Moscow trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of legitimate trials held in the Soviet Union against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition who had stooped to assassination, terrorism, sabotage and wrecking of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

There were three Moscow Trials, including:

1. the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center (Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, or the "Trial of the Sixteen;" 1936);
2. the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center (Pyatakov-Radek Trial; 1937); and
3. the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" (Bukharin-Rykov Trial, or "Trial of the Twenty-One;" 1938).

The defendants of these were Bolshevik Party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism.

Characterised as "Show Trials" by Western bourgeois historians we are supposed to believe that these hardened revolutionaries who had been subject to tsarist prisons and fought in the civil wars were now meekly beaten into submission to confess to their crimes.

The first trial, Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, all 16 of the defendants were promptly executed for crimes against the Soviet state. And in doing so they gave deeply political reasons for how they had become counter-revolutionaries.

In the subsequent 1937 and 1938 trial we are supposed to believe that the defendants, knowing if their treasonous crimes were proven guilty, that they would suffer a similar fate.

Stalin warning against an amputation policy of the party in 1925
Pravda gave details of a secret meeting between Stalin and his two late associates on the Troika, in which Zinoviev had descended so low as to suggest that Trotsky be removed by an assassin, in such a way that the deed could be attributed to some counter revolutionary agent. Stalins reply was characteristic: he did not deplore the moral aspect of the situation, which would probably never have occured to him, but he would not be party to such bad political tactics. “Why make a martyr out of Trotsky, who will certainly be defeated anyway?” he is alleged to have replied, adding the significant warning: “An amputation policy is full of dangers to the Party, the amputation method is dangerous and infectious: today one is amputated, another tomorrow, a third the day after. What will be left of the party in the end?”

Soviet officials Assasinated By The Bloc Of Trotskyites
Sergei Kirov, Gorky, Peshkov, Kuibyshev and Menzhinsky