Editing Great Purge (section)

==Moscow trials==
{{Main|Moscow trials}}

===First and second Moscow trials===
[[File:Л. Д. Троцкий, Л. Б. Каменев и Г. Е. Зиновьев. Середина 1920-х годов.jpg|thumb|right|Bolshevik revolutionaries [[Leon Trotsky]], [[Lev Kamenev]], and [[Grigory Zinoviev]]]]

Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. These trials were highly publicized and extensively covered by the outside world, which was mesmerized by the spectacle of Lenin's closest associates confessing to most outrageous crimes and begging for death sentences:{{Original research inline|date=May 2021}}
* The first trial was of 16 members of the so-called "Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc," held in August 1936,<ref>Rogovin (1998), pp. 17–18</ref> at which the chief defendants were [[Grigory Zinoviev]] and [[Lev Kamenev]], two of the most prominent former party leaders, who had indeed been members of a [[Bloc of Soviet Oppositions|Conspiratorial Bloc]] that opposed Stalin, although its activities were exaggerated.<ref name=":2"/> Among other accusations, they were incriminated with the assassination of Kirov and plotting to kill Stalin. After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.<ref name=":0">Rogovin (1998), pp. 36–38</ref>
* The second trial in January 1937 involved 17 lesser figures known as the "anti-Soviet Trotskyite-centre" which included [[Karl Radek]], [[Yuri Piatakov]] and [[Grigory Sokolnikov]], and were accused of plotting with Trotsky, who was said to be conspiring with Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting and the rest received sentences in labor camps where they soon died.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=142}}
* There was also a secret trial before a military tribunal of a group of Red Army commanders, including [[Mikhail Tukhachevsky]], in June 1937.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=182}}

It is now known that the confessions were given only after great psychological pressure and torture had been applied to the defendants.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=121}} From the accounts of former [[OGPU]] officer [[Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov|Alexander Orlov]] and others, the methods used to extract the confessions are known: such tortures as repeated beatings, simulated drownings, making prisoners stand or go without sleep for days on end, and threats to arrest and execute the prisoners' families. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such interrogation, the defendants were driven to despair and exhaustion.<ref name="Redman">{{cite journal|last=Redman|first=Joseph|title=The British Stalinists and the Moscow Trials|journal=Labour Review|date=March–April 1958|volume=3|issue=2|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/pearce/1958/03/trials.html}}</ref>

Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded, as a condition for "confessing", a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and that of their families and followers would be spared. This offer was accepted, but when they were taken to the alleged Politburo meeting, only Stalin, [[Kliment Voroshilov]], and Yezhov were present. Stalin claimed that they were the "commission" authorized by the Politburo and gave assurances that death sentences would not be carried out. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the defendants, he had most of their relatives arrested and shot.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=87}}

====Dewey Commission====
{{Main|Dewey Commission}}

In May 1937, the '''Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials''', commonly known as the Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky, to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator [[John Dewey]]. Although the hearings were obviously conducted with a view to proving Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true.{{sfn|Snyder|2010|ref=none|p=137}}

For example, [[Georgy Pyatakov]] testified that he had flown to [[Oslo]] in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.<ref>{{cite book|title=Not guilty : report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials|last=Dewey|first=John|publisher=Sam Sloan and Ishi Press International|others=1859–1952|year=2008|isbn=978-0923891312|location=New York|pages=154–155|oclc=843206645}}</ref> Another defendant, [[Ivan N. Smirnov|Ivan Smirnov]], confessed to taking part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year.

The Dewey Commission later published its findings in a 422-page book titled ''Not Guilty''. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow Trials. In its summary, the commission wrote:{{blockquote|Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds:
* That the conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth.
* That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them.
* That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.}}

The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/index.htm|title=The Case of Leon Trotsky (Report of Dewey Commission – 1937)|website=www.marxists.org}}</ref>

====Implication of the Rightists====
In the second trial, [[Karl Radek]] testified that there was a "third organization separate from the cadres which had passed through [Trotsky's] school,"<ref name="ReferenceA">British Embassy Report: Viscount Chilston to Mr. Eden, 6 February 1937</ref> 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."{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=164}}

By the "third organization," he meant the last remaining former opposition group called the [[Right Opposition|Rightists]], led by Bukharin, whom he implicated by saying:

{{blockquote|I feel guilty of one thing more: even after admitting my guilt and exposing the organisation, I stubbornly refused to give evidence about Bukharin. I knew that Bukharin's situation was just as hopeless as my own, because our guilt, if not juridically, then in essence, was the same. But we are close friends, and intellectual friendship is stronger than other friendships. I knew that Bukharin was in the same state of upheaval as myself. That is why I did not want to deliver him bound hand and foot to the People's Commissariat of Home Affairs. Just as in relation to our other cadres, I wanted Bukharin himself to lay down his arms.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>}}

===Third Moscow trial===
{{See also|Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites"}}
[[File:1934 agranov yagoda unknown redens.jpg|thumb|[[NKVD]] chiefs responsible for conducting mass repressions (left to right): [[Yakov Agranov]]; [[Genrikh Yagoda]]; unknown; [[Stanislav Redens]]. All three were themselves eventually arrested and executed.]]

The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as the [[Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites"|Trial of the Twenty-One]], is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials,{{POV statement|date=May 2021}} it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", supposedly led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the [[Communist International]], former premier [[Alexei Rykov]], [[Christian Rakovsky]], [[Nikolai Krestinsky]], and [[Genrikh Yagoda]], recently disgraced head of the NKVD.<ref name=":2"/>

Although [[Bloc of Soviet Oppositions|an Opposition Bloc]] led by Trotsky and with zinovievites really existed, [[Pierre Broué]] asserts that Bukharin was not involved.<ref name=":2"/> Differently from Broué, one of his former allies,<ref>{{Cite book|last=Cohen|first=Stephen|title=Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution}}</ref> [[Jules Humbert-Droz]], said in his memoirs that Bukharin told him that he formed a secret bloc with Zinoviev and Kamenev in order to remove Stalin from leadership.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Humbert-Droz|first=Jules|title=De Lenine à Staline. Dix ans au service de l'Internationale communiste 1921–1931}}</ref>

The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder [[Maxim Gorky]] by poison, partition the USSR and hand its territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other charges.{{Citation needed|date=May 2021}}

Even previously sympathetic observers who had accepted the earlier trials found it more difficult to accept these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and [[Mikhail Kalinin|Kalinin]].{{Citation needed|date=May 2021}} No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing.<ref name="Corey Robin, Fear, Page 96">Corey Robin, "Fear", p. 96</ref> For some prominent communists such as [[Bertram Wolfe]], [[Jay Lovestone]], [[Arthur Koestler]], and [[Heinrich Brandler]], the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned the first three into fervent anti-communists eventually.<ref>Bertram David Wolfe, "Breaking with communism", p. 10</ref>{{sfn|Koestler|1940|p=258}} To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation.<ref name="Corey Robin, Fear, Page 96"/>

====Bukharin's confession====
[[File:Bucharin.bra.jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|[[Nikolai Bukharin]], Russian [[Bolshevik]] [[Russian Revolution|revolutionary]] executed in 1938]]

On the first day of trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|p=352}}

[[Anastas Mikoyan]] and Vyacheslav Molotov later claimed that Bukharin was never tortured, but it is now known{{POV statement|date=May 2021}} that his interrogators were given the order "beating permitted", and were under great pressure to extract confession out of the "star" defendant. Bukharin initially held out for three months, but threats to his young wife and infant son, combined with "methods of physical influence" wore him down. But when he read his confession amended and corrected personally by Stalin, he withdrew his whole confession. The examination started all over again, with a double team of interrogators.{{sfn|Conquest|2008|pp=364–335}}

Bukharin's confession in particular became subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel ''[[Darkness at Noon]]'' and philosophical essay by [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]] in ''Humanism and Terror''. His confessions were somewhat different from others in that while he pleaded guilty to "sum total of crimes", he denied knowledge when it came to specific crimes.{{Citation needed|date=May 2021}}

The result was a curious mix of fulsome confessions (of being a "degenerate fascist" working for "restoration of capitalism") and subtle criticisms of the trial. One observer noted that after disproving several charges against him, Bukharin "proceeded to demolish or rather showed he could very easily demolish the whole case."<ref>Report by Viscount Chilston (British ambassador) to Viscount Halifax, No. 141, Moscow, 21 March 1938</ref> He continued by saying that "the confession of the accused is not essential. The confession of the accused is a medieval principle of jurisprudence" in a trial that was based solely on confessions. He finished his last plea with the words:<ref>Tucker, Robert. "Block of Rights and Trotskyites." ''Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet''. pp. 667–668.</ref><blockquote>[T]he monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all.</blockquote>[[Romain Rolland]] and others wrote to Stalin seeking clemency for Bukharin, but all the leading defendants were executed except Rakovsky and two others (who were killed in [[Medvedev Forest massacre|NKVD prisoner massacres]] in 1941). Despite the promise to spare his family, Bukharin's wife, [[Anna Larina]], was sent to a labor camp, but she survived to see her husband posthumously [[Rehabilitation (Soviet)|rehabilitated]] a half-century later by the Soviet state under [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] in 1988.{{Citation needed|date=May 2021}}