Most books about a legal system are written by observers. This one was written by the man in charge of it. The dust jacket of the Progress edition states the fact without emphasis, in the middle of a paragraph about university degrees and conference attendance: "Since 1970 he is the Minister of Justice of the USSR." Vladimir Terebilov, born in Petrograd in 1916, a law graduate of Leningrad University in 1939, a soldier through the siege, afterwards an official of the Procurator's Office and the Supreme Court, was the serving head of the institution this book describes. He would hold the post until 1984, and then chair the Supreme Court of the USSR until 1989. The Soviet Court is therefore not a study. It is a ministry's account of itself, issued in English, for readers who would never see a Soviet courtroom.
The commission is legible in the back-cover copy, which invites the reader to "compare them for himself with the 194[8] Universal Declaration of Human Rights." That is the frame: an official reply, in the language of international circulation, to a specific and growing accusation. The accusation had a date.
In 1973 the Soviet legal system was doing something that this book does not mention. Pyotr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, two of the best-known figures of the Moscow opposition, were tried in Moscow that August and sentenced to three years imprisonment and three years exile under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, which covers anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. Marilyn Vogt, reporting the case in Intercontinental Press of 10 September 1973, noted that "the trial was completely closed, the only reports on the proceedings being predigested ones issued by the Soviet Foreign Ministry's press department and by TASS," and that Yakir had by then been held over fourteen months, "in violation of a Soviet law that specifies a nine-month maximum for pre-trial confinement." The same paper had reported in June that a judicial-psychiatric commission ruled on 29 January 1973 that the former general Pyotr Grigorenko must continue compulsory psychiatric treatment, and described Vladimir Bukovsky, who had smuggled the Serbsky Institute's diagnoses to the West, as "himself now imprisoned." That autumn Pravda ran its campaign against Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.
None of this appears in The Soviet Court. The words "anti-Soviet agitation" do not occur in it. Neither does "psychiatric" in any custodial sense, nor the name of any political defendant. This is a book about the Soviet judiciary published in the year of the Yakir–Krasin trial that does not know the Yakir–Krasin trial happened.
That is the second silence. The first is larger, and it is the one on which the book's credibility properly turns.
Chapter I contains a section called "The Judiciary in the Pre-War Period." It runs from the founding of the USSR Supreme Court in 1923 to the reorganisation of the People's Commissariats of Justice in December 1938 — that is, straight through the Terror. Here is what a Soviet Minister of Justice wrote in 1973 about his own institution in those years. Of the constitutional settlement: "The new Constitution of the USSR was adopted in December 1936. In accordance with it the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed, on August 16, 1938, a law on the judicial system of the USSR, the Union and Autonomous Republics." Of what that law achieved: "The 1938 Law on the Judicial System of the USSR, the Union and Autonomous Republics established a harmoniously structured judiciary and strictly defined the functions of Soviet courts at all levels." The section's remaining difficulty is administrative, and the book states it as the hard problem of the period: "Delineating the functions in guiding courts of law between the People's Commissariat of Justice as a state administrative body and the Supreme Court of the USSR as an organ of judicial supervision was a complicated problem."
Harmonious. Complicated. Those are the words. In roughly sixty-four thousand words, the name Stalin does not appear once. Neither does Vyshinsky — Andrei Vyshinsky, Procurator-General of the USSR from 1935 to 1939, prosecutor of the Moscow trials, the most internationally famous Soviet lawyer who ever lived, and the author of the evidentiary doctrine that made those trials possible. The words purge, terror and repression do not occur. The year 1937 appears exactly once in the book, and it appears to record that Alexander Gorkin was elected Secretary of the Central Executive Committee. "Rehabilitation" occurs fifteen times and every occurrence concerns the re-education of convicted criminals; not one concerns the millions posthumously or belatedly rehabilitated after 1953, a process in which the Supreme Court of the USSR — the body Terebilov would later chair — was the principal instrument. A book cannot both claim its courts as a proud continuous institution since 1917 and decline to say what they did in 1937.
The most eloquent passage is one the author did not intend. Section 7 of Chapter I is called "Prominent Lawyers," and it offers short biographies of the founders. One of them reads:
"Nikolai Krylenko made an important contribution to the building of the Soviet judiciary. He was born in 1885 in the Smolensk Region where his father was exiled under police surveillance for 'political unreliability'.... In 1931, he was appointed People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR and in 1936, People's Commissar of Justice of the USSR."
Then a paragraph on his role in founding the Supreme Court, his chair at Moscow University, his doctorate of 1934, his eighty books. Then the next lawyer. Krylenko was arrested in January 1938 and shot on 29 July 1938, after a trial reported to have lasted twenty minutes. He was rehabilitated in 1955. A holder of Terebilov's own office was killed by the system Terebilov later administered, and the book that praises his contribution cannot say when or how he died. It is worth being exact here, because the point is easily overstated: of the jurists profiled, Krylenko is the one whose fate the omission conceals. Stucka died in 1932; Vinokurov and Antonov-Saratovsky survived. But the biographies are written in a house style that simply stops, and the reader is given no means of telling the difference between a career that ended and a life that was taken.
Against that background, read the chapter the book is built around, "Principles of Socialist Justice." Terebilov sets out the elective judiciary, the people's assessors, the independence of judges, the public nature of trials, the right to defence, equality before the law. The exposition is clear and, on its own terms, careful. It is also, at two points, self-refuting.
On independence, the book is emphatic: "Any interference in the adjudication of cases on the part of officials, government, Party or any other organs is totally impermissible." Two paragraphs later it writes: "These legal guarantees apart, great importance attaches to the instructions issued on this point by the organs of the Communist Party, which exercises political guidance of the state. But Party leadership does not interfere administratively in judicial activity." The load is carried entirely by the adverb. Party bodies issue instructions to which great importance attaches, and "keep an eye on the state of the eradication of crime"; they simply do not do so administratively. A judiciary independent of everything except the instructions of the single legal party is being described, in good faith, as independent.
On publicity, the book is expansive. Trials are open, covered by press, radio and television; courts hold travelling sessions in factories; and the purpose is frankly educational — "the more people attend the court sittings, the more chances there are that lessons will be learned contributing to the prevention of further crimes." The exception is narrow and reasonable-sounding: hearings may be closed where publicity "would be detrimental to the maintenance of state secrets," and Terebilov adds that "exceptions in Soviet law are minimal" and the practice "is adopted by all countries." He is right that all countries have such a rule. What he does not say is who decides what a state secret is, and the book has already told us. In Chapter III, listing the organs of preliminary investigation, it records that "investigators from the Committee of State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR are charged with investigating cases of espionage and other especially dangerous crimes against the state." Article 70 sat in precisely that chapter of the Criminal Code — especially dangerous crimes against the state. So the KGB investigated the political cases, the political cases involved state secrets, and cases involving state secrets were the ones the public could not attend. The whole political jurisdiction passes through the single clause the author calls minimal. Yakir and Krasin were tried behind it in the year this book appeared.
There is one flat error of fact, and it matters because the book volunteers it. Terebilov writes that "in December 1948, the Soviet Union signed and later ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," and quotes Article 11 on the presumption of innocence and the right to "a public trial." The Universal Declaration is a General Assembly resolution; it is not a treaty and was never open to signature or ratification by anyone. And on 10 December 1948 the Soviet Union did not vote for it. It abstained, together with the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. A Minister of Justice has misdescribed his own state's most-cited human rights commitment in the direction that flatters it.
None of which means the book is worthless, and a reader told that learns nothing. Most of The Soviet Court is about the courts most Soviet citizens actually met, and that account is broadly accurate and in places genuinely interesting. The people's assessors were real: two lay judges sitting with a professional judge, with equal voting rights, entitled to question witnesses and examine exhibits, the presiding judge voting last and enjoying, as the book puts it, "no privileges over the people's assessors." Assessors kept their wages while serving. From 1958 they were elected at workplace and residential meetings rather than in vast electoral districts, and Terebilov explains the change candidly — the old lists ran to "between 100 and 150 persons," so "the voters had a poor knowledge of the candidates nominated." Lay participation on that scale has no equivalent in most Western systems, and it was not decorative in ordinary criminal and civil work.
The account of legal aid is likewise substantially true. Every district and town had a legal advice bureau; defence counsel was mandatory in cases involving minors, persons unable to defend themselves, and any case in which a prosecutor appeared; where a defendant could not pay, the bar association was "duty bound to appoint an advocate and pay him the requisite fees out of its funds." From 1958 counsel could enter at the close of the preliminary investigation rather than only at trial. Ten thousand trade-union legal aid bureaus gave free advice. Divorce, housing, inheritance, labour disputes and ordinary theft were adjudicated by these courts, competently and cheaply, for people who in much of the world would have had no access to a lawyer at all. The chapters on civil procedure, arbitration between enterprises, comrades' courts, and the penal provisions on mitigation and conditional release are informative, and remain useful as a description of how the system was meant to work and largely did work in the ninety-odd per cent of its business that was not political. Where the book overreaches on this ground it is visible — the flat claim that the Soviet methods of reforming convicts "have nothing to do with claims about the notorious 'forced labour'" is an assertion and not an argument — but the underlying institutional description holds up.
The critique, then, is not that Soviet law was a fiction. It is that a second jurisdiction existed alongside the one described here: investigated by a security police answerable to the Party, prosecuted under articles of the code this book never names, heard behind a state-secrets exception this book calls minimal, before audiences that were not the public. The Soviet Court is an honest guide to the first jurisdiction and a systematic denial that the second exists.
That denial was answered as it was made, and answered from the left. The Trotskyist press reported these trials continuously through 1973 — the Yakir and Krasin case, Grigorenko's confinement, the death in custody of Yuri Galanskov, who had been convicted under Article 70 — and it framed them, as Vogt did, as a revival of "the method of trial by 'confessions,' the central method used by Stalin in the notorious Moscow 'show trials' of 1936-38." The framing was not new in 1973. It goes back to the Dewey Commission's Not Guilty (1938), which examined the Moscow trial charges against Trotsky and found them fabricated, and to Trotsky's own The Stalin School of Falsification, whose subject was precisely the removal of names from Soviet histories. The structural argument — that a bureaucracy which had expropriated political power from the working class would require a legal apparatus that could be suspended at need — is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written while Krylenko was still People's Commissar of Justice and before he was arrested.
The most useful thing about this book is that it does not argue for arbitrary power. It argues, at length and with evident conviction, for legality, publicity, independence, defence and the equality of citizens before the law. Terebilov meant those principles; his ministry applied them daily in the courts that handled the country's ordinary business. What he could not do, from the office he held, was apply them to the cases that mattered most, or admit in print that his own predecessor had been shot. Read it for the system it describes accurately. Read the silences for the system it was written to conceal.