What were the key features of the show trials

If all else failed then the victim was simply told that he would be executed without the formality of a trial. The show trials became just that — a show. For whatever reason, Stalin viewed these men as potential rivals and as such they had to go.

Both these men were charged with plotting to kill Stalin. I am guilty of having been the organiser, second only to Trotsky, of that block whose chosen task was the killing of Stalin. The party saw where we were going, and warned us. Stalin warned us scores of times but we did not heed his warnings. We entered into an alliance with Trotsky. My motives? We, the opposition, had banked on a split in the party, but this hope proved groundless. We were actuated by boundless hatred and by lust of power.

Nikolai Bukharin was charged with treason and admitted his crimes in court just as Stalin wished. However, Stalin believed that he could not even trust the senior officers in the Red Army. They along with anyone else Stalin believed he could no longer trust also became victims of the purges.

The Role of Women in Nazi Germany x. Joseph Stalin had shared power with Zinoviev and Kamenev in…. Joseph Stalin's Early Years. Edward P. Gazur has pointed out: "Those in attendance fully expected the customary addendum which was used in political trials that stipulated that the sentence was commuted by reason of a defendant's contribution to the Revolution.

These words never came, and it was apparent that the death sentence was final when Ulrikh placed the summation on his desk and left the court-room. The following day Soviet newspapers carried the announcement that all sixteen defendants had been put to death. This included the NKVD agents who had provided false confessions. Joseph Stalin could not afford for any witnesses to the conspiracy to remain alive. Edvard Radzinsky , the author of Stalin , has pointed out that Stalin did not even keep his promise to Kamenev that his wife, Olga Kamenev , and their two sons, would be saved.

All three of them were either shot or died in a prison camp. Most journalists covering the trial were convinced that the confessions were statements of truth.

The Observer wrote: "It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The government's case against the defendants Zinoviev and Kamenev is genuine. If they had a hope of acquittal, why confess? If they were guilty of trying to murder Stalin and knew they would be shot in any case, why cringe and crawl instead of defiantly justifying their plot on revolutionary grounds? We would be glad to hear the explanation. The New Republic pointed out: "Some commentators, writing at a long distance from the scene, profess doubt that the executed men Zinoviev and Kamenev were guilty.

It is suggested that they may have participated in a piece of stage play for the sake of friends or members of their families, held by the Soviet government as hostages and to be set free in exchange for this sacrifice. We see no reason to accept any of these laboured hypotheses, or to take the trial in other than its face value.

Foreign correspondents present at the trial pointed out that the stories of these sixteen defendants, covering a series of complicated happenings over nearly five years, corroborated each other to an extent that would be quite impossible if they were not substantially true. The defendants gave no evidence of having been coached, parroting confessions painfully memorized in advance, or of being under any sort of duress.

Walter Duranty , the New York Times correspondent based in Moscow , also accepted the idea that the executed men were also involved with Adolf Hitler in trying to bring down the Soviet government. They were accused of working with Leon Trotsky in an attempt to overthrow the Soviet government with the objective of restoring capitalism. Robin Page Arnot , a leading figure in the British Communist Party , wrote: "A second Moscow trial, held in January , revealed the wider ramifications of the conspiracy.

The volume of evidence brought forward at this trial was sufficient to convince the most sceptical that these men, in conjunction with Trotsky and with the Fascist Powers, had carried through a series of abominable crimes involving loss of life and wreckage on a very considerable scale.

Edvard Radzinsky , the author of Stalin has pointed out: "After they saw that Piatakov was ready to collaborate in any way required, they gave him a more complicated role. In the trials he joined the defendants, those whom he had meant to blacken. He was arrested, but was at first recalcitrant. Ordzhonikidze in person urged him to accept the role assigned to him in exchange for his life.

No one was so well qualified as Piatakov to destroy Trotsky, his former god and now the Party's worst enemy, in the eyes of the country and the whole world. He finally agreed I to do it as a matter of 'the highest expediency,' and began rehearsals with the interrogators. One of the journalists covering the trial, Lion Feuchtwanger , commented: "Those who faced the court could not possibly be thought of as tormented and desperate beings.

In appearance the accused were well-groomed and well-dressed men with relaxed and unconstrained manners. They drank tea, and there were newspapers sticking out of their pockets Altogether, it looked more like a debate The impression created was that the accused, the prosecutor, and the judges were all inspired by the same single - I almost said sporting - objective, to explain all that had happened with the maximum precision.

If a theatrical producer had been called on to stage such a trial he would probably have needed several rehearsals to achieve that sort of teamwork among the accused. Piatakov and twelve of the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. Karl Radek and Grigori Sokolnikov were sentenced to ten years. Feuchtwanger commented that Radek "gave the condemned men a guilty smile, as though embarrassed by his luck.

But what transpired surpassed all my expectations of human baseness. It was all there, terrorism, intervention, the Gestapo, theft, sabotage, subversion All out of careerism, greed, and the love of pleasure, the desire to have mistresses, to travel abroad, together with some sort of nebulous prospect of seizing power by a palace revolution. Where was their elementary feeling of patriotism, of love for their motherland?

These moral freaks deserved their fate My soul is ablaze with anger and hatred. Their execution will not satisfy me. I should like to torture them, break them on the wheel, burn them alive for all the vile things they have done. It is claimed that Reinhard Heydrich developed a plan to damage the Red Army. In January , a Soviet journalist heard stories that senior members of the German Army were having secret talks with General Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

This idea was reinforced by a diplomat from the Soviet embassy in Paris who sent a telegram to Moscow saying he had learned of plans "by German circles to promote a coup de'etat in the Soviet Union" using "persons from the command staff of the Red Army.

According to one version Although this was understood in SD circles as an NKVD plant, Heydrich determined to use it, in the first place, against the German High Command, with whom his organization was in intense rivalry. Major V. Dapishev of the Soviet General Staff has claimed that the plot "originated with Stalin" as he wanted to purge the leadership of the armed forces.

Roy A. Medvedev , has argued in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism that he is convinced that Heydrich arranged the forgery of the documents.

However, he points out: "It would be a mistake to think that these false accusations were the main cause of the destruction of the best cadres. They were only a pretext. The real causes of the mass repression go much deeper. Any serious investigation would have exposed the Nazi forgery against Tukhachevsky, but Stalin did not order an expert investigation. It would have been even easier to establish the falseness of many other materials produced by the NKVD, but neither Stalin nor his closest aides checked or wanted to check the authenticity of these materials.

On 11th June, , Tukhachevsky and seven other Soviet generals appeared in court on the charges of treason for having conspired with Germany. All were executed. Any officer, no matter how remotely connected to Tukhachevsky and the seven deposed generals in the past or present, was rounded up and executed.

In turn, the military subordinates of the newly executed commanders became the next group of candidates for elimination and so on, like a never-ending web of destruction. Even the top echelon of Soviet marshals and generals, who had signed the verdict for the actually non-existent trial of Tukhachevsky and the other generals, disappeared one by one, never to be heard of again. By the end of the reign of terror, the officer corps of the Soviet Army had been decimated beyond recognition.

The next show trials took place in March, , and involved twenty-one leading members of the party. Another leading figure in the government, Maihail Tomsky , committed suicide before the trial. They were all charged with attempting to assassinate Joseph Stalin and the other members of the Politburo, "to restore capitalism, to wreck the country's military and economic power, and to poison or kill in any other way masses of Russian workers.

Raphael R. Abramovitch , the author of The Soviet Revolution: pointed out that at his trial: "Bukharin, who still had a little fight left in him, was extinguished by the concerted efforts of the public prosecutor, the presiding judge, GPU agents and former friends.

All of them were sentenced to death, along with other people arrested in connection with the trial. This was the first of several 'show trials' during Their aim was to expose a coordinated ring of 'spies' and 'terrorists' organized by former oppositionists. It was not enough to convict and punish them: the aim of the show trials was to prove the existence of these 'conspiracies' beyond doubt by having the accused confess their guilt before the Party and the world unaware of the torture used to extract their confession.

In NKVD circles the confession was regarded as the highest form of proof. There was no other evidence. A second show trial, in January , witnessed the conviction of Piatakov, Radek and fifteen other former supporters of Trotsky for industrial sabotage and espionage - as already proven by the Kemerovo trial.