Comrade Wallaby has been revealed as a counterrevolutionary agent and his attempt to disseminate reactionary propaganda to sabotage the People’s Board has been defeated.
I knew there were something up about him.
They were conducted to show the prolotariat that Comrade Stalin was in control, and would protect the revolution. The religion of Communism had to show that enemies were always trying to attack the revolution. And, note that most of the defendants went to their deaths acknowledging their errors, and with gratitude for Comrade Stalin showing the way back to reconciliation. Orwell described the epiphany of Winston in “1984”.
I thought the show trials were for (former) ranking members of the Party, as opposed to the NKVD arresting Ivan Ivanovich and charging him with espionage because they were expected to produce so many confessions a month.
Doesn’t change the fact that they were railroaded. Their factual guilt being a happy coincidence, kinda like “man shot in the back 21 times by police really had a gun !”
But if the Rosenbergs doesn’t work for you, try Sacco and Vanzetti.
Fitzroy McClean (one of the inspirations for James Bond) attended the trials, and wrote that the defendants went so willingly to their deaths because they’d been conditioned by years of living underground and sacrificing everything to the Party.
Bukharin did go off-script at one point, and the proceedings were briefly halted while he was hustled into a side room and presumably reminded of his obligations and his family’s continuing health.
Bukharin denied spying for the West, but he never attempted to defend his softer version of Communism. Zinoviev had been in charge of Petrograd during the Red Terror, and so had plenty of blood on his own hands, and could accept a system that killed innocent people whose only crime was that they had now become an undesirable element. The Trial of the Wreckers was pretty much like a lot of meetings we’ve all been through: some scapegoat is found; there isn’t much the poor sap can do for himself, and out he goes. It wasn’t at all like the kill-offs of the French Revolution, when Danton and Robespierre had died protesting how their deaths would destroy the correct direction society should take. The Old Bolsheviks just thought they’d unfortunately gotten pulled into the people-grinder of history.
Part of the purpose was gaslighting, to fuck with people’s sense of reality. If the Party says it’s true, it’s true, and there are no exceptions. If the Party says someone is guilty, then he is guilty.
In totalitarianism, it isn’t “Do as you are told”. It’s “Think as you are told”. One of the first steps in making others believe is to make them unsure of their basic assumptions. Then you pound at them until they accept your assumptions.
Regards,
Shodan
This seems to be one of the few times abjectly confessing did save the accused; they were given prison sentences instead of death, and many were rehabilitated later. While ironically their prosecutor Krylenko was himself purged and executed later.