Not necessarily just Stalin, and not just necessarily the USSR, but those seem to be the epitome of the term. The USSR was a pretty closed society, and the Big Cheese could pretty much make anyone disappear that he wanted. There wasn’t the mass media that we take for granted today, so what was the point. It would have been easy enough to just report that [whatever person out of favor] had been tried, convicted, and executed without going thru the motions, and it’s not like most people would know–and not that they could do anything about it if they did.
Propaganda instruments that help the regime in:
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maintaining the fiction of procedural rigor within the system
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maintaining the fiction of there having been an actual crime against the system
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providing the opportunity of naming and shaming the scapegoat of the day for whatever WAS going “wrong” and thus
3a) affirming that the System itself and The Supreme Leader are NOT the problem
3b) letting others in the system know: “You remember what comrade Yuri used to do and say? That’s what happens to people who say and do that and to those who hang around them. Don’t.”
3c) providing others an incentive to vehemently denounce and distance themselves from comrade Yuri and point their fingers at his other buddies, thus doing the secret police’s work for them.
- providing the opportunity for a coerced “confession” to be extracted and circulated for propagandistic purposes
The show trials were for show for the people *within *the system as much as for the masses.
Got it in one.
To appease all the useful idiots in the west who had the dream the USSR was a socialists paradise so they could see the trials and ignore the reality.
I defer to anyone who has an authoritative answer to the question.
Spitballing, however, I imagine that a dictator probably sees two ways to maximize the deterrence effect of liquidating one rival upon other potential rivals. Either make them simply disappear, or humiliate them in a very public spectacle. How he chooses one method over another might depend on what he knows about how much of a power base that rival has – a knock in the night removes an isolated threat, while a show trial sends a message to the whole remaining faction that you broke their leader before executing him. But I’m just guessing.
BTW this may be somewhat of a grey zone “General Question”, I don’t know if anyone can cough up a memo from the Central Committee saying “these are the real reasons we’ll have show trials”.
Because show business is realer than real business. And they play to what is now termed the base.
You can’t think of the USSR as half a dozen Communists on top with the rest of the people wanting revolution. The people had been trained from birth to believe in the system. Seeing the system work against traitors who were trying to take away the gains the government had given them - very real gains if you compare 1935 Russia to 1905 tsarist Russia - was exactly what they wanted. The show trials made the ordinary people feel good.
The Soviet leadership didn’t invent show trials, although they were the Golden Age Hollywood of show trials, and show trials are going on today. Look at the Planned Parenthood hearings in Congress last week. The head of PP was shouted at, interrupted, insulted, made to account for lying information falsely attributed to PP, and accused over and over of heinous murder. Nobody could possibly have believed any of that or taken it as real government. And yet presumably it was all done for the delight and satisfaction of their base, which from all accounts wants the entire government to be shut down if PP is not defunded.
Show trials work. Until they don’t, and then they are horrifying examples of the evil of the past. Until they vary the formula a touch and they work again. The worst part of humanity is people.
I would guess there’s also a “how powerful is this faction” question to go with this. If you try to arrest and try your main opposition on the even of a coup, the opposition might decide to go through with it anyway to break dear leader out of the pokey. They might also be thrown into disarray if their leadership is suddenly killed.
Dunno how much that influences things.
As mentioned above, a lot of it was to deflect blame. “The whole reason we’re not yet a paradise is that reactionary elements like Boris are sabotaging the system.”
Moderator Note
Let’s avoid political commentary of this kind in GQ. No warning issued, but let’s stick closer to the subject in the OP.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
On that theme, I am curious if the Soviet Union ever accused the US of having Show Trials. It may be that they said so in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but, I’m curious if they ever did? Rosenbergs, perhaps? But, I’m more curious of accusations of large scale trials.
Definitely. The ‘authoritative’ answer, for all intents and purposes, is along the lines of “to rid the People of the Counter-Revolutionary spies and traitors in the midst of our Workers Paradise, and to stop the murders of the Proletariat by Reactionary Forces.”
Look at it another way. You can kill fewer people and still make everyone else obey by making an example of the ones you murder. In a way, if you gotta be a ruthless dictator, you’re being less bad by having the worst dissidents and other undesirables executed after a show trial than disappearing all the bad apples.
AFAIK, they didn’t. For one thing Stalin was not likely to use the term even to accuse others of it. And in fact Google ngrams shows that the term was not all that common until after Stalin’s death. (Most of the results are from standard court usage, e.g. “judgment to show trial.”)
There is a slight bulge in the late 1930s, but from 1941 on the USSR was our ally against Hitler and so accusations and slurs were tamped down. It grew slowly but constantly after that but time search for the early 50s pulls up only a few mentions.
Thank you kindly, Exapno.
Well, I could, but i’m afraid that even after all this time, someth
A lot of people believed within and outside the Soviet bloc that the accused were guilty and the trials just. This is depicted for instance in Costa Gavras “The confession” (based on the Prague trial) where even the communist wive of one of the main accused believes him guilty of the weird accusations threw at him once he admitted to them.
I also saw an American WWII propaganda movie depicting very clearly the accused as guilty of treason and sabotage in Stalin’s purge of the army.
Communists outside the Soviet union didn’t perceive Stalin as a bloody disctator and swallowed anything link, hook and sinker. Even non-communists weren’t certain the trials weren’t based on real plots. And within the eastern block, obviously, information was very restricted and propaganda running at full steam, so presumably most believed the party line.
There was no reason not to give the outside appearance of justice to the sentence for high profile cases. You can make some nobody dissapear without explanation, but if you want to get rid of someone famous as a hero of the 1917 revolution or a previously lauded leader of the Soviet Union, the people is going to need some public explanation. The trials provided such.
The Rosenbergs were most certainly depicted as having been railroaled outside the USA.
And obviously, there’s the whole McCarthy thing.
The Rosenburgs WERE soviet spies. their children gave up trying to clear their names, after soviet archives revealed them to be what they were accused of.
The Nazi People’s Court was for the same purpose - as much to rally support around the regime, make excuses for the war not going their way, and to put the willies up potential enemies of the regime by warning them traitors will be crushed, and that ordinary Germans should be watchful (i.e. paranoid) for traitors in their midst.