The
Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of
Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
during the
Great PurgeGreat Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937–1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and Government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of...
. Many of the defendants were executed. After
Nikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
's revelations in the 1950s, the Moscow Trials are today universally acknowledged as
show trialThe term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the...
s in which the verdicts were predetermined, and then publicly justified through the use of coerced confessions, obtained by
tortureTorture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is:In addition to state-sponsored torture, individuals or groups may be motivated to inflict torture on others for similar reasons to those of a state; however, the motive for torture can also be for the sadistic gratification of...
and threats against the defendants' families. The purpose of the trials was to eliminate any potential political challengers to Stalin's authority, especially Old Bolsheviks with solid revolutionary credentials. The principal tactic was to charge the defendants, under
Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal CodeArticle 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on February 25, 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. It was revised several times...
, with conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism.
Summary
- The first trial was of 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre," held in August 1936, at which the chief defendants were Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician.-Before the 1917 Revolution :Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad , Ukraine,...
and Lev KamenevLev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and a founding member and later chairman of the ruling Politburo.-Background:Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker...
, two of the most prominent former party leaders. All were sentenced to death and executed.
- The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures including Karl Radek
Karl Berngardovich Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution.-Life:...
, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory SokolnikovGrigory Yakovlevich Sokolnikov , born Girsh Yankelevich Brilliant, was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet politician and economist....
. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually shot. The rest received sentences in labor camps.
- The third trial, in March 1938, included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites," led by Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Marxist theoretician, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , journal Bolshevik , and Izvestia , and the...
, former head of the Communist International, former Prime Minister Alexei RykovAlexey Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician, Soviet head of the government from between 1924 to 1930.-Political activity:...
, Genrikh YagodaGenrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.-Early Life and Career:...
, Christian RakovskyChristian Rakovsky was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist...
and Nikolai KrestinskyNikolai Nikolaevich Krestinsky was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.-Origins:...
. All the leading defendants were executed.
- There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army
The Red Army The Red Army The Red Army was the Soviet government’s revolutionary militia beginning in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the USSR. Since 1946, after the Second World War, it was called the Soviet Army.The 'Red...
generals, including Mikhail TukhachevskyMikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Soviet military commander, chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s.-Early life:...
, in June 1937.
Evaluation of the trials
At the time, many Western observers who attended the trials said that they were fair and that the guilt of the accused had been established. They based this assessment on the confessions of the accused, which were freely given in open court, without any apparent evidence that they had been extracted by torture or drugging.
Joseph E. DaviesJoseph Edward Davies was the second Ambassador to represent the United States in the Soviet Union.-Biography:...
, the U.S. ambassador, wrote in
Mission to Moscow:
- "In view of the character of the accused, their long terms of service, their recognized distinction in their profession, their long-continued loyalty to the Communist cause, it is scarcely credible that their brother officers...should have acquiesced in their execution, unless they were convinced that these men had been guilty of some offense.* It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty.* The Bukharin trial six months later developed evidence which, if true, more than justified this action. Undoubtedly those facts were all full known to the military court at this time."
Communist Party leaders in most Western countries echoed these views and denounced criticism of the trials as capitalist attempts to subvert Communism.
The British lawyer and MP Denis Pritt, for example, wrote: "Once again the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties," but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted."
Communist Party leader
Harry PollittHarry Pollitt was the head of the trade union department of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the General Secretary of the party for more than 20 years.- Early life :Pollitt was born 22 November 1890 in Droylsden, Lancashire...
, in the
Daily Worker of March 12, 1936 told the world that 'the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress’. The article was ironically illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with
Nikolai YezhovNikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovschina" .- Early life and career :Little reliable info is available about Yezhov's family and early years...
, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by
NKVDThe People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including...
archivists.
In the United States, Communist proponents such as
Corliss LamontCorliss Lamont , was a socialist philosopher, and advocate of various left-wing and civil liberties causes. He is the great-uncle of 2006 Democratic Party nominee for the United States Senate from Connecticut, Ned Lamont....
and
Lillian HellmanLillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes...
also denounced criticism of the Moscow trials, signing
An Open Letter To American Liberals in support of the trials for the March 1937 issue of
Soviet Russia Today In the political atmosphere of the '30s the accusation that there was a conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union was not incredible, and few outside observers were aware of the events inside the Communist Party that had led to the purge and the trials.
However, the Moscow trials were generally viewed negatively by most Western obsevers including many liberals. New York Times noted its absurdity in its editoiral in March 1, 1938: "It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates. The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to George III."
After the death of Stalin,
Nikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
repudiated the trials in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party:
- "The commission has become acquainted with a large quantity of materials in the NKVD archives and with other documents and has established many facts pertaining to the fabrication of cases against Communists, to glaring abuses of Socialist legality which resulted in the death of innocent people. It became apparent that many party, Government and economic activists who were branded in 1937-38 as ‘enemies,’ were actually never enemies, spies, wreckers, etc., but were always honest Communists.
- They were only so stigmatized and often, no longer able to bear barbaric tortures, they charged themselves (at the order of the investigative judges – falsifiers) with all kinds of grave and unlikely crimes."
It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants. From the accounts of former GPU officer
Alexander OrlovAlexander Mikhailovich Orlov was a Soviet espionage administrator. He defected to the U.S. in 1938. He warned Leon Trotsky of his impending assassination...
and others the methods used to extract the confessions are known: repeated beatings, torture, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.
Dewey Commission
In May 1937 the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the
Dewey CommissionThe Dewey Commission was initiated in March 1937 by the "American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky." It was named after its Chairman, John Dewey...
, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator
John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been very influential. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology...
. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.
For example, Piatakov testified that he had flown to
Oslois the capital and largest city in Norway. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the town was largely destroyed by a fire in 1624. The Danish–Norwegian king Christian IV rebuilt the city as Christiania . Oslo, then an alternative name, became official again in 1925...
in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place. Another defendant,
Ivan SmirnovIvan Smirnov may refer to:*Ivan Nikitich Smirnov , Russian revolutionary*Ivan Nikolayevich Smirnov , Russian guitarist*Ivan Vasilyevich Smirnov , Russian pilot...
, confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.
The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled
Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
- That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
- That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them."
- That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."
Contemporary opinions in defense of the trials
A number of American communists and progressives outside of the Soviet Union signed a
Statement of American Progressives on the Moscow Trials. These included
Langston HughesJames Mercer Langston Hughes, was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry...
and
Stuart DavisStuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his Jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful.-Biography:...
, although some, like Hughes and Davis would later express regrets.
Some contemporary observers who thought the trials were inherently fair cite the statements of
MolotovVyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
, who while conceding that some of the confessions contain unlikely statements, said there may have been several reasons or motives for this - one being that the handful who made doubtful confessions were trying to undermine the Soviet Union and its government by making dubious statements in their confessions to cast doubts on their trial. Molotov postulated that a defendant might invent a story that he collaborated with foreign agents and party members to undermine the government so that those members would falsely come under suspicion, while the false foreign collaboration charge would be believed as well. Thus, the Soviet government was in his view the victim of false confessions. Nonetheless, he said the evidence of mostly out-of-power Communist officials conspiring to make a power grab during a moment of weakness in the upcoming war truly existed. This defense collapsed after the release of Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress.
First Moscow Trial (Trial of the Sixteen)
The first trial was held from August 19 to August 24, 1936 in the House of Trade Unions; the principal defendants were
Grigory ZinovievGrigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician.-Before the 1917 Revolution :Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad , Ukraine,...
and
Lev KamenevLev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and a founding member and later chairman of the ruling Politburo.-Background:Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker...
. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had been secretly tried in 1935 but it appears that Stalin decided that, with suitable confessions, their fate could be used for propaganda purposes.
Genrikh YagodaGenrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.-Early Life and Career:...
oversaw the interrogation proceedings.
The full list of defendants is as follows:
- Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician.-Before the 1917 Revolution :Gregory Zinoviev was born in Yelizavetgrad , Ukraine,...
- Lev Borisovich Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly the nominal head of the Soviet state in 1917 and a founding member and later chairman of the ruling Politburo.-Background:Kamenev was born in Moscow, the son of a Jewish railway worker...
- Grigory Yevdokimov
- Ivan Bakayev
- Sergei Vitalyevich Mrachkovsky, a hero of the Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed and the Soviets under the domination of the Bolshevik party assumed power, first in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a multi-party war that...
in SiberiaSiberia , is the vast region constituting almost all of Northern Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the USSR from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the...
and the Russian Far EastRussian Far East is a term that refers to the Russian part of the Far East, i.e., extreme east parts of Russia, between Siberia and the Pacific Ocean...
- Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan
Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan was an Armenian communist party leader who was one of the first victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. Ter-Vaganyan was one of sixteen Soviet intellectuals who stood as defendants during the Moscow Show Trials...
, leader of the ArmeniaArmenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
n Communist Party
- Ivan Nikitich Smirnov
Ivan Nikitich Smirnov was a Communist Party activist.In 1899, Smirnov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and became a Bolshevik. He led his party activity in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Vyshniy Volochok, Rostov, Kharkov, and Tomsk. Smirnov was subject to repeated arrests...
, People's Commissar for communications
- Yefim Dreitzer
- Isak Reingold
- Richard Pickel
- Eduard Holtzman
- Fritz David
- Valentin Olberg
- Konon Berman-Yurin
- Moissei Lurye
- Nathan Lurye
All of them were charged under Articles 58.8, 19 and 58.11 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The main charge was forming a terrorist organization with the purpose of killing Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet government. They were tried by the
Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSRMilitary Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR was created in 1924 to the Supreme Court of the USSR as a court for the higher military and political personnel of Red Army and Fleet...
, with
Vasili UlrikhVasiliy Vasilievich Ulrikh was a senior judge of the Soviet Union during most of the regime of Joseph Stalin. In this capacity, Ulrikh served as the presiding judge at many of the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union.-Early life:Vasili Ulrikh was born in Riga, Latvia, then a...
presiding, and sentenced to death, the prosecutor being Andrei Vyshinsky.
At first, Zinoviev and Kamenev refused to confess, but after harsh interrogations and threats against their families, they agreed to confess on condition of a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and those of their families and followers would be spared. This plea was accepted, but when they were taken to the supposed Politburo meeting, only Stalin,
Kliment Voroshilovor Klyment Voroshylov , popularly known as Klim Voroshilov was a Soviet military commander and politician.-Early life and Russian Revolution:...
, and Yezhov were present. Stalin explained that they were the "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave them the promised assurances. After the trial, however, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, but also had most of their relatives arrested and shot.
Trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen)
In another trial in January 1937, the principal defendants were
Karl RadekKarl Berngardovich Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution.-Life:...
, Yuri Piatakov, Grigori Sokolnikov,
Nikolai MuralovNikolai Ivanovich Muralov , was a Bolshevik revolutionary leader in Russia, and member of the Left Opposition.Muralov was one of the few old Bolsheviks who, like Alexei Rykov and Alexander Shlyapnikov, participated directly and actively in the 1905 Revolution.A soldier in an automobile unit of the...
, Mikhail Boguslavsky and others (17 persons altogether). All but four of them were sentenced to death; the remainder were sentenced to imprisonment in
labor campA labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s. Radek was spared as he implicated others, including
Nikolai BukharinNikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Marxist theoretician, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , journal Bolshevik , and Izvestia , and the...
,
Alexei RykovAlexey Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician, Soviet head of the government from between 1924 to 1930.-Political activity:...
, and Marshal
Mikhail TukhachevskyMikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Soviet military commander, chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s.-Early life:...
, setting the stage for the Trial of Military and Trial of the Twenty One.
Radek provided (or more accurately was forced to provide) the pretext for the purge on massive scale with his testimony that there were "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school" as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help."
By the third organization, he meant the last remaining former opposition group called
RightistsThe Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...
led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying: "I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Buklharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms."
Trials of the Military
The 1937 trial of high-up military commanders, also known as the "Tukhachevsky Affair", was a
secret trialA secret trial is a trial that is not open to the public, nor reported in the news. Generally no official record of the case or the judge's verdict is made available...
, unlike the Moscow
show trialThe term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial. The term was first recorded in the 1930s. There is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant and that the actual trial has as its only goal to present the...
s. However, it featured the same type of frame-up of the defendants and it is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the
Great PurgeGreat Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1937–1938. It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and Government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of...
.
Mikhail TukhachevskyMikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Soviet military commander, chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s.-Early life:...
and the senior military officers
Iona YakirIona Emmanuilovich Yakir was the Red Army commander and one of the world's major military reformers between World War I and World War II.-Early years:...
,
Ieronim UborevichIeronim Petrovich Uborevich was a Soviet military commander of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and eventually attained the rank of Army Commander, 1st Rank, equivalent to General of the Army after tsarist ranks were reintroduced in 1940.Uborevich began his military career during...
, Robert Eideman, Avgust Kork, Vitovt Putna, B.M. Feldman and Vitaly Primakov were accused of anti-Communist conspiracy and sentenced to death; they were executed on the night of June 11/June 12, immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session of the
Supreme Court of the USSRThe Supreme Court of the USSR was the supreme court of the Soviet Union during its existence. The Supreme Court of the USSR included the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and other elements which were not typical of Supreme Courts found in other countries, then or now....
. This trial triggered a massive purge of the Red Army.
The Trial
The third show trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of Soviet show trials because of the people involved and the scope of charges, which tied together all the loose threads from earlier trials. It included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites":
- Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Marxist theoretician, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , journal Bolshevik , and Izvestia , and the...
- Marxist theoretician, former head of Communist International and member of Politburo
- Alexei Rykov
Alexey Ivanovich Rykov was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and Soviet politician, Soviet head of the government from between 1924 to 1930.-Political activity:...
- former premier and member of Politburo
- Nikolai Krestinsky
Nikolai Nikolaevich Krestinsky was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.-Origins:...
- former member of Politburo and ambassador to Germany
- Christian Rakovsky
Christian Rakovsky was a Bulgarian socialist revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and Soviet diplomat; he was also noted as a journalist, physician, and essayist...
- former ambassador to Great Britain and France
- Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigor'evich Yagoda was the head of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs and border guards body, from 1934 to 1936.-Early Life and Career:...
- former head of NKVDThe People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including...
- Arkady Rosengoltz - former People's Commissar for Foreign Trade
- Vladimir Ivanov
Vladimir Ivanov may refer to:*Vladimir Ivanovich Ivanov , Russian film director*Vladimir Ivanovich Ivanov , Uzbek SSR leader*Vladimir Ivanov , Soviet boxer...
- former People's Commissar for Timber Industry
- Mikhail Chernov - former People's Commissar for Agriculture
- Grigori Grinko - former People's Commissar for Finance
- Isaac Zelensky - former Secretary of Central Committee
- Sergei Bessonov
- Akmal Ikramov - Uzbek leader
- Faizulla Khodjayev - Uzbek leader
- Vasily Sharangovich - former first secretary in Byelorussia
- Prokopy Zubarev
- Pavel Bulanov - NKVD officer
- Lev Levin - Kremlin doctor
- Dmitry Pletnev - Kremlin doctor
- Ignaty Kamazov - Kremlin doctor
- Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky
- Pyotr Kryuchkov
The fact that
YagodaYagoda is a surname and may refer to:* Genrikh Yagoda , head of the NKVD* Ben Yagoda , professor of journalism* Yagoda, Sri Lanka, a town in Sri Lanka...
was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming its own. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder
Maxim GorkyAleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist...
by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand over territory to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, among other preposterous charges.
Even sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it hard to swallow the new charges as they became ever more absurd, and the purge had now expanded to include virtually every living Old Bolshevik leaders except Stalin. For some prominent former communists such as
Bertram WolfeBertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former Communist best known for biographical studies of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:Bertram Wolfe was born January 19, 1896 in New York City...
,
Jay LovestoneJay Lovestone was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and CIA collaborator, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions within...
,
Arthur KoestlerArthur Koestler
CBE was a prolific writer of essays, novels and autobiographies....
, and
Heinrich BrandlerHeinrich Brandler was a German communist trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist and writer. He is most notable as a chairman of the Communist Party of Germany during the early 1920s, and as the co-founder of the Communist Party Opposition.Brandler came from a socialist-oriented...
, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and even turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists.
Bukharin's Confession
The preparation for this trial was delayed in its early stages due to the reluctance of some party members to denounce their comrades. It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced
YagodaYagoda is a surname and may refer to:* Genrikh Yagoda , head of the NKVD* Ben Yagoda , professor of journalism* Yagoda, Sri Lanka, a town in Sri Lanka...
with
Nikolai YezhovNikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovschina" .- Early life and career :Little reliable info is available about Yezhov's family and early years...
. Stalin also observed some of the trial in person from a hidden chamber in the courtroom.
On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things.
Anastas MikoyanAnastas Hovhannesi Mikoyan was an Armenian Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman during the Stalin and Khrushchev years. In the Soviet Union he is primarily known as Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ....
and
Vyacheslav MolotovVyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given order, "beating permitted," and were under great pressure to extract confessions out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession, amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.
Bukharin's confession in particular became the subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel
Darkness at NoonDarkness at Noon is the most famous novel by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler. Published in 1940, it tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik old guard and 1917 revolutionary who is first cast out and then imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he once helped...
and a philosophical essay by
Maurice Merleau-PontyMaurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
in
Humansism and Terror among others.
His confessions were somewhat different from others in that, while he pleaded guilty to general charges, he denied knowledge of any specific crimes. Some astute observers noted that he would allow only what was in written confession and refuse to go any further. Also the fact that he was allowed to write in prison (he wrote four book-length manuscripts including a autobiographical novel,
How It All Began, philosophical treatise, and collection of poems - all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in 1990's) suggests that some kind of deal was reached as a condition for his confession. (He also wrote a series of very emotional letters to Stalin, tearfully protesting his innocence and professing his love for Stalin, which contrasts with his critical opinion of Stalin and his policies as expressed to others and with his conduct in the trial.)
There are several interpretations of Bukharin's motivation (beside being coerced) in the trial. Koestler and others viewed it as a true believer's last service to the Party (while preserving a modicum of personal honor), whereas Bukharin's biographers Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker saw traces of
Aesopian languageAesopian Language is communications that convey an innocent meaning to outsiders but hold a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement. It is based in reference to Aesop. It is referred to by Herbert Marcuse in his book One-Dimensional Man where it is used...
, with which Bukharin sought to turn the table into a trial of Stalinism (while keeping his part of the bargain to save his family). Bukharin himself speaks of his "peculiar duality of mind" in his last plea, which led to "semi-paralysis of the will" and Hegelian "
unhappy consciousnessFor Hegel the unhappy consciousness is associated with a stage in the history of the development of the freedom of self-consciousness.This stage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit follows after the phase of the master-slave consciousness....
", which presumably stemmed from the reality of ruinous Stalinism (although he could not of course say so in the trial) and the threat of fascism (which required kowtowing to Stalin, who became the personification of the Party).
The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions and subtle criticisms of the trial. After disproving several charges against him (One observer noted that he proceeded to demolish, or rather showed he could very easily demolish, the whole case ) and said that "the confession of accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in the trial that was solely based on confessions. He finished his last plea with "the monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable, especially in the new stage of the struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R become clear to all."
Romain RollandRomain Rolland was a French dramatist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (they were killed in prison in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife,
Anna LarinaAnna Larina was the wife of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, and spent many years trying to rehabilitate her husband after he was purged by Joseph Stalin in 1938...
, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived.
Totals
All of the surviving members of the
LeninVladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
-era Politburo, except Stalin and Trotsky, were tried. By the end of the final trial Stalin had arrested and executed almost every important living Bolshevik from the Revolution. Of 1,966 delegates to the party congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested. Three out of five Soviet marshals (
Alexander YegorovAlexander Ilyich Yegorov , Soviet military commander, was a prominent victim of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s....
,
Vasily BlyukherVasily Konstantinovich Blücher Vasily Konstantinovich Blücher Vasily Konstantinovich Blücher (also spelled Blyukher, Blukher, Bliukher etc, ( – November 9, 1938), Soviet military commander, was among the prominent victims of Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s....
, Tukhachevsky) and several thousands of the
Red ArmyThe Red Army The Red Army The Red Army was the Soviet government’s revolutionary militia beginning in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the USSR. Since 1946, after the Second World War, it was called the Soviet Army.The 'Red...
officers were arrested or shot. Outside of politics, many millions of ordinary people died in the purges. The key defendant,
Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky , born Leyba Davidov Bronstein , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was one of the leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Lenin...
, was living in exile abroad, but he still did not survive Stalin's desire to have him dead and was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.
Rehabilitation
While Khrushchev's Secret Speech denounced Stalin's personality cult and purges as early as in 1956, rehabilitation of Old Bolsheviks proceeded at a slow pace.
Nikolai Bukharin and 19 other co-defendants were officially completely rehabilitated in February 1988. (Yagoda, who was deeply involved in the great purge as the head of NKVD, was not included) In May 1988, rehabilitation of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and co-defendants was announced.
In January 1989, the official newspaper
PravdaPravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
reported that 25,000 persons had been posthumously rehabilitated. The same year Khrushchev's secret speech was finally published in full (although its existence was public knowledge already in 1956).
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