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

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 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.

Source A is an extract from Trotsky's testimony to the Dewey Commission (16 April 1937). Using Source A and your own knowledge, explain the role of the Moscow Trials in Trotsky's later life. [5 marks]

Evaluate the extent to which the Dewey Commission shaped Western understanding of the Moscow Trials. [25 marks]

Compare the views of Robert Conquest and J. Arch Getty on the Stalin terror. [10 marks]