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the right to a defense. But an entire group should not be placed "outside
the pale of human law."
The moderate Steinberg suddenly perceived the specter of the French
Terror, the exclusion and the liquidation of all factions and opposition.
"We dared not simply and blindly repeat the mistakes of the French
Revolution," he wrote. A hundred years earlier the Girondin Vergniaud
had prophetically warned the Convention that the exclusion of moderate
factions was only the beginning of repression. Soon all citizens would
come under suspicion. Now Steinberg echoed Vergniaud. "Withdraw legal
protection from the liberals today, and the same is likely to happen to other
poli tical groups tomorrow."
Rising to answer Steinberg, a furious, contemptuous Trotsky icily
remarked that people should be "grateful" to be thrown in jail, for in past
revolutions "they would have been taken to the Palace Square and there
made...a head shorter!" (Trotsky himself was ultimately made a head
shorter when an assassin, wielding a pickax, struck him in the head.)
Finally Lenin spoke, evoking the model of the French Revolution, declar–
ing that criticism of the Russian revolution would not be tolerated. "The
great French Revolution," he recalled, "put the hostile parties outside the
law." The Bolsheviks won the vote-150 to 98-to arrest their opponents.
All who opposed Government orders would be "destroyed on the
spot," decreed Trotsky in a pamphlet he wrote in February 1918, in the
wake of the attack of the German Army. The pamphlet, designed to awak–
en Russians' heroism and love for their country, concluded with this
ominous threat of sununary arrest and execution. Once again Steinberg
strongly objected. At a meeting of the People's Commissars, he argued that
this cruel threat undermined the "pathos" of Trotsky's manifesto. But
Lenin, Steinberg later recalled in his memoirs, responded with derision,
"Do you really believe that we can be victorious without the very cruelest
revolutionary terror?" "Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of
Justice?" Steinberg shouted. "Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for
Social Extermination and be done with it!" Lenin's face suddenly bright–
ened. "Well put," he replied. "That's exactly what it should be...but we
can't say that."
The Bolsheviks, observed Steinberg, slavishly imitated the speech and
behavior of the French Jacobins. "But," he added, "they forgot that the
French Revolution itself was drowned in bloody defeat precisely because of
its terrorism." Like their Girondin predecessors, Russian dissidents, includ–
ing the revolution's own founders, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin,
were later liquidated or exiled for their deviation from the party line.
Within a year, the Commissar ofJustice had become one of the revo–
lution's prisoners. Steinberg was arrested in February 1919, thrown into
