The “Political Red Cross” and the Genealogy of Rights Discourse in Revolutionary Russia* Stuart Finkel University of Florida The court simply laughed at the protest of counsel and their refer- ences to the law, whereupon Muravioff, stirred with ire, shouted: “Woe to the country, woe to the people who have no respect for their law and who laugh at those who defend the law.” (The Twelve Who Are to Die: The Trial of the Socialists-Revolutionists in Moscow) 1 Contemporary Russian human rights activists have traced their movement’ s roots not just to the celebrated dissidents of the late Soviet period, but signifi- cantly further back. The genealogy they have forged originates in the efforts by the so-called Moscow Political Red Cross (1918–22) and its successor, Ekate- rina Peshkova’ s Aid to Political Prisoners (1922–38), to help political detainees under Lenin and Stalin. 2 Unmentionable in official Soviet publications even af- ter Stalin’ s death in 1953, the Political Red Cross first reemerged in samizdat and in émigré memoirs and journals of the 1960s and 1970s, 3 but interest truly * Many thanks to colleagues for feedback on previous versions, including the anon- ymous reviewers for JMH, Padraic Kenney, Sheryl Kroen, Andrea Orzoff, Lynn Patyk, Randall Poole, and the Dartmouth History Department faculty seminar. Research sup- port was provided by IREX, a National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant, and the University of Florida. The Journal of Modern History 89 (March 2017): 79–118 © 2017 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2017/8901-0003$10.00 All rights reserved. 1 W. Woytinsky et al., The Twelve Who Are to Die: The Trial of the Socialists- Revolutionists in Moscow (Berlin, 1922), 58. “Muravioff ” is N. K. Murav’ev, defense counsel for the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and erstwhile chairman of the Political Red Cross. 2 While these two organizations differed significantly in their structure and opera- tional modality, they were and still are conflated in popular memory as the “Political Red Cross.” 3 O. Markov [M. R. Levin], “Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova i ee pomoshch’ politza- kliuchennym,” Pamiat’, no. 1 (1976), 313–24, translated as “Ekaterina Peshkova and How She Helped Political Prisoners,” Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, no. 25 (Jan.–Mar. 1977), 95–107; D. Minin [D. M. Batser], “Eshche o Politicheskim Krasnom Kreste,” Pamiat’, no. 3 (1978), 523–38; Sofia Dubnova-Erlich, “Mikhail Vinaver,” Chron- icle of Human Rights in the USSR, no. 27 (Apr.–Jun. 1977), 90 –95. Aleksandr Solzheni- tsyn marveled at an old Menshevik’ s stories about how “even in the Soviet period a Po- litical Red Cross had existed. We found this difficult to imagine. It wasn’t that we thought Full article [open access] at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690299