Chapter 3: The Terrifying Trial
Stalin’s mortal sin of organizing for the old party members shocked the whole world. These defendants, who stood before the Moscow court, were famous all over the world. Along with Lenin and Trotsky, they had mobilized the Russian working masses in the great socialist revolution that created a state unprecedented in history.
What compelled these outstanding revolutionaries to suddenly betray their beliefs, their parties, and the working class? What motivated them to commit such unpardonable crimes as espionage, treason, sabotage of industrial construction, and mass repression of workers? Is all this just to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union?
The Moscow trials confronted the world with a choice: either all of Lenin’s comrades and close associates were said to have become traitors and fascist bandits, or Stalin was an unprecedented conspirator and executioner. Or Stalin was a conspirator and an executioner as never before.
People were bewildered by the horrendous charges, and this bewilderment increased when all the defendants bowed their heads and confessed at the trial. People became increasingly distrustful of similar trials. The bizarre behavior of the defendants in court has given rise to all sorts of hypotheses and speculations; they may have confessed under the influence of hypnosis, or their confessions may have been extracted under torture, or they may have been forced to take large quantities of mind-destroying drugs. There is only one aspect that no one wants to even think about, and that is that Stalin was right, and Lenin’s old comrades had indeed committed heinous crimes, and that is why they confessed.
Of course, Stalin also understood that the world would not believe that the prosecutor’s office would declare without any proof that the founders of the Bolshevik Party had defected to Hitler or Japanese imperialism, or that they would try to revive capitalism in the Soviet Union. Therefore, it was expected that he would do everything in his power to adduce objective evidence to convict, even one such piece of evidence. However, in each of the three Moscow trials, the state prosecutor failed to produce a single piece of evidence that would have proven the defendant’s guilt: no secret letters, no espionage information, not even a political manifesto or leaflet.
And yet the indictment says. The scale of the conspiracy the defendant is accused of committing is enormous. But isn’t it bizarre that three Moscow trials have produced no physical evidence? According to the indictment, these conspiracies involved the entire Soviet Union, and the participants in the conspiracies, according to government speculation, secretly traveled to Germany, France, Denmark, and Norway, where they met in secret to discuss plans to kill Soviet government leaders and to split the Soviet Union. Throughout the Soviet Union, dozens of terrorist and sabotage cells were operating in a frenzy, attempting to murder leaders, carry out bombings, and sabotage the production of industrial and mining enterprises. In short, for four years, hundreds of people were deliberately trying to bring down the country. But how can one explain the fact that the Ministry of the Interior could not find a single piece of paper or any other material evidence?
In conversations with several foreign writers, Stalin explained that the defendants were experienced clandestine activists who had destroyed in advance the evidence that would have brought them ruin. Stalin, who always considered himself well versed in the detective work of the secret service and today’s Ministry of the Interior, probably privately laughed at the ludicrousness of his explanation, which could not be refuted.
The Russian Party underground workers were no less experienced in clandestine activities than the defendants in today’s Moscow courts. In short, the same people sat in the dock in the pre-revolutionary period and in the Stalinist system today. However, the Russian police often found in their places of clandestine activity a large amount of material that was presented to the court as material evidence of their revolutionary activities. After the February Revolution, hundreds of party documents, including Lenin’s own correspondence, were found in the archives of the secret service.
The Ministry of the Interior, like the secret service before the revolution, had a wide variety of intelligence channels and could rely on spies to obtain solid evidence. Incidentally, the MVD had more “eyes and ears” – i.e., informers – than the DIA. The Secret Service can try to force a revolutionary to defect as a spy, but it cannot threaten him with death if he refuses. The MVD not only threatens, but can actually kill those who refuse, because the MVD does not need a court sentence to do so. The pre-revolutionary police could send the revolutionaries themselves into exile, but had no power to exile or murder their families, whereas the Ministry of Internal Affairs had such power.
When the Soviet government issued a summary report of the first public trial, the Western press, which had suspected from the beginning that Stalin’s move was purely an attempt to liquidate the former opposition leaders, immediately emphasized the fact that the court had presented no objective evidence of the defendants’ guilt. Stalin was so disturbed by this reaction of the West that he asked the State Prosecutor, Vyshinsky, to explain it in public at the next court session. The following is a statement made by Vyshinsky at the Second Moscow Trial in January 1937.
“The crime charged against the defendant was committed by the defendant’s own hand …… But what kind of evidence do we have to have in order to meet the requirements of the lawsuit? The question could also be asked: You say this is a conspiracy case, but where is your evidence? ……”
“I’m sure that such a claim cannot be made in the case of a conspiracy, as the basic rules of criminal procedure also say.”
The state prosecutor thus brazenly shows that such a charge is without the necessity of any proof of the defendant’s guilt. Thus, anyone with an open mind must ask the question: Since the investigators did not show any evidence of guilt to the arrested persons, what compelled the old Bolsheviks to confess to having committed a crime punishable by death under Soviet law?
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