Purge Trials

The first trial opened in August 1936, while Genrikh G. Yagoda was head of the secret police. The main defendants were Grigory Yevseyevich Zinovyev, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, and Ivan Smirnov, all of whom had been prominent Bolsheviks at the time of the October Revolution (1917) and during the early years of the Soviet regime. With 13 codefendants they were accused of having joined Leon Trotsky in 1932 to form a terrorist organization in order to remove Stalin from power. The prosecution blamed the group for the assassination of Sergey Mironovich Kirov (December 1934) and suggested that it planned to murder Stalin and his close political associates. On Aug. 24, 1936, the court found the defendants guilty and ordered their executions.

The second trial opened in January 1937, after N.I. Yezhov had replaced Yagoda as chief of the NKVD. The major defendants were G.L. Pyatakov, G.Y. Sokolnikov, L.P. Serebryakov, and Karl Radek, all prominent figures in the Soviet regime. They and their 17 codefendants were accused of forming an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre,” which had allegedly collaborated with Trotsky to conduct sabotage, wrecking, and terrorist activities that would ruin the Soviet economy and reduce the defensive capability of the Soviet Union. They were accused of working for Germany and Japan and of intending to overthrow the Soviet government and restore capitalism. They were found guilty on Jan. 30, 1937; Sokolnikov, Radek, and two others were given 10-year sentences, and the rest were executed.

At the third trial (March 1938), the prosecution suggested that the Zinovyev–Trotsky conspiracy also included Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin and Aleksey Ivanovich Rykov, the leaders of the right-wing opposition to Stalin that had been prominent in the late 1920s. Yagoda was also accused of being a member of the conspiracy, as were three prominent doctors who had attended leading government officials. A total of 21 defendants were accused of performing numerous acts of sabotage and espionage with the intent to destroy the Soviet regime, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore the capitalist system. They were also charged with responsibility for Kirov's death, and it was alleged that Yagoda had ordered the three doctors to murder the former secret police chief V.R. Menzhinsky, the author Maksim Gorky, and a member of the Politburo, V.V. Kuibyshev. Bukharin was accused of having plotted to murder Lenin in 1918. Although one defendant, N.N. Krestinsky, retracted his guilty plea, and Bukharin and Yagoda skillfully responded to the prosecutor Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky's questions to demonstrate their innocence, all the defendants except three were sentenced to death on March 13, 1938.

In addition to the so-called show trials, a series of closed trials of top Soviet military leaders was held in 1937–38, in which a number of prominent military leaders were eliminated; the closed trials were accompanied by a massive purge throughout the Soviet armed forces. Stalin's liquidation of experienced military leadership during this purge was one of the major factors contributing to the poor performance of Soviet forces in the initial phase of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

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