The first Moscow trial

On 19 August 1936, in the October Hall of the House of the Unions in Moscow, a trial began that the whole world was watching. Sixteen defendants appeared before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, among them two men who only ten years earlier had been among the most powerful in the state: Grigory Zinoviev, former chairman of the Communist International and master of Leningrad, and Lev Kamenev, former boss of Moscow and Lenin’s deputy in the government. The prosecution charged that, on the orders of the exiled Leon Trotsky, they had formed a “united Trotskyite-Zinovievite centre” that had murdered Sergei Kirov and was preparing assassinations of Joseph Stalin and other leaders. The defendants confessed to almost everything. On 24 August all of them were sentenced to death, and in the night that followed, on 25 August, they were shot. It was the first of the three great show trials of 1936–1938 and the opening of the Great Terror.

Some English-language accounts state that the trial was directed against Old Bolsheviks and against “top officials of the Soviet political police”. The second part is not correct. There were no NKVD chiefs in the dock in August 1936; it was the NKVD, headed by Genrikh Yagoda, that prepared the trial. Yagoda himself was tried only in the third Moscow trial, in March 1938. The name “Trial of the Sixteen”, sometimes used for it in Russian and English, can also be misleading, since it more commonly denotes the Moscow trial of the leaders of the Polish Underground State in June 1945.

From “moral responsibility” to a “terrorist centre”

Zinoviev and Kamenev lost the struggle for power with Stalin in 1925–1927 and, together with Trotsky, were expelled from the party; thereafter they repeatedly recanted, were readmitted and were expelled again. After the murder of Kirov on 1 December 1934 both were arrested, and in January 1935 they were sentenced to ten and five years’ imprisonment respectively for “moral and political responsibility” for the crime. A few months later, in the so-called Kremlin affair, Kamenev’s sentence was increased to ten years.

Stalin did not stop there. At the beginning of 1936 the NKVD reopened the investigation into former Trotskyites and Zinovievites. The investigation, conducted from January to August 1936 by Yagoda’s men under the supervision of the Central Committee secretary Nikolai Yezhov, was meant to prove that prisoners and exiles had for years been forming a terrorist conspiracy. The arrested men were deprived of sleep, their families were threatened, and they were promised their lives in exchange for confessions. According to the accounts of NKVD defectors, which must be treated with caution, Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed to testify after a meeting with Stalin, who assured them that they would not be shot. On 29 July 1936 the Central Committee sent party organisations a secret letter on the “terrorist activity of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc”, and on 15 August the prosecution announced that the case would go to court.

The defendants

The sixteen defendants formed two unconnected groups. Eleven were well-known Bolsheviks from the former opposition: besides Zinoviev and Kamenev, they included Grigory Yevdokimov, Ivan Bakayev, Sergei Mrachkovsky, Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan and Ivan Smirnov, in 1919 one of the heroes of the fighting against Kolchak in Siberia, who had been in prison since 1933. The other five were German communists, émigrés from Germany and mostly little known; according to researchers, at least one of them, Valentin Olberg, was an NKVD agent. Their presence was meant to show that the Trotskyites were collaborating with the Gestapo, and thus with Nazi Germany.

The indictment claimed that in the autumn of 1932 the two oppositions had merged into a “united centre” which, on Trotsky’s orders, had resolved to kill Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Andrei Zhdanov, Lazar Kaganovich, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stanislav Kosior and Pavel Postyshev, and on 1 December 1934 had murdered Kirov through Nikolayev’s Leningrad group. Missing from the list of supposed targets, however, was Vyacheslav Molotov, which observers read as a sign that his position was weakening.

The trial

The trial was public, but only about 150 selected people were admitted to the courtroom – workers and officials from lists approved by Yezhov – together with foreign journalists and diplomats. The presiding judge was Vasili Ulrikh, who more than a year earlier had sentenced Kirov’s assassin, and the prosecutor was the Procurator of the USSR, Andrey Vyshinsky. The defendants waived their right to defence counsel. Pravda printed transcripts of the hearings every day, and rallies were organised throughout the country demanding death for the “gang of murderers”. On 21 August Pravda published a letter from sixteen well-known writers under the title “Wipe them off the face of the earth!”.

In the courtroom the defendants repeated their rehearsed testimony, incriminating themselves and one another. Zinoviev said that his “defective Bolshevism” had turned into anti-Bolshevism and that through Trotskyism he had arrived at fascism. Kamenev confessed that he had served fascism and counter-revolution. The only material evidence was Olberg’s forged Honduran passport, and the only witness was Smirnov’s former wife, who had herself been arrested. Smirnov and Eduard Holtzman, although they admitted belonging to an illegal opposition group, denied any part in terrorism.

The prosecution’s case was full of contradictions that were easy to expose. Holtzman testified that in 1932 he had met Trotsky’s son Lev Sedov at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen, from where they had gone to Trotsky himself for instructions. The Danish press quickly established that the hotel of that name had been demolished in 1917, and Sedov was able to prove that he had not been in Denmark at the time. Trotsky’s “instruction” to kill Stalin turned out to be his open letter of March 1932, printed in the émigré Bulletin of the Opposition, in which he called for “Lenin’s last advice” to be carried out and for Stalin to be removed from the post of General Secretary. The prosecution read the Russian word ubrat’ (убрать), meaning “to remove”, as “to kill”. Smirnov was alleged to have passed Trotsky’s coded instructions to the conspirators at a time when he had long been in prison.

The verdict

On 22 August, in his closing speech, Vyshinsky demanded that the “mad dogs” be shot, “every one of them”. In their final statements the defendants did not defend themselves but condemned their own crimes. On the night of 23–24 August the court sentenced all sixteen to death, and Trotsky and Sedov in absentia to arrest should they ever be found in the USSR. Appeals for clemency were rejected within a day. The sentences were carried out in the NKVD cellars in Moscow on 25 August 1936. The promise to spare their lives, if it had really been made, proved to be a lie. Repression also struck the families of the condemned: among others, both of Kamenev’s sons by his first marriage were shot.

During the trial several defendants, under pressure from the investigators, named other people: Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky, Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov. Vyshinsky announced that the prosecution was opening an investigation into them. On 22 August, when the newspapers reported this, Tomsky, the former trade union leader, shot himself at his dacha outside Moscow. The investigation into Bukharin and Rykov was dropped for the time being, but Radek, Pyatakov and Sokolnikov were soon arrested.

Reactions abroad

In the West the trial caused astonishment. Many observers could not understand why former leaders of the revolution were publicly accusing themselves of the gravest crimes. Some Western communists and Soviet sympathisers found the confessions credible; the British lawyer Denis Pritt, who was present in the courtroom, wrote that the trial had been fair. Others, especially socialists and Trotskyists, spoke of a frame-up from the outset. Trotsky, then living in Norway, was interned by the Norwegian government under pressure from Moscow, and in December 1936 he sailed for Mexico. There, in April 1937, he was examined by an independent commission chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey, which in September 1937 found the Moscow charges to have been fabricated.

In the Soviet Union the trial was beyond discussion. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the USSR quashed the verdict and rehabilitated all the condemned on the grounds that no crime had been committed.

Significance

The trial of August 1936 crossed a line that Stalin had not crossed before: for the first time he had former members of the Bolshevik party leadership, Lenin’s comrades, sentenced to death and executed. From then on no one in the party could feel safe. A month later Stalin decided that the NKVD was acting too slowly. On 25 September 1936 he telegraphed from his holiday on the Black Sea that Yagoda had “definitely proved himself incapable” of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc, and demanded that Yezhov be appointed head of the NKVD. Under Yezhov the terror engulfed hundreds of thousands of people. The subsequent show trials – of Pyatakov and Radek in January 1937, and of Bukharin, Rykov and Yagoda in March 1938 – elaborated a theme that had already appeared in 1936: the Trotskyite conspiracy was supposedly acting in concert with Germany and Japan.

This accusation had significance beyond the USSR. In 1936 Moscow was proclaiming a policy of popular fronts against fascism while at the same time shooting Old Bolsheviks as alleged Gestapo agents. The trials undermined Western confidence in the Soviet Union as an ally and strengthened the conviction in London and Paris that it was a weak, unpredictable state ruled by terror. Only three years later Stalin, who had had Zinoviev and Kamenev shot for their alleged collusion with Hitler, himself concluded a pact with Hitler.