The Shchastny File: Trotsky and the Case of the Hero of the Baltic Fleet

Abstract

One of the most sensational and illuminating yet little known judicial episodes in early Soviet history is the case of Aleksei Mikhailovich Shchastny, so-called admiral of the Baltic Fleet, who was arrested by Lev Trotsky and summarily tried, convicted, and executed in June 1918 for conspiring to overthrow Soviet power. The Shchastny file, a recently declassified top-secret Cheka criminal case file in the Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service for St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg region, documents this episode in vivid detail.' While making it possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the Shchastny case, the file, some 362 pages long, also sheds light on broader issues such as Trotsky's political and military leadership; complexities in the outlook, employment, and situation of military specialists; the Soviet-German relationship in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the centralizing of state power in Moscow and resulting tensions between Moscow and Petrograd; early politicization of the Soviet judicial system; and political instability in the Petrograd region in the spring and early summer of 1918. Captain First Rank Shchastny was commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Named to that position temporarily on 20 March 1918, after the arrest of Admiral A. V. Razvozov, who had refused to recognize the authority of the Soviet government, Shchastny was confirmed in the post by the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) on 5 April.2 It bears noting that Trotsky, then commissar for war and the navy, supported the appointment and that Shchastny accepted it reluctantly. As he later explained, felt a moral obligation to try to save the fleet, which I had served for twenty years, survived Port Arthur with, and worked to rebuild.3 Born in Zhitomir in 1881, the son of a general in the Imperial army, Shchastny graduated with honors from the Kiev Military Academy and the prestigious Naval Academy in St. Petersburg. The February 1917 revolution found him in Helsingfors (Helsinki), where