Judge Dennis Davis
The Stalin Show Trials: Do They Have More Than Just Historical Interest?

Judge Dennis Davis | The Stalin Show Trials Do They Have More Than Just Historical Interest | 07.05.22

- What I’m going to do this evening, as I always do in these kinds of lectures, is to try to give you some kind of conceptual framework within which to understand what effectively is meant by a political trial. We will then, as it will, examine Stalin’s political trials by way of me talking you through them, and, excuse me, and two clips that I want to show you in this regard. And I want to end up with a little conclusion which will draw on last week’s Parashah portion of the Torah that was read last week, which I think has some implications for us today. But let me start with the fact that what we are talking about today is effectively the concept of the show trial and that, inextricably, is linked to the concept of the political trial. And so I want to just draw your attention, if I may, to a book which I have spoken about previously when we spoke about Nuremberg and other trials that I’ve spoken on, which is a book by Otto Kirchheimer, K-I-R-C-H-E-I-M-E-R. Otto Kirchheimer, “Political Justice; the use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends.”

And he published this in 1961. It’s a definitive study, in many ways, of the broad concepts that we are engaging in this evening. And what he says, he’s talking about the political trial, he says the political trial involves the prosecution by the state of one or more individuals for the Commission of Criminal Offences. The offences could be common law crimes. They could be other statutory criminal acts directed against the state. Things like treason, sedition, breaches of security legislation, all of which are designed, as it were, to achieve and preserve political authority, the political authority of the person or the group who is in power. And he says about it that the whole idea of these trials is that the past is reconstructed for the sake of the future by a possible weapon, and the weapon is the trial, and it’s all part of the battle for political domination. Now, the trial, he says, requires a segment of history to be reconstructed. The past segment is part of a still present conflict, but the judge is allowed to disregard its present elements and treat it exclusively as a past event.

In other words, the whole idea is you dip back into the past, you reinterpret it, and that past then essentially justifies criminal action taken against your opponents by way of legal procedure. And he says, any trial that entails risk that its reconstruction of a past event through the testimony of witnesses will not take place as anticipated. So in the political trial, it’s imperative that witnesses reenact their predetermined roles with scrupulous fidelity to the narrative of the political authority in question. Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart. And we are going to see that this evening. There is more various forms of political trials. Stalin’s were, perhaps the crudest. I hope at some time in the near future to do a lecture on the Rivonia trial, the trial of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the 1960s. And that is a political trial, but of a slightly different kind. And we’ll get there. But there’s another point I want to just draw your attention to in relation to Kirchheimer. And it is this. it is interesting that he talks about the nature of the legal system that applies in these kind of contexts. And listen to what he has to say, And I’ll read this slowly, because it has implications for us today.

“The meaning of legal consciousness in a heterogeneous society thus offers special problems. If no informal consensus exists on fundamental community issues and values, the judges cannot play their traditional role in realising the community value structure and pointing it up in relation to specific issues. Impartiality presupposes a commonly accepted starting proposition. If as the judge’s point of departure, the judge uses propositions which are emphatically rejected by substantial elements in the community, he or she will not be able to rely on the presumption of obedient owed to his office, even if he or she can show that he or she has adhered with some consistency to his initial proposition.” Just think about what he’s saying. He’s saying when you have a heterogeneous society,. and you’ve got massive divisions within that society, the judiciary, certainly the way he’s talking about it, is under terrible strain.

It can’t play a traditional role in essentially reflecting community values because there’s no consensus on what community values are. And he then goes on to say, “impartiality presupposes a commonly accepted starting proposition. If your point of departure uses propositions, which are emphatically rejected by substantial elements of the community, well then you can’t actually discharge your job as an impartial judge. Well, those of you who’ve just listened to that would be entirely correct to say, "oh, you are talking about the American Supreme Court of 2022.” And indeed, you would be right to suggest that that analytic applies, but it applies even more so in extraordinary authoritarian societies where the heterogeneity of the society is denied and gives way to the authority of the leader or the party. And that’s really where you get into trouble and where the legal system ultimately goes down a slippery slope into a arm, as it were, of repression, rather than, as it were, a shield against autocratic and authoritarian rule.

But I raise it with you, because when I read this again in preparation for this evening’s talk, I thought, how extraordinary that Kirchheimer wrote that 62 years ago and how incredibly relevant that is to what we’ve seen in the last month in the Supreme Court of the United States, totally rending asunder, A series of what one would’ve thought were general community values. I’m not only talking about abortion, but of course I am. But the whole idea of the environmental protection and the division between religion and state. But let us go back, then, to the sharper question of the political trial, particularly as used by Stalin, and we will get back to some implications later. Now, the incredible thing about Stalin was that there is more than an arguable case that he was the most inhuman person in the history of humankind. Because if you look at what Stalin did, he’s credited with presiding over the Soviet Union slaughter of approximately 43 million Russian children, women and men as well as others who were crippled, aged, and infirm.

These comparisons are obscene, but that’s more than double. The 21 million innocent people killed by Hitler and even more than the 38 million innocent people murdered by the Chinese regime under Mao Tse-tung’s communist leadership. Now, some of the 43 million innocent Russians murdered by the Soviet government under Stalin’s rule, sorry, none of them were war combatants. I’m not talking about that. Their death was solely attributable to the consequences of his domestic policy. So the immensity of the inhumanity of the Stalin rule needs to be taken into account in this incredible way in which Stalin sought to curb any opposition of any kind to his rule. And what we are talking about this evening, to a large extent, are the trials that he employed to justify the authoritarian, and in fact, totalitarian, regime, which perpetrated the murders to which I’ve made reference.

But let us just back up for a moment. It is absolutely correct to suggest that within a few years of the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party were really using criminal trials as a political tool. In 1922, Lenin encouraged what he called “noisy educative trials” of 34 members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which was a rival party to the Bolsheviks. The indictment was some 117 pages and was printed both for domestic and international distribution as propaganda. The charges, based on a horribly written penal code, which meant that most of, if not all these charges, if they were sustained in any event, were charges of retrospective, as it were, criminal cases. The reality was that, as a result of this 1922 trial, all of the accused were sentenced to death and executed. In 1928, Stalin actually ran a trial as well, for 53 engineers, strange enough, drawn from the Donbas region in Ukraine, who were accused, stranger because of what’s happened now, who were accused of deliberate acts of wrecking on sabotage, And they were framed as acts of class struggle, counterrevolutionary activity.

The OGPU, the security police, basically got confessions out of them through various measures, and at the end of the day, Stalin then chose somebody that we are going to learn about quite a bit, this evening, Andrey Vyshinsky, who was a Bolshevik careerist, happy to accept orders to secure the desired outcome, and he ensured that all of them were convicted and sentenced to death. So impressed was Stalin by the Vyshinsky performance there that in 1930 there was a further called “the Industrial Party trial,” which concerned a group of scientists and economists accused of plotting a coup against the regime with foreign powers. The prosecution relied on various decisions that they had made in the course of their roles that were characterised, however unreasonably, as quote, “wrecking the Soviet economy,” made them scapegoats for the wider economic problems being encountered in the late twenties, early thirties, as a result of which a further trial took place, and all of them, again charged by Vyshinsky, who now became the procurator general of the Soviet Union, and they were sentenced to death.

And so we come to the show trials that really made history, and I want to show you the background to that by virtue of a clip. So, Lauren, clip one.

[Clip plays]

• [Narrator] In January, 1934, Joseph Stalin summons the supreme decision making body of the Soviet Union. The Party Congress. One of those summoned is his loyal supporter, Sergei Kirov. Kirov thinks he is the closest thing Stalin has to a friend. The general secretary himself gives Kirov the choice position of Leningrad party boss. But now the paranoid leader believes Kirov has become too popular among the party delegates. Popular enough that he can one day become a rival or betray the revolution like Malinowski. On December 1st, 1934, Sergei Kirov walks into his office in Leningrad. At the time, his death is an outrage and a mystery. What no one realises is that Kirov’s murder is part of Stalin’s master plan. The party leader decides to seize the opportunity and get rid of all his old rivals at once.

• The best way to do it is a purge. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate that his arch enemies were responsible for the beloved Kirov’s death.

• [Narrator] He begins by arresting Lenin’s old deputy, Lev Kamenev, and his supporters. He accuses them of being traitors and of conspiring to murder Kirov. To make the absurd accusations credible, Stalin needs a confession. Kamenev and other top party leaders are taken from prison to the Kremlin, where he makes them an offer they cannot refuse.

• If you accept your fate and say what the party requires of you, then I can guarantee that your family will not suffer. Now is it worth your family suffering? And of course, being committed to their families, they back off.

• [Narrator] With their confessions in the bag, Stalin puts Kamenev and 15 other senior party members on trial. Foreign press are invited to view the proceedings.

• They attended the show trials and they expressed pleasure. The system was so perfect that the accused voluntary confessed and they were listened to and treated very humanely.

• [Narrator] Stalin’s plan works perfectly. His old rival Kamenev and the other alleged conspirators are shot.

[Clip ends]

• Now that’s the start. Now the trial which followed the Kirov murder is described very well by Simon Sebag Montefiore in his book, “Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar” as follows. He says, “the 350 spectators were mainly NKVD clerks in plain clothes, foreign journalists, and diplomats.” Also, “On the raised dais in the centre, the three judges, led by Ulrikh, sat on portentous throne-like chairs covered in red cloth. The real star of this theatrical show, the Procurator General Andrei Vyshinsky, whose performance of foaming ire and articulate pedantry would make him a European figure, sat to the audience’s left. The defendants, sixteen shabby husks, guarded by the NKVD troopers with fixed bayonets, sat to the right. Behind them was a door that led to the suite that might be compared to the "celebrity hospitality green room” in television studios.

Here in the drawing room with sandwiches and refreshments sat Yagoda,“ the dreaded head of the police at that time, "who could confer with Vyshinsky and the defendants during the trial. Stalin was said to be lurking in a recessed gallery with darkened windows at the back where the orchestras once played for aristocratic quadrilles and whence puffs of pipe smoke were alleged to be emanating. Six days before the trial began, he departed for a train to Sochi,” but of course he kept monitoring the process. “The accused were indicted,” writes Montefiore, “with a fantastical array of often bungled crimes ordered by the shadowy conspiracy led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev that had successfully killed Kirov, but repeatedly failed to kill Stalin and the others.” That was a lie. “The language of these trials was as obscure as hieroglyphics and could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which ‘terrorism’ simply signified ‘any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.’

All his political opponents were per se assassins. More that two ‘terrorists’ was a ‘conspiracy’ and, putting together such killers from different factions, created a ‘Unified Centre’ of astonishing global, indeed Blofeldian, reach that reveals much about Stalin’s internal melodrama as well as about Bolshevik paranoia, formed by decades of underground life.” So the first of this trial was really essentially a typical put up job as a way to justify the murder of Kirov, who at one point had been a great friend of Stalin’s, but who ultimately paid the price for that, and then one had to justify the murder by virtue of a trial. I’m going to talk much more about Vyshinsky in a moment, but perhaps let’s look at a second clip about the second trial, in which Stalin got rid of a whole host of his most prominent comrades at one particular point in time, but who ultimately also paid the price for the Stalinist paranoia and Stalin’s attitude that nobody could, as were, be regarded in the same league as he, and that his authority was preeminent and had to be obeyed at all times in an unequivocal way.

And here is another case, classic case, of a political trial to justify the most appalling murder of his opponents. Let’s have a look at this.

[Clip plays]

• [Narrator 2] A year and a half later, Stalin eliminated another former comrade, Nikolai Bukharin, the prominent Marxist theorist whom Lennon once described as “the favourite of the party.” Stalin and Bukharin had worked together against Trotsky, and later against Zenoviev and Kamenev, Here with Stalin on Red Square. The relationship with Stalin began to break down at the end of the 1920s, but Bukharin was given a reprieve for several more years. He was arrested in 1937. The trial of Nikolai Bukharin and 20 others began in March of 1938. As in the other show trials, the prosecution was led by Vyshinsky, who represented the state and Stalin. This trial which shocked the world was extensively filmed. Yet the accused Bukharin is nowhere to be seen in any of the pictures. In contrast, all of state prosecutor Vyshinsky’s tirades have been recorded.

• [Translator] Exactly one year ago, Comrade Stalin analysed deficiencies in our work and arrived at the conclusion that the Trotskyite hypocrites must be liquidated. This direction he outlined in an article he wrote in which he stated two words on the deviants, saboteurs, spies, and others, Trotskyites and Bukharinites, Your Honour, this whole right wing Trotskyite block whose leadership is now in the dock is not a political party. It is not a political movement. This block has no ideological content, nothing intellectual, as was the case with earlier members of this clique. Now, it has sunk into the foetid ground of underground spies. This is a fifth column, a Ku Klux clan which has opened the door to the enemy, who is a sniper from a secret perch who wants to help invading enemies conquer our villages and cities who wants to contribute to the defeat of their own country. It is clear that these so-called masters must be mercilessly crushed and destroyed.

Some of the accused, as you remember, especially Bukharin, did not even make an attempt to put a good face on a bad situation. Bukharin likes it, how should I put this? To describe himself as a theorist, a Marxist. In fact, an orthodox Marxist. Bukharin shamelessly lied back in 1918 when he broke with left wing communists. Bukharin is also telling now lies before the court. Bukharin knew of the plan to arrest Lenin, Stalin, and Svetlov, and who knew of such a plan would also have carried it out. Who is prepared to use force is also prepared to commit murder. The plot has been uncovered. The mask of treason has been torn from their faces, now and forever. Let the verdict be heard like thunder. Like a fresh purifying thunderstorm of Soviet justice.

Our entire country, no matter whether young or old, demand only one thing. That the traitors and spies who wanted to sell out the homeland should be shot like Rabid Dogs. The masses demand only one thing. To stamp out this accursed vermin. 150 Million people of our great socialist homeland and want to express our deep thanks to Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, The Peoples’ Commissar For Internal Affairs, and the best comrade of our Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. He was able to uncover and bring to trial a whole band of murderers and provocateurs from the rightest Trotskyite Bukharin groups, as well as from a German group and other fascists.

• [Narrator 2] Bukharin knows the verdict before it is read by the judge, Ulrikh. In his closing statement, he expresses his loyalty to the party. He tells them,

• [Translator] Comrades, when you carry the banner of communism onward to victory, you’ll know that a bit of my blood will be on it.

• [Narrator 2] The verdict.

• [Translator] It has been proven that in the year 1918, Bukharin and a group of left-wing communists, along with Trotsky and left-wing socialist revolutionaries, organised a plot against the Soviet government with the goal of breaking the Brest peace treaty, to arrest and kill Lenin, Stalin, and Svetlov, And to establish a new government. Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich; Rykov, Alexei Ivanovich; Yagoda, Genrikh Grigoryevic; are sentenced to the highest punishment: to be executed by firing squad, their entire property to be confiscated.

[Clip ends]

• So that’s the current case. And as is indicated in the clip, I mean, you’re talking about somebody who was central to the early revolutionary period, which engulfed Russia from 1917. I want, if I may, to make three sets of comments about this. The first is this. You might watch this and think, “ gosh, who would believe this nonsense? Who would believe Vyshinky’s ranting and raving and the obvious kind of way in which the whole thing had been set up?” Well the answer to that is the entire- well not the entire, but very significant members of the international community, including international lawyers.

Let me give you three illustrations. A delegation of lawyers with the International Association of Lawyers issued a statement which inter alia said this. “We consider the claim that the proceedings were summary unlawful to be totally unfounded. The accused were given the opportunity of taking counsel. We hereby categorically recur that the accused were sentenced quite lawfully.” British lawyer, Dennis Pritt, who attended the entire trial, issued the following separate statement. “What first struck me as a British lawyer was a defendant’s completely free and unconstrained conduct. They all looked well, they all stood up and spoke when they wanted to. I personally am convinced that there’s not the slightest reason to suppose the presence of any unlawfulness in the trial’s formal contents.” If you think that’s not enough, British historian Sir Bernard Pares said “The guilt of the defendants was proven beyond doubt.” The International Human Rights League declared the trial as lawful.

Their Moscow representative wrote as follows. “We all look for a mistake only when the accused denies his guilt, when he shouts out his innocence to all in sundry. If Captain Dreyfus had pleaded guilty, there would’ve been no Dreyfus case.” It is extraordinary. The world’s intellectuals as a whole were definitely silent in their criticism of the trials, and Stalin’s use of judicial terror, which followed mass arrests and reprisals against innocents, were effectively regarded as nothing more than, in a sense, a manifestation of a criminal justice system. So that’s the first point I want to make. And it is extraordinary, is it not? It’s something which we need to think deeply about. How was it that in the 1930s, right? We of course can say something different, the benefit of hindsight, but how was it in the 1930s that this could take place exactly as I’ve depicted it to you? And that was regarded as absolutely perfectly fine, not dissimilar to our own trials which were taking place at the time then.

The second aspect I’d like to just touch on is Vyshinsky. We’ve seen him in both clips, and he’s not unimportant in terms of this particular period. Vyshinsky, as I indicated, was sort of, as it were, discovered by Stalin, a Russian, I’m not going to pronounce this particularly well, but his name is Vaksberg Arkadii, wrote a book translated in English called “Stalin’s Prosecutor” which is a biography of Vyshinsky. It shows his career as a Soviet official from the 1917 October revolution to basically a year after Stalin’s death in 53. And the truth was that he was central to all of these political trials. And Vyshinsky had a particular view. He became, in many ways, the central, legal, almost jurisprudential figure of the Soviet system. It had previously been developed by Evgeny Pashukanis, who had a very sophisticated Soviet theory of law, but this was replaced very quickly by Vyshinsky, who in 1922 was elected the chairman of Moscow’s collegiate of lawyers. Let’s just have a look at what Vyshinsky had to say. He wrote a book called “The Theory of Legal Evidence in Soviet Law.”

One of the central arguments as it were, the quintessential notion of Vyshinsky’s legal wisdom, was to say “confession is a queen over all sorts of evidence.” Confession is a queen over all sorts of evidence. And we know that’s precisely what was the basis of all the evidence of all these trials. And the trials demonstrated that Vyshinsky and Stalin did not intend for a confession to reveal the truth, but to invoke the confessor in a process of obscuring their innocence. His prime contributions were that justice is flexible. It depends upon what is in the interest of the people, and the interest of the people are determined by what Joseph Stalin suggested they were to be. And his explanations that the presumption of innocence is an abstract liberal legal principle that is a demobilising, demagnetizing effect in the fight against crime.

When a colleague complained that the presumption of guilt caused the compression of procedural protections for an accused person, Vyshinsky wrote, “there’s nothing to substantiate this emphatic assertion that in the Soviet criminal trial, the burden of proof is never transferred to the defendant and his counsel.” That was Vyshinsky. And, as I say, he was absolutely central to development of the legal system which gave rise to the trials and to the continued impression through and after World War II. I should just, in 1940, he was rewarded by Stalin, by making him a senior official in the Soviet Foreign Diplomatic Corps. He was with Stalin in 1945 at the Alta Conference. He was present with Stalin at Germany’s Surrender in May 45. He gave several speeches in the United Nations. He was the Soviet Union’s Minister for Foreign Affairs from 49 to 53. When Stalin died in 53, of course there was a backlash because even, even Krushchev admitted that the Bukharin trials had taken place without a scintilla of evidence justifying their execution.

On the morning of November 22nd, 1954, Vyshinsky was scheduled to address the United Nations. While preparing in the Soviet Union’s Park Avenue compounds, He was suddenly stricken by a strange ailment, died within minutes. Somebody screamed, “they killed him.” There’s no question Vyshinsky was an embarrassment to the Krushchev Soviet regime because he was directly linked to Stalin’s crimes, which at that point they were trying to eschew. Whether he was murdered or died of natural causes doesn’t change the fact that he still died, to be blunt, more pleasantly than the numerous innocent people that he helped send to his death. He was given a state funeral. But Vyshinsky really goes down as it were, you know, in history as the central evil authority together side by side with Stalin in developing the concept of a political trial to remove all of Stalin’s opposition and to justify it, very successfully, as I’ve indicated, by virtue of the reports that I’ve cited to you from the Western press.

Let me all make one final set of remarks. A book that many of you have read, but perhaps will read now on a slightly different light, is Arthur Crystal’s “Darkness at Noon.” It has been suggested that, because there are allusions to Nazi Germany, the book may not only be directly linked to the Soviet trials, although it’s about the life and death of a fictional revolutionary leader, Nikolai Salmanovic Rubashov, So in fact, that Russian does tell you something, and there’s no doubt about it, that “Darkness at Noon” was inspired by the show trials of the 1930s, because finally Khrushchev started to realise, particularly when Bukharin, whom we admired as a highly intellectual Bolshevik leader had been the subject of the political trial after being one of Stalin’s ideological enemies, he realised that in fact this was something very, very evil. And Krushchev resigned from the Communist Party. He delivered a passionate speech to the communist controlled German writer association in Paris. And he said basically that what had happened was quite obvious. That there was no basis by which one could any longer justify the Soviet regime.

He was asking a question and it comes up in this “Darkness at Noon.” “How could such a large portion of the Soviet establishment have spent months plotting against the government of Stalin without being discovered? How had powerful leaders such as the Bukharin be transformed into impotent defendants and manipulated to confess to crimes they’d clearly not committed? How had Stalin managed to pull off this monstrous coup de etat so successfully, and why had the victims played their part so willingly and gone so obediently to their death?” Those are the questions he asks, and I think they’re justified questions for us today. And what, effectively, “Darkness at Noon” was, was Koestler’s attempt at answering these questions. In other words, he was trying to suggest what was it, how was it that this all happened?

And he essentially came to the conclusion, he came to the conclusion that the show trials were both a symptom of Soviet corruption and proof that there was a rot that undermined the entire system and that the most loyal party members amongst the accused confessed because the ideological ground beneath their feet had been cut away, and they had nothing more to believe in. Perhaps changed them. Viktor Frankl. There was no meaning left for them. It was their resulting psychological collapse that Koestler wished to explore, rather than the mechanisms of the trial themselves. And I think that’s a really important question. It’s not just the fact that they supported Stalin and Stalin’s perfidious conduct. It’s the question of how the political trial, as it were, renders any form of opposition hopeless. And in the case of people who did believe at one point, as did Koestler, in the communist enterprise, a kind of total destruction of their entire kind of vault on trial to such an extent that they’ve got nothing left to live for.

Those was Koestler’s attempts at examining, as it were, the reasons for the domestic terror programmes, which were underpinned by the political trials of the time. And it really is quite extraordinary when you think it through, just how much people bought into this. How much. It was so that there was no basis for any of these cases and yet the West bought it, bought into it, particularly left-wing leaning people. In 1956, even Krushchev admitted that the only evidence were confessions obtained through physical pressure and he conceded there had been glaring violations and many entirely innocent people became victims. But yet, as I say, somehow those trials, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, were very successful in doing precisely what a political trial does. Delegitimate your opponents, justify the actions you’ve taken, and therefore support your own authority. And so if you ask me, “what do we learn from this?”

Firstly, we learn a number of things. We learn the fact, I think from this, that law is a very complex instrument that can be used in so many ways. And I think we’ve seen that recently in what would be a war against the constitutional enterprise, which ultimately has now been initiated by this Supreme Court in the United States. If you wish, you know, if some of these decisions had been taken in Iran, you would’ve said the Muellers had now taken charge over law. And you may want to say that evangelicals have done precisely the same thing in this case. You want to look at the way in which, in general terms, political trials take place, and there’s some pointers to them. Generally, people are charged with laws that are drafted widely and applied retrospectively. There is always some form of interrogation. Instructions are given to investigators and prosecutors by political leaders directly.

There is no therefore independence. Prosecutors are politicised rather than independent. Trials before judges who are unquestionably loyal to the regime. Open justice is questionable and probably denied. The difficulties which are placed in the way of a proper defence representation are always central to political trials. And indeed, when I come to talk about South African political trials and see that much of this is true. Denial to the accused of advanced knowledge of the prosecution case, reliance on confessions without any interrogation of whether the confession was given voluntarily. Always a mote of inflammatory language in court targeted against the accused. Denials of right of appeal. Certainly efforts to control, manipulate, and deceive the media, seen that in the Stalinist case. Measures to whip a public sentiment based on the suggested need for strong action against these particular people. So there you are.

Those are the barometers for a political trial. And one sees not just this taking place in the Soviet Union, which of course was the political trial on steroids, but it raises really interesting questions about the way in which law is used by certain segments of the society to ultimately other, if you wish, oppress, or in fact remove opposition to authoritarian rule. Let me make one or two final remarks. As I said, based on Parashah of last week. The Parashah of last week was about Korach. You may remember you don’t have to remember, but for the sake of recall, Korach, of course, sought to oppose Moshe, regarded Moshe as an authoritarian leader, And Korach basically claimed that he had divine support and that accordingly he and his followers should take over. And what is interesting is that of course we know that Korach and his supporters are killed. Basically the earth swallows them, and God has created a miracle by which they all basically led to a terrible death. And the Talmudic commentators, both in the Tractate Sanhedrin and the Chatam Sofer, amongst others, kind of engaged with “what was it that Korach did that was so terrible?”

And the answer is that they say Korach claimed, is the word divine authority, and effectively said he was the one who was authorised to lead and no one else. And the lesson which was taken from this particular Parashah is this. That once you get to the point where there is only one version, where there is no other. In other words, to put it in the words that Chatam Sofer said, “Don’t be like Korach and his company, who argued that God spoke only to them. It is forbidden for any individual to maintain that God speaks only to him, that only he knows the truth, and that there’s no possibility of truth to his opponents. It is an illegitimate and therefore improper debate, where one fixed to delegitimate the other side, declaring that only one side has the whole truth.” That was the lesson of Korach. And it’s a lesson for today, because what was Stalin all about? whatever you may say about Lenin, and he wasn’t sort of chap that you perhaps wanted to have a beer with, but the fact was, whatever the ideals were to start with, and they were very questionable, by the time of Stalin, There was no doubt that there was no room for dissent. Stalin was the authority. There was no other view.

When you reach a point in society where other views are closed, they don’t have any scope for being listened to they are delegitimated, they are ultimately regarded as alien. You reach a point where to some extent, you started down the road to Stalin. The warning for us in our modern societies is not that we are going to necessarily replicate the show trials of the 1930s. The warning is that the pathology which gave rise to those trials is effectively a culture of authority. And when you replace in society a culture of justification of argument for a culture of authority, where only one argument prevails and no other, you start down the road which led to Stalin. And in fact, may I suggest that that’s precisely what Arthur Koestler had in mind when he wrote “Darkness at Noon,” expressing his disillusionment with his earlier belief in communism and his fundamental conviction that it was such an evil regime that it was actually irredeemable and could not be repaired in any way.

I’m more than happy to take questions, because that’s basically my shtick. And let me turn to questions, because this is a really important debate, in my humble opinion.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Rose says, “your description of this dream of the Czar’s begs the question- oh, sorry, of the Czar’s autocracy, that it is all the same but in different bodies. Is this essentially simply desire for power rather than the good of the community, especially in the communist regime. In addition, is this an issue of this nation’s brutalism?” A: What a fascinating question. There’s so many ways in which I could answer that. The way in which I would want to suggest this to you, Rose, And you’ve asked a question which is enormously profound. I think it’s right to say that the czar, essentially, certainly Nicholas II, ruled in the most autocratic fashion. It’s interesting by the way that he, just out of any Czar, that he did not recognise the Ukraine as of any autonomy at all. It was the kind of Russification of Ukraine under his rule, and he wouldn’t tolerate any kind of plurality of perspective. And so you’re right to suggest, and it’s interesting that history has essentially, if you go back as your question of brutalism, that history essentially now replicates this dreadful problem through Putin who really in many ways continues its legacy. And, and you’re right to say that given the structure of the czarist enterprise, it is not entirely surprising that Lenin simply changed, as it were, the deck chairs on the Titanic.

But it was still the Titanic, meaning it was still going to run any democracy to ground. And I think that the answer to the implication to that is something that I’ve been trying to push in this lecture precisely in the ending when I’ve invoked the authorities, the Talmudic authorities that look at Korach. And it is this. If you lose the practise of recognising the right that another person may have, if you actually say right, “the other person has no rights, only I have and only my group has,” you basically are on the road towards that kind of autocratic regime. And what I fear is that, even if you’ve inherited a serious democratic practise, it’s so fragile that if you destroy it, you get to this particular point that you’re asking, “Do you not then lead as it were down an autocratic rule from which it’s extremely difficult to recover?” And that’s my fear about, for example, the United States of American now.

You have to ask yourself, right, if you destroy fundamental pillars carefully constructed of a constitutional democracy, you know, what happens thereafter? and what happens when people take over who don’t believe in that and then essentially run the show for quite some time? So it’s a great question whether, in fact, Russia as it were, is ultimately an inherently autocratic. All I can say is that it’s had precious little opportunity throughout its history to exhibit any democratic practises. There have obviously been people who are democratically inclined, but they’ve been crushed. And Stalin, sorry, and Putin himself has used the show trial. I mean, what is the latest for these great political opponents? They’re all effectively show trials to essentially basically delegitimate legitimate opposition to him.

Q: “Did Koestler and commit suicide?” A: I’m not sure about that, but there’s certainly, I think they did, but whether the Stalinists stopped or not, I don’t know, but it was an extraordinarily controversial book, which they certainly didn’t like.

“The trial of Rudolph Slansky…” Yes, it does fall into that category. “The citation at the beginning of the lecture,” John, I’m not entirely sure, but if you’re referring to my reference to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar,” which I’ve used- Oh, I know what you wanted. You’re talking about Otto Kirchheimer, K-I-R-C-H-E-I-M-E-R, political justice.

Q: “Has Vyshinsky’s legal doctrine been revoked?” A: Well, yes, in theory, but not in practise.

Q: “If these political trials are directed by an autocrat, why do they feel it necessary to pretend to hide behind the law? Why don’t you say the person did this and executed?” A: Because you are looking for legitimacy. That was the irony of it. Even Stalin was. He was playing to an international audience. You saw the way in which the Bukharin trial was effectively portrayed for international consumption. You can see the way in which, as I tried to indicate to you, a significant measure of international legal opinion was that the trials were fair. It allows Stalin, it allowed him a measure of justification in the broader community, which in sense wasn’t unimportant to his political project. The reason you use the law for a political trial is exactly as Kirchheimer says. Nothing is more effective in de-legitimizing your opponents. To be sure, he kills 43 million. But at the same time, when it came to his crucial political opponents, he wanted to almost suggest that these were criminals. How better to do it than the show trials? How better to do it than using Vyshinsky for that particular purpose?

Q: Gene asks, "How did Vyshinsky manage to survive the paranoia?” A: Well, he didn’t entirely, Gene, as I indicated. After 53, he was in New York and he died rather mysteriously. Most people believe that the Khrushchev regime bumped him off.

Thank you very much, Abigail. There were, yes, there was a trial of certain the doctors, and indeed there was a trial of some of the generals, which is why in fact they did so poorly in the war beforehand.

So that’s my full for this evening. Thank you very much for listening, and I hope that that in listening to this lecture, one realises that when one talks about something like the show trials of Stalin, these are not just historical curiosities. They essentially raise profound questions, albeit in a different context for our contemporary world.

Goodnight to everybody.