First Procurator General of the USSR and architect of revolutionary legality
At the 1922 Petrograd trial, Krasikov demanded the death penalty for Metropolitan Veniamin, arguing that "the church must kneel before the revolution" — and the court obliged.
A Bolshevik revolutionary who joined Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva in 1892 and sat on the Bureau of the II RSDLP Congress in 1903 alongside Lenin and Plekhanov, he became the USSR's first Procurator General in 1924 and laid the institutional foundations of the Soviet judicial system. He founded the anti-religious journal Revolution and Church, helped draft the Soviet constitutions of 1918, 1924, and 1936, and died of illness in 1939 after being removed during the Great Purge.
Career Timeline
- 1892Joined Emancipation of Labour group, Geneva
- 1903Bureau member, II RSDLP Congress (with Lenin and Plekhanov)
- 1905Head of agitation, Petersburg Party Committee
- 1917Helped organize Petrograd Soviet; chaired MRC military-investigative commission
- 1918–1924Deputy People's Commissar of Justice
- 1919–1924Founder and editor, Revolution and Church
- 1924–1933First Procurator General of the USSR
- 1933–1938Deputy Chairman, Supreme Court of the USSR
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Petersburg Soviet executive committee member & head of agitationElected to the executive committee of the Petersburg Soviet in October 1905 and headed Bolshevik agitation; arrested with other deputies at a Soviet session on 3 December and jailed in Kresty Prison.
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Prosecutor General
Architect of the Anti-Religious Struggle: The 8th Department and Revolution and Church
In May 1918, Krasikov was appointed head of the 8th Department of the People's Commissariat of Justice (informally known as the "Liquidation Department") tasked with implementing the decree on the separation of church and state. Under his direction, the department set about systematically dismantling the administrative, property, and educational foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church, treating it as a vestige of the old regime. An August 1918 instruction stripped the clergy of all juridical and property rights, and in early 1919 Krasikov organized the first nationwide campaign to forcibly open the relics of saints, publicly undermining the Church's authority.
As editor of the journal Revolution and Church, launched in 1919, Krasikov consistently argued that the task was "to smash the old church-state machine to pieces." He blocked publication of Patriarch Tikhon's conciliatory pastoral letter, and when the Cheka proposed fostering a "Soviet church" to split the hierarchy, Krasikov objected that "supporting any organization that reproduces the fog of religious consciousness would contradict the most basic tasks of the proletarian dictatorship." When figures like Latsis and Yaroslavsky argued for using reformist clergy to divide the Church, Krasikov held the hard line, insisting that "church and life are mutually contradictory concepts at this historical moment" and opposing any reproduction of religious organization whatever.
When the campaign to confiscate church valuables escalated nationwide in 1922, Krasikov stood at its apex. A member of the "central troika" that drafted the confiscation decree and a member of Trotsky's Moscow and Central confiscation commissions, he took the floor as chief prosecutor at the Petrograd show trial. Facing 86 defendants, Krasikov declared: "The criminal organization is before you — it is the Orthodox Church itself, with its strict hierarchy and its undisguised counterrevolutionary designs." The tribunal sentenced ten to death, including Metropolitan Veniamin, Archimandrite Sergius (Shein), Professor Yuri Novitsky, and lawyer Ivan Kovsharov; on the night of 12 August 1922, four were shot. Veniamin was canonized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1992.
In October 1922 Krasikov joined the secret Anti-Religious Commission of the Party Central Committee, and in 1929 he helped draft the Law on Religious Associations, which confined all religious activity to the interior of worship buildings under a sweeping catalogue of prohibitions. Even after his appointment as Procurator General in 1924, he continued serving on the central council of the League of the Militant Godless, steering Soviet religious policy beyond mere separation toward what he called "the complete extinction of religious prejudice."