Quick questions on Trotsky, Moscow Trials and Dewey Commission: HSC Modern History Personality

The Stalin regime moved against the Old Bolshevik opposition in three open trials in Moscow between 1936 and 1938. The trials are collectively known as the Moscow Show Trials. The common framework was a Trotsky-led international conspiracy with German and Japanese intelligence to overthrow the Soviet regime and partition the Soviet Union. The Bukharin and Pyatakov groups in the Soviet Union were the alleged internal arm.

The first Trial of the Sixteen was held in Moscow from 19 to 24 August 1936. The accused were Zinoviev, Kamenev, Ivan Smirnov, Ivan Bakaev, Sergei Mrachkovsky, and 11 others. The charge was the formation of a "Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre" responsible for Sergei Kirov's assassination (1 December 1934) and a series of further planned assassinations.

The Trial of the Seventeen was held from 23 to 30 January 1937. The accused included Yuri Pyatakov (deputy commissar for heavy industry), Karl Radek, Grigori Sokolnikov (who had signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty), and Leonid Serebryakov. The charge was the formation of a "Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre" with German and Japanese intelligence.

The Trial of the Twenty-One was held from 2 to 13 March 1938. The accused included Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov (Lenin's successor as Sovnarkom chair), Genrikh Yagoda (the NKVD chief of the Sixteen trial), and Nikolai Krestinsky. The charge was the formation of a "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" with the same external connections.

Lev Sedov, Trotsky's son and political secretary, died in Paris on 16 February 1938 in a private clinic after an appendectomy. The circumstances were suspicious. The NKVD operative Mark Zborowski (codename "Etienne") was Sedov's closest collaborator in Paris and had reported on him to Moscow. Sedov's death deprived Trotsky of his most effective political assistant.

The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was formed in November 1936 by Sidney Hook, James T. Farrell, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others. The Committee requested an international Commission of Inquiry. The Commission was chaired by John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, then 78 years old.

The Dewey Commission published its 422-page report Not Guilty on 13 December 1937. The Commission found:

Trotsky's response to the Trials produced two major pamphlets and many shorter pieces. The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) traced the rewriting of Bolshevik history through the textbooks and archives. The Crimes of Stalin (1937) reconstructed the structure of the Trials from the confessions and the unanswered alibis. The eight days of Coyoacan testimony, published as The Case of Leon Trotsky (1937), is the major single primary source.

The three open Moscow Trials are the visible tip of the wider 1936-1938 Yezhovshchina that killed perhaps 700,000.

Lev Sedov organised the documentary defence from Paris until his February 1938 death.

The hearings were April 1937. The Not Guilty report was December 1937.