The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against Trotskyists and members of the Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were three Moscow trials: the first, in August 1936, was the Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center; the second, in January 1937, was the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center; the third and last trial, in March 1938, was the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites". The Old Bolsheviks, veteran revolutionaries who had been prominent in the party since before or during the October Revolution, and top officials of the Soviet secret police were the most well-known defendants at each trial. International observers, including some who were initially open to believing the confessions of the defendants, became steadily more disillusioned as the absurdity of the trials escalated with each round of proceedings.
Most defendants, including the Old Bolsheviks, accused of various conspiracies against the state, were executed. The trials are generally seen as part of Stalin's Great Purge, a campaign to rid the party of current or prior opposition, including Trotskyists and leading Bolshevik cadre members, who partially represented the growing discontent in the Soviet populace resulting from the coldhearted management of the economy. Although Stalin's rapid industrialization and his first five-year plan created upward mobility for the urban population, it had not gone smoothly, or without costs. By 1928–1933, the chaos and falling wages associated with the industrialisation drive, combined with the closing down of dissident speech and brutality of forced agricultural collectivization, had led to an acute economic and political crisis, especially among the sizable peasant population. The government was acutely conscious of this fact. Stalin, the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), and the Party increasingly interpreted even the slightest glimmer of dissent as anti-state activity, and took steps to prevent it taking the form of an opposition against their increasingly authoritarian rule.
Several prominent figures (such as Andrei Bubnov, Alexander Beloborodov and Nikolai Yezhov) were sentenced to death during outside these trials.
Background
The years of Stalin's centralisation of leadership, 1923–1929, involved a crucial set of political struggles that would frame the later accusations at the Moscow Trials. Bolshevik politicians who Stalin had routed during his rise to the top job, the Old Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, were the most well-known defendants at the trials. Despite fits and starts, the accusations against them steadily escalated in the years leading up to the trials, particularly following the 1932 Ryutin affair and the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934.
Power struggles in the USSR
Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin formed a ruling triumvirate in early 1923 after Vladimir Lenin had become incapacitated from a stroke. In the context of the series of defeats of communist revolutions abroad (crucially the German revolutions of 1919, but also later the Northern Expedition), which left the Russian Revolution increasingly isolated in a backward country, the triumvirate was able to affect the marginalization of Leon Trotsky in an internal party political conflict over the issue of Stalin's theory of Socialism in One Country versus Trotsky's theory of Permanent revolution.
A few years later, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the United Front in an alliance with Trotsky which favored Trotskyism and opposed Stalin specifically. Consequently, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin and defeated Trotsky in a power struggle. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Kamenev and Zinoviev temporarily lost their membership in the Communist Party.
The Ryutin affair
In September 1932, the Soviet secret police obtained a copy of the so-called "Ryutin Platform", named after one of its authors, Martemyan Ryutin, a prominent oppositionist who had been readmitted to the party after recanting his views. He was expelled yet again, and sentenced to ten years in prison, after the document was discovered. The platform spread alarm through the central government and police services with its calls for Stalin and the party leadership to be "removed by force". Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotskyist Karl Radek and others were found to have read the platform and not notified authorities, leading to their expulsion from the Communist Party. This entire event later came to be known as the Ryutin affair.
At this time, Zinoviev and Kamenev entered in contact with Trotskyists in the USSR and again joined Trotsky against Stalin, this time in secret. They formed a bloc of opposition with the Trotskyists, along with some rightists. Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, also a defendant at the first Moscow Trial, was one of the bloc's leaders. Like Ryutin and many others, Smirnov recanted his oppositional stances and rejoined the party in late 1929, in what he called a "tactical manoeuvre". He urged his followers to do the same, in order to allow Trotskyists to restart their oppositional activities in secret. This act, of an oppositionist disavowing their own activity, only to rejoin the party and pick up where they left off, became known as "double-dealing".
For many years, Pierre Broué and a number of historians assumed that this bloc was dissolved after the arrest of Smirnov and Ryutin. However, some documents found after Broué's search showed that the Underground Left Opposition stayed active even in prison. In fact, the prisons became their centers of activities.
The Ryutin platform was only one example of a forceful oppositionist trend in international leftist politics. In fact, many Trotskyists and ultra-leftists of this era, including Trotsky himself, had begun to write of the importance of removing Stalin, as they thought his policies would inevitably lead to the defeat of the international socialist movement. These calls for Stalin's violent removal only increased the paranoia of the authorities.
The assassination of Sergei Kirov
In December 1934, Sergei Kirov was assassinated. 15 oppositionists were subsequently found guilty of direct or indirect involvement, and sentenced to be executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were found guilty of "moral complicity" in Kirov's murder and in January 1935 they were both sentenced, in secret, to prison terms of ten and five years respectively.
Although Nikolai Yezhov, then secretary of the Central Committee, broached the theory of their direct participation in the crime at the June 1935 Central Committee plenum, his speech was never published. No other party members spoke in favour of his theory, or defended them against Yezhov's allegations, at the plenum, and it took more than a year for Zinoviev and Kamenev to be re-tried and executed. Why Stalin and the Soviet government waited so long to put them on trial is unknown; scholars believe that at this time Yezhov simply did not have sufficient evidence.
Regardless, paranoia within the NKVD escalated following Kirov's assassination, with many alleged "counter-revolutionary groups" liquidated in the year before the first Moscow Trial.
The trials
Each of the Moscow trials followed a similar script. Almost all the defendants confessed to the accusations put to them, and each was charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code — a vague legal code criminalising "counter-revolutionary activity". However, the absurdity of allegations against the accused steadily escalated as they progressed. In the first trial the defendants were cast as a gang of minor oppositionists, has-beens who had plotted to assassinate Stalin and other government leaders, with the Gestapo presented as shadowy enablers of the Trotskyists and their plans. Zinoviev and Kamenev were well-known as oppositionists, and had been in prison eighteen months before their appearance in the dock. But from 1937 onwards, the alleged conspiracy began to expand into a plot involving deeply covert enemies who had worked against the Party from the time of Lenin, vast wrecking of the economy and collaboration with secret agents from Japan, Britain and Germany to dismember the Soviet Union, conduct a coup and restore capitalism.
August 1936: The first Moscow trial
The first Moscow Trial, officially known as the Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center, sometimes called the Trial of the Sixteen, was held from 19 to 24 August 1936.
Conspiracy and investigation
In December 1935 V. Balitskii, head of the Ukrainian NKVD, sent Moscow a detailed report about the arrests of 33 members, some of whom had confessed, of a "Trotskyist, Nationalist, Menshevik", "terrorist" organisation, which allegedly had ties to Ivan Kuzmich Fedotov, the rector of the Gorky Pedagogical Institute. A parallel investigation into another group in Gorky also pointed investigators in the direction of the institute. On 1 January 1936, the GUGB NKVD stated in a message to its Ukrainian counterparts that they had exposed a Valentin Olberg, the "emissary of Trotsky". Olberg, a stateless multinational communist who had recently entered the USSR on a purchased Honduran passport, was an important activist in European Trotskyism, with close ties to Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov. Three years earlier, in June 1932, the German Communist Party had broken into Olberg's apartment and sent the NKVD an extensive collection of letters to him from Trotsky and Sedov.
Olberg was arrested, along with his wife and brother, on 5 January 1936. Fedotov was detained five days later on 10 January, after returning from vacation. NKVD investigators accused Olberg of being a Trotskyist and a terrorist; he initially resisted their accusations, providing contradictory testimony and denying that he was a Trotskyist — up until his interrogation on 13 February. During this interrogation, and from that point onwards, Olberg began to confess to the charges, stating that he was indeed sent by Trotsky to help prepare the assassination of the USSR's leaders, in particular Stalin. Him and his brother, Pavel Olberg, also claimed under interrogation that they and the Trotskyist movement had links to the Gestapo.
Internal NKVD telegrams sent to Stalin in mid-1936 laid out much of the alleged evidence. In addition to the NKVD's denunciations, reports from its international spy ring, confessions of those under arrest and the letters sent by the KPD, archived reports allege that investigators seized letters from Trotsky, weapons, ammunition, explosives and liquid for removing ink from passports in implicated apartments, universities, and on the persons of those under arrest.
Olberg's testimony was subsequently used by the NKVD to arrest many alleged oppositionists in the USSR, and the information he provided convinced Stalin to make him a crucial defendant in the 1936 Moscow Trial. It is possible he confessed under the influence, or threat, of torture, although there is not evidence of either in archival sources. The confessions established supposed conspiratorial activities that became common charges in the USSR over the next few years: the murder of Kirov; preparations to assassinate the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party; and collaboration with foreign powers. According to the Olbergs and others arrested, their group planned to send conspirators into the crowds at the May Day parade in Moscow, and throw bombs onto Stalin's podium. A parallel organisation was supposed to bomb Andrei Zhdanov's car in Leningrad. Independent confirmation of these alleged plans is lacking.
In June and July 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were interrogated about their participation in the organisation. When interrogated they denied being part of any Trotsky-led conspiracy, but by 23 July, Kamenev had confessed to membership of the organisation, accusing Zinoviev of being a lead instigator. Three days later on 26 July, Zinoviev was confronted by one of his followers, Karev, who accused him directly; after repeated denials, Zinoviev asked that the interrogation be stopped so he could make a full confession. Soon afterwards, Zinoviev submitted a 540-page confession, "A Deserved Sentence", written by him in prison.
To this day, it is not entirely clear why those arrested confessed to these crimes. Historians have not found definitive proof that they were tortured, but memoir sources claim they agreed to confess on condition that they receive a direct guarantee from the entire Politburo, and that their lives and those of their families and followers would be spared.
Mark Zborowski was an undercover NKVD agent deep inside the Trotskyist movement, working alongside to Lev Sedov. Among his duties were reporting the details of Trotskyist networks across Europe, which the NKVD knew little of. During Olberg's interrogations in the spring of 1936, the NKVD sent Zborowski directives asking him to acquire information about Kurt Landau (then unknown to them), and Valentin Olberg. While his reports were not mentioned in public, they provided the NKVD with crcial operational intelligence.
Over the course of his time alongside Sedov, Zborowski also sent reports to his handlers which aligned with parts of Olberg's testimony. In June 1936, before the announcement of the first Moscow Trial, Zborowski described Sedov, anxious to learn more about the situation in the USSR, suggesting he enter the country to appraise the situation: "We will give you instructions, money and a passport. You will go for two or three months, travel around to several locations to addresses that I will give you." This description shared distinct similarities to Olberg's confession about his trip and Sedov's instructions.