"However, our political courts — the special collegia of provincial courts, the military tribunals (and why, actually, should there be military tribunals in peacetime anyway?), and all the supreme courts too — unanimously followed the path of the OSO [Special Boards attached to the GPU-NKVD]. They, too, did not get stuck in the mud of public trials or in arguments between sides. Their primary and principal distinguishing feature was closed doors. They were first of all closed courts — for their own convenience. And by now we have become so accustomed to the fact that millions and millions of people were tried in closed sessions and have become used to this for so long that now and then some mixed-up son, brother, or nephew of a prisoner will even snort at you with convinction: "And what would you have wanted? ... There's information here. Our enemies will find out! You can't do it!" Thus the fear that our "enemies will find out" makes us clamp our head between our own knees. Who in our Fatherland, except some bookworms, remembers now that Karakozov, who fired at the Tsar, was provided with a defense lawyer? Or that Zhelyabov and all the Narodnaya Volga group were tried in public, without any fear that the "Turks would find out?" Or that Vera Zasulich, who attempted to kill the official who was, translated into Soviet terms, the Chief of the Moscow Administration of the MVD — although she missed, and the bullet went past his head — not only was not destroyed in a torture chamber but was acquitted in open court by a jury — no Troika — and then went off in triumph in a carriage?"