Chapter 8 The Law as a Child We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering. I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people. And it is a vexing one. It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless. It makes us an easy prey for liars. Therefore, if they demand that we forget even the public trials, we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in our newspapers, but they didn’t drill a hole in our brains to make us remember—and so we’ve forgotten them. Only things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain. I am not even talking about young people, since they, of course, know nothing of all this, but about people who were alive at the time of those trials. Ask any middle-aged person to enumerate the highly publicized open trials. He will remember those of Bukharin and Zinoviev. And, knitting his brow, that of the Promparty too. And that’s all. There were no other public trials. Yet in actual fact they began right after the October Revolution. In 1918, quantities of them were taking place, in many different tribunals. They were taking place before there were either laws or codes, when the judges had to be guided solely by the requirements of the revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ power. At the same time, they were regarded as blazing their own trail of bold legality. Their detailed history will someday be written by someone, and it’s not for us even to attempt to include it in our present investigation. *This chapter is concerned with the public trials conducted in the first few years following the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. It reviews five specific trials from 1918 to 1920. One can already observe the indiscriminate character of the accusations and the collaboration of prosecution and defense attorneys against the accused.*