Moscow Trials

Three trials

The first was the Trial of the Sixteen in August 1936, at which Zinoviev, Kamenev, and their co-defendants were charged with forming a united Trotskyite-Zinovievite centre and organizing the murder of Kirov. The second was the Trial of the Seventeen in January 1937, where Pyatakov, Radek, and Sokolnikov among others were accused of industrial sabotage and collusion with foreign intelligence through an anti-Soviet Trotskyite reserve centre. The third was the Trial of the Twenty-One in March 1938, which charged Bukharin, Rykov, and the former NKVD chief Yagoda as members of a Right-Trotskyite bloc.

The closed military trial of Tukhachevsky and the Red Army high command in June 1937 is conventionally grouped with these. Where the public trials took the old political leadership, this closed one took the military chain of command.

Producing confessions

The prosecutions rested on confession rather than material evidence. Investigation proceeded through prolonged continuous interrogation, sleep deprivation, and threats against families, and physical coercion was formally authorized by a Politburo decision of July 1937. The court under the prosecutor Vyshinsky treated the defendants' confessions as the sole means of proof, and contradictions between statements were not examined.

International reaction divided. Part of the Western left accepted the verdicts on the strength of the trials' formal procedure, while others argued they were fabricated. A commission of inquiry led by Dewey in 1937 examined the charges against Trotsky and reported that they were without foundation.

Function and aftermath

The trials served two purposes. One was the physical removal of the old opposition leadership. The other was to supply a narrative for the mass operations running at the same time. Once the leadership had been defined as a conspiracy in league with foreign powers, mass arrests in the provinces could be presented as the uncovering of that conspiracy's lower cells.

The logic soon reached those who had staged the trials. Yagoda was executed as a defendant in the third of them, and Yezhov was shot in 1940. Some defendants were rehabilitated under Khrushchev, and the rehabilitation of the principal ones, Bukharin and Rykov among them, came in 1988.