Posthumous sentence

Yakov Saulovich Agranov was not lucky again. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court refused the rehabilitation of the infamous Chekist. The main military prosecutor’s office, first rehabiliting Agranov, herself brought a protest to the Supreme Court for her own decision.

Meanwhile, if the court had been guided by the right, and not political expediency, then Agranov should have long been rehabilitated, as well as tens of thousands of victims of political repressions of the 30-50s that have not yet been rehabilitated. Just because when sentences to these persons, the judicial procedure was grossly violated. This happened when people were convicted in administrative order of the Troika or Two, or when the court sentences were sentenced in a special manner adopted after the murder of Kirov - without the participation of the prosecution and protection and without the right to appeal. But in this case, it would have to be rehabilitated not only by Agranov, but also by people even less pretty, like Berry, Yezhov, Beria, Abakumov and other bloody executioners, who themselves eventually fell under the distribution.

By the way, Abakumov and some of his accomplices were already partially rehabilitated, recognizing that they did not actually engage in conspiracies and espionage, and the falsification of criminal cases, which they were charged quite reasonably, while they committed these crimes, was punishable not by the death penalty, but by a 25-year conclusion.

With general rehabilitation, some Nazi criminals will also fall under the amnesty (although there are prisoners of war among them, convicted of crimes that were not committed, most of them are highly unsympathetic), and some real spies (although the vast majority of spy affairs of that period are gross falsification, but the victims of these clearly falsified cases are far from rehabilitated). Some traitors of the Motherland like General Vlasov (who will not cease to be traitors from this) will fall under rehabilitation, since the same Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, which laid in two days and bypassed without prosecutors and lawyers, judged both him and other leaders of the ROA. But if you rehabilitate on the principle of violation of the right to a fair court, then it is necessary to rehabilitate the really everyone, including the berry, and Yezhov, and Beria, and Agranova.

However, we are used to evaluating court decisions not by law, but "by conscience." When Agranov’s rehabilitation, they especially pushed that he was friends with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pilnyak, many other figures of literature and culture, helped them and sometimes saved from repression. Well, friendship, subsequently, was a specific one, not contrary to official tasks. Obviously, a major Chekist wanted to know about the mood of the cultural elite first -hand. And about salvation from repression, it is recalled that at the Nuremberg trials, Goering's lawyers emphasized that he was friends with one Jewish family and saved her from persecution. This, however, did not alleviate the fate of the Nazi number two at all.

And in the same way, with the abolition of rehabilitation, the main role was played by feelings, not legal arguments. In a change in the position of the prosecutor’s office, the publication of historians and human rights activists who pointed out the “merits” of Yakov Saulovich in terms of falsification of shooting political affairs played a role from the case of the 1921 Petrograd combat organization and the case of the industrial party and ending with the conspiracy for the murder of Kirov and the Moscow political processes of 1936-1937. And the military collegium motivated the rehabilitation of rehabilitation by the fact that it is impossible to rehabilitate those who committed crimes against justice, that is, they were engaged in falsification of criminal cases. However, on August 1, 1938, when the same military collegium judged Agrane, he was accused under Art. 58.11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR - in "Participation in a counter -revolutionary terrorist Trotskyist conspiracy" (in which the agents found himself guilty of the investigation), but not in the falsification of criminal cases: after all, the cases that the agrans were officially not recognized as fakes. Here, from the party, shortly before the arrest that followed on July 20, 1937, he was really excluded with the wording "for systematic violations of socialist legality", but this is still not a court decision. Yes, and it was reasonable under this phrase, apparently, not the persecution of obviously innocent, but something completely different. As a investigation, Agranov admitted : “I saw that the investigation into the affairs of the Trotskyists, which was conducted by the head of the NKVD of the NKVD Molchanov in connection with the murder of S.M. Kirov, was carried out superficially and did not reveal anything. However, I did not take any measures to revise the Trotskyists in the terrorist struggle against the CPSU (b) and Soviet power.”

Individual rehabilitation of Agranov seems doubtful - why is he better than berries, Yezhov or Beria? And the abolition of this rehabilitation is even worse - after all, it means recognition of the justice of the clearly false accusations for which he was convicted and executed. The way out of this legal impasse could be a mass rehabilitation of all the right to a fair court in Soviet times. But for such a radical step, we should have another state.