Moscow Trial (1937)

IN 1934, Kirov was assassinated. White Guards were at first said to be instrumental in it, and the Latvian Consul was implicated. But after a matter of six weeks, Zinoviev and Kamenev were found to be “indirectly” responsible, and Trotsky was brought in through a mysterious letter, though like a number of letters that Trotsky was later supposed to have written, this one was never produced.

Over a hundred communists were shot as a result of that assassination, Zinoviev and Kamenev sent into exile in Siberia, and a great “purge” throughout the country took place, which meant more shooting and imprisonment of unknown men.

The trial in August “established” that Zinoviev and Kamenev were directly responsible for the shooting of Kirov, and that they planned to murder Stalin, Voroshilov and Kaganovich and then to seize power themselves. They had no political programme to put in the place of “Socialism in a Single Country,” they had no mass support, they could see that everybody loved Comrade Stalin’s socialism, but, stupid fellows, they had a “lust for power” which led them to terrorism. The attempt to frame-up Trotsky was sharper. He arranged the assassination of Kirov, and attempted the assassinations (over a period of four years with innumerable “agents” to do the job) of Stalin and Vorolishov. But these two bore charmed lives, they were always too far away or their cars went too fast. Trotsky plotted with the secret Nazi police. All this was “established” at the August trial, only no evidence was brought forward except the bare statements of the accused, which were extraordinary fragmentary, often completely contradictory, and easily proved to be the fabrications of the G.P.U. [For a profound and derailed analysis of the “evidence” and testimony in the August trial, we strongly recommend to our readers Behind the Moscow Trial – The Greatest Frame-up in History, by Max Shachtman]. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot and n other prisoners with them. Tomsky, implicated in the trial, committed suicide. A further purge took place ; more shootings, more imprisonments.

Now we have the present trial in which 13 more old revolutionaries, including Piatakov and Serebryakov have been murdered, and Sokolnikov and Radek and two lesser known revolutionaries imprisoned for ten years. The crimes put down to these men grow more extravagant. Not only terrorism now and working with the Gestapo, but working with Japan too, promising to give away large portions of territory at the end of the war, plotting with these enemies of the Soviet Union. These men with their long history as revolutionaries, what was it to them to help in the plans of a new imperialist slaughter to which the blood bath of 1914 would not compare ? Nothing at all ! To prove that, they are responsible for train wrecks (the Daily Worker tells you all about maimed girls and children they tried to murder) for industrial catastrophes, for ruined crops. Trotsky, of course, is the greatest monster of all. But we have no reasonable motive except “lust for power.” Yet it is well to note that among the accused in these trials, there is not to be found a single former kulak, manufacturer, banker, Czarist, White Guard, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary, anarchist, or any other one-time opponent of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet regime. All of them, except of course the obvious G.P.U. agents, were tried old Bolsheviks.

The purge going on is more far-reaching than before. Everywhere according to the testimony of the Soviet press itself, in every big town, in every agricultural area, in big factories, in all industries, Trotskyists exist. Trotskyism has been liquidated “finally and irrevocably,” as “finally and irrevocably” as Socialism has been established time without number since Trotsky was expelled in 1927. A classless Society exists, according to the official reports, everyone is “happy and joyous” and singing anthems of praise to Stalin, yet everywhere the purge has to go on ; more shootings and more imprisonments. And this is not the end. Further frame-ups are being prepared. Bucharin and General Putna – and literally hundreds of lesser known communists – are now under arrest. Any breath of criticism against the system is Trotskyism, is terrorism. This state of affairs is what these shameless bureaucrats of the Soviet Union and their hirelings in the Comintern have the impudence to call socialism. The trial is an indictment not of the socialist system but of the rottenness of the regime of the Soviet bureaucrats. The wide discontent of the masses has been laid bare before the whole world.

The Daily Worker, brazen as ever, says the trial is a blow for peace, for socialism and democracy. For Peace ! By the trial and its attendant terrorism, Stalin attempts to wipe out in the Soviet Union any possible rallying centre for working class international action during the next war. That war for him is a war of national defence. He will keep faith with his imperialist allies, and no revolutionary flag will be borne on the bayonets of the Russian army.

Trotskyism stands for world revolution. It is the chief enemy to-day for the bourgeoisie and for the betraying Third International. “Turn imperialist war into civil war.” The Trotskyists alone raise Lenin’s slogan.

The brazen slanderers of the Comintern call Trotsky Fascist, Trotskyists, agents of Fascism. They bring forward no proof in their mock trials, because there is no proof. They know the true revolutionary character of Trotsky’s writing and teaching. But they have to cover up their own vile treachery to the working class, and the further they go along the counter-revolutionary path, the louder they howl against Trotsky, the dirtier the slanders they hurl against him.

They call Trotsky Fascist. They who in the U.S.A. are ready to ally themselves to “sprouting Fascists,” in France with “all sincere Frenchmen” including the Croix de Feu and the National Volunteers, in Italy with the “Old Guard” as well as young Fascists.

The betrayal of the working class can only be done by the working class leaders. In 1914, the bourgeoisie used the Social Democracy. In the coming war, their chief manipulators will be the Communist Party leaders.

Every article in the Daily Worker on the trial ended with an incitement against Trotsky and Trotskyists. Trotsky’s life is in danger from the official communists. We here are prepared for them to attempt the persecution of our comrades. They have done it elsewhere, they will do it here. In Spain today, with lies and slander and demagogy, they incite the workers to shoot the revolutionary fighters of P.O.U.M.

The trials are a pledge from the Stalinists to the bourgeoisie of their good faith as allies in the coming war.

As soon as we have the official account of the trial we shall publish a detailed analysis. Unless one uses their own documents the Stalinists can always escape exposure by denial.

C.L.R. James

Stalinism’s condemnation to death of the revolutionary vanguard, first in Russia and then throughout the world, was the first act by which the Kremlin showed world imperialism how much it could count on it...

The heads that are rolling are those of the communist revolutionaries of the Bolshevik Party, not those of opponents of the revolution.

"We will destroy every enemy, even an old Bolshevik, we will destroy his relatives, his family. Anyone who acts or thinks contrary to the socialist state will be destroyed without mercy."

IV Stalin, November 1937 (Reported in “Stalin’s Loyal Executioner : People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov 1895-1940” by Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov).

All the former proletarian revolutionary leaders were transformed into bandits and puppets by Stalin’s clique in order to definitively discredit any revolutionary tendency that claimed to challenge the bureaucracy that usurped power against the proletariat.

From 1935 onwards, all of Russia would be marked by endless trials, with investigations, denunciations, arrests, torture, and executions of men accused of the worst crimes. Yet, at the top, opposition had completely ceased. It was the working-class base that the bureaucracy began to fear again. This was first evident during the "trade union crisis." Workers largely boycotted the union elections, believing that the unions were nothing more than transmission belts for company managers and that it was not worth the effort to vote for them. Stalin himself held numerous summit meetings to understand what was happening and how to deal with it. The union elections demonstrated this disavowal so strongly that the election results were annulled by Stalin. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was forced to convene a commission which declared : "The trade unions are going through a crisis... Many union members express justified discontent with the activities of the trade unions. They wonder what their usefulness is and what use they can be to the proletarian state and the working masses.... Initiative from below must be allowed, because only the working masses will succeed in raising trade union activities to the necessary level."

It is therefore necessary to launch a campaign against those who will be presented as the enemies of these masses and who will be the object of campaigns of denunciation. This is the preparation for a vast national campaign against those who destroy socialism and covertly attack the workers : hidden enemies !

This is the basis for the upcoming Moscow trials and the campaign to eliminate so-called Trotskyists. It will involve blaming the difficulties suffered by the working masses on scapegoats presented as those responsible for having deceived the people...

The so-called "Trotskyist-Zinovievist Terrorist Centre" trial took place in Moscow from 19 August 1936 to 24 August 1936, with the most well-known defendants :

Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Evdokimov, Ivan Bakayev, Sergei Mrachkovsky, Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan and Ivan Smirnov.

A second trial, known as the Trotskyist Reserve Anti-Soviet Centre, opened on 23 January 1937. This time, 17 people were accused, mainly

Georgy Piatakov, Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov, Nikolai Muralov, Mikhail Boguslavsky and L. Serebriakov.

A third trial opened in May-June 1937. Conducted in secret, it took place behind closed doors and targeted exclusively the highest-ranking generals of the Red Army. Among the accused were :

Mikhail Tukhachevsky (Marshal and Deputy Commissar of Defense), Iona Yakir (Commander of the Kyiv Military District), Ieronim Uborevich (Commander of the Belarusian Military District), Robert Eideman (Head of the Civil Defense Organization), Avgust Kork (Head of the Military Academy), Vitovt Putna (Military Attaché in London), Boris Feldman (Head of the Red Army Administration), and Vitali Primakov (Deputy Commander of the Leningrad Military District).

Yan Gamarnik, head of the political administration of the Red Army, also indicted, committed suicide on May 31, 1937.

The so-called Bloc of Anti-Soviet Rightists and Trotskyists trial took place from March 2 to 13, 1938. The 21 main defendants were :

Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Krestinski, Christian Rakovsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and Arkady Rosengoltz.

They are all accused of treason, espionage, and conspiracy under the name of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization. The defendants allegedly confessed to their participation under torture. They are all sentenced to death by a military tribunal.

But these public trials were only conducted with those leaders who agreed to confess. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of victims received only a bullet in the back of the head without a public trial.

Trotsky’s view in 1936 : "The spiciest dishes are yet to come"

What were the Moscow Trials of 1935-1938 ?

For the first time, in 1935, the Stalinist leadership decided to hold a public trial of the old revolutionary leaders of the Bolshevik Party from October 1917.

This is what Isaac Deutscher reports in his work "Trotsky, the Outlaw Prophet" :

“Moscow had just announced that Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other defendants would soon be tried for treason, conspiracy, and attempted murder of Stalin. A lengthy indictment was then circulated, in which Trotsky was branded the chief instigator… Zinoviev and Kamenev were accused of terrorism and also of collusion with the Gestapo… Later that day, the indictment alleged that it was from Norway that Trotsky was sending terrorists and assassins into the Soviet Union… That same day, August 15, 1936, Trotsky refuted the accusations, describing them in the press as “the greatest forgery in world political history” : “Stalin is staging this trial in order to stifle discontent and opposition. The ruling bureaucracy treats every criticism and every form of opposition as a conspiracy.”

The accusation that he was using Norway as a base for terrorist activity was, he said, aimed at depriving him of asylum and the opportunity to defend himself...

From August 19 to 24, the wireless broadcast the trial transcripts. The prosecutor, the judges, and the accused performed a spectacle so hallucinatory in its masochism and sadism that it seemed beyond human imagination. From the very beginning, it became clear that the stakes in the trial were the heads of the sixteen accused, and with them, the heads of Trotsky and Lyova (in the indictment, Lyova played the role of her father’s chief assistant).

As the proceedings progressed, it became clear that this trial could only be the prelude to the destruction of an entire generation of revolutionaries. But what was even worse was the way the accused were dragged through the mud, forced to crawl to their deaths amidst sickening denunciations and self-denunciations.

Compared to all this, the nightmares of the French Revolution with their carts, the guillotines, the fratricidal struggles of the Jacobins now seemed a drama of sober and solemn dignity.

Robespierre had placed his adversaries in the dock, among thieves and scoundrels, and had overwhelmed them with fantastic charges ; but he had not prevented them from defending their honor and dying fighting, and Danton, at least, was free to exclaim : "After me, it will be your turn, Robespierre !"

But Stalin was driving his broken opponents into the unfathomable depths of self-humiliation, forcing the leaders and thinkers of Bolshevism to behave like miserable medieval women who had to report to the Inquisition all their acts of witchcraft and all the details of their debauchery with the devil.

Here, for example, is the dialogue between Prosecutor Vyshinsky and Kamenev, which took place in front of the whole world :

Vyshinsky : How should we assess your articles and written statements in which you expressed your loyalty to the Party ? Was this a deception ?

Kamenev : No, it was even more serious than deception.

Vyshinsky : A perfidy then ?

Kamenev : Even worse than that.

Vyshinsky : Worse than deception, worse than perfidy ? Then find the word. Was it treason ?

Kamenev : You found the word.

Vyshinsky : Indicted Zinoviev, do you confirm this ?

Zinoviev : Yes.

And here is how Kamenev concludes his mea culpa :

“Twice my life has been spared, but everything has its limits. There is a limit to the magnanimity of the proletariat, and we have reached that limit… We sit on this bench side by side with agents of foreign intelligence. Our weapons were the same, our hands joined before our destinies were united here at this bar. We served fascism, we organized the counterrevolution against socialism. This is the path we have followed, and this is the abyss of despicable perfidy into which we have fallen.”

This is the state Zinoviev was in when he appeared at the trial

Zinoviev came next :

“I am guilty of having been the organizer, as Trotsky’s second-in-command, of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc which set itself the goal of assassinating Stalin, Voroshilov, and other leaders… I plead guilty to having been the principal organizer of Kirov’s assassination. We made an alliance with Trotsky ; my deficient Bolshevism then transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at fascism. Trotskyism is a variety of fascism, and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism.”

Ivan Smirnov, who had defeated Kolchak in the Civil War and had served alongside Trotsky on the Revolutionary Military Council, said :

"There is no other path for our country than the one it is currently following. There is not, and there can be no other direction than the one history has given us. Trotsky, who sends his directives and instructions to terrorists and considers our state a fascist state, is an enemy ; he is on the other side of the barricade."

Mrachkovsky, another old companion of Trotsky, a hero of the Civil War, declared :

"Why did I follow the counter-revolutionary path ? It was my connection with Trotsky that led me to do this. From the day this connection was established, I began to deceive the Party and its leaders."

Bakayev, the fearless head of the Leningrad Cheka during the Civil War and the leader of the 1927 opposition demonstrations, confessed :

"The facts revealed before this court show the whole world that the organizer of this... counter-revolutionary terrorist bloc, its inspirer and animator, is Trotsky... I have risked my life many times in the interests of Zinoviev and Kamenev ; I feel a deep anguish at the thought of having become a docile instrument in their hands, an agent of the counter-revolution, a man who raised his arm against Stalin."

For hours, Vyshinsky, the former Menshevik, who had only joined the Bolshevik procession well after the Civil War, and who now held the office of Prosecutor General, vented his fury and rage in a fit of cleverly affected hysteria :

“These rabid dogs of capitalism have tried to tear limb from limb the best of the best of our Soviet land. They have killed one of the men of the Revolution who was dearest to us, this wonderful, admirable man, as bright and as cheerful as the smile on his lips was always cheerful and as our life is bright and cheerful. They have killed our Kirov, they have wounded us close to the heart… Our enemy is cunning, a cunning enemy cannot be spared… Our entire people are quivering with indignation, and, as the State Prosecutor, I join my voice full of indignation and anger to the rumbling voices of the multitudes… I demand that these dogs who have become rabid be shot, all of them without exception.”

After five days filled with gross vituperation and obscene insults, five days during which the prosecution did not present a single piece of evidence, the court delivered a verdict condemning all the accused to death, and which concluded with the following sentences :

"Lev Davidovich Trotsky and his son Lev Lvovich Sedov... convicted of having directly prepared and personally directed the organization of terrorist activities in the USSR must, if discovered on the territory of the USSR, be immediately arrested and brought before the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR."

On the second day of the trial, Trotsky gave a full interview to Arbeiderbladet, which published it the following day, August 21, on its front page under the headline "Trotsky declares Moscow accusations false" and which left its readers in no doubt that, in this matter, his sympathies were with Trotsky... The latter was suddenly and slyly deprived of this freedom and those who deprived him of it were the men who had just professed their friendship for him, honored him and flattered themselves with having given him refuge. On August 26, exactly one day after the Moscow trial had ended, two senior officers of the Norwegian police called on him to inform him, on orders from the Minister of Justice, that he had committed an offense against the conditions laid down by his residence permit ; and they asked him to sign an undertaking not to interfere in the future, directly or indirectly, orally or in writing, in current political matters relating to other countries…. On August 29, Yakubovich, the Soviet ambassador, had delivered to Oslo an official note demanding Trotsky’s expulsion ; the note insisted that Trotsky was using Norway as a base for conspiracy and it invoked the verdict of the Supreme Court in Moscow… The Norwegian ministers, who were afraid of angering Moscow by allowing Trotsky to conduct his defense in public, therefore decided to intern him…

By 1934, it seemed that Trotskyism had been wiped off the map for good. And yet, two or three years later, Stalin feared it more than ever.

Paradoxically, the great purges and mass deportations that followed Kirov’s assassination gave new life to Trotskyism. The Trotskyists, surrounded by tens and even hundreds of thousands of recently banished people, no longer felt isolated. They were joined by the mass of capitulators, who gloomily reflected that things would never have come to this point if they had stood firm alongside the Trotskyists. Oppositionists, members of younger age groups, Komsomltsy who had first opposed Stalinism long after the defeat of Trotskyism, deviationists of all kinds, ordinary workers deported for petty offenses against labor discipline, malcontents and grumblers who only began to think politically when they found themselves behind barbed wire—all these people formed an immense audience for the Trotskyist veterans. The regime in the concentration camps was becoming more and more cruel. The camp inhabitants had to toil ten or twelve hours a day, and they died of hunger and wasted away from disease, in indescribable filth.

Once again, however, the camps became schools and training grounds for the opposition, and the Trotskyists became unequalled monitors.

They led the deportees in almost all the strikes and hunger strikes ; they demanded improvements in the conditions of life in the camps from the administration ; and, through their reckless, often heroic, conduct, they inspired others with the will to hold out.

Firmly organized, self-disciplined, and politically well-informed, they constituted the true elite of that enormous fraction of the nation that had been forced back behind the barbed wire.

Stalin realized that he would achieve nothing through further persecution. It was hardly possible to add to the torment and oppression, which had only surrounded the Trotskyists with the halo of martyrdom. As long as they lived, they would constitute a threat to him, and with war and its attendant dangers approaching, the potential threat could become real.

We have seen that, since he had seized power, he had had to constantly reconquer it. It was then that he decided to rid himself of the need to continue this reconquest. His goal was to secure it once and for all and against all risks.

And there was only one way to succeed in this enterprise : the complete extermination of all opponents, and above all the Trotskyists.

The Moscow trials were staged to justify this plan, the greater part of which was then carried out, not under the spotlights of the courtrooms, but in the dungeons and camps of the East and the Far North.

An eyewitness, a former inmate of the Vorkuta camp, who, however, was not himself a Trotskyist, describes the Trotskyists’ final activities and their annihilation as follows.

“In this camp alone there were about a thousand long-time Trotskyists who called themselves Bolshevik-Leninists. About five hundred of them worked at the Vorkuta mine and for all the camps in the Pechora district. There were several thousand orthodox Trotskyists, deported since 1927, who remained faithful to their political platform and their leaders to the end… In addition to these genuine Trotskyists,” he continues, “there were at that time, in the camps at Vorkuta and elsewhere, more than a hundred thousand internees who, as members of the Party or Komsomoltsy, had joined the Trotskyist opposition, and then had been, at different times and for different reasons… forced to repent and abandon the ranks of the opposition. Many deportees who had never been members of the Party also considered themselves Trotskyists..." He notes among their leaders VV Kossior, Posnansky, Vladimir Ivanov and other long-time Trotskyists.

"They arrived at the mine in the summer of 1936 and were housed in two large barracks. They categorically refused to work in the shafts. They only did work at the pithead, for eight hours only, and not ten or twelve as required by the regulations and as the other inmates did. They openly ignored the camp regulations. Most of them had already been systematically sent to political isolation camps for almost ten years, first in cells, then to the camps on the Solovetsky Islands, and finally to Vorkuta.

The Trotskyists were the only group of political prisoners who openly criticized the general Stalinist line and who resisted the jailers no less openly and systematically.

In the autumn of 1936, after the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the Trotskyists organized demonstrations at the camp in honor of their executed leaders and comrades. Shortly after, on October 27, they began a hunger strike. And it was in this strike that, according to the account cited above, Trotsky’s youngest son, Sergei, took part. Trotskyists from all the camps in the Pechora rayon joined in, and the strike lasted 132 days. The strikers protested their transfer from all previous places of deportation and the fact that they were being punished without a public trial. They demanded an eight-hour working day, the same diet for all prisoners, regardless of whether or not they met the standard of performance, the separation of political prisoners from common law prisoners, and the transport of invalids, women and the elderly out of the polar camps to regions with a more favourable climate.

The decision to go on hunger strike was taken during a public meeting...

The administration, fearing that their example would spread, transferred the Trotskyists to deserted and half-demolished huts about forty kilometers from the camp.

Of a total of a thousand strikers, several died and only two voluntarily ended the hunger strike.

In March 1937, on orders from Moscow, the camp administration gave in on all points….

One morning, towards the end of March 1938, the roll call of the notorious Trotskyists was held, who received a kilo of bread and the order to prepare their belongings for a new convoy… After fifteen or twenty minutes, a salvo suddenly rang out half a kilometer from the barracks, near the steep bank of the small river called Upper Vorkuta. Then a few isolated shots were heard, as if fired at random, and again there was silence. Soon, near the barracks, the escort of the convoy passed again. And everyone understood in what sort of convoy the prisoners had been sent.

The Moscow Trials by Broué

It seems that 1935 was the year of preparation for the major trials against the old guard. The archives of the Society of Old Bolsheviks and the Association of Former Convicts were combed through by the commissions headed by Yezhov and Malenkov. Some of the future convicts, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yenukidze, Smirnov, had already been in the hands of the NKVD for some time. Pravda of June 5, 1936, set the tone for what would be the new period : "With a firm hand, we will continue to annihilate the enemies of the people, the monsters and Trotskyist furies, whatever their clever camouflage." On July 29, the secretariat sent a circular to local organizations, the text of which is still unknown, but the title of which is given in the Smolensk archives ; It deals with "the terrorist activity of the counter-revolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc" [1].

The machine is in motion, and, from August 1st, the press is filled with information reporting the discovery of counter-revolutionary plots and actions, all "Trotskyist-Zinovievist", the arrest, in all the republics of the USSR, of students, journalists, young communists and workers, like this group of "Trotskyists" who are accused of having "seized" the organization of the party in the famous Vyborg district in Leningrad. On the 11th, the suicide of the first secretary of the Armenian party, Khandjian, is announced. On the 14th, the entire press simultaneously published the news that a new Zinoviev trial was about to open and a decree that seemed to somewhat reverse the draconian provisions of the December 1934 law, since it restored public hearings, the assistance of lawyers and allowed an appeal to the executive against sentences within three days of the pronouncement of the judgment. On August 19, the "Trial of the Sixteen" began, the first of the "Moscow Trials."

The Trial of the Sixteen.

The indictment was published the same day. It was Prosecutor Vyshinsky who presented it before the military tribunal of the Supreme Court of the USSR, composed of three military judges and presided over by Ulrich. The sixteen accused formed, at first glance, a rather heterogeneous group. Among them were, in fact, four of the best-known representatives of the old guard, the former leaders of the "new opposition," Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, and Bakaiev. They had already been convicted several times, including once for complicity in the assassination of Kirov ; they could also include the lesser-known figures of the old leaders, such as Pickel, Zinoviev’s former secretary, and Reingold, Sokolnikov’s former financial collaborator, both, like the previous ones, former members of the United Opposition. The former Trotskyists of the 1923 Opposition, the United Opposition, and the Left Opposition constituted a second group :

Ivan Nikitich Smirnov and Serge Mrachkovsky, former opposition leaders, renounced the struggle in 1928-29. Dreitser, a Red Army officer and close collaborator of Trotsky, whom he supported during the 1926-1927 struggle, and Ter Vaganian, a writer and journalist of the younger generation, also capitulated at this time. A senior official, Goltsmann, visited Trotsky during his deportation, but although he sympathized with the opposition, he was not a member. The last group, finally, was made up of unknown individuals whose interrogation revealed a dark past : Olberg, Berman-Yurin, Fritz David, Moses, and Nathan Lourie. All these men announced that they would plead guilty and refused the assistance of lawyers.

The prosecution’s case claims that at the end of 1932, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, and Ter Vaganyan, "reintegrated ex-Trotskyists," formed a "center" with Zinoviev and Kamenev to prepare and carry out terrorist attacks against the leaders of the party and the country. For this purpose, Trotsky and Sedov sent terrorists, the six unknown persons in the dock, to the USSR, with passports and visas provided by the Gestapo. It was the center that, through Zinoviev, transmitted Trotsky’s order to kill Kirov. There is no material evidence : the indictment is based only on the confessions of the accused, obtained recently, since Kamenev only confessed on July 13, Mrachkovski on the 20th, Pickel on the 23rd and others on the very eve of the trial, Evdokimov on August 12, Smirnov on the 13th, Ter Vagaman on the 14th.

The center’s contacts with Trotsky are attested by Goltsmann, who says he had an interview with Sedov in November 1932 at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen, then with Trotsky himself in the same city, and received instructions from him to develop terrorism. Mrachkovsky states that in December 1934 he received, through Dreitser, who had met Sedov in Berlin, a letter from Trotsky written in invisible ink, setting as his task "the assassination of Stalin and Voroshilov." Moïse Lourie admits to having received instructions from Trotsky in March 1933 in Berlin from Ruth Fischer and Maslow. Bakaiev accuses himself of having overseen the preparations for Kirov’s assassination. Other defendants confessed to having prepared assassination attempts on the lives of various figures, including Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Ordzhonikidze, Kossior, and Postyshev. The leaders admitted to having personally participated in organizing these crimes. "We were burning with hatred," [2] Zinoviev asserted, after Kamenev had said : "What guided us was boundless hatred against the leadership of the party and the country, a thirst for power." [3]

Prosecutor Vyshinsky demanded the death penalty for "these clowns, these pygmies," "these adventurers who tried to trample with their muddy feet the most fragrant flowers in our socialist garden" [4] : "These rabid dogs must be shot." The press orchestrated the indictment in the same style ; Izvestia of August 23 wrote : "They have nothing in their souls, if not a bestial hatred matured over ten years against our sun Stalin and the victorious genius of counter-revolutionary impurity." On the 24th, all the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. Izvestia celebrated "humanism alone, [...] the defense of the regime which, under the leadership of the great Stalin, assures millions of men a new life, a free life." On the 25th, the sixteen condemned men were executed. Pravda writes : "Since this has been done, we breathe better, the air is cleaner, our muscles acquire a new life, our machines work more happily, our hands are more nimble."

The problems posed by the confessions of the Sixteen.

Although the official version of the trial, the prosecution’s theory, was accepted with reservations by Stalin’s supporters and "friends of the USSR" throughout the world, a careful reading of the official documents alone reveals a series of contradictions and impossibilities, not to mention improbabilities, which allow it to be considered one of the most poorly staged judicial mockeries of all time.

First, there is the problem of the absentees. Vyshinsky speaks of twelve defendants who are the subject of a special investigation, but who will never appear in public before a tribunal : Dimitri Schmidt, one of the leaders of the Red Army, a legendary supporter of the civil war, who, according to him, was the organizer of the terrorist groups ; the old Bolshevik Gertik, already convicted in January 1935 and who is accused of having participated with Matorin, another of Zinoviev’s secretary, in the preparation of Kirov’s murder ; Gaven, a Latvian communist, a friend of Smilga, accused of having served as an intermediary and transmitted Trotsky’s "terrorist directives" to Smirnov in 1932. These men died or will die without having been tried and without having confessed. The prosecution does not seem to be concerned with making its thesis coincide with that which it had defended at the trial of January 1935, in which only four defendants, out of nineteen convicted at that time, are again answerable for the murder of Kirov. No reference will be made, as would seem normal, to the other previous trials related to the case, that of the heads of the NKVD, of Leningrad or the second Kamenev trial. Nor is there any mention of the Latvian consul, Bisseneks, who, in 1934, allegedly gave 5,000 rubles to Nicolaiev, offering to put him in touch with Trotsky. In fact, any honest man, reading in 1936 the stenographed reports of the trial of the Sixteen, could, without waiting for Khrushchev’s "revelations" in 1956, persuade himself of the innocence of all the defendants with regard to the murder of Kirov.

Moreover, the confessions themselves are full of contradictions regarding the terrorist acts and instructions. Dreitser admits to having made visible to the naked eye, before transmitting it to Mrachovsky, the message written by Trotsky in invisible ink. Mrachovsky in turn admits to having received it and made it visible. No one is concerned about this contradiction. The other attacks are, at most, "crimes of intent" : Berman-Yurin admits to having wanted to kill Stalin at the 18th plenary assembly of the International’s executive, but was unable to enter the room. Fritz David was able to enter, but not approach Stalin. Vyshinsky, recalling these two confessions, maintains that they correspond to the truth since Trotsky had developed, in 1927, his "Clemenceau thesis"... Nathan Lourie wanted to shoot Voroshilov whose car went too far ; he also thought of assassinating Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze at a meeting in Chelyabinsk, but, in the end, he did not go.

The "material evidence" invoked by the prosecution is no more solid than the confessions. The fact that Olberg, a Latvian citizen, has a Honduran passport obviously proves nothing, unless one firmly believes that only the Gestapo can issue such passports. Vyshinsky brandishes as evidence a letter from Trotsky, discovered according to him in a secret wall of Goltsmann’s suitcase, in which the opposition leader says that Stalin must be "removed." It is in fact an open letter, published worldwide in 1932, which contains the following sentence : "We must, finally, carry out Lenin’s last and urgent advice : remove Stalin," which at least proves that, if Trotsky gave "terrorist directives," he was in good company. The prosecutor has great difficulty coordinating the indications provided by the confessions and making them coincide with the prosecution’s. The act maintains that the center operated from 1932 to 1936. Now Zinoviev and Kamenev, who confessed, were in exile from 1932 to 1933, were arrested in December 1934 and have not been out of prison since. Mrachkovski, another member of the center, was during this time in Kazakhstan. As for Smirnov, he has not left prison since January 1, 1933. Vyshinsky will have to conclude that, "if the center functioned, it was thanks to well-organized connections which allowed, even those who were not at liberty, [...] to participate in its direction" [5] ; but he does not give the slightest indication of the nature of these "connections."

The "stenographic report" certainly includes significant cuts : Vyshinsky’s indictment declares inadmissible the comparisons made by the accused with the anti-Tsarist terrorism of the 19th century, while there is no trace of these comparisons in the text. The very thesis of "confessions" begins to waver as soon as one reads the "summarized" passages of the report. Thus, Ter Vaganian is said to have tried to trick by replacing (in Trotsky’s instructions) the word "terror" with the phrase "energetic struggle against the leaders of the Communist Party." Later, however, he had to admit that these were instructions whose "content was terrorism, and terrorism only" [6]. Similarly, "Smirnov denies his direct participation in terrorist activities. [...] The accused confesses only when the prosecution has confused him with irrefutable facts" [7]. Smirnov’s interrogation lasted three hours : a brief dialogue shows that he is not confessing, since he denies having been part of the center :

VYSHINSKY : When did you leave the center ?

SMIRNOV. - I had no intention of leaving, there was nowhere to go.

VYSHINSKY. - Did the center exist ?

SMIRNOV. - Was this a center ?

In his indictment, Vyshinsky returns to Smirnov’s resistance, who ultimately confessed only as a joke, offering himself as leader to his co-accused since they insisted on it. He had previously denied for months "His entire interrogation on May 20th is summed up in these words : ’I deny this, I deny it again, I deny everything’" [8].

The most docile defendants hint at resistance in the use of double-edged language that ultimately casts doubt on the authenticity of their statements. What other meaning can there be in the last statements of Evdokimov, who has admitted everything he was accused of ? "Who will believe," he cries, "a single word we say ? […] Who will believe us, who are before the tribunal as a counter-revolutionary gang of bandits, as allies of fascism and the Gestapo ?" [9]. In the mouth of Kamenev, who in his later years studied Machiavelli and Loyola, some lines have curious resonances, as when, after having meekly answered, as Vyshinsky would have it, that the thirst for power had led him into the ranks of the counter-revolution, which the prosecutor immediately translates as "fighting socialism", he eagerly agrees : "You draw the conclusion of a historian and a prosecutor" [10]. Even the crushed man that is Zinoviev asserts a surge of dignity by saying how much he suffers from being in the dock between an Olberg and a Nathan Lourié, which makes no sense if one accepts with the prosecution that he is their leader.

Soon, moreover, the precarious edifice collapses under the investigations of those who verify what is verifiable. We learn from Denmark that the Bristol Hotel, where Goltsmann confessed to having met Sedov at the end of December 1935, was demolished in 1917 and that there is no longer a hotel of that name in Copenhagen. Sedov proves, moreover, through testimonies as well as his visas from the time that he never went to Copenhagen. The depositions of the last days will be modified accordingly, Berman-Yurin and Fritz David no longer speaking of Sedov’s presence in Copenhagen, and Olberg suddenly presenting a version in which Sedov’s wife replaced her husband, who was unable to attend.

Meaning and scope of the trial of the Sixteen.

The political objective of this trial can be read between the lines of the prosecutor Vyshinsky, a lifelong political adversary of the accused, since he was a Menshevik before being a Stalinist. Thus he returns to the 1935 trial to press Zinoviev to make, this time, sufficient confessions : "Zinoviev even had the effrontery to claim that he and his fifteen accomplices were subjectively loyal to the working class and did not want to embark on the path of counter-revolution, but that objectively things had turned out differently. […] I would like Zinoviev, in his defense speech, to tell us how it happened that, subjectively loyal to the working class, he objectively turned to the other path. [...] Such things do not happen. [...] If, objectively, things actually took this turn, it is only because your subjective loyalty to the revolution, accused Zinoviev, was false and rotten. I ask you to tell us about this too" [11]. This "slumped old man", whom Ciliga glimpsed barefoot in a prison yard in 1935, is in fact asked to complete his condemnation by condemning all opposition, to dishonour it by dishonouring himself, to help Stalin reach Trotsky, to serve as an example and a warning, by his humiliation and his death, to all of Stalin’s adversaries.

For the names of the men implicated in the "confessions" of the defendants in the August trial are those of the flower of the Bolshevik Party, "all the surviving members of the Central Committee that made October," as Leon Sedov noted : Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Shlyapnikov, Sokolnikov, Serebryakov, Smilga, Pyatakov, Karl Radek, the Civil War generals Putna, Schmidt, and others. With them and through them are threatened all the opponents of the past, even when they have since renounced and laid down their arms, in fact, all opposition, virtual, all alternative leadership. No member of the Left Opposition figures among the accused, all of whom had long ago broken with Trotsky and agreed to play the role of accusers against him on behalf of Stalin, Pickel even before the 15th Congress, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Evdokimov since January 1928. The process of amalgamation, which would become familiar, consisted of presenting these men as if they were opponents, and judging them at the same time as others with highly suspect pasts who accused them. Moïse Lourié, for several years, had become the specialist in anti-Trotskyist articles in the Correspondance internationale, under the name of Emel. Olberg had tried, in 1931, to become Trotsky’s secretary, and had been sidelined precisely because of his dubious personality. Fritz David had been Wilhelm Pieck’s secretary and, as such, involved in all the internal struggles of the German party. All these little-known men, docile instruments of the accusation, probably linked to the GPU or held by it, seem to have been chosen from circles close to the German Communist Party in order to support the theory of relations with the Gestapo.

For the prosecution’s case to have political significance, it is obviously necessary for the traitors themselves to glorify Stalin and celebrate his victory. They do not fail to do so. Reingold declares : "Zinoviev said : ’Stalin concentrates in himself the strength and firmness of the leadership. He must therefore be eliminated’" [12]. Mrachkovsky affirms : "The hope in the collapse of party policy must be considered doomed" [13]. Smirnov : "Our country has no other path than the one it is pursuing and there can be no other direction than that given to us by history" [14]. Kamenev : "The policy of the party, the policy of its leadership has triumphed in the only sense in which the victory of socialism is possible" [15]. And, in his last statement : "I adjure my sons to use their lives to defend the great Stalin" [16].

The glorification of Stalin is accompanied by the litany against Trotsky, "the man who pushed me to crime," says David [17], "the soul and organizer of the terrorist bloc," says Bakaiev [18]. Mrachkovsky accuses him of having "engaged him in the path of counter-revolution" ; his old friend Smirnov says that he is an "enemy [...] on the other side of the barricade" [19]. Zinoviev affirms : "Trotskyism is a variety of fascism and Zinovievism is a variety of Trotskyism" [20]. There is more here than a rite, and more also than an operation for internal use intended to discredit Trotsky in the eyes of what remains of the workers’ vanguard in the USSR and in the world.

On July 19, 1936, the Spanish military uprising triggered a workers’ and peasants’ revolution that triumphed in the Republican zone : at its head were Stalin’s irreducible opponents, the revolutionary syndicalists of the CNT, the dissident communists led by the former Trotskyist Andres Nin. The Spanish revolution was a direct threat to the European status quo, an obstacle to the USSR’s search for bourgeois allies, since, even more than the prospect of the extension of the German and Italian zone of influence into the Mediterranean, it frightened the capitalist political circles of England and France. Stalin, who, in the first weeks of the conflict, aligned himself with the policy of non-intervention advocated by France and demanded by England, would soon intervene in Spain. The Russian military aid that would allow the Republican army to hold out during the last months of 1936 was, politically, a counter-fire, because the Russian advisors supported the moderate forces in the Republican camp, allowing them to slow down and then stop the revolutionary momentum. Stalin killed two birds with one stone, simultaneously consecrating the communists as champions of anti-fascism, conceived as an alliance of "all democrats" against the fascists, a reflection in each country of the coalition he wanted to form in Europe between the Western democracies and the USSR against the Rome-Berlin axis. The fight against the revolutionary elements in Spain was both a guarantee given to future allies from the point of view of social and political conservation and an aspect of the Russian bureaucracy’s struggle to maintain its monopoly on the advanced working-class sectors. From September 1936, military and political advisers, specialists from the NKVD, arrived in Spain to undertake the liquidation of all extremist revolutionary elements. Seen from this perspective, the trial of the Sixteen was an operation intended to facilitate Stalin’s new foreign policy, at the same time as a psychological preparation for the war against fascism alongside the capitalist democracies, a perspective that not only excluded revolution, but obliged it to be fought as a direct threat to the USSR’s alliance system [21].

The trial is therefore only the most spectacular aspect of a vast political campaign. In the USSR, it is the pretext and the cover for the new campaign of purging the party which is launched from the secret instruction of July 29. Since there are hardly any masked opponents left to unmask, they begin to exclude anyone in the past who had, with a Zinovievist or a Trotskyist, even a tenuous link, like, in Kozalsk, one of the Smolensk branches, a militant who, in 1927, had held the platform of the opposition in his hands, a second who "had given a favorable description of a Trotskyist" or a third who had simply been a student at the institute of the Red professors. All the meetings end with a tribute to "the vigilance and sagacity of the beloved leader, Comrade Stalin" [22].

It is clear, however, that the Trial of the Sixteen missed its target. Kamenev and Zinoviev, by admitting the thirst for power as their motive, did Stalin a poisoned service : by denying having had a program different from his, they clearly implied that it was, on both sides, only about power : Pravda of September 12, 1936, recorded the blow and indicated the direction to follow for the trials to come : "The accused tried to conceal the true aims of their action. They replied that they had no program. Yet they had one, that of the destruction of socialism and the restoration of capitalism." During the next trial, the accused would indeed admit to having had a "program."

Towards the second trial.

It is likely, however, that the conditions of the first trial provoked resistance or hesitation in ruling circles, even those very close to Stalin, about which we have little information. After the accused indicted Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, an investigation was opened against them. Vyshinsky, by announcing this before the tribunal, simultaneously triggered the traditional shower of resolutions and messages demanding their punishment. Hunted, sensing what awaited him, Tomsky committed suicide on August 23. However, on September 10, a statement published in Pravda announced that the investigation into Bukharin and Rykov had ended with a dismissal, "no legal basis" for accusation having been found against them. Most historians assume, rightly it seems, that such a conclusion of the investigation marked a step backward from the initial plans. For the moment, we must give up on the events that thus slowed down the repression already directed at the right-wingers at that date.

Schapiro believes that in any case it was this decision to dismiss the case concerning the two former leaders of the right that was at the origin of a strong reaction from Stalin and a worsening of the crisis. He relies on Khrushchev, who places the beginning of what he calls "mass repression" at the end of September. It was, in fact, on September 25, according to him, that Stalin and Zhdanov, on vacation in Sochi, on the shores of the Black Sea, telegraphed to "Kaganovich, Molotov and other members of the Politburo" that it was "necessary and urgent to appoint Ezhov to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs" (NKVD), and commented : "Yagoda has shown himself definitively incapable of unmasking the Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc. The GPU is four years behind" [23].

Yezhov’s appointment was announced in Pravda on the 27th : "transferred" to the PTT, Yagoda would in turn be purged a few months later. It was probably during this period that the leadership of the NKVD was reorganized under Yezhov’s thumb and that the former Chekists who had led it since the time of the Civil War, Pauker, Trilisser, Agranov and others, disappeared : the only survivor of Yagoda’s six deputies, Zakovsky, whose role in fabricating confessions at the trials was highlighted by Khrushchev in 1956, was also the only one whose first service in the political police was after the Civil War and who was thus able to escape suspicion of sympathizing with the Old Bolsheviks. Arrests among the latter multiplied, only a very small number of whom would appear at the second trial. It is worth noting that persistent rumors at the time attributed to Ordzhonikidze efforts to stop the coups threatening the old guard and to protect, in particular, his deputy Pyatakov, whose past as an opponent promised him a leading role in an upcoming trial. At the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev partially confirmed these rumors by revealing that Sergo Ordzhonikidze, whose death was to be announced on February 18, 1937, had in fact committed suicide because he "no longer wanted to have anything to do with Stalin and share the responsibility for his abuses of power" [24].

Nor do we have much precise information about the trial for sabotage and terrorism that took place in Novosibirsk from 19 to 22 November 1936, in which, out of nine accused described as "Trotskyists," six were sentenced to death and executed. The fact that the nine were presented as agents of Pyatakov, against whom the testimony of his friend Drobnis was produced, suggests a staged attack similar to that of July 1935 against Kamenev, designed to break the resistance and extract a confession from a man around whom the net was tightening, since his wife had already been arrested eight months before him, and since, according to the report of his trial, he only consented to the first confession in December 1936.

The second trial.

The second trial took place from January 23 to 30, 1937, before the same court, President Ulrich, and Prosecutor Vyshinsky. The eighteen defendants were chosen using the now classic method of amalgamation. Pyatakov was the main figure in the group of old Bolsheviks, along with Karl Radek : the former was still a member of the Central Committee, and the latter was an editor at Izvestia and co-author of the Constitution a few weeks earlier. Serebryakov, a former party secretary, a repentant oppositionist, and a railway administrator, and Sokolnikov, deputy commissar for the forest industry and deputy member of the Central Committee, were also from the old guard. The old Bolsheviks, former Decists, Drobnis and Boguslavsky, had also recanted their ideas, as had Livschitz, a former member of the United Opposition, and held important positions in the economic administration. Nikolai Muralov, Trotsky’s old friend, is the only one of the former opponents who, before his last arrest, had never signed a declaration of repentance. A second group of accused is composed of economic officials, Kniazev and Turok, of the railways, Rataitchak and Shestov, of the chemical industry, all old communists, Norkin and Pushin, more recent communists and important administrators, the non-party Stroilov, chief engineer of the Ruznetsk coal trust. Finally, Arnold, a non-party "chauffeur" with multiple identities, and Hrasche, presented as a "professor" and a "spy," form the now indispensable group of shady characters, probably playing the role of informers.

The general outline of the trial differs little from the previous one. Pyatakov and his companions are accused of having organized a "reserve center," a replacement leadership intended to eventually take over from the "Trotskyist-Zinovievist center" destroyed during the first trial. They acknowledge this and provide a wealth of detail about their relations with the leaders of the first "center" and with Trotsky. A former Izvestia correspondent, Romm, testifies that he met Trotsky in Paris at the end of July 1933 and that he received written instructions from him, which he brought back to Radek. Radek claims to have destroyed the texts, but gives their content : defeatism and terrorism were Trotsky’s instructions. Pyatakov states that in December 1935, from Berlin, where he was on an official mission, he flew to Oslo, where he met Trotsky in his house : Trotsky gave him instructions for sabotage and terrorism and informed him of his talks with Rudolf Hess, the Nazi minister, Hitler’s deputy, and of the agreements they had concluded for their common struggle against the USSR. Pyatakov and Radek further acknowledge their direct responsibility for all terrorist acts, committed or not, attributed to the action groups dependent on one or the other center, from the murder of Kirov to those - only planned - of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Kossior, Postychev, Eikhe, Chuhar and other lesser figures of the regime. The officials of the economic administration, from Serebryakov, the old Bolshevik, to Stroilov, the non-party man, confess to an impressive list of acts of sabotage that range from the systematic setting of very low labor standards for railway workers to the organization of derailments, including plans to reduce coal production by 80%, the organization of explosions in mines with the aim of killing as many Stakhanovite workers as possible, that of "intoxications" or "mass poisonings," the squandering of public funds, the systematic delay, of up to three months, in the payment of workers’ wages, the withdrawal from circulation of locomotives in good working order and their replacement by unrepaired machines. Kniazev, alone, admits to the organization of fifteen serious train accidents and 1,600 breakdowns. All declare that in this sabotage campaign, they have applied the directives given by Trotsky. The lesser-known of the accused also claim to have been agents of foreign intelligence services : Stroilov from Germany, Kniazev from Japan, Rataitchak being, according to Vyshinsky, "perhaps a Polish and perhaps German spy" [25] and Hrasche eating, like him, from several troughs.

After this unveiling of turpitudes, Vyshinsky undertakes, in his indictment, to demonstrate, by going back to Trotsky’s activity before the revolution, how the opposition was doomed to end in sabotage and treason. Thirteen defendants are sentenced to death, including Pyatakov, Muralov, Serebryakov, Boguslavsky, Drobnis. Arnold and Stroilov are sentenced to ten and five years in prison. Two of the stars of the trial, Sokolnikov and Radek, are spared, being sentenced only to ten years in prison. As after the first trial, before and after the execution, the press takes up in chorus Vyshinsky’s vituperations against the condemned, "professional criminals with the cold blood of a viper" [26].

Problems posed by the second trial.

The second trial may not have been prepared by the same men ; it was undoubtedly prepared in the same offices, by specialists trained at the same school. Here too, it is clear that only those who confessed appear : all the files are numbered, Arnold has the number 36, which suggests that there are at least nineteen absentees. Their names are also cited during the proceedings, whether they are those responsible or those who carried out the crimes : Priobrazhensky is designated by Radek as a member of the center, Beloborodov, Boudou Mdivani, Kolziouhinski, to limit himself to the most well-known, are mentioned several times. Neither of them will ever appear in a public trial. The prosecution tries several times to have the accused confirm the confessions made by those convicted in the first trial, particularly with regard to the Kirov assassination. But the change of direction, the broadening of the range of "confessed" crimes forced the prosecutor to contest the confessions of those convicted in 1936, when he exclaimed : "When we began to unravel more and more the abject skeins of their monstrous crimes, we discovered at every step the lies and deception of these men who were already one foot in the grave" [27].

None of the accused resisted, as Smirnov had attempted. Several, however, denied certain accusations and made ambiguous confessions. Pyatakov refused to admit that at the beginning of his "Trotskyist" activity, he knew it would lead him to treason and thus dealt a blow to the thesis of Trotskyism, a conscious betrayal. He denied any preparation for an attack on Stalin until too many other testimonies had been presented to him for him to continue without demolishing the entire edifice. Soon it would become known for certain that two testimonies, two major confessions, were false : the Oslo interview could not have taken place, if only because no foreign traveler had flown to Norway during the period indicated, and because the circumstances of Trotsky’s stay did not allow him to receive such a visit in conditions of secrecy. Furthermore, he was under the surveillance of the French police in Saint-Palais at the time Romm claims to have met him in Paris. But the questionnaire drawn up by Trotsky to clarify Pyatakov’s testimony was obviously not submitted to him : as the opposition leader feared, Pyatakov was executed on February 1, before world opinion could exert sufficient pressure to have him interrogated again.

In fact, nothing remains today of the accusations and confessions from the second trial either. The "Oslo trip" does not exist any more than the Bristol Hotel. When, at the Nuremberg trials, the Russian prosecutor faced the principal leaders of Nazi Germany, and in particular Rudolf Hess, he did not ask any questions about the latter’s interviews with Trotsky, the basis of the treason charge at the 1937 trial, despite the protests of Natalia Sedova and Trotsky’s political friends. This silence and that of the German archives on this point clearly establish the falsification. In January 1937, Muralov, the Old Bolshevik, and Arnold, the adventurer, had confessed to a failed attack on Molotov’s automobile in Prokopievsk in 1934. Muralov was executed. At the 22nd Congress, Shvernik, chairman of the Control Commission, said, speaking of Molotov’s "cynicism" : "During a trip to Prokopyevsk in 1934, the right wheels of his car slipped into a hollow in the road. None of the passengers were injured. This episode later served as a pretext for a version of an "attack" on Molotov’s life, and a group of innocent people were convicted because of it." [28]

The meaning of the trial.

In fact, the key to the trial lies in the official stenographic report, and in particular in the interrogation and statements of Karl Radek, the true spokesman for the prosecution in the dock, one of the rare survivors of the trials, spared visibly as a reward for the role he had played in them. One of the most remarkable men of his generation for his intellectual abilities, close to the opposition from 1923 to 1926, an active member of it from 1926 to 1928, he had abandoned it in 1929 and would be, from that date, one of Trotsky’s targets, who accused him in particular of having denounced Blumkin to the GPU and of having become a real informer. A highly talented actor, Radek is perfectly at ease in front of the court facing Vyshinsky, whom he occasionally puts in his place with a sharp word, nonchalantly denounces all the accomplices of the center, Bukharin and Rykov, exonerated four months earlier, Putna, a collaborator of Tukhachevsky, on whom he will leave a suspicion hanging, only to clear him of it the next day. Above all, he makes a final statement in which he humorously throws out some information on the conditions of the investigation and gives the trial its full political significance.

Protesting against certain characterizations applied to the accused by the prosecutor, he begins by recalling that the entire trial is based on confessions. "The trial," he says, "has two central points. It has exposed the preparation for war and has shown that the Trotskyist organization has become the agency of those forces preparing the new world war. What is the evidence of this fact ? The evidence is the statements of two men : mine, in which I stated that I received directives and letters—which I burned, unfortunately—from Trotsky, and the statements of Pyatakov, who spoke with Trotsky. All other testimony is based on ours. If you are dealing only with mere common criminals, with informers, how can you be certain that what we have said is the truth, the unshakable truth ?" [...] It goes without saying that the prosecutor and the court, who know the whole history of Trotskyism, who know us, have no reason to suspect us, who are dragging around this ball and chain that is terrorism, of having added to it for our own pleasure that of state treason. It is useless to try to persuade you. But we must first try to persuade the Trotskyist lunatics scattered and prowling around the country who have not yet laid down their arms, who are dangerous and must understand that we are telling here with deep emotion the truth and nothing but the truth," this truth which, according to him, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Mrachkovsky concealed, since "Kamenev preferred to perish like a bandit without a political program" [29].

Radek therefore undertakes to demonstrate how Trotskyism leads to treason, because Stalin’s power is too strong. "The old Trotskyists," he says, "maintained that it was impossible to build socialism in a single country : that is why it was necessary to accelerate the revolution in the West. Now this is what is offered to them : in the West, no revolution is possible ; for this reason, destroy socialism in the USSR. That socialism is being built in our country is a fact that no one can fail to see. » Radek explains that, if he did not denounce the conspiracy, when he learned of the alliance between Trotsky and Hitler, it was on the one hand because "Soviet justice is not a chopping machine" and "because there was a significant layer of people whom we had brought into this path of struggle who did not know, I would say, the essential principles of the organization, who wandered in the dark." Not without a certain black humor, he confesses : "I must say that it was not me who was tortured, but that it was I who tortured the investigators by forcing them to do useless work. For two and a half months, I forced the investigating judge, through interrogations and by contrasting my statements with those of the other accused, to reveal the whole picture before me, so that I would know who had confessed, who had not confessed, to what extent the confessions were made by each. "And he tells how, last of all, he "confessed everything", making himself the director of the show : according to Krivitzki, it was an interview with Stalin that made him decide to "continue the investigation against himself" [30].

Radek’s conclusion is a political call for sacred union intended to disarm any virtual opposition : "There are in this country half-Trotskyists, quarters of Trotskyists, eighths of Trotskyists, people who have helped us, unaware of the existence of the terrorist organization, having sympathy for us and who, out of liberalism or a rebellious spirit towards the party, have helped us. We say to these people : when there is a straw in the mass of a large hammer, the danger is not yet great ; but, when the straw is in a propeller, it can lead to a catastrophe. We are in a period of extreme tension, a pre-war period. To all these elements, […] we say : anyone who feels in his relations with the party the slightest crack in his confidence must know that tomorrow he may become a diversionist, a traitor, if he does not apply himself to repairing this crack by total sincerity before the party. Secondly, we must tell the Trotskyist elements of France, Spain and other countries - there are such elements - that the experience of the Russian Revolution has shown that Trotskyism is the saboteur of the workers’ movement. We must warn them that they will pay with their heads if they do not profit from our experience. Finally, we must tell the whole world, to all those who fight for peace, that Trotskyism is an instrument of the warmongers" [31].

A cynical Stalinist, Radek does not provide Stalin with free services. He intends to be rewarded for them and underlines their value : "When Nicholas Ivanovich Muralov, the man closest to Trotsky, whom I believed was ready to die in prison without uttering a word, when this man made his declarations and justified them by saying that he did not want to die with the idea that his name could become the flag of all the counter-revolutionary rabble, well, that is the most profound result of this trial" [32]. Through his mouth is expressed the necessity that is imposed on Stalin if he wants to preserve his threatened regime : it is necessary to overcome the diffuse opposition within the country, it is necessary to ensure the monopoly of the communist parties over the workers of France, Spain and elsewhere, it is necessary to win the alliance of the Western powers to ensure peace by maintaining the status quo. The condition of this victory is the prior destruction of the Trotskyist opposition, of the organization for the Fourth International, which must be annihilated because it threatens the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, both internally and externally : it is in this sense that the Muralov "confession" is "the most profound result of the trial," because it, and it alone, is a real defeat for Trotsky.

Here too, however, the result appears slim, with the benefit of hindsight : while in Spain and France the NKVD killers are committed to the systematic liquidation of Trotsky’s supporters and revolutionaries : anti-Stalinists in general, assassinating, in France, the Czechoslovak Klement and the Pole Reiss, then Leon Sedov himself, in Spain, the leader of the POUM Andres Nin, the Austrian Kurt Landau, the Czech Erwin Wolf, the German Moulin and many others, it is inevitably led to strike in the USSR even well beyond the numerically reduced core of the "Trotskyists" and to exterminate the entire old guard of Bolsheviks and foreign communists residing in the USSR, the very cadres of the party and the International.

Closed trial and liquidation without judgment.

A whole series of arrests immediately followed the Pyatakov trial. Bukharin and Rykov were probably arrested at this time, as was the jurist Pashukanis, whom Pravda attacked on January 20. Ordzhonikidze’s suicide on February 18 was another aspect of the struggle taking place within the apparatus, of which the plenary assembly of the Central Committee, which took place between February 23 and March 5, was only one episode. The Pravda communiqué of March 6 stated that "the question of the anti-Party activity of Bukharin and Rykov was examined" and that their expulsion from the party had been decided. Krivitsky and the authors of Stalinist assert that Bukharin and Rykov, taken from prison for the occasion, attended the assembly and pleaded not guilty in vain. The report made by Khrushchev in Moscow and published in Pravda on March 17 seems to confirm the presence of the two men at the Central Committee : "They came to the assembly to deceive it, [...] they did not take the path of repentance" and must be considered as "enemies of the party and the working class."

"If Stalin were about to return to the path of revolution, he would not have exterminated and demoralized the revolutionaries. In the final analysis, Mussolini is right when he writes in the "Giornale d’Italia" that "no one so far has dealt a harsher blow to the ideal of communism (of the proletarian revolution) nor exterminated communists with such ferocity as Stalin."

Leon Trotsky – March 9, 1938
The Trial of the 21

Trial report

"Even before it was over, the Moscow trial had already tired public opinion with the accumulation of incredible absurdities. It was possible for any average journalist to write in advance the text of the speech to be delivered the next day by Prosecutor Vyshinsky ; only, perhaps, the quantity of crude insults could be underestimated.

Vyshinsky’s case is linked to the political trial. During the revolution, he was in the White camp. Having changed his orientation after the final victory of the Bolsheviks, he long felt humiliated and watched. Today, he has his revenge. He can mock Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, whose names he had to pronounce with exaggerated respect for many years. Meanwhile, ambassadors Troyanovsky, Maisky, Suritz, each of whom has a past as fraught as Vyshinsky, are explaining to the public opinion of civilized humanity that they followed the precepts of the October Revolution, while Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, Trotsky, and many others betrayed these teachings, as they have always betrayed. Everything is turned upside down.

From the conclusions that Vyshinsky will have to deliver at the end of the last series of trials, it emerges that the Soviet state is a centralized apparatus of treason. The heads of government and the majority of the People’s Commissars (Rykov, Kamenev, Rudzutak, Smirnov, Yakovlev, Rosengoltz, Chernov, Grinko, Ivanov, Ossinsky and others) ; the great Soviet diplomats (Rakovsky, Sokolnikov, Krestinsky, Kavatchan, Bogomolov, Yurenev and others) ; all the leaders of the Comintern (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek) ; the most important leaders of the economy (Pyatakov, Smirnov, Serebryakov, Lifshitz and others) ; the best captains and leaders of the Red Army (Chukhachevsky, Mrachkovsky, Alksnis, Admiral Orlov and others) ; the most outstanding worker-revolutionaries that Bolshevism has produced in the last 35 years (Tomsky, Evdokimov, Smirnov, Bakayev, Serebryakov, Bugulansky, Mrachkovsky) ; the leaders and members of the governments of the Russian Soviet Republics (Sulimov, Varvara Yakoleva) ; all the leaders without exception of the 30 Soviet Republics, that is, the leaders of the national liberation movements (Budu Midvani, Okudzhava, Kavtaradze, Chervyakov, Goloded, Skrypnik, Lyubshanko, Nestor Lakoba, Faisal Khodzaev, Ikramov and dozens of others) ; the leaders of the GPU of the last ten years (Yagoda and his collaborators) ; Last but not least, the members of the all-powerful Politburo, which is in fact the supreme power in the country : Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin, Rudzutak – all participated in the conspiracy against Soviet power even during the years when it was still in their hands. As agents of foreign powers, all of them tried to dismantle the Soviet federation they had created and to enslave to fascism the peoples for whose liberation they had fought for decades.

In their criminal activities, ministers, marshals, and ambassadors invariably submitted to a single person. Not an official leader, but an outlaw. At his mere sign, veterans of the revolution became agents of Hitler and the Mikado. On Trotsky’s "instructions," transmitted through a casual correspondent from the Tass agency, the leaders of industry, transport, and agriculture destroyed the country’s productive forces, as well as its cultural wealth. On an order sent from Norway or Mexico by the "enemy of the people," Far Eastern railway workers destroyed military convoys, and venerated Kremlin doctors poisoned their patients.

The revelations of the recent trials have led Vyshinsky to paint a very strange picture of the Soviet state ! But that’s the difficulty. The totalitarian regime is the dictatorship of the apparatus. If all the key positions in the apparatus belonged to Trotskyists who were entirely devoted to me, why then is Stalin in the Kremlin and I in exile ?

Everything is turned upside down in this trial. The enemies of the October Revolution present themselves as its executors – the careerists boast of being the champions of its ideals, the specialists in falsification are the investigating judges, the prosecutors and the judges in court. (…) »

Leon Trotsky – March 10, 1938

The rest
In the press

In the highly charged news of the summer of 1936, the first trial occupied a more than honorable place. A large number of newspapers devoted several columns to the event. However, journalists seemed disoriented when it came to commenting on the trial and generally relied on the widely reproduced Havas agency "commentary" : "The proceedings progressed in a tangle of confessions and half-confessions, of partial denials concerning points of no interest... As in the previous proceedings, the accused defended themselves on nuances of interpretation, doctrine, and tones of intention that only those initiated into Russian revolutionary activity followed with interest... There seems no doubt that the accusation was partly founded. It is, however, impossible to say to what extent it was." A very small minority of newspapers, both right-wing and left-wing, expressed their conviction in the innocence of the accused. In general, the press maintained a certain reserve : "Who knows ?" "We don’t know, we can’t know," wrote L’Intransigeant, summarizing the opinion of most observers. The press reaction was a little more lively in January 1937. The confessions of the accused aroused more skepticism : "I am guilty, you are guilty, he is guilty... The series of confessions continues in Moscow," wrote Le Journal. But Le Temps, a respected news journal, considered, like many others, that the confessions of the accused prejudged their guilt "even if some confessions do indeed seem implausible" : "The accused all agree in recognizing the accusations against them as well-founded. There is no doubt that the accused organized attacks against the current leaders of the Party and the Soviet government, that they wanted to clear the way to take power and that, between them and the Stalinist group, it was a fight to the death in which they made light of human lives." » Albert Mousset, in the very "respectable" Journal des Débats, calls on Dostoyevsky to "explain" his inability to take sides : "It is difficult to form an opinion on the innocence or guilt of those shot in Moscow. Let us again refer to Dostoyevsky who said... "It is only among us that the most outspoken scoundrel can be fundamentally, even sublimely honest, without ceasing to be a scoundrel."

The majority of the press may acknowledge that the confessions are "extravagant", "strange", "astonishing", "confusing", but only six newspapers (39) consider the accused innocent.

Read here

Charles Plisnier in “Fake Passports” :

"What does this new trial mean ?

Do we want the world to believe that all these Bolshevik leaders, who escaped from the Tsar’s prisons and his gallows, who, around Lenin, facing civil war, foreign war, built the USSR, have gathered to betray it ? Do we want the world to believe that these Partisans who, for their Party, suffered prison, deportation, hunger and slander, have gathered to sell it out and destroy it ? Do we want the world to believe that these strategists and tacticians of the revolution have resolved to have Stalin assassinated, at the precise moment when their power becomes so strong and their star so close, that, in order to reduce them, it is necessary to arrest their comrades in struggle, by the thousands and tens of thousands, in all the Republics ?

No. No. I knew these Zinovievs, these Smirnovs : it is through the reform of the Party that they want to save Russia and the Revolution….

The Moscow trial is flooding the newspapers.

How is it that world opinion does not rise up ? What has become of this working-class conscience, which allows the survivors of its first revolution to be dishonored by officials ? (…) In the midst of these newspapers that I have read, crumpled, and re-read, it seems to me that an unhealthy emanation, a base madness, envelops me and debases me.

These men, one after the other, renounce defending themselves against the most outrageous accusations, those of treason and assassination. One after the other, this one who was the leader of the first soviet of the first revolution, that one who was the organizer of the victory in Asia, all of them admit their crimes.

"Accused, this statement proves that you have committed a serious crime. Do you confess guilt ?"

" - Yes.

“So, all of you, you assassinated Stavrov ?”

" - Yes.

"So, you all organized the assassination ?"

" - Yes.

"How should we assess the articles and statements you wrote in 1933, in which you expressed your devotion to the Party ? A lie ?

" - Worse.

“- A perfidy ?

" - Worse.

“Worse than lies. Worse than perfidy. Say the word yourselves : betrayal ?”

“You found it.

“- Treason, perfidy, duplicity !

" - Yes. "

I’m living in a nightmare.