Episode 270 – The Moscow Trials

Last time, we finished the monumental series on one of Russia’s greatest heroes, Mikhail Kutuzov. Today, we will tell the story of the infamous Moscow Trials, also known as the Show Trials, which were held between 1936 and 1938. 

I will be relying on four books to tell the story of this horrific period of time in the Soviet Union. Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith, and On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by Sheila Fitzpatrick.

The Moscow Show Trials were part of the more extensive operation known as the Great Purge, a topic I will cover later this year in a multi-part series. The focus of the Moscow Trials was the destruction of Old Bolsheviks, those men, and women who Stalin viewed as a threat to his control of the Soviet Union. 

There would be three trials in total. The first would be called the “Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center" or the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, also known as the 'Trial of the Sixteen' which would be held in August 1936. The second, held in January 1937, was named "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center," also known as the Pyatakov-Radek Trial or the 'Trial of the Seventeen'. The third and final trial was known as the "Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" or the Bukharin-Rykov Trial, also known as the 'Trial of the Twenty-One', held in March 1938.

The defendants were predominantly Old Bolshevik Party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with Imperialist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism. As Stalin put it, “We will destroy every enemy, even if he is an Old Bolshevik. We will destroy his kin, his family. Anyone who by his actions or thoughts encroaches on the unity of the socialist state, we shall destroy relentlessly.” Not the use of the word ‘thoughts’ in his statement. It gave the secret police and communist officials the right to pretty much arrest and execute anyone. 

The First Show Trial was all Stalin's idea, with NKVD head Genrikh Yagoda initially leading. Unfortunately for Yagoda, he was a bit reluctant to be put on the trial as he didn't believe the charges being bandied around were real. This would eventually cost him his life, as he would be one of the featured defendants in the Third Moscow Show Trial in 1938, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. 

Behind the scenes, Nikolay Yezhov was the one setting up the Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial. This concerned Yagoda, but he had lots of other things on his plate. Stalin alleged that he received reports that correspondences from Trotsky were found in possession of someone arrested in an unrelated case. 

The main defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, old comrades of Lenin and party leaders of the first hour, but also supporters of Leon Trotsky in his struggle with Joseph Stalin in the twenties. The main charge was their membership in the so-called Trotsky-Zinoviev Center, an entirely fictitious terrorist organization. Zinoviev and Kamenev initially refused to confess, but Stalin assured them that they would not be executed if they did.

The real reason for the show trials was the faltering Soviet economy and the repression of the people. Things were not going well, and Stalin needed to find a scapegoat. By putting on these trials, it would redirect the peoples’ ire toward a new enemy. Stalin’s first focus was on two men he despised deeply, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. This comes as a surprise as the two men, along with Stalin, formed the triumvirate that marginalized Leon Trotsky. They would then turn around when seeing the amount of power that Stalin was accumulating to side with Trotsky against the leader. It was a fatal decision. 

Stalin then moved to ally himself with Nikolai Bukharin to oust Kamenev and Zinoviev. This was his modus operendi, to work one side against the other, divide and conquer, and associate yourself with a future enemy. This would be the basis of the first of the trials, also known as the Kamenev-Zinoviev Trial or the Trial of the Sixteen.

The Ryutin Affair is one of the tools that Stalin used along with Prosecutor General Andrei Vyshinsky. Martemyan Ryutin was an Old Bolshevik and a secretary of the Moscow City Communist Party Committee in the 1920s. In June 1932, Ryutin wrote a pamphlet titled "Appeal to All Members of the All-Union Communist Party" and a nearly 200-page document entitled "Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship," also known as "Ryutin's Platform". In these documents, the Old Bolshevik called for an end to forced collectivization, talking about "peace with the peasants", a slowing down of the forced industrialization, the reinstatement of all previously expelled Party members on the left and on the right, including Leon Trotsky (big mistake) and a "fresh start." Obviously, Stalin could not tolerate this as he was busy consolidating his grip on power.

Ryutin was arrested on September 23, 1932. On September 27, the Presidium of the Central Control Commission hastily convened to investigate and deal with the Ryutin group. Twenty-four members of the CCC, including Yan Rudzutak, Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, Avel Yenukidze, Aaron Soltz, and Lenin's sister, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova authorized the investigation into who the members of the Ryutin group. Many of these committee members would later be part of future show trials and executed. The committee’s final report stated that the members of the "Union" were characterized as "degenerate elements who have become the enemies of communism and of Soviet power, as traitors to the party and the working class, who have tried to form an underground bourgeois-kulak organization under a fake 'Marxist-Leninist' banner for the purpose of restoring capitalism in general and kulakdom in particular in the USSR".

According to Stalin, their fates were obviously sealed, but more work needed to be done. So, first, all members, including Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled from the communist party. Then, just a little over 2 years later, Sergei Kirov was assassinated, or set up by Stalin, which led to the start of the Great Purge.

Stalin had supposedly received information that Trotsky was sending letters to those opposed to the leader. Nikolai Yezhov "found" the correspondence much to the surprise of NKVD boss Genrikh Yagoda. He had no such information. In June 1936, Yagoda reiterated his belief to Stalin that there was no link between Trotsky and Zinoviev, but Stalin promptly rebuked him. The NKVD chief knew deep down that he was now in trouble.

A number of supposed co-conspirators were arrested and tortured, many under the supervision of Stalin. They would confess that Kamenev, Zinoviev, and fourteen others were involved in a conspiracy. The main charge was forming a terror organization with the purpose of killing Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet government. 

All of the defendants were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow by NKVD chief executioner Vasily Blokhin. Blokhin is one of history’s cruelest killers of all time. He is said to have executed thousands of men by himself. 

Blokhin, under orders from Lavrentiy Beria, was the chief executioner of Polish prisoners at the Katyn Forest Massacre. It was said that he would work ten hours a night, shooting each victim in the back of the head with a German Walther pistol as he didn't trust the Soviet-made TT-30. According to documents uncovered during the period of glasnost under Gorbachev, Blokhin shot 7,000 people, making him the most prolific executioner in world history. He killed all of those people in just 28 days. As you can tell, Stalin and his policies brought out the worst in humankind.

This first Show Trial was absurd in many ways. Some of the confessions and evidence were clearly false. One example was the Old Bolshevik Eduard Holtzman, who was accused of conspiring with Trotsky and his son Sedov to assassinate the Soviet hierarchy in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol in 1932, where Leon was giving a public lecture. A week after the trial, it was revealed by a Danish Social Democratic newspaper that the hotel had been demolished in 1917. Stalin was furious with this stupid claim. He reportedly yelled, "What the devil did you need the hotel for? You ought to have said railway station. The station is always there.” 

Stalin was conveniently away from Moscow during the first trial. This was done to brush off any criticism of the boss by the people if the prosecution did not go as planned. Still, as you might guess, he kept a running correspondence with both Lazar Kaganovich and Yezhov. It was essential to Stalin that the prosecutor and the judge make it clear during the hearings that "The role of the Gestapo should be exposed in its full magnitude." Stalin knew that, eventually, he would have to face off against the Nazis, so he had to make them the bad guys early on.

The lead prosecutor of the First Show Trial was Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky. Even though he once signed an arrest warrant for Lenin, he would become a close associate of Joseph Stalin. Whatever the boss wanted, Vyshinsky would provide. At the first trial, he would say about the defendants, “Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! ... Down with these abject animals! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let's exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation! Let's push the bestial hatred they bear our leaders back down their own throats!”

In a somewhat gruesome example of the degradation of both the executed and executioners, when Kamenev and Zinoviev were shot, the bullets were according to Montefiore, “dug out of their skulls, wiped clean of blood and pearly brain matter, and handed to Yagoda, probably still worn." He further went on to write, "Yagoda labeled the bullets 'Kamenev' and 'Zinoviev' and treasured these macabre but sacred relics, taking them home to be kept proudly with his collection of erotica and ladies' stockings." Unfortunately, it wouldn't be long before Yagoda would suffer the same fate. The man who would replace him, Nikolai Yezhov would keep the bullets until his death in the Third Show Trial.

As Sheila Fitzgerald puts it in her book, On Stalin’s Team, "Like any good suspense story, the scenario of the first Moscow show trial hinted at future sequels. There were suggestions of links with the Right, and a promising 'nerve center' of a terrorist conspiracy involving former Leftists, including Karl Radek and Yuri Pyatakov, was emerging in interrogation testimonies." As she further tells us, "On the last day of the trial, prosecutor Vyshinsky made the startling announcement that, as a result of compromising testimony offered in the trial just concluded, investigations would begin of Tomsky, Rykov, Bukharin, and Pyatakov." It was all set up to be this way by Stalin to rid himself of his potential rivals.

The second show trial began on January 23, 1937, and would continue for seven days. This trial involved 17 Old Bolsheviks including Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov, Grigory Sokolnikov, and Leonid Serebryakov. These were all men who were crucial in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War. Radek would be critical in this trial as his confession, likely induced by torture, would implicate men like Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, setting the stage for the Trial of Military and Trial of the Twenty-One.

The "Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" was another successful attempt by Stalin to rid himself of anyone who would dare to question his ultimate authority. One of the ways that Stalin would breed fear into those he suspected of turning on him was to play a kind of cat-and-mouse game. One day, he would denounce the person, and the next, he would invite them to dinner. Another scheme was to arrest the wife of his target before going after the husband. 

One example of this during the Show Trial period was that of Yuri Pyatakov. His wife was arrested in July 1936 because of her so-called connections to Leon Trotsky. As Montefiore records, “Shortly before the Zinoviev trial, Yezhov summoned Pyatakov, read him all the affidavits implication him in Trotskyite terrorism, and informed him that he was relieved of his job as Deputy Commissar. Pyatakov offered to prove his innocence by asking to be "personally allowed to shoot all those sentenced to death at the trial, including his former wife, and to publish this in the press. As a Bolshevik, he was willing even to execute his own wife.”

Another old friend of Stalin had also had enough of the arrests of Old Bolsheviks, many of whom were long-time comrades. Sergo Ordzhonikidze was upset his brother had been arrested, as well as Avel Enukidze. Anastas Mikoyan remembered Ordzhonikidze saying the following about Stalin, "We were such close friends! And suddenly, he allows this sort of thing to be done!" It disturbed Ordzhonikidze so much that he went home and shot himself on the eve of the Central Committee plenum.

In the second trial, the setup for the third trial and another purge, that of the army officers, was offered up by Radek in his so-called confession. He said that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through Trotsky's school" as well as "semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help."

Although I am not going to go into depth about the military trials and purges since I will do so at a later date, it should be noted that German intelligence fueled much of the suspicion of the leaders of the Red Army to eliminate many of the officers before invading the Soviet Union. The evidence they “leaked” was that Marshal Tukhachevsky was planning a coup. While this was carefully not presented at the trial, it did influence Stalin’s mindset. He viewed the military as his greatest potential enemy and threat. Also, unlike the Moscow Show Trials, the military, or Tukhachevsky Affair, it was held in secret. Stalin didn’t want the Germans to know what he was doing to his army.

The last and most absurd of the Show Trials was known as the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" of the Trial of the Twenty-One. The biggest target of them all was Nikolai Bukharin; although men like Yagoda, Alexei Rykov, Nikolai Krestinsky, and Christian Rokovsky were important, Stalin had to get rid of Bukharin. The charges brought against the men included:

Murdering Sergey Kirov, Valerian Kuybyshev, State Political Directorate (OGPU) chair Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, and writer Maxim Gorky and his son

Unsuccessfully trying to assassinate Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Yakov Sverdlov in 1918.

Plotting to assassinate Yakov Sverdlov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, and Stalin.

Conspiring to wreck the economy (by sabotaging mines, derailing trains, killing cattle, deliberately organizing deficit of food products, putting nails and glasses in butter) and the country's military power.

Spying for British, French, Japanese, and German intelligence agencies.

And, finally, making secret agreements with Germany and Japan, promising to surrender Belarus, Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Russian Far East to foreign powers.

While there was opposition to Stalin, the truth is that the real chance of anyone pulling off a coup or removing the Soviet leader disappeared in 1933. Stalin just couldn't allow anyone to voice any opposition to him. Something in his psyche wouldn't allow criticism or even perceived criticism. 

What is remarkable about Bukharin being put on trial at all is that Stalin allowed him to escape the Soviet Union. Bukharin was sent to Paris by Stalin in February 1936 to negotiate the purchase of the Marx and Engels archives held by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) before its dissolution by Hitler. His young wife, Anna Larina, joined him, which opened the possibility of exile. Still, he decided against it, saying that he could not live outside the Soviet Union. 

Stupidly, in conversations with Boris Nicolaevsky in Paris, he called Stalin a devil. He also admitted to French leftist writer Andre Malraux that Stalin would kill him if he returned to the USSR. Stalin was likely made aware of these comments by Bukharin. He was arrested on February 27, 1937. At the trial, in his final speech, Bukharin was to have said, "while in prison, I made a revaluation of my entire past. For when you ask yourself: 'If you must die, what are you dying for?' – an absolute black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. There was nothing to die for if one wanted to die unrepented."

The prosecutor, Vyshinsky, yelled in the court, "Shoot the mad dogs!" many were executed immediately after the end of the trial. Of the twenty-one on trial, 18 got the death sentence. Three survived although death might have been preferable. Pletnyov was sentenced to 25 years in prison, Rakovsky to 20 years, and Bessonov to 15 years of hard labor in the gulag system. Vasily Blokhin, the chief executioner of the NKVD, conducted all of the executions personally.

The tragedy didn't end with the death of the defendants. It continued on towards their families and relatives. Any grown-up son would be shot, and wives and ex-wives would be arrested and sent to the gulag. Young children would be put into orphanages under new names. 

What Stalin got out of the Show Trials was the fear of everyone around him that no one was safe. He made it known to his inner circle that some of them had been mentioned in the confessions of those found guilty. Hearing that from their boss must have sent shivers down their spines. Those around the remaining loyalists would be victims of the fear-mongering by Stalin.

From Sheila Fitzgerald, “The stoic and loyal Molotov is a prime example. After his German tutor was arrested, his daughter’s German nanny followed. His closest friend, Alexander Arosev, was arrested in July 1937 and executed six months later. Of his four deputies, Rudzutak and Antipov were arrested by the middle of 1937, with Valery Mezhlauk following in December, and Chubar in mid-1938.”

The Show Trials were over, and the Great Purge was coming to an end, but Stalin needed a new scapegoat to bring all this murder to a conclusion. Also, there was significant international skepticism about this last trial because of some of the absurd and ridiculous charges and evidence presented. For some prominent former communists, such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break from communism. It turned the first three into ardent anti-communists. Stalin needed to blunt his personal responsibility for it.

What better person than the head of the NKVD to take the blame. Nikola Yezhov was arrested on April 10, 1939. Months previous, he knew he was in deep trouble and began to drink heavily. Lavrenty Beria had been given control of the NKVD. Yezhov knew the routine, get a job, lose job, get arrested, and lose their life. Yezhovshchina was the term used by the Soviet press to describe the Great Purge and the Moscow Show Trials. 

While Yezhov's arrest and subsequent execution were not made public, Stalin made it known that certain elements within the NKVD had overstepped their bounds and were guilty of taking things too far. The people were too frightened to believe anything other than what Stalin had told them. It was not the end of show trials, but it was the end of this series of them.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Join me next time when we cover a much brighter and more artsy subject, the history of one of the world’s greatest museums, the Hermitage.

So, until next time, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vineyamineya.