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The Moscow trials were a series of show trials held by the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938 at the instigation of Joseph Stalin. They were nominally directed against " Trotskyists " and members of the " Right Opposition " of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union .
The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of the Soviet Great Purge. The accused were tortured to extract confessions and publicly admitted their guilt during the show trial. Most of the accused, including Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov and Genrikh Yagoda, were convicted, and sentenced to death.
Between 1936 and 1938, three very large Moscow trials of former senior Communist Party leaders were held, in which they were accused of conspiring with fascist and capitalist powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union and restore capitalism.
The commission proclaimed that it had cleared Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials and, moreover, exposed the scale of the alleged frame-up of all other defendants during these trials. Among its conclusions, it stated: "That the conduct of the Moscow trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no effort was made ...
In the Moscow trials, the defendants were found guilty of conspiring against Stalin, of having formed a conspiratorial bloc and collaborated with foreign governments. When it was discovered that Trotsky had indeed formed a "bloc" with the opposition in the USSR, like the Soviet government claimed, it put the Trials in a new light.
Marc Jansen , A Show Trial Under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982. Karl Kautsky, "The Moscow Trial and the Bolsheviki," preface to The Twelve Who Are to Die: The Trial of the Socialists-Revolutionists in Moscow]. Berlin: Delegation of the Party of Socialists ...
Purged Old Bolsheviks were condemned in a series of show trials known as the Moscow Trials, and then executed for treason or sent as prisoners to the Gulag system of labor camps. By 1938, the number of Old Bolsheviks who remained in power (other than Stalin himself) was small, and the vacant positions were filled by a younger generation of ...
The commission purported to clear Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials and, moreover, exposed the scale of the alleged frame-up of all other defendants during these trials. Among its conclusions, it stated that "the conduct of the Moscow trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no effort was made to ascertain ...