As 2010 drew to a close, the backsliding accelerated with a flurry of new setbacks—notably the rigged re-sentencing of dissident entrepreneur Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, the brutal repression of the political opposition in Belarus following the December 19 presidential election, and the passage of a spate of repressive new laws in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez assumed decree powers.[167]
The Moscow Trials comprised three events: The first trial, held in August 1936, involved 16 members of the ‘Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc’. The two main defendants were Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. The primary accusations against the defendants were that they had, in alliance with Trotsky, been involved in the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934, and of plotting to kill Stalin.[168] After confessing to the charges, all were sentenced to death and executed.
The second trial in January 1937 of the ‘Anti-Soviet Trotskyite-Centre’ comprised 17 defendants, including Karl Radek, Yuri Piatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov, who were accused of plotting with Trotsky. Thirteen of the defendants were executed, and the remainder died in labour camps.
The third trial was held in 1938 against the ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyists’, with Bukharin as the chief defendant. They were accused of having planned to assassinate Lenin and Stalin in 1918, and of having plotted to dismember the USSR for the benefit of foreign powers.
These trials have been condemned as ‘show trials,’ yet the very openness to foreign journalists and diplomats, as distinct from secret tribunals, is surely an approach that is to be commended rather than condemned. It also indicates the confidence the Soviet authorities had in their charges against the accused, allowing the processes to be subjected to foreign scrutiny.
The world generally has come to know the Moscow Trials as a collective travesty based on torture, threats to families, and forced confessions, with the defendants in confused states, declaring their confessions of guilt by rote, as if hypnotised. The trials are considered in every sense modern-day ‘witch trials’. For example, Professor Sidney Hook expressed the widely held view of the trials many years later that, ‘The confessions, exacted by threats and torture, physical and psychological, whose precise nature has never been disclosed, consisted largely of alleged ‘conversations about conversations.”[169] However the opinions of first-hand observers are not unanimous in condemning the methodology of the trials. The US Ambassador to the USSR, himself a lawyer, Joseph E Davies, was to write of the trials in his memoirs published in 1945 (that is, about seven years after the Dewey Commission had supposedly proven the trials to have been a travesty):
At 12 o’clock noon accompanied by Counselor Henderson I went to this trial. Special arrangements were made for tickets for the Diplomatic Corps to have seats.…[170] …On both sides of the central aisle were rows of seats occupied entirely by different groups of ‘workers’ at each session, with the exception of a few rows in the centre of the hall reserved for correspondents, local and foreign, and for the Diplomatic Corps. The different groups of ‘workers,’ I am advised, were charged with the duty of taking back reports of the trials to their various organizations.[171]
Davies stated that among the foreign press corps were the following representatives: Walter Duranty and Harold Denny from The New York Times, Joe Barnew and Joe Phillips from The New York Herald Tribune, Charlie Nutter or Nick Massock from Associated Press, Norman Deuel and Henry Schapiro from United Press, Jim Brown from International News, and Spencer Williams from The Manchester Guardian. The London Observer, hardly pro-Soviet, opined that: ‘It is futile to think the trial was staged and the charges trumped up. The Government’s case against the defendants is genuine’.[172]
Of Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, Davies opined that: ‘the prosecutor … conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable moderation’. Especially notable, given the subsequent claims that were made about the allegedly confused, brainwashed appearance and tone of the defendants, Davies observed: ‘There was nothing unusual in the appearance of the accused. They all appeared well nourished and normal physically’.[173] A delegation of the International Association of Lawyers stated:
We consider the claim that the proceedings were summary and unlawful to be totally unfounded. The accused were given the opportunity of taking counsels…. We hereby categorically declare that the accused were sentenced quite lawfully.[174]
In 1936 the British Labour Member of Parliament and distinguished lawyer D N Pritt KC, wrote extensively of his observations on the first Moscow Trial. In the lengthy article published in Russia Today, Pritt, after alluding to the good condition of the defendants who, in accord with the observations of Davies, did not appear to have suffered under Soviet detention, wrote:
The first thing that struck me, as an English lawyer, was the almost free-and-easy demeanour of the prisoners. They all looked well; they all got up and spoke, even at length, whenever they wanted to do so (for the matter of that, they strolled out, with a guard, when they wanted to).
The one or two witnesses who were called by the prosecution were cross-examined by the prisoners who were affected by their evidence, with the same freedom as would have been the case in England.
The prisoners voluntarily renounced counsel; they could have had counsel without fee had they wished, but they preferred to dispense with them. And having regard to their pleas of guilty and to their own ability to speak, amounting in most cases to real eloquence, they probably did not suffer by their decision, able as some of my Moscow colleagues are.[175]
Pritt was struck by the informality of the proceedings, and commented on how the defendants could interrupt at will, in what seems to have been a freewheeling debate:
The most striking novelty, perhaps, to an English lawyer, was the easy way in which first one and then another prisoner would intervene in the course of the examination of one of their co-defendants, without any objection from the Court or from the prosecutor, so that one got the impression of a quick and vivid debate between four people, the prosecutor and three prisoners, all talking together, if not actually at the same moment—a method which, whilst impossible with a jury, is certainly conducive to clearing up disputes of fact with some rapidity.[176]
Pritt’s view of Vyshinsky is in accord with that of Davies, stating of the prosecutor: ‘He spoke with vigour and clarity. He seldom raised his voice. He never ranted, or shouted, or thumped the table. He rarely looked at the public or played for effect’.[177] Pritt stated that the fifteen defendants[178] ‘spoke without any embarrassment or hindrance’. Pritt’s concluding remark states: ‘But it is equally clear that the judicature and the prosecuting attorney of USSR have taken at least as great a step towards establishing their reputation among the legal systems of the modern world’.[179]
167
C Gershman, ‘The Fourth Wave: Where the Middle East revolts fit in the history of democratization—and how we can support them’, The New Republic, March 14, 2011. NED, http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-presentations-and-articles/the-fourth-wave
168
‘The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre’, Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Report of Court Proceedings, ‘Indictment’, Moscow, August 19-24, 1936.
169
Sidney Hook, ‘Reader Letters: The Moscow Trials’, Commentary Magazine, New York, August 1984, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-moscow-trials/
174
Cited by A Vaksberg, Stalin’s Prosecutor: The Life of Andrei Vyshinsky (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 123.
175
D N Pritt, ‘The Moscow Trial was Fair’, Russia Today, 1936-1937. Sloan http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/pamphlets/1936/moscow-trial-fair.htm