The verbatim record of the Moscow trial of March 2–13, 1938, published as the Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” is not a work of literature but a state document: a transcript of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., presided over by V. V. Ulrich, with Andrei Vyshinsky prosecuting. It sets down, session by session, the indictment, the examinations of twenty-one accused and their witnesses, the prosecution’s closing speech, the defence pleas, the last words of the defendants, and the verdict. What it offers a reader today is the full texture of a Stalinist show trial — the charges, the confessions, the cross-examinations, and the rhetoric that framed them.
“I ask the Court to explain to the accused Bukharin that he is here not in the capacity of a philosopher, but a criminal”
The Core Argument
The prosecution’s case, laid out in the indictment and driven home by Vyshinsky, holds that the accused belonged not to a political tendency but to a criminal conspiracy — the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” — formed on the instructions of foreign intelligence services. The alleged aim was to restore capitalism, dismember the Soviet Union by severing Ukraine, Byelorussia, Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Far East, and to serve Germany, Japan, Britain and Poland through espionage, wrecking, diversion and terrorism. The defendants are charged under Articles 58¹ᵃ, 58⁸, 58⁷, 58⁹, 58¹⁰ and 58¹¹ of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R. — treason, espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and the undermining of military power. Vyshinsky’s closing speech insists the trial proves the accused are “a gang of murderers, spies, diversionists and wreckers without principles or ideals,” an advance detachment of international fascism, and demands death for the traitors.
Inside the Book
The Court, the Charges, and the Indictment
The verbatim record opens with the machinery of the trial itself: the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., sitting from March 2 to 13, 1938, with a press communication appended concerning a closed session held on March 9. The bench is named — President V. V. Ulrich, members I. O. Matulevich and B. I. Yevlev, secretary A. A. Batner — and the prosecutor is A. Y. Vyshinsky. Twenty-one accused stand charged under Articles 58¹ᵃ, 58⁸, 58⁷, 58⁹, 58¹⁰ and 58¹¹ of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R.: treason, espionage, diversion, terrorism, wrecking, undermining military power, provoking foreign attack. Each confirms receipt of the indictment; Maximov is identified as Dikovsky, alias Abramovich. Most refuse counsel, and only Levin, Pletnev and Kazakov accept defenders. The indictment describes a conspiracy built on foreign intelligence instructions to restore capitalism and dismember the Soviet Union — Ukraine, Byelorussia, Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Far East — through espionage, wrecking and terror. It invokes earlier trials, Tukhachevsky’s and those of Mdivani and Okudjava, and names Trotsky as tied to German intelligence since 1921 and British since 1926, with Krestinsky, Rosengoltz, Rakovsky, Chernov, Sharangovich and Grinko as agents, and Zelensky, Ivanov and Zubarev as tsarist provocateurs.
Grinko, Krestinsky, and the Ukrainian Thread
Grinko takes the stand and traces the Ukrainian organization’s instructions back to the Right and Trotskyite centre, and his own chiefly to Rykov. Through 1935 and early 1936 he carried out its tasks, reaching the centre through Krestinsky, and through Krestinsky passed the Ukrainian organization’s formula to fascist circles abroad, receiving confirmation that it was accepted. His personal fascist connections ran back to the end of 1932. He went to Krestinsky because the Trotskyites had their own Ukrainian line, and he wanted official relations fixed so that the same thing was discussed everywhere. Vyshinsky presses: had Grinko exposed Krestinsky? Grinko answers that he got confirmation, not exposure. Krestinsky denies connecting Grinko with fascists, saying he merely introduced him to business people, and denies negotiating for Trotskyite ends. Grinko places the talks in his old office at the People’s Commissariat of Finance; Krestinsky counters that he visited Grinko often at conferences, having been appointed to a committee on Finance and Foreign Affairs. Grinko says he told Krestinsky their position, that Pyatakov had sent him, and later spoke at the Grand Theatre with the man Krestinsky had dealt with. Rykov corroborates two meetings with Grinko at the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936 — meetings, he says, of members of an illegal organization fighting the Party and Soviet government. Rykov knew Krestinsky was a Trotskyite and Krestinsky knew Rykov belonged to the illegal organization; Krestinsky insists he knew of Rykov’s underground struggle only from statements at the Plenum of the Central Committee, and that today he is telling the truth. Grinko names Bukharin, Rosengoltz, Zelensky and Yagoda as members, and each corroborates as regards himself. Grinko then lays out the centre’s program: reliance on the military aid of aggressors, undermining defence, opening the front in war, consent to dismemberment, and a plan to seize the Kremlin. He reports terrorist assignments — Ozeryansky instructed by Yakir and Gamarnik to prepare an act against Yezhov, Bergavinov preparing one against Stalin — and wrecking in the People’s Commissariat of Finance, the Lepel case in Byelorussia, savings banks, the state budget, capital construction and agriculture, summed up in Rykov’s formula: “strike at the Soviet government with the Soviet ruble.” Grinko pleads guilty wholly. Chernov follows with his biography, his Menshevik past, his doubts from 1927, and his meeting with Rykov in autumn 1928 at Mukhalatka, where Rykov explained the Rights’ program and told him to incite the middle peasants; Rykov confirms the meeting and the intention to make Chernov a follower.
Zubarev and the Police Agent
Zubarev testifies that his crimes in the seed cultivation department of the U.S.S.R. Commissariat of Agriculture matched Chernov’s account: confusion in seed cultivation, lowered seed quality, bad materials, bad sifting, careless storing — reducing yields and souring the peasant mood against “selected seeds.” The period, he says, was the end of 1933 and beginning of 1934. In March 1934 he moved to the R.S.F.S.R. Commissariat, where the organization also existed, connecting through Muralov, long People’s Commissar of Agriculture of the R.S.F.S.R., whose Assistant Commissar Lisitsin was likewise a member. There his wrecking took the form of wrongly planned vegetable sowing, neglect of vegetable growing in the eastern districts despite industry’s needs, the uneconomic shipping of vegetables from Central Russia, retardation of fruit-tree nurseries, absent crop rotation on state farms, and cattle left without fodder so that herds died off. He knew the bloc’s program included terror and organized it himself: at the end of 1936, about December, he and Lisitsin received instructions to form a terrorist group in the R.S.F.S.R. Commissariat. No definite persons were fixed at first; the target was leading members of the Central Committee, particularly the Political Bureau, and given their positions they settled on Molotov — Stalin, Kaganovich and Voroshilov had been raised, but technical possibilities limited them to Molotov. Vyshinsky then asks when he became an agent of the tsarist Okhrana; Zubarev corrects him — tsarist police. In 1908 police searched his father’s village and found illegal literature; Inspector Vasilyev offered escape from punishment in exchange for becoming an agent. He called on Vasilyev in Kotelnich, receiving instructions to inform on the Kotelnich organization — its leaders Chibisov, Petukhov and Popov, the match factory, the garrison. In 1910 he connected with the Sterlitamak inspector, under the pseudonym “Paren,” earlier “Vasily,” and in Ufa “Prokhor.” He betrayed co-operative members, Zemstvo staff and political exiles, including the Social-Democrat agronomist Silin. Mobilized in 1916, he reported on his unit’s political sentiments once, and stayed connected with the police until the revolution. Vasilyev gave him thirty rubles on two occasions — Vyshinsky calls these “thirty pieces of silver,” twice what Judas received.
Krestinsky’s Testimony on Deception and the Coup Timetable
Krestinsky told the court how the conspirators planned to lie to everyone. Statements to the population and the army would pose as a rebellion of loyal Soviets overthrowing a bad Soviet government and restoring a good one, while saying nothing about the coup’s real aims. Foreign governments would likewise be kept in the dark about the plan to change the entire foundation of the state and the territorial concessions already agreed; instead the plotters would profess peace and disarmament while defending Soviet frontiers against forcible partition. His letter to Trotsky, carried to Norway by Bessonov — though Krestinsky believed Bessonov had been sent for Sedov, the letter actually went through Reich-Johannson — asked Trotsky’s view on dissolving state and collective farms. Krestinsky thought the collective form had proved itself economically and should be kept, with internal relations altered so an upper stratum could emerge; they should not be too outspoken. Trotsky replied agreeing, probably at the end of December or the beginning of January, and on his own initiative urged hastening the coup, sending instructions circuitously in a letter to Rosengoltz that arrived around the same time or later, perhaps through Shostak.
After the reply, preparations became more direct and Tukhachevsky received carte blanche. Around the beginning of February, Rosengoltz and Krestinsky were formally made members of the centre. Back in November, Rosengoltz, Gamarnik and Krestinsky had taken over leadership of the Trotskyite organization after Pyatakov and Radek were pushed out; they now dealt with Tukhachevsky and Rudzutak directly, corresponding with Trotsky themselves rather than through Pyatakov as before. They told Rudzutak to reckon with them as the Trotskyites’ main representatives and to count them into this centre, which existed even though it never met in full force. In February Tukhachevsky was away in Sochi, leaving instructions for his military confederates to get ready. A conference in Rosengoltz’s apartment fixed the coup for the second half of May. At the very beginning of May it emerged that Tukhachevsky was not going to London; Rudzutak, back from Central Asia, then declared he could accomplish the coup in the first half of May.
Since 1935 Krestinsky had been in contact with three covert Trotskyites in the Moscow Party organization — Postolovsky, Purer and Korytny — who were placing covert Trotskyites in responsible jobs and keeping contact with the Party for Moscow. He told them the time for action was nearing, so they must draw up lists of people to arrest and remove at the outbreak of the coup, and lists of replacements. With local district conferences under way, the lists were to be ready around May 12. But early in May the debacle began: changes in the military department were published, Gamarnik was removed as First Assistant People’s Commissar and Tukhachevsky as Second Assistant, Tukhachevsky was transferred to Samara, Yakir from Kiev, Uborevich from Byelorussia, and Kork and Eidemann were arrested. A coup was now impossible, and the question of a mid-May rising became irrelevant. Krestinsky began preparing for arrest, talked matters over with Rosengoltz, who did not expect to come to grief and undertook to continue connections with Trotsky, and warned the Moscow men to get in touch with Rosengoltz if he were taken. A few days later he was arrested.
He added that he had not spoken of his Trotsky connections after returning from abroad; they were maintained through Berlin and Bessonov, and after Trotsky moved to Oslo through their Minister there, Yakubovich. In autumn 1935 Trotsky, through Yakubovich, reproached them all for insufficient activity — not in accelerating the coup, which depended on external circumstances and the outbreak of war, but in developing terrorist and diversive work. Krestinsky conveyed this to all the leading comrades. Then Pyatakov went abroad and many letters passed through Bessonov, sometimes through Yakubovich, and when Yakubovich left in the winter of 1935 their situation was reported through him. Through Bessonov in 1934 Krestinsky communicated the results of his talks with Rosengoltz, Rudzutak and Tukhachevsky, and that a committee had been formed in 1935, though Pyatakov had probably spoken of it first. On terrorism, Rosengoltz had told the truth that the business was centralized and Smirnov was attending to it; soon Smirnov was arrested and Mrachkovsky took over, then Pyatakov, and when Pyatakov was dead and—
Ikramov, Khodjayev and the Uzbek Nationalist Bloc
Ikramov began by admitting he had denied everything before his arrest, but now refused to hide behind Bukharin or “our leaders,” insisting they had learned denial methods from them; he noted that Vyshinsky had witnessed how many days he and his leaders denied at the Plenum of the Central Committee, and that their arsenal and methods of denial were identical. Vyshinsky asked him to affirm that Bukharin had spoken to him about wrecking. Ikramov described a 1935 conversation on Zubovsky Boulevard, in a new apartment block, fourth or fifth floor; present were his wife, Bukharin’s wife, and a woman called Aunt Sonya. They supped in the kitchen, then Bukharin led him into another room. Vyshinsky asked Bukharin whether Aunt Sonya existed; Bukharin deflected to the “matrimonial aspect.” Pressed on wrecking, Bukharin called the formulations unclear, then confirmed the 1935 meeting occurred but said he had said not a word about politics. Ikramov said Bukharin was not telling the truth. Bukharin admitted recruiting Ikramov in 1933 and thought he remained a member in 1935, reasoning that Ikramov was serious and would not retreat from obligations. He denied Ikramov’s account that he came from Moscow claiming Lenin’s thesis on non-capitalist evolution was wrong and proposing capitalism in Uzbekistan, calling himself not that stupid. Asked what they discussed, Bukharin said tea, weather, Turkestan weather, no politics. Vyshinsky ironized that Bukharin assumed Ikramov was still a member; Bukharin said that in 1933 Ikramov was embittered against the Party leadership over events in Kazakhstan, so he loaded him with a charge then, convinced he would continue. Vyshinsky challenged that a leader meeting an enlisted member two years later would not discuss weather; Bukharin said a planned meeting did not occur because Ikramov did not find him in. Vyshinsky noted Bukharin’s good memory for meetings that did not take place; Bukharin called those phantoms. Ikramov confirmed the Kazakhstan talk, saying Bukharin saw something terrible from the railway car window and he consented immediately in 1933. On 1935, Ikramov insisted the circumstances were as described, with three outsiders present, supper in the kitchen, then a separate well-furnished room. Vyshinsky established there were three rooms. Bukharin admitted meeting Ikramov after enrolling him and discussing anti-Soviet activity.
Ikramov said the main conversation concerned uniting his group with Faizulla Khodjayev’s.
Bulanov on Yagoda’s Protection of the Conspirators
Bulanov testified that Yagoda shielded Dreitzer despite the department chief holding definite facts of Dreitzer’s prolonged Trotskyite activity; Yagoda’s line toward the Rights, Trotskyites and Zinovievites aimed at ending the struggle against them, and repressive measures came only after Party or public reminders, as a matter of form. Vyshinsky pressed whether Yagoda knew of Dreitzer’s conspiratorial work and shielded him, and Bulanov confirmed it. Turning to Ivan Nikitich Smirnov, Bulanov said that while Smirnov was in prison Yagoda sent Molchanov to instruct him on what limits to keep if testimony were demanded. When Smirnov was brought from prison to Moscow, Yagoda departed from his usual practice — he did not normally visit prisons — and went to see him in his cell; Bulanov heard Yagoda tell Molchanov he was easy in his mind about how Smirnov would conduct himself in Court. Vyshinsky put it plainly: he coached him.
The Arrests of Kamenev and Zinoviev
After the assassination of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, when the decision was taken to arrest Kamenev and Zinoviev, Yagoda sent Bulanov to arrest Kamenev together with Pauker, Chief of the Operations Department — a man fully initiated into conspiratorial affairs, exceptionally trusted, the connecting link with Yenukidze. Bulanov later learned Pauker was a German spy, and Yagoda confirmed he had known it. Zinoviev was to be arrested by Molchanov and Volovich; Molchanov was Chief of the Secret Political Department of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and a member of the organization of the Rights, while Volovich, Assistant Chief of the Operations Department, was implicated in espionage — Yagoda confirmed Volovich was a German spy. Yagoda’s instructions were to bring Kamenev and Zinoviev in but not to make a search.
The Decision to Kill Yezhov
Bulanov then turned to specific crimes. He knew from Yagoda that the decision to assassinate Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov was adopted by the centre with exclusively political aims — a measure to insure against exposure as participants in the conspiracy and to preserve the possibility of carrying it out. After Kirov’s assassination, Yezhov was appointed by the Central Committee to watch the investigation, and Yagoda grew increasingly alarmed as Yezhov rapidly mastered the work of the Administration of State Security, with no certainty he would not discover the true state of affairs. Yagoda employed every means to misinform him: only materials, information and records picked out by Yagoda and his assistants were sent to him, while corresponding information and documents were concealed and held back. At the beginning of the first third of 1936 Yagoda said he had no guarantee Yezhov would not dig down to the truth, and was convinced resolute measures were needed to localize an impending danger.
Yagoda’s Knowledge of the Kirov Assassination
In early 1936 Bulanov learned that Yagoda had known how the Kirov assassination was organized. Entering Yagoda’s office unannounced, he found him excitedly talking to Molchanov; after Molchanov left, Yagoda said: “It looks as if Yezhov is also getting at the bottom of the Leningrad affair.” Then, warning Bulanov of the confidentiality and promising “if anything should happen” to tear his head off, Yagoda said he had known an attempt on Kirov was being prepared; he had a reliable man in Leningrad initiated into everything, Zaporozhetz, Assistant Chief of the Leningrad Regional Administration, and had so arranged matters as to facilitate the assassination of Kirov by Nikolayev — done with the direct connivance, and consequently assistance, of Zaporozhetz. Yagoda mentioned, abusing Zaporozhetz for lack of efficiency, that several days before the assassination the guard had detained Nikolayev by mistake, finding a notebook and revolver in his portfolio, but Zaporozhetz released him in time. Yagoda also said Borisov, an employee of the Leningrad Administration, had a share in the assassination; when members of the government came to Leningrad and summoned Borisov to the Smolny to interrogate him as a witness, Zaporozhetz, alarmed and fearing Borisov would betray those behind Nikolayev, decided to kill him; on Yagoda’s instructions Zaporozhetz arranged an automobile accident to the car taking Borisov to the Smolny, and Borisov was killed, ridding them of a dangerous witness. Bulanov then understood Yagoda’s unusual solicitude when Medved, Zaporozhetz and other officials were arrested and brought to trial: he had entrusted Bulanov personally with the care of the families of Zaporozhetz and Medved, and had them sent for detention to the camp unusually, not in the prisoners’ car but in a special through car; before sending them he had Zaporozhetz and Medved brought to see him. The danger of exposure was so evident that Yagoda decided to assassinate Yezhov. In summer 1936 he instructed other persons, not implicated in the present trial, to have poison laid in the apartment where Yezhov lived; how, when, by what means and under what circumstances he did not tell Bulanov, who does not know, but is certain it was done.
The Court’s Finding and Vyshinsky’s Opening
The Court established the exact identity of the representatives with whom the conspirators of the anti-Soviet “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” were connected, and the states they represented. At this in-camera session, the accused Yagoda testified, fully admitting he organized the murder of Comrade M. A. Peshkov, stating he pursued personal as well as conspiratorial aims. At the morning session of March 11, 1938, the President resumed the session and gave Vyshinsky, Procurator of the U.S.S.R., the floor for the Prosecution. Vyshinsky addressed the Comrades Judges, members of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, calling the case an exceptional phenomenon of extraordinary public and political significance. While the Supreme Court had examined grave crimes before, this was the first case of such crimes and criminals. As the Court investigation proceeded, it exposed ever more monstrous crimes, before which the deeds of the most inveterate criminals fade. He asked what other trial could compare in monstrosity, brazenness and cynicism, or expose crimes with such force and tear the mask from scoundrels, showing the world the bestial countenance of international brigands directing miscreants against peaceful Socialist labour.
The Bloc as an Agency of Foreign Intelligence
Vyshinsky asserted the trial’s historic significance: it proved with scrupulousness that the Rights, Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and bourgeois nationalists are a gang of murderers, spies, diversionists and wreckers without principles or ideals.
Key Ideas
Several ideas recur throughout the proceedings. One is the claim that the accused have “ceased to be a political trend” and become “a gang of professional wreckers, diversionists, spies and assassins” — a formulation Vyshinsky attributes to Stalin and treats as vindicated by the trial. Another is the concept of wrecking itself: the confessions describe deliberate sabotage of agriculture, industry, finance and planning, from the “strike at the Soviet government with the Soviet ruble” attributed to Rykov to the destruction of mulberry trees and the wrecking of the Chirchik and Kuvasai power projects. A third is the idea of the “mask” — Vyshinsky’s charge that Bukharin used philosophy and ideology as a cover for espionage, that “philosophy and espionage, like genius and villainy, do not go together.” The trial also turns on the notion of the “centre”: an inner directing body whose members coordinated the alleged conspiracy across the Rights, the Trotskyites, the military group, and the nationalist organizations of Ukraine, Byelorussia and Central Asia.
Themes
The deeper themes of this document are the mechanics of confession and the language of total denunciation. Again and again the accused confirm their guilt, describe their crimes in the state’s own vocabulary, and compete to expose one another — Khodjayev against Ikramov, Ikramov against Bukharin, Zelensky against Ikramov, Kamkov against Bukharin. The record shows how testimony is shaped: witnesses are called, contradictions are pressed, and defendants who resist are accused of “pettifogging” and evasion. Bukharin’s exchanges with Vyshinsky — his invocation of Hegel’s Logic on the word “this,” his insistence that he spoke in “vague nebulous formulas” — dramatize the collision between a defendant’s attempt to qualify his guilt and a prosecutor’s demand for absolute admission. Running beneath it all is the theme of the foreign hand: the conspiracy is always said to be directed from abroad, by Trotsky, by German, Japanese, British and Polish intelligence, by fascist circles. The trial’s stated purpose is to expose that hand and to demonstrate the unity of the Soviet people against it.
Why It Matters
The report endures as a primary document of the Great Terror and of the logic of the Moscow trials. It preserves, in the defendants’ own words, the confessions that sealed their fates — Grinko’s admission of wrecking in finance, Zubarev’s account of his tsarist police service and his espionage for Germany, Krestinsky’s testimony about the planned coup and the lists of officials to be arrested, Bulanov’s revelations about Yagoda’s role in the Kirov assassination and the plot against Yezhov, and the final pleas in which the accused renounce clemency and ask only to atone. It also preserves the prosecution’s rhetoric in full: Vyshinsky’s demand for death, his comparison of the accused to a “police department of Japanese and German intelligence,” his insistence that the trial matters for “world peace, human culture, real democracy and freedom of nations.” For historians of the Soviet Union, of show trials, and of the language of political accusation, the volume remains an essential — and chilling — source.
