The Great Terror

Certain of the objections to the Zinoviev Trial were dealt with. For example, on the absence of documentary proof Vyshinsky now remarked:

The accused committed the deeds attributed to them…. But what proof have we in our arsenal from the point of view of judicial procedure? … The question can be put this way: a conspiracy, you say, but where are the documents? … I am bold enough to assert, in keeping with the fundamental requirements of the science of criminal procedure, that in cases of conspiracy such demands cannot be put.¹²⁹

(On this point, one of the defense lawyers, inadequately briefed, was to refer approvingly to “documents available in the case.”)¹³⁰

The popular rage line was heavily played:

They blow up mines, they burn down workshops, they wreck trains, they mutilate and kill hundreds of our best people, sons of our country. Eight hundred workers in the Gorlovka Nitrate Fertilizer Works, through Pravda, communicated the names of the best Stakhanovites in those works who died by the treacherous hand of the diversionists. Here is the list of these victims: Lunev—Stakhanovite, born 1902. Yudin—a talented engineer, born 1913. Kurkin—a member of the Young Communist League, Stakhanovite, 23 years of age. Strelnikova—girl shock brigade worker, born 1913. Moisets—shock brigade worker, also born 1913. These were killed, over a dozen were injured. Maximenko, a Staldianovite who fulfilled his norm of 125 to 150 per cent, was killed. Nemikhin—one of the best shock brigade workers—sacrificed his ten days’ leave to go down the Tsentralnaya Pit, and there somebody waited for him and killed him. Shot-firer Yurev—one of the men who took part in the fighting against the White Chinese—was killed. Lanin, an old miner, a participant in the Civil War, was killed. And so on and so forth.¹³¹

As a result, Vyshinsky felt justified in shouting, as he perorated,

I do not stand here alone! The victims may be in their graves, but I feel that they are standing here beside me, pointing at the dock, at you, accused, with their mutilated arms, which have mouldered in the graves to which you sent them!

I am not the only accuser! I am joined in my accusation by the whole of our people! I accuse these heinous criminals who deserve only one punishment—death by shooting!¹³²

Unlike the defendants in the Zinoviev Trial, some of the junior accused this time had defense counsel. These took a different view of their duties from those in bourgeois courts. Braude started by saying, in a locus classicus for Stalinist defense lawyers:

Comrade Judges, I will not conceal from you the exceptionally difficult, the unprecedentedly difficult position in which the Defence finds itself in this case. First of all, Comrade Judges, the Counsel for Defence is a son of his country. He, too, is a citizen of the great Soviet Union, and the great indignation, anger and horror which is now felt by the whole population of our country, old and young, the feeling which the Prosecutor so strikingly expressed in his speech, cannot but be shared by Counsel….

In this case, Comrade Judges, there is no dispute about the facts. Comrade Prosecutor was quite right when he said that from all points of view, from the point of view of documents available in the case, from the point of view of the examination of the witnesses who were summoned here, and cross-examination of the accused, all this has deprived us of all possibility of disputing the evidence. All the facts have been proved, and in this sphere the Defence does not intend to enter into any controversy with the Procurator. Nor can there by any controversy with the Procurator concerning the appraisal of the political and moral aspects of the case. Here, too, the case is so clear, the political appraisal made here by the Procurator is so clear, that the Defence cannot but wholly and entirely associate itself with that part of his speech.¹³³

When the “defense” had finished, the last pleas followed. Pyatakov ended his, with downcast eyes:

In a few hours you will pass your sentence. And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.¹³⁴

Radek’s most useful contribution was to make the point that there were still “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites, people who helped us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us, people who from liberalism, from a Fronde against the Party, gave us this help….” This was in fact a charter for disposing of any critics of the Purge, even if “seveneighths-Stalinist.”

Yet while both abject and cogent in his presentation of the charges against Trotsky and the accused, he managed to make a few two-edged remarks. He continued to dissociate himself and his co-defendants from the direct German connection: