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Unlock This CourseMost victims of the purges vanished quietly. The most famous Old Bolsheviks were treated differently. Between 1936 and 1938 they were put on trial in Moscow in front of an audience. Stalin had four reasons for doing this in public.
Key terms:
The 'Trial of the Sixteen'. Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen others were accused of working with Trotsky to murder Kirov and of planning to kill Stalin. All sixteen were found guilty and shot within a day of the verdict.
Seventeen men were tried, including Pyatakov, a leading manager of heavy industry, and the writer Radek. They were accused of wrecking mines and railways and spying for Germany and Japan. Thirteen were shot.
Twenty-one men were tried, including Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda, the former head of the NKVD. The charges included spying and plotting to kill Lenin and Stalin. Eighteen were shot.
Trotsky, living abroad, was named as the chief plotter in all three trials. He was sentenced to death in his absence and was murdered in Mexico by a Soviet agent in August 1940.
The trials were held in the House of Unions in Moscow. Foreign journalists and diplomats were invited, and the speeches were printed in the newspapers and broadcast on the radio. The prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, called the accused 'mad dogs' and demanded that they be shot. Meetings were held in factories where workers voted for the death penalty.
There was almost no evidence apart from the confessions of the accused. These had been forced out of them beforehand by weeks of questioning without sleep, by threats against their families and by promises. Zinoviev and Kamenev were reportedly promised their lives if they confessed. The promise was broken.
The charges were absurd, and the stories sometimes fell apart. In 1936 one of the accused said he had met Trotsky's son at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1932. That hotel had been knocked down in 1917. In 1938 one defendant, Krestinsky, took back his confession in court. The next day, after a night with the NKVD, he said he was guilty after all.
Even so, the trials worked. Many Soviet people believed them, because they could not imagine that famous leaders would confess to crimes they had not done. Some foreigners believed them too, including the American ambassador, Joseph Davies.
The Red Army was the one organisation strong enough to overthrow Stalin. Many of its commanders had risen under Trotsky during the Civil War, and its best-known leader, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, was popular and had ideas of his own. Stalin did not trust them.
In May 1937 Tukhachevsky was arrested and beaten until he confessed. On 11 June 1937 he and seven other generals were tried in secret, accused of spying for Germany and plotting against Stalin. They were shot within hours. Unlike the Old Bolsheviks, they were given no public trial.
The purge then spread through the whole officer corps in 1937-38:
Stalin's power was now total. The Old Bolsheviks were dead, and nobody was left who could challenge him. Their jobs went to younger officials who owed everything to Stalin and obeyed without question. The cost was that officials were too frightened to give honest advice or report bad news.
Thousands of managers, engineers and planners were arrested as 'wreckers'. Their replacements had little experience. Managers stopped taking risks or trying new ideas in case a mistake was called sabotage, and many sent in false figures. Remember, growth in industry slowed sharply after 1937.
The army lost most of its experienced leaders just as war in Europe was coming closer. New officers were promoted too fast and were afraid to act without orders. The damage showed in the war against Finland in 1939-40, when the huge Red Army took over three months and suffered very heavy losses to defeat a small neighbour.
Millions of families lost a relative to prison, the camps or execution. Wives of 'enemies' could be arrested too, and their children sent to orphanages. Schools, hospitals and universities lost teachers, doctors and scientists. A few people gained, because every arrest left a job or a flat for someone else.
How this weakness affected the army when Germany attacked is covered in Invasion: Soviet Setbacks, 1941-42.
Don't say Tukhachevsky was tried in a show trial. The three Moscow Show Trials were public trials of Old Bolsheviks. The generals were tried in secret. Don't write that the purges only made Stalin stronger: they made his own position safe but made the country weaker, especially its army and industry. And keep the three trials apart: 1936 Zinoviev and Kamenev, 1937 Pyatakov and Radek, 1938 Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history book)
From a modern history textbook.
The Moscow trials were theatre, not justice. Every line had been written in advance and rehearsed in the cells until the broken defendants knew their parts. On stage, beneath the chandeliers, Vyshinsky played the outraged prosecutor and screamed for blood, while invited foreign reporters watched from the seats like an audience on opening night. No real evidence was produced: confessions were enough. The verdict, like the script, had been settled by Stalin long before the curtain rose.
(a) What impression does the author give about the Moscow Show Trials? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that the Moscow Show Trials were a fake, staged performance and not real trials at all. This is shown by the language of the theatre that runs through the whole extract: the trials were 'theatre, not justice', the defendants 'knew their parts' and the verdict was settled 'before the curtain rose'. These words suggest that everyone was acting and nothing was genuine. The author's tone is scornful, saying that Vyshinsky 'played' the prosecutor and 'screamed for blood', which makes him sound like an actor, not a lawyer. The author has also chosen to stress the 'rehearsed' confessions, the 'broken' defendants and the lack of 'real evidence', and says nothing about the many people who believed the trials at the time. This selection makes the trials seem a complete sham controlled by Stalin.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations, and explains how the author's choice of words, tone and selection of points (including what is left out) create that impression.
Don't retell what the extract says about the trials, and don't add your own facts about Zinoviev or Bukharin: this question gives no marks for them. Pick out the author's loaded words, such as 'theatre', 'script' and 'screamed', and say what each one makes the reader think. Then add one sentence on what the author chose to stress or leave out.