The Great Terror

The new trial did not have the immediate and obvious aims of the first. The motives remaining are plain enough. First, revenge. Most of the leading ex-Trotskyites were now destroyed. And revenge carried with it, of course, Stalin’s idea of precautionary or preventive measures. A clean sweep, even if there was no more compelling reason for action by normal standards, fitted Stalin’s firm belief in “Stone dead hath no fellow” and “Better safe than sorry.”

Moreover, Stalin had been temporarily balked of a more important prey—Bukharin and the Rightists. The trial was thus not the one he had intended, but a pale substitute. At the same time, it kept the pot boiling. It provided continuity. And it could be, and was, used to implicate the Right once again. A minor mystery, given this motive of Stalin’s, is why Uglanov was not brought into it. He had been named as subject to investigation in the announcement of 21 August. He was not among those rehabilitated in September, and yet he was not tried. It would have been greatly to Stalin’s advantage to have put up so prominent a Rightist in January 1937, as a bridge to Bukharin and Co. And even though Yagoda is alleged to have protected him, there was time, on ordinary reckoning, between Yagoda’s fall and the January 1937 Trial for Yezhov to prepare him. One can only presume that, as we have said, he refused to talk.

The new batch of accused were designated simply “the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center.” No other group or faction was represented, unlike the case at the 1936 Trial of the “Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center” or the later “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.” The first trial had anyhow been, as we saw, unimpressive on the Trotskyite side. Radek was now put up to say,

If you take the composition of the old centre you will find that the Trotskyites did not have a single one of the old political leaders on it. There were Smimov, who was more of an organizer than a political leader; Mrachkovsky, a soldier and a fighting man; and Ter-Vaganyan, a propagandist.⁶⁶

Since there were no genuine Trotskyites to hand, as there were genuine Zinovievites and genuine Rightists, the distinguished ex-Trotskyites had to serve.

In other ways, the new accused presented a different impression from that of their predecessors. Then, there had been a seven-man “Center,” plus various hangers-on. This time, the Center consisted of only four people: Pyatakov, Radek, Serebryakov, and Sokolnikov. Radek and Sokolnikov were not accused of crimes as serious as those of the other two. Pyatakov and Serebryakov were charged with organizing three main sabotage groups (among dozens they had allegedly set up): the railway-wrecking organization headed by Livshits; the “West Siberian Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” at Novosibirsk, consisting of Muralov, Boguslavsky, and Drobnis, having under them a variety of industrial wreckers in the area; and the three wreckers in the chemical industry, coming directly under Pyatakov. The specializations were not complete; for example, the railway wrecker Knyazev was also a Japanese spy, while the coal wreckers of Siberia were also the organizers of the attempted assassination of all visiting Politburo members.

The indictment differed greatly from that of August 1936. Then, it had simply been a matter of terrorism. It had been remarked by Vyshinsky and in evidence that the accused had no policy except the seizure of power from Stalin. But such a policy was by no means unpopular,⁶⁷ and soon after the executions the press had started to announce that Zinoviev did have a political program after all—one involving the restoration of capitalism, which he had naturally tried to concea1.⁶⁸

Stalin was to remark:

At the Trial in 1936, if you will remember, Kamenev and Zinoviev categorically denied that they had any kind of political platform. They had full opportunity to unfold their political platform at the Trial. Nevertheless, they did not do so, declaring that they had no political platform whatsoever. There can be no doubt that they both lied in denying that they had a platform.⁶⁹

This theme was strongly put in the new indictment. The accused intended to renounce industrialization and collectivization, and they relied for support in particular on the German and Japanese Governments. They proposed to make territorial concessions to Germany, to allow German capital into the country, and in case of war with Germany to carry out wrecking in industry and at the front. This had all been arranged at a meeting between Trotsky and Rudolf Hess.

Trotsky had also at least implied the desirability of defeat in war, having allegedly written to Radek: “It must be admitted that the question of power will become a practical issue for the bloc only as a result of the defeat of the U.S.S.R. in war. For this the bloc must make energetic preparations.…”⁷⁰