recruited into an anti-Soviet conspiracy, including Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. Nikolai Krylenko was tried by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court on July 29, 1938. In accordance with Krylenko's own theories of socialist legality, the verdict and sentence had been decided in advance. The trial lasted only twenty minutes, just long enough for Krylenko to retract his false confessions. After being found guilty, he was taken away and immediately shot once in the back of the head. Personality The writer Razumnik Ivanov-Razumnik was in prison with Krylenko in 1938, and described him as "notorious and universally disliked". This seems to have a common view. The British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart described him as "an epileptic degenerate" and "the most repulsive type". Covering the Industrial Party trial, the American journalist Eugene Lyons was struck by how "Prosecutor Krylenko's bullet-head shone in the arc-lights, his flat Scythian features tensed in his cruel sneer." Another journalist, William Reswick, watched Krylenko summing up for the prosecution at the Shakhty Trial: Legacy The NKVD officer who had taken Krylenko's testimony, one Kogan, probably Captain Lazar V. Kogan, who also interrogated Nicolai Bukharin and Genrikh Yagoda, was, in turn, shot in 1939 (probably, on March 2) for "anti-Soviet activity". Krylenko's conviction was one of the first annulled by the Soviet State in 1955, during the Khrushchev thaw. Krylenko's ex-wife and fellow Old Bolshevik Elena Rozmirovich survived the purges by keeping a low profile and working in the Party archives. His sister worked for Maxim Litvinov in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (although she was never a member of the Party); in 1924 she decided to leave Russia with the American writer Max Eastman (who had been in Russia for almost two years, researching and writing a life of Trotsky). To enable her to leave, Litvinov agreed to pass her off as a member of his delegation when he travelled to London for an international conference. But she could not leave the delegation and remain in a free country without a passport, which the Bolsheviks would not give her. So, in the hours before their train left, she and Max Eastman got married. They were still married and living in America when she died in 1956. Thus she escaped the purges. Furthermore, Krylenko's creation of what was later dubbed "The Soviet Chess Machine" led Soviet Grandmasters to dominate the World Chess Championship for most of the remainder