From Newsgroup: rec.arts.books

On 1/9/26 4:05 PM, Rhino wrote:

On 2026-01-09 4:36 p.m., Adam H. Kerman wrote:

Inspired by the other thread to do some reading, did you know there was
such a thing as jurisprudence in the USSR? If you were executed under
the Stalin regime, you could be confident that proper procedure was
followed.

You must be being sarcastic. The one thing you could be sure of is that the Soviet justice system was anything BUT just. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is the gold standard on this but it's three volumes and close to 2000 pages so that may be more than you're willing to take on. (I've read it three times now and HIGHLY recommend it as having done more to educate me about the real world than anything else I've ever read.)

Picture a trial that lasted just 10 or 15 minutes, with no defence attorney present or allowed. (Show trials were the exception in that they pretended to permit a defence attorney, although many of them openly expressed their contempt for their clients in open court and their desire that their client should get the maximum penalty allowed by law.) A typical trial was in front of a "troika", a panel of three men (although there were often just two) who basically noted that you had confessed (after intensive torture, although they probably didn't mention that bit) and announced the sentence, which might be an immediate execution or a long stint in the camps.

Worse than that, Troikas were trials in absentia.

It should also be mentioned that it wasn't necessary to have actually DONE SOMETHING to be sentenced to the Gulag: merely being related to someone who had confessed to something was sufficient. Stalin's "justice" system had no hesitation in sending parents, grandparents, spouses, aunts and uncles, or children of confessed criminals to the Gulag for several years. (Very young children would get sent to brutal orphanages were they were eventually recruited to join the secret police in many cases, often as some of the cruelest officers).

Here's a blog post talking about the guy who wrote the book that every
lawyer in training read.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2024/02/old-legal-theories-given-a-new-life/

Vyshinky was among the vilest of the vile people that surrounded Stalin.

I would like my own copy to pound the clue through the skull of anyone
apologizing for socialism demanding that more and more of it be
implemented in the West. This is the most disturbing thing I've read all
day.

If you read it, Gulag Archipelago will be the most disturbing thing you've read in your entire LIFE. My brother had little interest in politics - although some in history - and he read the whole thing. He wasn't one to talk much on the phone and even less so when it was long distance but he called me long distance after he read it and we had an extensive chat about it; it had moved him that much.

Which version? The author approved Abridged version pulls
punches, the real version is three volumes totaling 1,600
pages or so.

Robert Conquest's book, The Great Terror (especially the 30th anniversary revision and probably the 40th anniversary revision) are considerably shorter if you want to get a sense of the times without reading so much. Conquest was an Anglo-American historian who, as a young man, had joined the (British) Communist Party about the same time as Kim Philby (while also at Cambridge) but who eventually soured on Communism and wrote many books on the history of Soviet communism. The revised editions of the Great Terror are especially good because he was able to confirm a lot of things that had only been informed speculation in the original version due to the opening of the Soviet archives to Western researchers.

Factual warnings and descriptions were given about the Communists,
in book form, since they got into power in 1917. There is no merit
to the argument that anti-communism only became "acceptable" in the
West at some later date, after a book is published, like 1941, with
Valtin's The Night, 1947 with Kravchenko's I Choose Freedom, or
1956 with Khruschev's Secret Speech, 1961 with A Day In The Life,
1973 with Gulag Archipelago, or after the USSR broke up, even
though anti-communism was always dismissed by the "cultural elite"
as Sour Grapes.









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