non-commissioned officer, and after transfer to the reserve he was commissioned as an army infantry second lieutenant in November 1913. The English account treats the same period as promotion to lieutenant before his discharge in 1913, so the two accounts differ over his rank.

Assigned by the party to the empire's Social Democratic Duma faction, he was arrested on 11 December 1913 and exiled from St Petersburg to Kharkiv for two years. There he graduated from the law faculty of Kharkiv University as an external student and took a law degree; this legal study during exile became the academic foundation for his later career in the revolutionary tribunals and the prosecution service.

In July 1914, on the eve of the First World War, he emigrated to Austria and then to Switzerland, attending the Berne party conference in March 1915. The English account records that in mid-1915 Lenin sent him to Russia to help rebuild the Bolshevik underground. In June 1915 he was sent illegally to Moscow together with his wife Elena Rozmirovich. In November 1915 he was arrested again on a charge of evading conscription as a reserve officer and held in Kharkiv until April 1916. He was released with an accompanying document demanding that those concerned "be prepared for his propaganda" and forced into the active army. In 1916 he served as a junior officer in the regimental signals unit of the 13th Finland Rifle Regiment, 11th Army, on the Southwestern Front, and from 12 (25) August to 15 (28) September 1916 he was treated at a field hospital in Moscow. After the February Revolution of 1917 his work in the regimental, divisional and army committees began on this ground of underground activity and frontline service.

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.

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.