Revolutionary Military Railway Tribunals in Northwestern Russia

Abstract

This article discusses aspects of activities and social functions of the revolutionary military railway tribunals, which operated in 1920–1923. The novelty of the research is ensured by the lack of attention to this theme in historiography and the involvement of a wide range of sources which have not been previously introduced into the scholarship. The author focuses on the activities of the railway tribunals in four railway networks: the United North-Western Roads (Warsaw and Baltic directions), the Petrograd part of the Moscow-Vindava-Rybinsk network, Nikolaevskaii railway network (the prospective October railway), and Murmansk network. Three revolutionary military railway tribunals operated there. The author, for the first time in historiography, describes the reasons and the process of organizing the latter, their staff composition, and the forms of their work that changed at different stages. The emphasis is placed on the emergency powers of employees of these departments and the tasks assigned to them which was manifested in almost unlimited freedom of the members of the tribunals in administering justice in the “interests of the revolution”. The article presents an original perspective on the process of the controversial activity of the transport tribunals. The study reveals a conflict between their urgent task to restore labor discipline, on the one hand, and practical activities aimed at indulging the avant-garde class, on the other hand. The author comes to the conclusion that the tribunals, first of all, sought to unite the proletarian collectives around the Communist Party. Managers’ enthusiasm for an ideological project led them away from reality. In the final part of the article, it is proved that during the period of new economic policy, the activities of the revolutionary tribunals lost their extraordinary character. They ceased tocorrespond to their purpose and, in fact, turned into people’s courts, being abolished in 1923.

Keywords:

revolutionary tribunals, war communism, railways, the People’s Commissariat of Railways, emergency commissions, bag people, labor deserters, visiting sessions