page_title: Great Purge
section_title: Third Moscow Trial
hierarchical_section_title: Great Purge / Moscow Trials / Third Moscow Trial
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Руководители ОГПУ - делегаты XVII съезда ВКП(б): Я.С.Агранов, Г.Г.Ягода, неизвестный и С.Ф.Реденс. Deutsch: Die OGPU-Funktionäre Ja.S.Agranow, G.G. Jagoda, (unbekannt) und C.F.Redens als Delegierte während des XVII. Parteitags der KPdSU (B) in Moskau
context_page_description: The Great Purge or the Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovschina, was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union that occurred from 1936 to 1938. It involved a large-scale repression of wealthy peasants; genocidal acts against ethnic minorities; a purge of the Communist Party, government officials, and the Red Army leadership; widespread police surveillance; suspicion of saboteurs; counter-revolutionaries; imprisonment; and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.
  The "Kulak Operation" and the targeting of national minorities were the main components of the Great Terror. Together these two actions accounted for nine-tenths of the death sentences and three-fourths of Gulag prison camp sentences. Of the operations against national minorities, the Polish Operation of the NKVD was the largest one, second only to the "Kulak Operation" in terms of the number of victims.
context_section_description: The third and final trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, is the most famous of the Soviet show trials, because of persons involved and the scope of charges which tied together all loose threads from earlier trials. Meant to be the culmination of previous trials, it included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites", led by Nikolai Bukharin, the former chairman of the Communist International, former premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky and Genrikh Yagoda, recently disgraced head of the NKVD.
  The fact that Yagoda was one of the accused showed the speed at which the purges were consuming their own. It was now alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the U.S.S.R and hand her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain, and other preposterous charges.
  Even previously sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it harder to swallow these new allegations as they became ever more absurd, and the purge expanded to include almost every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin and Kalinin. No other crime of the Stalin years so captivated Western intellectuals as the trial and execution of Bukharin, who was a Marxist theorist of international standing. For some prominent communists such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism, and even turned the first three into fervent anti-Communists eventually. To them, Bukharin's confession symbolized the
  depredations of communism, which not only destroyed its sons but also conscripted them in self-destruction and individual abnegation.
  The preparation for this trial, which took over a year, was delayed in its early stages due to the reluctance of some party members to denounce their comrades. It was at this time that Stalin personally intervened to speed up the process and replaced Yagoda with Yezhov.
caption: NKVD chiefs responsible for conducting mass repressions (left to right): Yakov Agranov; Genrikh Yagoda; unknown; Stanislav Redens. All three were themselves eventually arrested and executed.
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