Nikolai Krylenko

Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko (Russian: Никола́й Васи́льевич Крыле́нко, IPA: [krɨˈlʲenkə]; 2 May 1885 – 29 July 1938) was an Old Bolshevik and Soviet politician, military commander, and jurist. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet legal system, rising to become People's Commissar for Justice and Prosecutor General of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. He was executed during the Great Purge.

Krylenko was an exponent of socialist legality and the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment. Although participating in the Show Trials and political repression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krylenko was later caught up as a victim and arrested during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. Following interrogation and torture^{[citation needed]} by the NKVD, Krylenko confessed to extensive involvement in wrecking and anti-Soviet agitation. After a trial of 20 minutes, he was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, and executed immediately afterwards.

Krylenko was born in Bekhteyevo, in Sychyovsky Uyezd of Smolensk Governorate, the eldest of six children (two sons and four daughters) born to a populist revolutionary and his wife. His father, needing income to support his growing family, became a tax collector for the Tsarist government.

The young Krylenko joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904 while studying history and literature at St. Petersburg University, where he was known to fellow students as Comrade Abram. He was a member of the short-lived Saint Petersburg Soviet during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and a member of the Bolshevik Saint Petersburg Committee. He had to flee Russia in June 1906, but returned later that year. Arrested by the Tsar's secret police in 1907, Krylenko was released for lack of evidence, but soon exiled to Lublin (present-day Poland) without trial.

Krylenko returned to Saint Petersburg in 1909 and finished his degree. He left the RSDLP in 1911, but soon rejoined it. He was drafted in 1912 and was promoted to second lieutenant before being discharged in 1913. After working as an assistant editor of Pravda and a liaison to the Bolshevik faction in the Duma for a few months, Krylenko was arrested again in 1913 and exiled to Kharkiv. There he studied and earned a law degree. In early 1914, Krylenko learned that he might be re-arrested and fled to Austria.

At the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, he moved to neutral Switzerland as a Russian national. In mid-1915, Vladimir Lenin sent Krylenko back to Russia to help rebuild the Bolshevik underground organization. In November 1915, Krylenko was arrested in Moscow as a draft dodger and, after a few months in prison, sent to the South West Front in April 1916.

After the February Revolution of 1917 and the introduction of elected committees in the Russian armed forces, Krylenko was elected chairman of his regiment's and then division's committee. On 15 April, he was elected chairman of the 11th Army's committee. After Lenin's return to Russia in April 1917, Krylenko adopted the new Bolshevik policy of irreconcilable opposition to the Provisional Government. He had to resign his post on 26 May 1917 for lack of support from non-Bolshevik members of the Army committee.

In June 1917, Krylenko was made a member of the Bolshevik Military Organization and was elected to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets. At the Congress, he was elected to the permanent All-Russian Central Executive Committee from the Bolshevik faction. Krylenko left Petrograd for the High Command HQ in Mogilev on 2 July, but was arrested there by the Provisional government after the Bolsheviks staged an abortive uprising on 4 July. He was kept in prison in Petrograd, but was released in mid-September after the Kornilov Affair.