APPENDIX II
THE SOVIET ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
No better test can be found of any social system than its administration of justice. When that is utterly disorderly and without semblance of equity, the whole régime, we may be certain, is chaotic to the core.
In an article in the Journal of the American Bar Association, Judge Fisher writes that agents of the Soviet's supreme tribunal may combine in one person arresting officer, prosecutor, judge and executioner. He found secret courts engrossed in litigation to recover bribes promised by tradesmen but not paid. A former Moscow lawyer justified the system of wholesale bribery, he said, on the ground that it had become impossible to live at all without it. Judge Fisher found widespread trading despite the abolition of private property. Such illegal transactions were so general that they only could have been carried on with the connivance of corrupted officials.
Judges, the writer of the article found, were subject to no restraint but the "Revolutionary conscience.' effort was made to induce all workmen to act in that capacity, and in Petrograd there already had been more than 40,000 judges though there were only 40,000 workers.
Judges even in small villages had absolute power to carry out their decrees and the Cheresvechaika-"the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counter Revolution, Speculation and Sabotage" continues to employ capital punishment in parts of Russia which were declared to be under military rule,
