Moscow Trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of trials of political opponents of Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge. They are widely considered to have been show trials in which the verdicts were predetermined.

First Moscow Trial (Trial of the Sixteen)

The first trial was held from August 19 to August 24, 1936; the principal defendants were Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Aside from these two, several other prominent leaders were on trial: Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan, leader of the Armenian Communist Party; Sergei Mrachkovsky, a hero of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Russian Far East; and Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, People's Commissar for communications. Still others were G.E. Evdokimov, I.P. Bakayev, E.A. Dreitzer, E.S. Holtzman, I.I. Reingold, R.V. Pickel, V.P. Olberg, K.B. Berman-Yurin, Fritz David (I.I. Kruglyansky), M. Lurye and N. Lurye. All of them were charged under Articles 588, 19 and 588, 5811 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, with Vasili Ulrikh presiding, and sentenced to death, the prosecutor being Andrei Vyshinsky.

Trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen)

In another trial in January 1937, the principal defendants were Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov, Grigori Sokolnikov, Nikolai Muralov, Mikhail Boguslavsky and others (17 persons altogether). All but four of them were sentenced to death; the remainder were sentenced to imprisonment in labor camps.

Trial of Red Army Generals

\nSee Mikhail Tukhachevsky. The 1937 trial of Red Army generals was a secret trial under the military tribunal, unlike the Moscow show trials; however, it featured the same level of frame-up of the defendants and it is traditionally considered one of the key trials of the Great Purge. Marshal Tukhachevsky and the senior military officers Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir, Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich, Robert Petrovich Eideman, Avgust Ivanovich Kork, Vitovt Kazimirovich Putna, B.M. Feldman and Vitali Markovich Primakov were accused of anti-Communist conspiracy and sentenced to death; they were executed on June 11.

Trial of the Twenty One

\nMain article: Trial of the Twenty One. The Trial of the Twenty-One was held in March 1938. The chief accused were Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Nikolai Krestinsky, Christian Rakovsky, and Genrikh Yagoda.

Totals

All of the surviving members of the original Politburo, except Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, 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 and one-third of the Red Army officers were arrested or shot. Outside of politics, many millions of others died in the purges. 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 1940.

International reaction

The confessions of those defendants who admitted guilt were incredible. Leon Trotsky struggled to expose the fallacies, while Stalin continued to try to cover up. Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler wrote a brilliant novel about a fictional victim of the Moscow trials, Darkness at Noon. And in the United States, the Dewey Commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups. We therefore find Trotsky and Sedov not guilty."

External links

• Court proceedings: THE CASE OF THE TROTSKYITE-ZINOVIEVITE TERRORIST CENTRE\n*And they all confessed...\n*Dewey Commission Report