Part 1, Chapters 8-9 Summary and Analysis

"The Law as a Child" examines how the Soviet legal system works in the early revolutionary years, a subject largely forgotten by Russians. In telling it, Solzhenitsyn's cynicism rises to a level such that parsing the text becomes difficult. Solzhenitsyn has an intact copy of speeches delivered by N.V. Krylenko, initially a fierce revolutionary and the organizer of the early courts. Stenographic records have been heavily redacted, even for such important trials of the Left SRs—the third great turning point in 20th-century Russian history. The "Military Plot" of 1919 requires thousands of sentences, far too many to hold trials, so the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK)—or Chairman Sverdlov alone—pardons and punishes at will and corrects sentences. The bourgeois concept of guilt is uprooted and replaced by decisions about the "desirable results...