Trotsky's response to the Moscow Trials, 1936 to 1938, including the August 1936 trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the January 1937 Pyatakov trial, the March 1938 Bukharin trial, and the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry at Coyoacan in April 1937

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to outline the three Moscow Trials and Trotsky's response to them, including the John Dewey Commission of Inquiry. Strong answers integrate the framing of Trotsky as the master conspirator, the deaths of Lev Sedov and most of the Old Bolshevik leadership, the Coyoacan hearings, and the December 1937 Not Guilty verdict.

The answer

The framing strategy

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 trials were prepared by the NKVD under Genrikh Yagoda (later himself executed) and Nikolai Yezhov. State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky led the prosecution in all three trials. The confessions were extracted by sustained interrogation, the threat of family executions, and in some cases torture.

Trial of the Sixteen (August 1936)

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.

All 16 confessed, were convicted, and were shot on 25 August 1936. Lev Sedov's name was on the list of "absent conspirators." Trotsky's name headed it.

The trial was the trigger for Trotsky's internment in Norway and for the Dewey Commission inquiry.

Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937)

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.

Thirteen of the seventeen were sentenced to death and shot on 1 February 1937. Radek and Sokolnikov were sentenced to ten years and were murdered in the camps in 1939. The trial was the first that explicitly accused Trotsky of espionage for foreign powers.

Pyatakov's confession included a fabricated meeting with Trotsky at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen in December 1932. The Bristol Hotel had been demolished in 1917; Sedov demonstrated this from Copenhagen city records.

Trial of the Twenty-One (March 1938)

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.

Bukharin's defence was conducted with extraordinary subtlety: he accepted general political responsibility while denying specific operational charges, and his cross-examination of Vyshinsky exposed several of the prosecution's contradictions. He was shot on 15 March 1938 nevertheless.

The trial was the last and most elaborate of the three. It eliminated the last surviving member of Lenin's Politburo besides Stalin himself (Trotsky was abroad).

Lev Sedov's death

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

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. Other members included Otto Ruhle (the German Marxist), Suzanne La Follette (the American writer), Carlo Tresca (the Italian anarchist editor), Benjamin Stolberg, and Carleton Beals.

The Commission's preliminary hearings were held in Coyoacan from 10 to 17 April 1937. Trotsky gave testimony for eight days in English. The Commission was led for the defence by John Finerty, the American lawyer who had defended Sacco and Vanzetti. The hearings produced a 617-page transcript published as The Case of Leon Trotsky (Harper, 1937).

The Not Guilty verdict

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

• The Moscow Trials were "frame-ups."
• Trotsky and Sedov had not entered into agreements with foreign powers.
• The confessions had been manufactured.
• The trials displayed "the worst features of the Inquisition."

The verdict was a turning point in Western non-Communist Left opinion. The Trials lost their credibility with social democrats, liberal intellectuals, and most academic Russianists. The Communist Party press denounced the Commission as a "Trotskyite-Fascist instrument."

Trotsky's writings

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.

How to read a source on this topic

The Case of Leon Trotsky (Harper, 1937) and Not Guilty (Harper, 1938) are the primary record of the Dewey Commission. Conquest's The Great Terror (1968; revised 1990) is the canonical Western secondary work. Khlevniuk's Master of the House (2009) and The History of the Gulag (2004) draw on post-1991 archive openings.

The full NKVD case files on the three Trials remain partially closed in the Russian state archives.

Examples in context

Example 1. The Dewey Commission hearings (10 to 17 April 1937). Held at the Casa Azul in Coyoacan, the Commission under John Dewey heard Trotsky's defence. Its 422-page report (Not Guilty, 1938) found the Moscow Trials' charges fabricated. Bertrand Patenaude (Stalin's Nemesis, 2009) reconstructs the hearings from transcript and Diego Rivera's photographs. Trotsky's own The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) anchored the documentary case.

Example 2. The Bukharin trial (March 1938) and the Stalin Show Trials. Robert Conquest (The Great Terror, 1968, revised 2008) draws on samizdat and post-1991 archives to document the scale of the Purges (around one million executions 1937 to 1938). J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov (The Road to Terror, 1999) re-examined the Politburo decisions. Trotsky's responses in the Bulletin of the Opposition remain valuable as contemporary commentary.

Try this

Q1. 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]

• What the marker wants. Identify the trials' allegations; pair with Dewey Commission findings; link to the threat to Trotsky's life.

Q2. Evaluate the extent to which the Dewey Commission shaped Western understanding of the Moscow Trials. [25 marks]

• What the marker wants. Weigh the Commission's evidentiary impact against contemporary fellow-traveller dismissals; use Patenaude, Conquest.

Q3. Compare the views of Robert Conquest and J. Arch Getty on the Stalin terror. [10 marks]

• What the marker wants. Conquest (top-down terror, planned destruction) versus Getty (chaotic, factional, archive-based revision); judgement.