Stalin’s Show Trials

On August 19, 1936, the show trial against Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev because of "Trotskyism" began in Moscow. An excerpt from the article:

"Stalin’s Show Trials
By Dávid Fazekas

The Moscow Trials were a series of three show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938. The Moscow Trials included the Trial of the Sixteen, the Trial of the Anti-Soviet TrotskyistCenter, and the Trial of the Twenty-One. The defendants included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the former leadership of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism. The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants, including most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, and the trials are generally seen as part of Stalin’s Great Purge.

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Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev formed a ruling ‘troika’ in early 1923 after Vladimir Lenin had become incapacitated from a stroke. The troika effected the marginalization of Leon Trotsky in an internal party power struggle. A few years later, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the United Front in an alliance with Trotsky which favored Trotskyism and opposed Stalin specifically.[3] Consequently, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin and defeated Trotsky in a power struggle. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Kamenev and Zinoviev temporarily lost their membership in the Communist Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev, in 1932, were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and again were temporarily expelled from the Communist Party. In December 1934, Sergei Kirov was assassinated and, subsequently 15 defendants were found guilty of direct, or indirect, involvement in the crime and were executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were found to be morally complicit in Kirov’s murder and were sentenced to prison terms of ten and five years, respectively.
Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had been secretly tried in 1935 but it appears that Stalin decided that, with suitable confessions, their fate could be used for propaganda purposes. Genrikh Yagoda oversaw the interrogation proceedings.
The trial was held from August 19 to August 24, 1936 in the small October Hall of the House of the Unions (chosen instead of the larger Hall of Columns, used for earlier trials) and there were 16 defendants. The main charge was forming a terror organization with the purpose of killing Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet government. They were tried by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, with Vasili Ulrikh presiding, and the Prosecutor General being Andrei Vyshinsky.
Defendant Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, was blamed by his co-defendants for being the leader of the Center which planned Kirov’s assassination. He, however, had been in prison since January 1933 and refused to confess. All the defendants were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka prison in Moscow."