Preparations for the greatest trial of all were in less expert hands than those which had produced the Zinoviev and Pyatakov shows. The NKVD veterans had gone. Agranov had by now followed Yagoda and his staff, being “in 1937 expelled from the Party for systematic breaches of socialist legality,”1 or so a later Soviet footnote has it, as if asking us to believe that such practices were frowned on by the Party leadership of that year. He died, presumed shot, in 1938.2 His wife was also shot.3
Instead of Molchanov and Mironov, Agranov and Gay, Yezhov’s team for the 1938 Trial consisted basically of the experienced Zakovsky, promoted from Leningrad; Mikhail Frinovsky, who under Yagoda had been Commander of the NKVD’s Frontier Troops; I. I. Shapiro, Head of Yezhov’s Secretariat and of the new Section for Investigating Specially Important Cases; and to some extent Slut-sky of the Foreign Department.4 They were all themselves to perish, but meanwhile they had after all contrived a show not grossly inferior to its two predecessors. The plot was more complicated, and more horrifying, and there were faults of detail which attracted the censure of the stricter critics. But on the whole, it was a fair success.
It might be thought (as we have said) that no public trial was now necessary. The opposition and the semi-independent voices among Stalin’s own supporters had been crushed. The third trial was in this sense little more than a victory parade. It brought together publicly every type of opposition, terror, sabotage, treachery, and espionage, and turned them into branches of one single great conspiracy. For the 1936 Trial, Molchanov had prepared for Stalin “a special diagram … a system of many colored lines on the diagram indicated when and through whom Trotsky had communicated with the leaders of the conspiracy in the U.S.S.R.”5 Such a diagram showing all the links in the Bukharin Case would be one of great complexity. The trial, which opened in the October Hall on 2 March 1938, had, indeed, taken over a year to prepare, but it was a production of far greater scope than the others.
For all the threads were now pulled together. The Rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, were linked to Trotsky; to the earlier Zinovievite and Trotskyite plotters; to Trotskyites, hitherto considered ex-Trotskyites, who had not yet been tried; to the usual dozens of terrorist action groups; to the espionage organizations of several powers. They had set up at least two “reserve” centers; they had been involved in Yenukidze’s plots; and they were closely concerned with that of Tukhachevsky. They had formed organizational connections with underground nationalist conspirators in half a dozen of the non-Russian Soviet Republics. Their own “Rightist” grouping had involved dozens of men thought to be loyal Stalinists, in high positions in the State. And, as a final touch, they had throughout had as a major accomplice Yagoda, with all his leading subordinates.
As Vladimir Voinovich comments of the shorthand report of the Trial in
Don’t regard it as a document, for it is not a document; don’t think about methods of investigation, about why Krestinsky first offered one story, then another. Regard it as a work of art. And you will agree that you’ve never read anything like it in all of world literature. What well-defined characters! What a grandiose plot, and how cohesive and integrated everything was. It’s just too bad that the characters were living people, otherwise you might be able to stand reading it.6
“In the dingy winter daylight and under the stale glare of the electric lamps,”7 a wide variety of prisoners sat in the dock. In the first trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and to a lesser extent Smirnov and Evdokimov, were the only well-known figures. The second, with Pyatakov, Radek, and Sokolnikov, was less impressive still. And in each case, the supporting cast consisted mainly of third-rate alleged terrorists and only slightly more interesting engineers.
