The Moscow Trials as Evidence

The Moscow Trials of August, 1936, January, 1937, and March, 1938, are generally regarded as frame-ups of innocent defendants. But there has never been any evidence that this is so. The present book submits the Moscow Trials to a careful study, in the light of the large amount of primary-source materials now available from the former Soviet archives and the Leon Trotsky archives at Harvard and the Hoover Institution. It concludes that the Moscow Trials were not frame-ups of innocent men. On the contrary: they were genuine trials, in that the defendants testified as they wished to testify. The Moscow Trials testimony, therefore, is valid evidence, and the conspiracies to which the defendants pleaded guilty really did exist.