On 23 January, just five months after the conclusion of the “Trial of the Sixteen,” a second major show trial of Bolshevik Party members open in Moscow. Known as the “Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center,” this sham proceeding accuses seventeen additional longtime Bolsheviks of anti-Soviet activities and attempts of sabotage. Among them are Georgii (Iurii) Piatakov, former spokesman of the “Workers’ Opposition” at the Tenth Party Congress (1921), and Karl Radek, who had recently helped to write the 1936 Soviet Constitution. Ten of the proceeding’s seventeen defendants hail from the Commissariat of Heavy Industry. The trumped-up charges include claims that the defendants had conspired with Leon Trotsky and Nazi German officials to assassinate leading Party officials while exploiting their administrative positions to sabotage the Five-Year Plans.
As with the previous Trial of the Sixteen, the defendants are subjected to lengthy periods of torture to extract confessions of guilt. Once before the court, they publicly debase themselves. with Piatakov, for one, proclaims: “Here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own faulty, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.”
Following the week-long trial, all seventeen defendants are found guilty. Thirteen, including Piatakov, are executed within seventy-two hours; the remaining four, Radek among them, are sentenced to ten years of penal labor (although they, too, will be murdered before completing their terms in the GULag). Radek’s extensive public testimony provides “evidence” that a third conspiratorial organization comprised of “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites,” and others is plotting against the Party and Soviet people. Among those implicated by Radek’s testimony is Politburo member and former editor of the Party newspaper Pravda Nikolai Bukharin.