4 Case Study: Stalin’s Show Trials, 1936 –1938

X1X Case Study: Stalin’s Show Trials, 1936–19384

Captio Stn alin promoted a cult of personality through propaganda in the Soviet Union. The caption reads 'Long live Stalin, leader of the Soviet People!' This chapter examines Stalin's show trials, also known as the Moscow trials. Their aim

was to instill fear, and hence, loyalty, in the people of Russia. We look at Stalin's motives for staging these trials and their significance.

The format of the trials is examined and how

evidence against defendants was gathered. We also explore why the defendants willingly confessed to crimes of which they could not have possibly been guilty.

?KEY QUESTION

What role did the show trials play in Stalin’s Russia?

What was the purpose of the show trials?

The centrepiece of the Great Terror that we read about in the last chapter was three show trials of former high-ranking Communists, or ‘Old Bolsheviks’, as they were known. Also named the Moscow Trials, they were propaganda trials designed to portray the accused men as enemies of the people. Show trials were not new in the Soviet Union under Stalin. A series of trials had also been staged against Soviet and foreign industrial experts between 1928 and 1933. The defendants had been accused of sabotage, treason and spying for foreign powers. In reality they were scapegoats for the failures of industrialisation.

Stalin’s aim in organising the new trials was to establish complete control over the new Communist Party and to eliminate any potential threats. Many of the accused were members of the party prior to the revolution. They had been appointed by Lenin and most had been opponents of Stalin in the 1920s. Many had been allied to Stalin’s fiercest rival in the party, Leon Trotsky.

As Martin Sixsmith points out, the main aim of the trials was:

the elimination of all those who had played key roles in the events of 1917, leaving Stalin as the sole link and successor to Lenin. All remaining party members would owe their positions and their careers to him alone.

Source: Martin Sixsmith, Russia: A Thousand Year Chronicle of the Wild East, BBC Books, 2011, page 307

Stalin (left) pictured with Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1925. Stalin was to have the three men in the picture shot during the Show Trials.

A further purpose of the trials was to find scapegoats to blame for failures during the Five-Year Plans. Some of the defendants had opposed the pace of industrialisation and this had annoyed Stalin. If it could be proved that spies and traitors were to be found in the highest reaches of the party, then it would justify the terror that was happening throughout Russia at the same time. The trials helped to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia in the country. Many genuinely believed that spies, wreckers and saboteurs were in their midst. People were constantly on the lookout for enemy agents.

What was the format of the trials?

In all, there were three trials, and like a puppet master Stalin completely controlled what happened. They were essentially a piece of political theatre. Holding public trials was risky for Stalin. It would have been easier to hold the trials behind closed doors. However, Stalin was determined to crush his rivals, both physically and in the court of public opinion. The defendants’ confessions were crucial to the success of the trials. The assassination of Sergei Kirov provided the proof of plots against Stalin and his supporters. The NKVD collected this ‘evidence’ while the arch villain and leader of the plots, Trotsky, was conveniently in exile.

Each trial followed the same format:

The defendants were accused of incredible crimes, e.g. plotting to assassinate Stalin or working as spies for foreign countries such as Germany.

The defendants were accused then confessed their guilt and were found guilty –the verdicts had been decided before the trial.

The proceedings were widely publicized both at home and abroad.

The vast majority were then shot.

The star of the show was the 53-year-old state prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky. He had been a moderate socialist prior to the revolution and this made him absolutely obedient, as he himself could find himself arrested at any moment. He had conducted a number of previous show trials and he understood that the aim of show trials was to incite the Soviet people’s hatred of the defendants. As we shall see, he achieved this with speeches full of anger, scorn and disgust directed at the defendants.

The first show trial: the trial of the sixteen

Between 19 and 24 August 1936, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and 14 other leading Bolsheviks were put on trial in the first of the show trials. Kamenev and Zinoviev were two of the most prominent figures in the party in the 1920s. Both had Andrei Vyshinsky (1883–1954) been rivals to Stalin for leadership of the party and had later allied with Trotsky. These actions had effectively ruined their careers and they had subsequently been expelled twice from the party.

Before the trial the defendants were interrogated by the NKVD to obtain the required confessions. Accused of being members of the United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre, the charge against the defendants was that, acting on Trotsky’s orders, they had organised a terrorist group for the purpose of assassinating the leaders of the party. They had succeeded in murdering Kirov and had plotted to kill Stalin and other party leaders.

Carefully planned and stage-managed, the trial opened on 19 August in the October Hall in the House of Unions in Moscow. The 350 spectators were mainly NKVD in plain clothes, foreign journalists and diplomats. The three judges sat on a raised platform in the centre. To increase their humiliation, the 16 defendants were dressed in old and ill-fitting clothes. The impression of their guilt seemed to be confirmed as they were guarded by NKVD troops with fixed bayonets. Stalin was said to be present in a gallery with darkened windows at the back of the room.

The defendants freely admitted their guilt. For example, Kamenev admitted that ‘for ten years … I waged a struggle against the party … and against Stalin personally’. Some of the evidence was very weak. One defendant confessed to being involved in the murder of Kirov when he was already in prison!

The accused implicated others in their evidence and this raised the prospect of other Bolshevik leaders appearing in later trials.

In his closing speech, Vyshinsky demanded the death penalty, saying:

I remind you, comrade judges, that it is your duty, once you find these people, all sixteen of them, guilty of crimes against the state, to apply to them in full measure those articles of the law that the prosecution has demanded. I demand that these rabid dogs be shot – every one of them – until the last of them is wiped out!

Before the verdict was announced, Kamenev said, ‘No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just.’ When the judges brought in their pre-decided verdict of death, one of the defendants shouted, ‘Long live the cause of Marx … Lenin and Stalin.’

The condemned leaders appealed for mercy, but this was rejected and all 16 were shot the next morning. The propaganda machine worked overtime to support the trials. Soviet newspapers as well as messages from factories and collectives throughout the country applauded the executions. They demanded more purges of counter-revolutionaries.

One telegram from the workers of a region near Moscow read:

The workers of the Meshchvsky Region demand merciless retribution against the terrorists and antiparty vermin of the Trotskyite opposition groups … Death to the enemies of the working class! ... Long live the Communist Party and its mighty leader, Comrade Stalin!

Source: Martin Sixsmith, Russia: A Thousand Year Chronicle of the Wild East, BBC Books, 2011, page 308

Here is an explanation of some of the language that was used during the show trials:

Assassins/terrorists: Opponents of Stalin. Bloc/Unified Centre: Co-operation between different factions opposed to Stalin. Conspiracy: More than two terrorists. Counter-revolutionary: A person working to overthrow the communist revolution and restore capitalism. Terrorism: Opposition to the policies of Stalin.

Andrei Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor, reading the charges.

The second show trial: the trial of the seventeen

The second show trial lasted from 23 to 30 January 1937. The defendants were accused of being members of the Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre. In all, 17 men were charged. The most prominent were Yuri Pyatakov and Karl Radek. Both were former supporters of Trotsky, while Radek had also been one of Lenin’s closest allies. The rest were leading figures in the industrialisation drive.

In court Vyshinsky called the defendants ‘liars and clowns, insignificant pygmies’. The accused fell over each other to prove their own guilt. They confessed to conspiring with anti-Soviet ‘Trotskyites’ and having spied for Nazi Germany and Japan. This was all the more remarkable as many of the defendants were Jewish! Some of the evidence was comical – it was alleged that Trotsky’s son ordered assassinations at a meeting in the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen even though this hotel had been demolished in 1917!

Stalin wrote the contents of Vyshinsky’s summing up at the end of the trial. Radek avoided the death penalty as he had agreed to implicate other leaders in his confession – paving the way for yet another show trial. He was sentenced to a prison camp, where he was later murdered by an NKVD agent. Most of the rest of the defendants were shot.

The purge of the Red Army

In between the second and third trials there was a widespread purge of the army. Historians are unsure of Stalin’s motives in purging the military. Along with the Communist Party, they provided a potential threat to his rule. He may have believed that to prevent a military takeover it was necessary to remove any officers whose loyalty was in doubt – many had been appointed by Trotsky during the Civil War.

These trials were conducted in secret, unlike the show trials. The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and other senior officers were tried for plotting with Germany and executed. Tukhachevsky’s name had been mentioned in evidence during the second show trial.

According to figures published in Soviet newspapers in 1987, the purge accounted for most of the leadership of the army. In all, about 50% of all officers, or 35,000 men, were shot. This action seriously weakened the leadership of the Red Army. This absence of leadership was to have a disastrous impact on the ability of the Red Army to resist the German invasion of 1941.

Many foreign Communists who had fled to Russia were also victims of the purges. For example, 10,000 Polish Communists were executed at the time of the third show trial in 1938.

The third show trial: the trial of the twenty-one

The last of the show trials was staged from 2 to 13 March 1938 and is the most famous. It was known officially as the

Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’

or the Trial of the Twenty-One. In all, 21 men stood in the dock. They included well-known figures such as Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Krestinsky and Alexei Rykov – all former members of the Politburo. Bukharin was a very popular figure in the party and the most prominent defendant. As we have read, he was involved in the power struggle that happened in the party after Lenin’s death. Another person in the dock was the former chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda. In a similar vein to the earlier trials, the defendants faced a wide range of allegations, including:

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) was an early member of the party and a loyal follower of Lenin. He was editor of Pravda – the party newspaper – from 1918 to 1929. He had been expelled from the party for opposing Stalin in 1929 but had been readmitted in 1934.

 Murdering Kirov and the famous writer Maxim Gorky

 Unsuccessfully trying to assassinate Lenin two decades before and plotting to assassinate Stalin as well as other Bolshevik leaders

 Conspiring to wreck the economy and the country’s military power

 Spying for Britain, France, Japan and Germany

 An ex-commissar for agriculture was blamed for ‘mistakes’ in collectivisation, while another defendant was accused of selling butter containing glass. These men were handy scapegoats for the failure of collectivisation.

The Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky explained the importance of this trial:

Then came the trial – in March 1938 – the last in the series of trials of famous Bolshevik leaders. The work of exterminating Ilyich’s [Lenin’s] comrade-in-arms was nearing completion. This trial was the climax of the Boss’s [Stalin’s] thriller. It now emerged that Bukharin and Rykov had collaborated simultaneously with the Trotskyist-Zinovievites, with Tukhachevsky and the other German spies in the high command … and with wreckers in the NKVD represented by Yagoda and his associates. The main organizer of the previous trials, Yagoda, thus became one of the stars of the Bukharin trial. Murdering doctors who had allegedly helped him to carry out his ‘perfidious [evil] schemes’ were tried with him.

Source: Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, page 369

When the trial started, Krestinsky actually pleaded not guilty:

The President: Accused Krestinsky, do you plead guilty to the charges brought against you? Krestinsky: I plead not guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites, of whose existence I was not aware. Nor have I committed any of the crimes with which I personally am charged, in particular I plead not guilty to the charge of having had connections with the German intelligence service.

The next day, after a night with the NKVD, he changed his mind:

Krestinsky: In the face of world public opinion, I had not the strength to admit the truth that I had been conducting a Trotskyite struggle all along. I request the Court to register my statement that I fully and completely admit that I am guilty of all the gravest charges brought against me personally, and that I admit my complete responsibility for the treason and treachery I have committed.

Source: Gudrun Persson, And They All Confessed, http://art-bin.com/art/amosc_preeng.html

After this minor, if unexpected, setback, the trial followed the normal format, with most of the defendants admitting responsibility for incredulous crimes and all were shot bar three minor figures. In his final speech, Bukharin made a strong defence of his actions. He confessed his guilt in general but denied many of the specific allegations against him, e.g. plotting to murder Lenin (see document B on page 39).

Nikolai Krestinsky, a former member of the Politburo. He was a defendant during the Trail of the Twenty-One.

Vyshinsky’s speech at the end of the trial shows the hatred directed at the accused men and the almost religious adoration of Stalin:

The weed and thistle will grow on the graves of these execrable traitors. But on us and on our happy country, our Glorious Sun will continue to shed His serene light. Guided by our beloved Leader and Master, the Great Stalin, we will go forward to Communism along a path that has been cleansed of the remnants of the last scum and filth of the past.

After the trial, Rykov wrote a letter to Stalin asking for clemency:

My guilt before the party and the country is great, but I have a passionate desire and, I think, enough strength to expiate it.

I ask you to believe that I am not a completely corrupt person. In my life there were many years of noble, honest work for the revolution. I can still prove that even after having committed so many crimes, it is possible to become an honest person and to die with honor.

I ask that you spare my life.

Source: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ a2rykov.html

The letter made no difference and he was shot on 15 March. Yagoda’s execution was particularly brutal. He was stripped naked, beaten and then shot. His replacement as head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, kept the bullet. Yezhov was to suffer exactly the same fate when he was executed in 1940.

What was the reaction in the west?

During the Show Trials the defendants had willingly confessed to their crimes. This amazed and confused Western spectators, both in Russia and abroad.

Some believed in the defendants’ guilt. Despite the weaknesses in the evidence, the US ambassador, Joseph E. Davis, was convinced that the allegations were true. He wrote:

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 [agreed] 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.

Source: Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, Garden City: Garden City Press, 1941

Many socialists who had visited the USSR in the 1930s were also convinced that the trials were fair. For example, leading British socialist Beatrice Webb ‘was pleased that Stalin had cut out the dead wood’.

Communist parties throughout Europe (these were controlled by Stalin) attacked any criticism of the trials. The leader of the British Communist Party called the trials ‘a new triumph in the history of progress’.

Why did the defendants confess to crimes they were not guilty of?

As we have read, foreign observers were baffled by the sight of hardened revolutionaries willingly confessing their guilt. Why did they do it? To this day, historians are not sure – a number of factors may have played a part.

 Torture and the fear of torture played a role. ‘All means’ were to be used to get confessions. The methods that were used broke the resistance of even the strongest person. When one official told

Stalin that Kamenev would not confess, an angry Stalin told the official not to come back until he had a confession from Kamenev.

 They may have thought that if they co-operated, their lives and those of their families would be spared. Stalin had promised Kamenev and Zinoviev that if they confessed publicly to their crimes, they and their families would not be shot. Up until the last minute, Zinoviev believed that he would be spared. Stalin did not honour this promise. Both men were executed and Kamenev’s wife and son were killed, while Zinoviev’s son, three brothers and one of his sisters were later shot. After a long interrogation, Bukharin confessed after threats to his wife and young son (he had been imprisoned for nearly a year before his trial).

 The accused men were loyal Communists and some may have believed that the good of the party came first, even over their own lives. This reasoning may have influenced Bukharin’s actions during the trial.

Assessment

Ten of the original 15-man Bolshevik government in 1917 perished in the show trials. Only two were still alive: Stalin and Trotsky. In 1940 Trotsky was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents in Mexico. The trials had made Stalin the absolute master of the Communist Party.

They also served as a warning to all party members that no one was safe from arrest. They reinforced the atmosphere of terror throughout the USSR. To the ordinary citizens, it sent the clear message that there were traitors everywhere working against their interests, even at the top of the party. This justified the Great Terror, as these traitors allied to hostile foreign powers such as Germany could end communism in the USSR.

It is difficult to disagree with the assessment of the show trials given by the historian Joe Lee:

Although the Show Trials of 1936–8 involved only a handful, they were the crowning glories of the entire process. They included the big three of the old guard, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin, a warning that treachery could infiltrate the highest ranks – and that any disagreement with Stalin could be seen as treachery.

Source: Joe Lee, The Shifting Balance of Power: Exploring the 20th Century

As a result of the Show trials, Stalin was the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.

SUMMARY: STALIN’S SHOW TRIALS 1936–1938

Purpose:

 To establish Stalin’s total control of the party by removing those who had opposed his rise to power or owed their careers to Lenin. These men were called Old Bolsheviks, as they had been members of the party before the October Revolution.  To justify the wider terror happening in the country at the same time.

Format:

 Defendants willingly confessed to crimes such as plotting to kill Stalin, the murder of Kirov, spying for foreign countries, etc.  Verdicts were decided before the trial – most were shot.  Propaganda was used to inform both the Soviet people and the wider world of the trials.  Main prosecutor: Andrei Vyshinsky.

Trial One – August 1936: United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre

16 on trial – main defendants:  Grigory Zinoviev  Lev Kamenev

Trial Two – January 1937: Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Centre

17 on trial – main defendants:  Yuri Pyatakov  Karl Radek (mentioned Bukharin in his evidence)

Trial Three – March 1938: Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites

21 on trial – main defendants:  Nikolai Bukharin  Nikolai Krestinsky  Alexei Rykov  Genrikh Yagoda (former head of the NKVD)

Stalin’s Russia – a timeline

1879 Stalin born in Georgia 1917 Played little role in the October Revolution 1922 Appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party 1924 Death of Lenin

Power struggle between Trotsky and Stalin who wins 1928 Stalin undisputed leader of the USSR

Introduction of the first Five-Year Plan

1929 Collectivisation policy introduced

1932–3 Famine in the Ukraine kills millions

1934 Murder of Sergei Kirov led to the beginning of the Great Terror 1936 First of the major show trials 1937 Second show trial

Purge of the armed forces 1938 Third show trial