42 Facts About Nikolai Krylenko

Nikolai 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.

Nikolai Krylenko was born in Bekhteyevo, in Sychyovsky Uyezd of Smolensk Governorate, the eldest of six children born to a populist revolutionary and his wife.

Nikolai Krylenko's father, needing income to support his growing family, became a tax collector for the Tsarist government.

The young Nikolai Krylenko joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1904 while studying history and literature at St Petersburg University, where he was known to fellow students as Comrade Abram.

Nikolai Krylenko 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.

Nikolai Krylenko had to flee Russia in June 1906, but returned later that year.

Nikolai Krylenko returned to Saint Petersburg in 1909 and finished his degree.

Nikolai Krylenko left the RSDLP in 1911, but soon rejoined it.

Nikolai Krylenko was drafted in 1912 and was promoted to second lieutenant before being discharged in 1913.

In early 1914, Nikolai Krylenko learned that he might be re-arrested and fled to Austria.

In November 1915, Nikolai 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.

Nikolai Krylenko had to resign his post on 26 May 1917 for lack of support from non-Bolshevik members of the Army committee.

In June 1917, Nikolai Krylenko was made a member of the Bolshevik Military Organization and was elected to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

Nikolai Krylenko took an active part in preparing the October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd as newly elected chairman of the Congress of Northern Region Soviets and a leading member of the Military Revolutionary Committee.

In early November 1917, immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Nikolai Krylenko helped Leon Trotsky suppress an attempt by Provisional Government loyalists, led by Alexander Kerensky and General Peter Krasnov, to retake Petrograd.

Nikolai Krylenko proved to be an excellent public speaker, able to win over hostile mobs with words alone.

Nikolai Krylenko supported the policy of democratization of the Russian military, including abolishing subordination, providing for election of officers by enlisted men, and using propaganda to win over enemy units.

From May 1918 and until 1922, Nikolai Krylenko was Chairman of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

Nikolai Krylenko simultaneously served as a member of the Collegium of Prosecutors of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

In early 1919, Nikolai Krylenko was involved in a dispute with the Cheka and was instrumental in taking away its right to execute people without a trial.

In 1922, Nikolai Krylenko became Deputy Commissar of Justice and assistant Prosecutor General of the RSFSR, in which capacity he served as the chief prosecutor at the Moscow show trials of the 1920s.

In early 1923, Nikolai Krylenko acted as public prosecutor in the Moscow show trial of the Soviet Union's Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Nikolai Krylenko, stated that the courts could trample upon the rights of classes other than the proletariat.

Nikolai Krylenko, who began to speak at 6:10 PM, was moderate enough at first, but quickly launched into an attack on religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.

Nikolai Krylenko was appointed State Prosecutor in 1928, and acted as prosecutor in the first three show trials staged after Joseph Stalin had taken control of the communist party.

At the Shakhty Trial, in 1928, Nikolai Krylenko called for death sentences for all 52 defendants.

Nikolai Krylenko was the prosecutor at the Industrial Party Trial in 1930, and the Menshevik Trial in 1931, at which he called for death sentences for five of the 14 defendants.

Nikolai Krylenko stepped down as Prosecutor General in 1932 and was replaced by Andrei Vyshinsky.

From 1927 to 1934, Nikolai Krylenko was a member of the Central Control Commission of the Communist Party.

Nikolai Krylenko used his positions to carry out the Stalinist line of total control and politicization of all areas of public life:.

In 1935, Nikolai Krylenko invited the former chess world champion Emanuel Lasker to Soviet Union, where he settled until 1937.

Nikolai Krylenko further argued that even a confession obtained under torture constituted proof of a defendant's guilt; material evidence, precise definitions of a crime, or judicial sentencing guidelines were not needed under socialism.

Nikolai Krylenko promoted his views on socialist legality during the work on two drafts of the Soviet Penal Code, one in 1930 and one in 1934.

Nikolai Krylenko's views were opposed by some Soviet theoreticians, including Soviet Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky.

Notably, it was Vyshinsky and not Nikolai Krylenko who prosecuted the first two high-profile Moscow show trials of Old Bolsheviks in August 1936 and January 1937.

In 1936, Nikolai Krylenko justified the inclusion of a law against male homosexuality in the 1934 Soviet penal code as a measure directed against subversive activities:.

Nikolai Krylenko was promoted to Commissar of Justice of the USSR on 20 July 1936, and was directly involved in the first waves of Joseph Stalin's Great Purges between 1935 and 1938.

Whereas Comrade Nikolai Krylenko used to spend a great deal of time on mountain-climbing and traveling, now he devotes a great deal of time to playing chess.

Nikolai Krylenko was tried by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court on 29 July 1938.

The trial lasted only twenty minutes, just long enough for Nikolai Krylenko to retract his false confessions.

Nikolai Krylenko had reached a state of frenzy where he spat words of venom, hurling them at his victims in a fit of raving madness.

Nikolai Krylenko's conviction was one of the first annulled by the Soviet State in 1955, during the Khrushchev thaw.