Moscow trials

The "Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center"

Conspiracy and investigation

In December 1935, the original case surrounding Zinoviev began to widen into what was called the "Trotsky-Zinoviev Center". Stalin allegedly received reports that correspondence from Trotsky was found among the possessions of one of those arrested in the widened probe.

Consequently, Stalin stressed the importance of the investigation and ordered Nikolai Yezhov to take over the case and ascertain whether Trotsky was involved. State Security Commissar of the 2nd Class Georgy Molchanov, a chief of the Secret-political department of the NKVD Main Directory of State Security (a predecessor of KGB), played a key role in the investigation.

The central office of the NKVD that was headed by Genrikh Yagoda was shocked when it was learned that Yezhov (at that time a mere party functionary) had discovered the conspiracy, because the NKVD had no connection to the case. In June 1936, Yagoda reiterated his belief to Stalin that there was no link between Trotsky and Zinoviev, but Stalin promptly rebuked him. This would have led to the inevitable conclusion about the unprofessionalism of the NKVD leaders who completely missed the existence of the conspiratorial Trotskyist center. Bewilderment was strengthened by the fact that both Zinoviev and Kamenev for a long time were under constant operational surveillance and after the murder of Kirov were held in custody.

The basis of the scenario was laid in confessions, possibly extracted under torture, from three of the arrested. One was Russian oppositionist Valentin Olberg, who taught at the Gorky Pedagogic Institute. The others were Soviet statesmen and former members of the internal Party opposition, Isaac Rejngold and Richard Pikel. Firmly believing in the mythical conspiracy, Rejngold executed the Party task with which he thought himself to be entrusted. The confessions present the standard items of supposed conspiratorial activities: the murder of Kirov; preparations to assassinate the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party; and the readiness to seize power in the USSR in order to "restore capitalism".

In July 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to Moscow from an unspecified prison. When interrogated they denied being part of any Trotsky-led conspiracy. Yezhov appealed to Zinoviev's and Kamenev's devotion to the Soviet Union as old Bolsheviks and advised them that Trotsky was fomenting anti-Soviet sentiment amongst the proletariat in the world. Throughout spring and summer of 1936 the investigators were requesting from the arrested "to lay down arms in front of the party" exerting a continuous pressure on them. Furthermore, this loss of support, in the event of a war with Germany or Japan, could have disastrous ramifications for the Soviet Union. To Kamenev specifically, Yezhov showed him evidence that his son was subject to an investigation that could result in his son's execution.

According to one witness, at the beginning of the summer the central heating was turned on in Zinoviev's and Kamenev's cells. This was very unpleasant for both prisoners but particularly for Zinoviev, who was asthmatic and could not tolerate the artificially increased temperatures.

Finally the exhausted prisoners agreed to a deal with Stalin who promised them, on behalf of the Politburo, their lives in exchange for participation. Kamenev and Zinoviev agreed to confess on condition that they receive a direct guarantee from the entire Politburo that their lives and those of their families and followers would be spared. When they were taken to the supposed Politburo meeting, they were met by only Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov. Stalin explained that they were the "commission" authorized by the Politburo, and Stalin agreed to their conditions in order to gain their desired confessions. After that the future defendants were given some medical treatment.

Trial

The trial (officially known as "процесс «Антисоветского объединенного троцкистско-зиновьевского центра»", also known as The First Moscow Trial, or the Trial of Sixteen), with 16 defendants, was held from 19 to 24 August 1936 in the small October Hall of the House of the Unions (chosen instead of the larger Hall of Columns, used for earlier trials). The defendants were tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, with Vasili Ulrikh presiding.

The Prosecutor General was Andrey Vyshinsky, a former member of the Menshevik Party who in 1917 had undersigned an order for the arrest of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), according to the decision of the Russian Provisional Government, but the October Revolution quickly intervened, and the offices which had ordered the arrest were dissolved. In 1920, after the defeat of the Whites under Denikin and the end of the Russian Civil War, Vyshinsky joined the Bolsheviks.

The main charge was forming a terror organization with the purpose of killing Stalin and other members of the Soviet government. Defendant Ivan Nikitich Smirnov was blamed by his co-defendants for being the leader of the Center which planned Kirov's assassination. He, however, had been in prison since January 1933 and refused to confess. Another defendant, the Old Bolshevik Eduard Holtzman, was accused of conspiring with Trotsky in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol in 1932, where Trotsky was giving a public lecture. A week after the trial it was revealed by a Danish Social Democratic newspaper that the hotel had been demolished in 1917.

Vyshinsky achieved international infamy as the prosecutor at the Zinoviev–Kamenev trial, lashing its defenseless victims with vituperative rhetoric. He often punctuated speeches with phrases like "Dogs of the Fascist bourgeoisie", "mad dogs of Trotskyism", "dregs of society", "decayed people", "terrorist thugs and degenerates", and "accursed vermin". This dehumanization aided in what historian Arkady Vaksberg calls "a hitherto unknown type of trial where there was not the slightest need for evidence: what evidence did you need when you were dealing with 'stinking carrion' and 'mad dogs'?" Vyshinsky would later be responsible for the Soviet preparations for the trial of the major German war criminals by the International Military Tribunal.

All of the defendants were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow by NKVD chief executioner Vasily Blokhin. The full list of defendants is as follows:

1. Grigory Zinoviev
2. Lev Kamenev
3. Grigory Yevdokimov
4. Ivan Bakayev
5. Sergei Mrachkovsky, a hero of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Russian Far East
6. Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan,
7. Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, People's Commissar for Posts and Telegraphs
8. Yefim Dreitzer
9. Isak Reingold
10. Richard Pickel
11. Eduard Holtzman
12. Fritz David
13. Valentin Olberg
14. Konon Berman-Yurin
15. Moissei Lurye
16. Nathan Lurye

The "Parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center"

The second trial occurred between 23 and 30 January 1937.

This trial involved 17 lesser figures including Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Leonid Serebryakov. Alexander Beloborodov was also arrested and intended to be tried along with Radek, but did not make the confession required of him, and so he was not produced in court. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting (Pyatakov and Serebryakov among them). The rest (including Radek and Sokolnikov) received sentences in labour camps, where they were later murdered. Radek was spared as he implicated others, including Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, setting the stage for the Trial of Military Leaders and the Trial of the Twenty One.

Radek provided the pretext for the purge on a massive scale with his testimony that there was a "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 Rightists 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 Bukharin 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.

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. U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies 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.

All "confessions" were extracted under the most severe torture. Images of the accused were not shown.

Trial of the Generals and the Tukhachevsky Affair

The Tukhachevsky Affair was a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army generals, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, in June 1937.

It featured the same type of frame-up of the defendants and it is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge. Mikhail Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, Robert Eideman, August Kork, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman, and Vitaly Primakov were accused of anti-Communist conspiracy and sentenced to death; they were executed on the night of June 11/12, immediately after the verdict delivered by a Special Session of the Supreme Court of the USSR. This trial triggered a massive purge of the Red Army.

The Trial of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites"

The third show trial, in March 1938, popularly known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, tied together all the loose threads from earlier trials.

The fact that Genrikh Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it now alleged that Nikolai Bukharin and others had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin numerous times after 1918 and had murdered Soviet writer Maxim Gorky by poison in 1936. The group also stood accused of espionage. Bukharin and others were claimed to have plotted the overthrow and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in collusion with agents of the German and Japanese governments, among other charges.

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 Yagoda with Yezhov. Stalin also observed some of the trial in person from a hidden chamber in the courtroom. On the first day of the trial, Nikolai 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 Mikoyan and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known that his interrogators were given the 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. However, 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

Bukharin's confession in particular became the subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism 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 his written confession and refused to go any further. The fact that he was allowed to write in prison (he wrote four book-length manuscripts including an autobiographical novel, How It All Began, a philosophical treatise, and a collection of poems – all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s) suggests that some kind of deal was reached as a condition for his confession. He also wrote a series of emotional letters to Stalin, 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 possible interpretations of Bukharin's motivation (besides coercion) 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 language, with which Bukharin sought to turn the tables and conduct a trial of Stalinism (while still 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 consciousness."

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), Bukharin said that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence", his point being that the trial was solely based on coerced 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 Rolland 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 Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but she survived.

Defendants

The trial included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites":

1. Nikolai Bukharin – Marxist theoretician, former head of Communist International and member of Politburo
2. Alexei Rykov – former premier and member of Politburo
3. Nikolai Krestinsky – former member of Politburo and ambassador to Germany
4. Christian Rakovsky – former ambassador to Great Britain and France
5. Genrikh Yagoda – former head of NKVD
6. Arkady Rosengolts – former People's Commissar for Foreign Trade
7. Vladimir Ivanov – former People's Commissar for Timber Industry
8. Mikhail Alexandrovich Chernov – former People's Commissar for Agriculture
9. Grigori Grinko – former People's Commissar for Finance
10. Isaak Zelensky – former Secretary of Central Committee
11. Sergei Bessonov
12. Akmal Ikramov – Uzbek leader
13. Fayzulla Khodzhayev – Uzbek leader
14. Vasily Sharangovich – former first secretary in Belorussia
15. Prokopy Zubarev
16. Pavel Bulanov – NKVD officer
17. Lev Levin – Kremlin doctor
18. Dmitry Pletnyov – Kremlin doctor
19. Ignaty Kazakov – Kremlin doctor
20. Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky
21. Pyotr Kryuchkov

Aftermath

Communist Party leaders in most Western countries denounced criticism of the trials as capitalist attempts to subvert Communism. A number of American communists and "fellow travellers" outside of the Soviet Union signed The Moscow Trials: A Statement by American Progressives. These included Langston Hughes and Stuart Davis, who would later express regrets.

Some contemporary observers who thought the trials were inherently fair cite the statements of Molotov, 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.

In Britain, the lawyer and Labour MP Denis Nowell 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," while socialist thinker Beatrice Webb "was pleased that Stalin had 'cut out the dead wood'." Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, in the Daily Worker of March 12, 1938, 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 Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by NKVD censors.

In the United States, left-wing advocates such as Corliss Lamont and Lillian Hellman 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 1930s, 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 observers, including many liberals. The New York Times noted the absurdity in an editorial on 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."

For Bertram Wolfe, the outcome of the Bukharin trial marked his break with Stalinism.

The 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 Commission, 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 Dewey, who led a delegation to Mexico, where Trotsky lived, to interview him and hold hearings from April 10 to April 17, 1937. The hearings were conducted to investigate the allegations against Trotsky who publicly stated in advance of them that if the commission found him guilty as charged he would hand himself over to the Soviet authorities. However, the proceedings put little pressure on Trotsky's statements and accepted much of them at face value, sometimes breaking the cross-examination when it was becoming "too improper" for Trotsky' case. The spirit of the proceedings of the commission fell short of a serious investigation even in the judgement of its own members: having resigned from the commission, Carleton Beals said in a public statement:

The hushed adoration of the other members of the committee for Mr. Trotsky throughout the hearings has defeated all spirit of honest investigation. [...] The cross-examination consisted in allowing Trotsky to spout propaganda charges with eloquence and wild denunciations with only rare efforts to make him prove his assertions. The work of the commission has largely consisted in an effort to fill in the gaps left by Mr. Trotsky's own attorney in the proving of Trotsky's case. Mr. Trotsky was given five days and a half to present his case. The cross-examination by the commission lasted only a day and a half. One day of that was largely taken up by a banal cross-examination by [commission's attorney] Mr. Finerty on the history of the tactics and politics of the Russian revolution, conducted in such kindergarten fashion and with such eager adoration for Mr. Trotsky by the commissioners as to make the proceedings the laughing stock of any intelligent person. The rest of the commission's time was expended in pointless erudite questions on dialects and other matters little related to the Moscow trials. There was no valid attempt to get at the guilt or innocence of Mr. Trotsky.

Having failed to prove Trotsky's innocence, the commission brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.

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." For example, in Moscow, Pyatakov had testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.

British Provisional Committee

In Britain, the trials were also subject to criticism. A group called the British Provisional Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky was set up. In 1936, the Committee published an open letter in the Manchester Guardian calling for an international inquiry into the Trials. The letter was signed by several notable figures, including H. N. Brailsford, Harry Wicks, Conrad Noel, Frank Horrabin and Eleanor Rathbone. The Committee also supported the Dewey Commission. Emrys Hughes, the British MP, also attacked the Moscow trials as unjust in his newspaper Forward.

Legacy

All of the surviving members of the Lenin-era party leadership except Stalin, Trotsky and Kalinin, 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 Ilyich Yegorov, Vasily Blyukher, Tukhachevsky) and several thousands of the Red Army officers were arrested or shot. The key defendant, Leon Trotsky, 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.

Historian Isaac Deutscher regarded the Moscow trials "as the prelude to the destruction of an entire generation of revolutionaries".

While Khrushchev's Secret Speech denounced Stalin's personality cult and purges as early as 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.

After the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev repudiated the trials in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:

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 Orlov 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.

In January 1989, the official newspaper Pravda reported that 25,000 persons had been posthumously rehabilitated.

In literature

• Grieg, Nordahl. The World Must Still be Young [Ung må verden endnu være] (1938).
• Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon (1940)
• Maclean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches (1949).
• Orwell, George. Animal Farm (1944).
• Rybakov, Anatoly. Children of the Arbat (1987); Fear (1990); Dust and Ashes (1994).
• Serge, Victor. The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1949).

In film

The trials are mentioned in the 1939 film Ninotchka, where, when asked about news from Russia, the title character tells Soviet agents in Paris that "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians." The trials are also portrayed in the 1943 American pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow, where the purges are shown as an attempt by Stalin to rid his country of pro-Axis "fifth columnists". Some "fifth columnists" are described in the film as acting on behalf of Germany and Japan. The film "defends the purges, complete with a quarter-hour dedicated to arguing that Leon Trotsky was a Nazi agent". In the film, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Joseph E. Davies proclaims at the end of the trial scene: "Based on twenty years' trial practice, I'd be inclined to believe these confessions."