Moscow trials

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Four Moscow trials between 1936 and 1938 in which high officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Bolsheviks ) and the Soviet Union were charged and killed for alleged terrorist and subversive activities are referred to as Moscow Trials . They fell in the early days of the Great Terror under Josef Stalin , during which the old guard of the Bolsheviks, who still came from Lenin's allegiance, got out of the way with so-called purges and thus secured his sole rule. Three trials were public hearings and organized as show trials , and one was a closed military trial . In these trials, political opposition within the CPSU was made the subject of an accusation under criminal law and thus almost the entire leadership of the October Revolution was eliminated. Almost all of the allegations against the defendants were later refuted.

meaning

Andrei Wyschinski , center, reads the indictment, 1937

The Moscow trials liquidated the main representatives of the generation of politicians of the October Revolution of 1917: Grigory Zinoviev was, among other things, chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and the Executive Committee of the Comintern , Alexei Rykov chairman of the Council of People's Commissars , Lev Kamenev his deputy and also a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee , Nikolai Bukharin was a member of the Politburo and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Pravda . Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot after the 1936 trial, Rykov and Bukharin after the 1938 trial. The assassination of Leon Trotsky by Soviet agents in Mexico in 1940 was only one of the six most eminent men Lenin had mentioned in his will Stalin remained. Georgi Pyatakov and Karl Radek , also members of the Central Committee, were convicted in 1937. With the trials, Stalin, who directed all trials in the background, got rid of all possible opponents in the party. Almost all party members who took part in the 1934 “party congress of the victors” as delegates were sentenced to death and executed. In particular against the supporters of the Leningrad party secretary Sergei Mironovich Kirov , Stalin waged a campaign of revenge.

Legal preparation

Kirov was murdered on December 1, 1934. He was a personal friend of Stalin, who went on vacation with him and had greatly promoted his political career. The Stalin biographer Edvard Radzinsky calls Kirov Stalin's "loyal henchman" (loyal cronies) and quotes from Kirov's speech at the XVII. Party congress of the CPSU in 1934, at which the “Woschd” was extolled twenty-two times with ever new panegyric (praising) expressions. On the day of Kirov's murder, a law was passed that ordered the judiciary to expedite cases of terrorist acts and to carry out death sentences immediately. This law largely deprived the defendants of their proper defense, the opportunity to have their verdict reviewed, and the pardon. It became one of the foundations for the liquidations of the following years.

procedure

Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov in 1938 before the trial

The chief prosecutor from 1936 to 1938 was Andrei Vyshinsky , the General Prosecutor of the Soviet Union , who had replaced Nikolai Krylenko . Both had played a major role in the Shakhty trial in 1928 . In each of the trials it was alleged that the accused had a conspiratorial connection with Trotsky and agents of capitalist foreign countries for the purpose of undermining Soviet power (Section 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code). Who these alleged clients were was based on the prevailing foreign policy alliance wishes of the Kremlin leadership: sometimes they were settled more in Berlin, sometimes more in London.

The cause of the trials was the assassination of the Leningrad party secretary Sergei Kirov in 1934, behind which Trotsky and his alleged henchmen in the Politburo of the CPSU were supposed to be behind . Confessions of the accused previously made by the NKVD served as “evidence” for this ; No physical evidence was presented. The convictions leading to the conviction were obtained through torture or psychological pressure, for example through threats to arrest, mistreat or kill relatives. Several specific statements by the defendants were easy to refute. The Golzmann accused in the first trial wanted to z. B. met with Trotsky on his visit to Copenhagen in 1932, after a previous meeting with Trotsky's son Leo Sedov at the Hotel Bristol . However, the hotel had already closed in 1917. Sedow, who was living in Berlin at the time, had also not been able to go to Copenhagen at all because of visa problems. Another defendant, Olberg, testified that Sedov's planned trip was canceled at the last minute. However, these blatant contradictions between Golzmann's and Olberg's statements did not attract the attention of the public prosecutor, other parties involved in the process or the docile Soviet press.

The then Deputy People's Commissar Georgi Pyatakov , accused in the second trial, said he flew on a "special plane" from Berlin to Oslo in December 1935 to meet with Trotsky. Aside from the extremely dry and improbable description of the trip, the Norwegian authorities were quick to determine that not a single foreign aircraft had landed in Oslo in December 1935.

Alleged facts did not stand up to the confrontation with reality.

The following processes were carried out in detail:

The death penalty was imposed and carried out against 50 of the 66 accused . The remaining 16 were sentenced to prison terms.

"Counter-process"

The main defendant in these trials was the absent Leon Trotsky, the former chairman of the Petrograd Soviet who organized the Soviet takeover on November 7, 1917. The defendants committed their crimes on his behalf to rebuild capitalism in the Soviet Union. Trotsky was Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1923 and was expelled into exile in 1929. Since then he has lived outside the Soviet Union (first in Turkey, then in France, then in Norway and from 1937 until his assassination in 1940 in Mexico).

The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky held numerous hearings in 1937 , which as a whole resembled a lawsuit. The Dewey Commission , chaired by John Dewey , consistently refuted the little material 'evidence' presented and published a report on September 21, 1937.

External perception and effect

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The Moscow trials can be seen as one of the first major crises in the Soviet system with an external impact on the group of mainly intellectual sympathizers in western countries. In view of the immediate threat from National Socialism in Central Europe, this effect was less significant than that of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 or the intervention of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (" Prague Spring "). Leading left-wing intellectuals such as Louis Aragon , Ernst Bloch , Ernst Fischer , but also Lion Feuchtwanger, who stayed in the Soviet Union for a short time in 1937, justified the trials in ignorance of the actual events. At the same time, selected material, such as the speeches of the Attorney General Andrei Wyschinski, for example in the GDR, served as a basis for discussion and training material in order to carry out purges within the SED.

rehabilitation

In his secret speech about the personality cult and its consequences on the XX. At the CPSU party congress , with which he initiated de-Stalinization, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev declared on February 25, 1956 that the accused were wrongly prosecuted, among other things because the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee had not been heard beforehand. Khrushchev also said: "The guilty pleading of many arrested persons charged with hostile activities has been achieved through cruel, inhuman torture." The full rehabilitation of many of the accused came over thirty years later in the era of glasnost and perestroika . The Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU had to found its own commission on September 28, 1987, which initially worked under the chairmanship of Mikhail Sergeyevich Solomenzew and from October 1988 under Alexander Nikolayevich Jakowlev . She investigated the cases of the Moscow trials and many other victims of Stalinism, and completed her work in July 1990 with the rehabilitation of over one million Soviet citizens.

Attempts to explain

There are different views in historical research about the exact background of these processes or the purges themselves. Among other things, personal security of power is considered possible, as is Stalin's paranoia .

Dimitri Volkogonov , on the other hand, doubts that Stalin really wanted to fight Trotskyist conspirators and agents of capitalism. The purges and the conspiracy theories on which they are based were originally an essentially rational calculation for the external stabilization of the Soviet Union and for securing personal rule, but then gained momentum and had an impact on the consciousness of their creator.

Contemporary representations

  • People's Commissariat for Justice of the USSR (ed.): Trial report on the criminal case of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorist center; Trial report on the criminal case of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist center: hearing before the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR, 19.-24. August 1936. Moscow 1936 ( online ).
  • People's Commissariat for Justice of the USSR (ed.): Trial report on the criminal case of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist center. Heard before the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR from 23-30. January 1937. Moscow 1937.
  • People's Commissariat for Justice of the USSR (ed.): Trial report on the criminal case of the anti-Soviet bloc of the Right and Trotskyists to be heard before the Military College of the Supreme Court of the USSR from November 2-13. March 1938. Moscow 1938.
  • John Dewey among others: The Case of Leon Trotsky. Report of Hearings on the charges made against him in the Moscow Trials. Harper & Brothers, London / New York 1937 ( online ).
  • Leo Sedov : Red Book on the Moscow Trial. Documents. Collected and edited by Lev Sedov. Editions Lion de Lee, Antwerp 1936. Numerous reprints, a. a. Reprint: isp-Verlag, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-88332-142-7 . Online after the reprint of the edition of Spartakus GmbH Hamburg 1972 [1] .
  • Victor Serge : 16 fusillés: où va la révolution russse . J. Lefeuvre, Paris 1936. In Cahiers Spartacus Paris. German edition as Die sixteen shot people - Unknown essays II. With a foreword by Magdeleine Paz Cahiers. Verlag Association, Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-88032-067-5 ( online ).
  • Leon Trotsky : Stalin's Crimes. Translated by Alexandra Pfemfert. Jean-Christophe-Verlag, Zurich 1937. New edition Dietz, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01552-4

Fiction editing

literature

  • Wladislaw Hedeler & Steffen Dietzsch: Chronicle of the Moscow show trials in 1936, 1937 and 1938. Planning, staging and effect. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-05-003869-1 .
  • Peter Huber & Hans Schafranek : Stalinist provocations against critics of the Moscow show trials. In: Wolfgang Neugebauer (Ed.): From Utopia to Terror. Stalinism analyzes. Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-85115-187-9 , pp. 97-134.
  • Dimitri Volkogonov : Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, ISBN 3-546-49847-X ; ECON-Verlag, Düsseldorf [u. a.] 1992, ISBN 3-430-19827-5 .
  • Vadim S. Rogovin : 1937, year of terror. Arbeiterpresse-Verlag, Essen 1998, ISBN 3-88634-071-6 .
  • Hans Schafranek: The short life of Kurt Landau. An Austrian communist as a victim of the Stalinist secret police. Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-900351-90-2 , pp. 374-427.
  • Hans Schafranek: Between Block Logic and Anti-Stalinism. The ambivalence of social democratic criticism of the Moscow show trials. In: Yearbook of the Association for the History of the Labor Movement. Vienna 1994, pp. 38-65.
  • Show trials under Stalin 1932–1952. Creation, background, sacrifice. With a foreword by Horst Schützler. Dietz, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-320-01600-8 .
  • Reinhard Müller : The Fall of the Anti-Comintern Block. A fourth Moscow show trial. In: Yearbook for Historical Research on Communism. Vol. 4, 1996, pp. 187-214.
  • Simon Sebag-Montefiore : Stalin. At the court of the red tsar. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-10-050607-3 .
  • Hermann Weber & Ulrich Mählert : Terror. Stalinist party purges 1936-1953. Schöningh, Paderborn [a. a.] ISBN 3-506-75335-5 ; extended special edition 2001, ISBN 3-506-75336-3 .

Web links

Representations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin , p. 402 f.
  2. ↑ Dimitri Volkogonow , Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1989, pp. 296-310.
  3. ^ Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin , Doubleday, New York 1996, p. 306.
  4. ↑ Reinhard Müller: NKVD torture. Terror-Reality and Production of Fiction , in: Wladislav Hedeler (Ed.): Stalinscher Terror 1934-41. A research balance sheet, BasisDruck, Berlin 2002, pp. 133–158.
  5. ↑ www.marxists.org: THE CASE OF Leon Trotsky. - Report of Hearings on the Charges Made Against Him in the Moscow Trials
  6. ↑ https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/81_2_Hedeler.pdf Wladislaw Hedeler: The scenarios of the Moscow show trials 1936 to 1938
  7. ↑ Speech by the First Secretary of the CK of the KPSS, NS Chruščev on the XX. Party congress of the KPSS (“Secret Speech”) and the decision of the party congress “On the personality cult and its consequences”, February 25, 1956 , accessed on July 7, 2010.
  8. ↑ Horst Schützler, foreword , in: Show trials under Stalin 1932–1952. Coming about, background, victims , Dietz, Berlin 1990, p. 8 f.
  9. ↑ Dimitri Volkogonow: Stalin. Triumph and tragedy. A political portrait , p. 18. Econ Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989/1999, ISBN 3-546-49847-X .