Schachty trial

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The pillared hall of the trade union house in Moscow served as a courtroom.

The Shakhty trial (also Shakhty affair ; Russian Ша́хтинское де́ло ) from May 18 to July 7, 1928 was the first show trial in the Soviet Union after the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922. It was directed against Soviet and some foreign specialists. The process made it clear that the phase of class reconciliation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was over and was related to the Stalin revolution from the forced collectivization of agriculture and the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union under the sign of the first five-year plan . The trial was well prepared and the defendants had to confess what they had been told beforehand. However, the organization was not as perfect as it was with processes in the following years. Numerous defendants refused to plead guilty or withdrew their statements. Even so, most of the more than fifty accused were convicted. The Moscow trials during the Great Terror of the second half of the 1930s were essentially modeled on the Shakhty trial.

prehistory

The process stood at the beginning of a campaign that Stalin launched against the technical intelligentsia, which at the time was still strongly pre-revolutionary and bourgeois. This was closely related to the end of the semi-market NEP period and the rigid industrialization course under the sign of the first five-year plan, the beginning collectivization of agriculture and de-culakization . The industrialization course met with enthusiastic approval, especially among the younger party members. Stalin needed the support of the radicals in the struggle against the right-wing opposition in the leadership of the party. After defeating Trotsky, he was particularly keen to break the influence of Alexei Ivanovich Rykov , Mikhail Pavlovich Tomski and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin .

The rapid industrialization and the first approaches to collectivization were at the beginning of severe social burdens. The specialists served as scapegoats and the trials were intended to intimidate potential critics. The regime could not and did not want to admit errors in the system; instead, conspiracy theories were constructed according to which enemies of the people and foreign agents were responsible for the problems. The process ended the phase of class reconciliation and was the beginning of new class disputes. The bourgeois specialists formed the counterpart to the enemy image of the kulaks in the country. The specialists had enjoyed privileges during the NEP phase to the displeasure of the workers. The process should show that the bourgeois intelligentsia and non-party experts are now politically suspect and superfluous.

preparation

The process of 1928 and the ones that followed in 1930 and 1931 had similarities. All were under the direction of Stalin, all linked attempts at foreign influence with sabotage. From then on, this was referred to as pest work. The accused were specialists or functionaries, but indirectly the trials were also directed against those who deviated from the law in the party leadership. In order to increase the public impact, the processes were linked to appropriate campaigns in the media and the public with the aim of radicalizing the mood.

The preparation of the indictment was in the hands of the secret service OGPU . Alleged acts of sabotage in the Shakhty region in the Donets Basin on behalf of foreign and emigrated Russian capitalists served as a hook. Among other things, a conspiracy with connections to the French financial world and Polish secret service circles was assumed. The alleged crimes and the confessions were inventions that were meticulously thought out by the secret service. A brochure with the preliminary results of the investigation was published two and a half months before the start of the trial. In this, the interrogation protocols were quoted extensively. Central importance was attached to the proof of the pest work or sabotage. Anti-Soviet stereotypes or simple greed for money were constructed as motifs. Stalin had already made the objective clear at the April plenary session of the Central Committee , i.e. before the start of the trial: " The facts say that the Shakhty case is an economic counter-revolution that was arranged by a section of the bourgeois specialists who had previously directed the coal industry The facts go on to say that these specialists, organized in a secret group, received money for the pest activity from the former masters who are now emigrated in Europe and from counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet capitalist organizations in the West finally say that this group of bourgeois specialists, at the direction of capitalist organizations in the West, influenced our industry and shattered it. "It turned out that Stalin's internal party opponents agreed with him on the matter. Rykov stated during the April plenary session of the Central Committee that the party should not be guided by the abstract principle that the guilty should be brought to justice. When arresting, one has to start less from criminal law practice or the "principle of justice" than from "our great politics."

course

Delivery of the accused during the Shakhty trial. (May 18, 1928 to July 7, 1928)
Judge Andrei Wyschinski will announce the verdict at the end of the trial. (July 7, 1928)

Fifty-three Russian engineers, technicians and officials were charged. There were also three German engineers. The trial took place in the great hall of the House of Trade Unions in Moscow and lasted six weeks. Those responsible ensured the greatest possible public attention. The hall held 1500 spectators and there were box seats for diplomats. The trial was filmed and 136 journalists were accredited. The German Vorwärts , however, noted that the entire socialist press in the world was excluded. The normal audience changed every day. The chief judge was Andrei Januaryevich Wyschinski . This was the prosecutor in the show trials of the 1930s. The prosecutor in the 1928 trial was Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko . He described the defendants as " fearful mercenaries of capital " who would have been too cowardly to openly "throw the political glove at the USSR ." Instead of professing their political position, they cowardly ducked away. The repentant demeanor of some of the accused was only dismissed as acting by the Soviet press. The sometimes ritualized guilty confessions appeared to be untrustworthy, especially to foreign trial observers.

In terms of form, the process ran like a circumstantial procedure. As in the trials of the following years, the defendants were asked to give previously rehearsed statements. But in contrast to the show trials of the coming years, the secret service did not succeed in forcing all of the accused to self-inflict. Twenty-three defendants declared innocence. Others withdrew their confessions during the trial. One of the German accused even managed to expose the self-accusation of a co-accused Russian as unfounded. However, this had no influence on the result. The court was able to obtain the desired “evidence” of guilt with the help of cooperating defendants or witnesses. With regard to the role of defense counsel, there is, on the one hand, the opinion in the literature that at least some have acted in the interests of the defendants, uncovering loopholes and contradictions. But there is also the opinion that the defense lawyers strictly adhered to the guidelines from above and did not make any attempts to become active in favor of their clients.

In addition to the usual means of criminal proceedings, coercion was also used. In order to force the stubborn to reaffirm their “confessions”, they were threatened, subjected to physical abuse and made weary by being deprived of sleep.

In total, only four of the defendants were ultimately acquitted . The rest were convicted. Eleven were sentenced to death . Five of them were executed . The lesson of the judgment was that "crises were created by enemies, that the loyalty of the workers belonged to the regime and not to family or kin."

Two of the German accused were acquitted, one received a suspended sentence. The fact that the proceedings against German citizens threatened to strain diplomatic and economic relations may have played a role in this leniency. The German ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau threatened to resign.

Stalin concluded from the trial that “there was a lack of revolutionary vigilance among party organizations and trade unions. It showed that our economists are extremely lagging behind from a technical point of view, that some old engineers and technicians, because they worked uncontrollably, easily slip into the path of pest work, all the more since they are constantly being harassed with supplies by enemies from abroad. “To secure industrialization, Stalin called for“ revolutionary vigilance ”.

As a result, other bourgeois specialists were subjected to repression, were arrested and convicted in later trials, such as the industrial party trial (1930). A final trial at this stage was the trial of the alleged Union office of the Mensheviks . A trial against a working peasant party no longer took place because Stalin stopped this wave of repression in 1931. In the wake of the Shakhty trial, around 7,000 specialists were arrested, deported to camps or placed under house arrest by 1931. It is estimated that around 10% of the technical staff had been withdrawn from the production process. This made the implementation of the five-year plan even more difficult.

literature

  • Lorenz Erren: "Self-Criticism" and Admission of Guilt: Communication and Rule under Stalin (1917-1953). Munich, 2008
  • Peter H. Solomon Jr .: Shakhty Trial. In: James R. Millar: Encyclopedia of Russian History. Thomson Gale, Macmillan Reference, New York 2004, ISBN 0-02-865693-8 . Online version ( Memento from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  • Jürgen Zarusky : The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model. Ideological disputes and foreign policy concepts 1917-1933. Munich, 1992
  • Jörg Baberowski : Scorched Earth: Stalin's Rule of Violence. Munich, 2012

Web links

Commons : Shakhty-Trial  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stefan Creuzberger : Power politician and ideologist. Stuttgart, 2009 p. 114, Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin. Parallel lives. Munich, 1998 p. 380.
  2. ↑ Lorenz Erren: "Self-Criticism" and Confession of Guilt: Communication and Rule under Stalin (1917–1953). Munich, 2008 pp. 341–342.
  3. ↑ Lorenz Erren: "Self-Criticism" and Confession of Guilt: Communication and Rule under Stalin (1917–1953). Munich, 2008 p. 342.
  4. ↑ Martin Ebel: Illustrate the horror of Stalin .
  5. ^ Jörg Baberowski: Scorched Earth: Stalin's Rule of Violence. Munich, 2012 p. 168f.
  6. ^ Vadim S. Rogovin : Stalin's war communism. Essen, 2006 p. 49.
  7. ↑ Review of: Julie A. Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial. Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen, Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 2000. In: Archives for Social History 2001 online version
  8. ^ Jürgen Zarusky: The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model. Ideological disputes and foreign policy concepts 1917–1933. Munich, 1992 p. 238.
  9. ↑ a b Peter H. Solomon Jr .: Shakhty Trial. In: James R. Millar: Encyclopedia of Russian History. Thomson Gale, Macmillan Reference, New York 2004, ISBN 0-02-865693-8 . Online version ( Memento from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ A b c Lorenz Erren: "Self-criticism" and confession of guilt: Communication and rule under Stalin (1917–1953). Munich, 2008 p. 343.
  11. ↑ a b Jörg Baberowski: Scorched Earth: Stalin's rule of violence. Munich, 2012 p. 169.
  12. ^ Jürgen Zarusky: The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model. Ideological disputes and foreign policy concepts 1917–1933. Munich, 1992 p. 238.
  13. ^ Frank Hirschinger : "Gestapo agents, Trotskyites, traitors": Communist party purges in Saxony-Anhalt 1918–1953 Göttingen, 2005 p. 99
  14. ^ Stefan Creuzberger: Power politician and ideologist. Stuttgart, 2009 p. 115.
  15. ^ Jürgen Zarusky: The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model. Ideological disputes and foreign policy concepts 1917–1933. Munich, 1992 p. 139.
  16. ↑ Horst Günther Linke: Community of Fate? The Soviet Union in the calculation of German ambassadors in Moscow 1922–1941. In: Stormy departures and disappointed hopes. Russians and Germans in the interwar period. Munich, 2006 p. 183f.
  17. ↑ Klaus-Georg Riegel: Marxism-Leninism as a "political religion". In: Political religion and religious politics: between totalitarianism and civil liberty. Göttingen, 2005. pp. 45f.
  18. ↑ Patrick Rotman : Gulag - The Soviet "head office of the camps". Arte , accessed March 31, 2020 . Episode 1, Minute 23
  19. ↑ Klaus-Georg Riegel: Marxism-Leninism as a "political religion". In: Totalitarianism and Political Religion. Concepts of dictatorship comparison. Volume II Paderborn u. a., 1997 p. 112.