Moscow trials

The Moscow trials were a series of trials held in the Soviet Union against Trotskyists and members of the Right Opposition who were carrying out acts of sabotage and assassination.

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)
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 assassinated by the bloc:

• Sergei Kirov
• Maxim Gorky
• Maxim Peshkov
• Valerian Kuibyshev
• Vyacheslav 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.

Murder of Sergei Kirov

In December 1934 Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Leningrad oblast (province) and city entered the Smolny institute, headquarters of the Bolshevik Party.

Kirov mounted the stairs and walked along the corridor of the third floor towards his office. Leonid Vasil'evich Nikolaev, an unemployed former Party member, was standing in the hallway. Nikolaev allowed Kirov to pass by then rushed towards him from behind, took out a pistol, and shot Kirov in the back of the skull. Nikolaev then tried to shoot himself in the head but missed and fell faint on the floor a few feet from Kirov's body.

Nikolaev was seized on the spot.

Before a week was out Nikolaev had admitted that he was part of a conspiracy by a clandestine group of Party members opposed to Joseph Stalin and favouring Grigorii Zinoviev, Leningrad First Secretary before Kirov.

NKVD investigators now turned their attention to this group. Interrogations of these Nikolaev had named, and then persons named by those men, led to a number of partial and full confessions.

Three weeks after the murder fourteen men were indicted for conspiracy to kill Kirov.

The large significance of the Kirov murder unfolded only gradually during the next three years.

The threads that bound the Kirov conspirators to Zinoviev and Kamenev, followed up by the NKVD investigators led to the three Moscow Trials

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

This last trial in turn led to the "Ezhovshchina" during which some hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, most certainly innocent, were arrested and executed, while many others imprisoned.

Bourgeois propagandists during this period would assert that Stalin had Kirov killed to then proceed with the so-called "Show trials" then the Ezhovshchina.

However, there have been three studies on the Kirov murder by Kirilina, Matthew Lennoe, and Grover Furr.

Both Kirilina and Lennoe come to the conclusion Kirov was assassinated by a lone gunman. Lennoes work is an interesting piece because he spends an introduction over a number of pages assuring us he is an anti-Communist and an anti-Stalinist and how much he hates socialism before asserting his conclusion - that Stalin did not kill Kirov.

In this we see the emotionally charged atmosphere of Soviet studies and how historians have to be ideologically "pure" before providing the conclusions of their research, whilst Grover Furr's study shows how flimsy their work is and how he was part of a clandestine group of terrorists.

Trials

The defining reasons for a number of the Trotskyists seeking to collaborate with the Nazi and German governments was due to their defeatism in the prospect of war. The Trotskyites did not believe the Soviet Union could win a war against German fascism. Under this context, they were hoping to collaborate with the Germans and Japanese to aid the destruction of the Soviet Union and the downfall of Stalin with the end result of a Soviet Union rump state with Ukraine and some of Russia's eastern territories and the establishment of a Trotskyist government.

This is perhaps best expressed by Trotsky:

"A military defeat threatens the social basis of the Soviet Union for the same reason that these bases require in peaceful times a bureaucracy and a monopoly of foreign trade – that is, because of their weakness. Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable. In a technical, economic, and military sense, imperialism in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution."

And Sokolnikov "we considered that Fascism was the most organized form of capitalism, that it would triumph and seize Europe and stifle us. It was better therefore to come to terms with it'.

In January, 1935, Zinoviev, Kamenev and several other associates of theirs were brought to trial on the charge of complicity in the murder of Kirov. They were acquitted of such complicity, but it was established that they had set up a counter- revolutionary organization, the activities of which encouraged the terrorist group at Leningrad, and that moreover they were aware of the latter's existence. Zinoviev and Kamenev were sentenced to ten years' and five years' imprisonment respectively. Then, in the late spring of 1936, a series of arrests of Nazi agents and Trotskyist conspirators revealed the existence of a much wider organization - a central terrorist committee which included, not only Zinoviev and Kamenev, but several leading Trotskyists. Preliminary investigations and evidence given at their trial (in August, 1936) revealed that, through Germans who had been sent to the U.S.S.R. by Trotsky himself, the organization was in close contact with the German Gestapo. Zinoviev, Kamenev and their associates were sentenced to be shot.

Within the next two weeks a number of other outstanding Trotskyists - Pyatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Serebryakov and Yagoda, head of the people's Commissariat for the Interior -were also under arrest, as a result of confessions which the Zinoviev- Kamenev group had made. They were put on trial in January, 1937. The revelations which they made, and their confessions in Court, showed that, after pretending for so long that they were animated by concern for the Soviet people, on the contrary their policy had been one of complete subordination to the plans of Hitler. The organization of wrecking on the railways and in the coalfields, at important chemical works and power stations, in agriculture and livestock breeding, was revealed to be only subsidiary to their main purpose. This was to call in outside assistance - from the German and Japanese intelligence services - to redress the balance when their efforts inside the U.S.S.R. were failing. In the words of Sokolnikov (who had been Ambassador in Great Britain at one time), 'we considered that Fascism was the most organized form of capitalism, that it would triumph and seize Europe and stifle us. It was better therefore to come to terms with it'. These terms included territorial concessions in the Ukraine and the Far East, and economic concessions to German industrialists, in return for large-scale subversive activities in the event of war between the U.S.S.R. and Germany and for the establishment of a Trotskyist Government after a German victory.

It is worth noting that, as a well-known American journalist who attended the trial wrote later, 'the impression held widely abroad that the defendants all told the same story, that they were abject and grovelling, that they behaved like sheep in the executioner's pen, isn't quite correct. They argued stubbornly with the prosecutor; in the main they told only what they were forced to tell'. Radek in his final evidence said, 'For two and a half months I compelled the examining official, by interrogating me and by confronting me with the testimony of the other accused, to open up all the cards to me, so that I could see who had confessed, who had not confessed and what each had confessed.' Nearly all the foreign diplomats in Moscow who had attended the trial, as U.S. Ambassador Davies reported to Secretary Hull on February 17th, 37, were convinced with him that the defendants were guilty. The Supreme Court sentenced the leaders of the conspiracy to be shot, while Radek, Sokolnikov and others who had played a minor part were sentenced to terms of imprisonment.

In May, 1937, yet another group of conspirators, whose existence had been revealed in the course of investigating evidence secured during the previous trial, was arrested. This consisted of two Deputy People's Commissars for Defence, Tukhachevsky and Garmarnik, and several other generals. They were brought to trial before a court-martial consisting of the highest military leaders of the U.S.S.R., and charged with espionage for the intelligence service of a country 'which is carrying on an unfriendly policy towards the U.S.S.R.' Later it was revealed that Tukhachevsky and his associates had reached the same point in their dealings with Germany as the Trotskyites primarily because they believed that there was no power on earth with a strength comparable with that of Germany, and that it was necessary to come to terms with her and with Japan. For this purpose they plotted a military coup - although the problem-had been how to find the rank and file for Such an enterprise as the seizure of Government buildings and the killing of Soviet leaders. On this, in fact, it broke down; and their trial in June, 1937, led to their conviction and execution.

There was yet one further group which was to be dealt with before the danger from within could be thought eliminated. It was announced in May that the Right-wing leaders Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were under suspicion of treason, as a result of evidence during the earlier trials. The first two were arrested, while Tomsky committed suicide. Other well-known Trotskyists were also taken into, custody during the year - Rosengoltz (a former associate of Trotsky in the War Department, later representative in London and People's Commissar for Foreign Trade), Rakovsky (former pre-1914 associate of Trotsky, later head of the Ukrainian Soviet Government, and later still Ambassador in London), Krestinsky (formerly one of the secretaries of the Central Committee of the Party, and later People's Commissar for Finance and Ambassador in Berlin), and several others. But the trial of this final group was not to be held until March, 1938.

Abroad, these trials aroused volumes of speculation, invention and abuse : abuse so sharp, indeed, that it was commonly regarded among ordinary Soviet citizens, as those who met them in these years could testify, as the most convincing proof that the Soviet Government had really struck a crushing blow at plans which had been hatched outside its borders, and that those who were responsible for the hatching were squealing. Be that as it may, the general verdict in the U.S.S.R. was well reflected in the remark of Stalin, at the XVII F Congress of the C.P.S.U. in March, 1939: 'To listen to these foreign drivellers, one would think that if the spies, murderers and wreckers had been left at liberty to wreck, murder and spy without let or hindrance, the Soviet organizations would have been far sounder and stronger.'

It is an open secret that, in the course of the investigations during these years, particularly in 1937, there were large numbers of arrests among suspected persons in responsible positions. Foreign journalists and diplomats, accustomed to judge of the strength of a regime by the fortunes of persons in authority, were quick to interpret these arrests as indicating and intensifying a profound lack of confidence. In reality the uncertainty did not exist among the broad mass of the population; and even among those small sections of the intelligentsia where gossip and the consciousness of past waverings caused misgivings, these began to be allayed from 1938 onwards, when large numbers of those who had been under investigation began to be released and returned to their normal occupations.

Evidence the trials were legitimate

Trotsky Harvard Archive

In 1939, 1940 and 1953 Leon Trotsky's archives were sold and transferred to Harvard University. Trotsky stipulated that the personal section remain closed until 40 years after his death.

After the archives were opened a Trotskyist historian, Pierre Broue, began to study its contents. Pierre Broue and his team began to discover that Trotsky had deliberately lied in his published works.

First they found evidence that the Bloc of Oppositionists and others had really existed. The activities of this Bloc were the major allegation in all three of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky and his son Sedov always denied that any such bloc had existed and claimed it was an invention Stalin.

Sedov’s letter in invisible ink reveals that the following groups existed: the Trotskyist Group in the USSR (“Our Group”), the Zinovievists, the group of I.N. Smirnov, the Sten–Lominadze Group, the “Safar(ov)–Tarkhan(ov) Group, the “right-wingers” and the “liberals”. Of course, not all of these participated in the “bloc”, but all of them knew of its existence and, according to Sedov, had contacts with it. (Pierre Broue, The “Bloc” of the Oppositions against Stalin, 1980)

Trotsky and the slogan "Get Rid of Stalin"

The correspondence between Trotsky and Sedov between October and December 1932 the period of the “bloc” constitutes an extraordinary set of documents. They enable us to follow almost from day to day the efforts of Trotsky to cling as closely as possible to what was really happening in the Soviet Union, and to grasp the full significance of the “bloc”, the cement of which precisely was hostility to Stalin, and the desire to drive him out of the General Secretary’s position. Trotsky opened the discussion about whether the slogan, “Get Rid of Stalin”, was appropriate on 17 October. “Get Rid of Stalin”, he wrote, “is correct in a well-defined, concrete sense”, but contrary to the “allies” and the “right-wingers”, he did not think it an appropriate one. In fact, he wrote that this slogan would not be dangerous “if we were strong”. But did it not risk being supported by the émigrés, by the Mensheviks and by the “internal Thermidoreans”? He went on: “It is always possible that in a few months Stalin will be obliged to defend himself against the Thermidorean pressure, and that we shall be obliged to support him momentarily”. Indeed, “this stage is not yet past and, consequently, this slogan does not correspond to the needs of the movement”.

During the 1980s, J. Arch Getty was also examining the Trotsky Harvard archive and discovered the existence of a Bloc.

“It is clear, then, that Trotsky did have a clandestine organization inside the USSR in this period and that he maintained communication with it. It is equally clear that a united oppositional bloc was formed in 1932” J. Arch Getty

In Pierre Broues Party Opposition of Stalin his conclusion was as follows:

One might suppose that I disagree with Professor Getty on every aspect of that important question. That is not true. I think that, in fact an in the last analysis, we are very close in our conclusions. I think that the new data concerning the "Opposition bloc," the organization of two Communist blocs of Oppositions, the attempt to unify the Communist Opposition, definitely destroys all the legends and preconceived ideas about an all-mighty, blood-thirsty, machiavelian Stalin. The Soviet Union in the thirties was passing through a serious economic and political crisis. Stalin was more and more isolated and many people, including some from the ranks of privileged bureaucracy of which he was only the best expression and the unifier, began to think about the necessity of getting rid of him. The Moscow Trials were not a gratuitous crime committed in cold blood, but a counter-stroke in a conflict which was really, as Trotskii wrote, "a preventative civil war."

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 from 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)

I carefully watched the next entry in the video blog of the President of the Russian Federation dedicated to the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions “The memory of national tragedies is as sacred as the memory of victories.” Honestly, I was extremely disappointed, because I expected a more responsible and balanced speech by the president on this issue.

For me, I.V. Stalin and his time is a very sore and relevant issue until now.

My grandfather – the commander of the second rank, deputy commissar of defense of the USSR for aviation Yakov Ivanovich (Jekabs Janovich) Alksnis, was shot in July 1938. His wife (my grandmother), Kristina Karlovna Mednis-Alksnis, as a member of the family of the traitor to the Motherland (CSIR), spent 13 years in camps and exiles. My father, Imant Yakovlevich, at the age of 10 was left without parents and until the age of 30 wore the stigma “son of an enemy of the people.” He found his mother only in 1957.

Therefore, our family always had anti-Stalinist sentiments and, accordingly, I was an anti-Stalinist.

When perestroika began, he eagerly read all the publications of those years, exposing the crimes of Stalin and his entourage.

In 1989, I was elected People’s Deputy of the USSR and after some time I sent an official deputy request to the then Chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov with a request to acquaint me with the documents relating to my grandfather.

In particular, I asked to show me his criminal case and the materials of the trial of M. Tukhachevsky, since my grandfather was part of the Special Judicial Presence, which sentenced Tukhachevsky and other military leaders to death.

I was particularly interested in the materials of the trial of a group of military leaders led by Tukhachevsky, since M. Tukhachevsky and Robert Eideman (chairman of the Central Council of Osoaviahim of the USSR), who were shot by the sentence of the Special Judicial Presence, were close friends of my grandfather, and they were almost friends with Robert Eideman not since childhood. And for me it was not clear how my grandfather could sentence his friends to death.

After a while I was invited to the Lubyanka and two volumes were placed in front of me. The first is the grandfather’s criminal case, and the second is a transcript of the trial of a group of military men led by Tukhachevsky. I was allowed to make the necessary statements.

I was immediately struck that in the criminal case there were extremely few documents. Grandfather was arrested on November 23, 1937, and shot on July 29, 1938, i.e. He spent 8 months in Lefortovo. And while in the case there were only three or four protocols of interrogations, and almost all of these protocols were about nothing.

For example, one multi-page protocol was devoted to organizing the repair of aircraft of the Air Force. Moreover, the protocol is very detailed, as it seemed to me, the answers to the investigator’s questions were simply rewritten from the governing documents of those years on the organization of aircraft repair.

I was surprised that three days after the arrest, my grandfather wrote a handwritten note in the name of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Yezhov, about his readiness to give sincere testimonies about his counter-revolutionary activities, but there were no traces of these sincere testimonies in the criminal case.

Judging by the materials of the case, the first interrogation took place only in January 1938. At the same time, judging by the 1956 rehabilitation materials filed in the same case, my grandfather was repeatedly summoned for interrogations and “beat out” evidence from him. But where are these protocols with “knocked out” testimonies, why were they not in the file?

After reviewing the transcript of the Tukhachevsky process, I realized that this process is also not so simple. 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.

I left the KGB building on Lubyanka in great dismay.

Firstly, I realized that my grandfather’s criminal case was “cleaned up” and some very important documents were removed from it. Obviously, these documents were seized during the Khrushchev thaw during the rehabilitation of the grandfather.

Secondly, there was still a “conspiracy of the military” in the Red Army.

And then the events related to the collapse of the Soviet Union began, and I was not up to the “business of days gone by.”

My father was very upset by the collapse of the country. This is surprising, but in spite of the fact that as a result of the tragic events of the 30s his whole life was broken, I did not have to meet a greater patriot of our country. His country died, and six months later, on July 17, 1992, at the age of 65, he also died as a result of a heart attack.

A month before, he and I, at the dacha, at evening tea, once had a frank conversation about what was happening, and suddenly my father said: “If Stalin was alive, he would not have allowed this mess.”

I was shocked! My father, an ardent anti-Stalinist who hated Stalin with all the fibers of his soul, suddenly understood and forgave him …

In 2000, I was elected a deputy of the State Duma, and I turned to the Director of the FSB, N. Patrushev, with a request to allow me to again familiarize myself with my grandfather’s criminal case. I was again invited to the Lubyanka, or rather, to the Kuznetsk bridge in the reading room of the FSB, and I was given a familiar criminal case.

I began to leaf through it, checking the records of 1990, and suddenly, to my amazement, I discovered that it lacked some important documents. For example, the NKVD intelligence report dated 1932 disappeared that the Latvian military attache stated in a private conversation with our agent that the Latvian General Staff has its own people among the military leaders of the Red Army. Among other surnames, the name of my grandfather was also mentioned there.

In 1990, I was very doubtful of this report, since it was unlikely that my grandfather could be an agent of the Latvian General Staff; according to the recollections of my grandmother, he was a stony-stone Bolshevik. But the very fact of the disappearance of this and some other documents allows me to conclude that the “cleaning” of archives continues to this day. The question arises: why?

So, in the archives there are documents that are not satisfied with the current government. The archives were “cleaned” under Stalin, under Khrushchev, under Gorbachev. “Cleaned” under Yeltsin.

And so I have no faith in the current fighters with Stalin.

Please note that more than 70 years have passed since those tragic events, but the archives of those years are still closed. Instead of archival documents, we are forced to read Solzhenitsyn and other detractors of Stalin. And what prevents to open archives? What prevents to open materials on the Katyn case? What prevents to open materials on the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact? What prevents to publish the transcript of the trial of Tukhachevsky?

So IM has something to hide.

And if so, then they do not have the right to condemn Stalin and his time.

Let THEY open the archives and give people the opportunity to give an assessment to those great and tragic times.

Involvement of Yezhov

Nikolai Yezhov, a known Nazi spy who 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.

List of Defendants

Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial

Grigory Zinoviev (1883 - 1936)

Lev Kamenev (1883 - 1936)

Grigory Evdokimov (1884 - 1936)

Ivan Bakayev (1887 - 1936)

Sergei Mrachkovsky (1883 - 1936)

Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan (1893 - 1936)

Ivan Smirnov (1880 - 1936)

Ephim Dreitzer (1894 - 1936)

Isak Reingold (1897 - 1936)

Richard Pickel (1896 - 1936)

Eduard Holtzman (1882 - 1936)

Fritz David (1897 - 1936)

Valentine Olberg (1907 - 1936)

Konon Berman-Yurin (1901 - 1936)

Moissei Lurye (1897 - 1936)

Nathan Lurye (1901 - 1936)

Further reading

• Court Proceedings (MIA)