Shakhty Trial
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The Shakhty Trial of 1928 was the first important show trial in the Soviet Union since the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922.
Under communist mismanagement, coal production had fallen steadily in the area for several years. Ill-conceived bureaucratic party mandates for constant increases in coal production, combined with inexperienced or fearful mining superintendents unwilling to press for needed equipment and overhaul of the mining industry had led to inadequate maintenance, repair, and replacement of equipment, much of it dating from pre-revolutionary times.
In 1928, the local OGPU arrested a group of engineers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty, accusing them of conspiring with former owners of coal mines (living abroad and barred from the Soviet Union since the Revolution) to sabotage the Soviet economy. The architect of these arrests and interrogations was Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, (1891-1939), a Stalin crony, and mass-killing specialist of peasants under the Dekulakization policy. Technically retired from the OGPU in 1931, he would later lead a secret police team within the NKVD itself.
The Shakhty trials marked the beginning of the use of accusations of sabotage against real and imagined class enemies within the Soviet Union, which was to become a hallmark of the Great Purge of the 1930s. On March 10, 1928, in response to the arrests, Pravda announced that the bourgeoisie were using sabotage as a method of class struggle. Joseph Stalin mentioned a month later that the Shakhty arrests proved that class struggle was intensifying as the Soviet Union moved closer to socialism.
Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky all opposed Stalin's new policy on repression from within the Politburo, but Stalin insisted that international capital was trying to "weaken our economic power by means of invisible economic intervention, not always obvious but fairly serious, organizing sabotage, planning all kinds of 'crises' in one branch of industry or another, and thus facilitating the possibility of future military intervention....We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. We cannot forget this for a moment."[citation needed]
Assisted by faked confessions extracted by Evdokimov, a torture and intimidation specialist, the trial resulted in five of the fifty-three accused engineers being sentenced to death and another forty-four sent to prison. This culminated into the Shakhty Trial of March, 1928, the first of many show trials to root out the perceived bourgeois threat. The trial marked the beginning of "wrecking" as a crime within the Soviet Union, as found in Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code). Workers not producing as much as the government felt they ought to were suspected of conspiring with foreign capital to sabotage the Soviet economy and summarily tried and sent to prison (or sometimes executed). On this subject, G.M. Krizhizanovskii said, "Who is not with us is against us." This reflected the atmosphere of paranoia and fear associated with the Great Purge.
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[edit] References
Eugene Lyons Assignment in Utopia (Lyons was present at the trial, a chapter gives an account)
