Moscow trials

The Moscow Trials were a series of legitimate trials held in the Soviet Union against 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.

Colonel Alksnis And The Tukachevsky Transcript

The grandson of an officer (Colonel Alksnis) who was executed in the purge and always had believed he was innocent read the transcript of his Grandfathers in 2000.

Colonel Alksnis was a Colonel in the Russian army and could be trusted to read it in the reading room. Which was classified under Kruschev and remained so until 2018 to the public. His Grandfather was linked to Tukhachevsky. Despite being an anti-Stalinist since an early age (as he believed his grandfather had been wrongly executed) after reading the Transcript he came away convinced Tukhachevksy, his Grandfather and the rest of the officers were guilty.

“My grandfather and Tukhachevsky were friends. And grandfather was on the judicial panel that judged both Tukhachevsky and Eideman. My interest in this case became even stronger after the well-known publications of procuror Viktorov, who wrote that Iakov Alksnis was very active at the trial, harrassed the accused. . . . But in the trial transcript everything was just the opposite. Grandfather only asked two or three questions during the entire trial. But the strangest thing is the behavior of the accused. Newspaper accounts claim that all the defendants denied their guilt completely. But according to the transcript they fully admitted their guilt. I realize that an admission of guilt itself can be the result of torture. But in the transcript it was something else entirely: a huge amount of detail, long dialogues, accusations of one another, a mass of precision. It’s simply impossible to stage-manage something like this. . . . I know nothing about the nature of the conspiracy. But of the fact that there really did exist a conspiracy within the Red Army and that Tukhachevsky participated in it I am completely convinced today.”

–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)

My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.

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.