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 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); 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.

The 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 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 signifance 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.

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)

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 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.