Moscow trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of trials held in the Soviet Union against alleged Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition who were carrying out acts of sabotage and assasination. The way the trials actually went is unclear, as different factions inside the CPSU would, over the years, bend the reality of the trials for their own interests, eventually making the actual truth unrecovereable.

Background

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)

There were five soviet officials assasinated by the bloc, including:

• Sergei Kirov
• Gorky
• Peshko
• Kuibyshev
• Menzhinsky

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. These trials would later be characterized as show trials, mostly from a lack of assertiveness to preserve any of the documents that would allegedly prove their legitimacy.

In the first trial, Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, all 16 of the defendants were executed for crimes against the Soviet state. Before their executions they gave deeply political reasons for how they had become counter-revolutionaries. The trials would be notable for their public aspect, and for the thousands of pages of confessions they would spawn.

Involvement of Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov, a known nazi spy which would later be executed for treason in 1940 and served as a functionary of the NKVD during the time of the trials and would later serve as head of the intelligence agency, was assigned to handle the gathering of information that would prove or disprove the involvement of various defendants in various plots, and there are many suspicions that Yezhov may have used the trial as his first opportunity for sabotage.