Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, in Politics on Trial, the first of two episodes about the Moscow show trials, the Stalinist show

trials. I'm talking to the historian of Russia, Edward Acton, about what are possibly the most

flagrantly, the most fraudulently political trials of them all. We're going to be exploring

why they happened, how they happened, and what they

led to, including what great works of literature.

Before we start my conversation with Edward Acton, we thought it might be helpful just to give

a little bit of context, because we're going to be talking about three trials, which happened over three years between

1936 and 1938, and it can be quite hard to distinguish between them, not least because they have

such both distinctive but also bizarre names. So I just wanted to talk about the three different trials. Today we're

going to be focused on the first one, which happened in 1936, August 1936. It is known as the

Trotskyite-Zionievite terrorist centre trial. Those are the kinds of names they were given.

Or sometimes better known by the name

of its two leading defendants, Zioniev and Khamenev. Zionnev and Karmonyev had been in 1924 with Stalin

two of the three members of the Troika who ruled the Soviet Union after the death of Lenin.

So these were two of the original Bolshevik

revolutionaries, Stalin's rivals. By 1936, they had been effectively perched. That is, they were

on the out, in disgrace. And this trial was the trial of those original Leninists. The second trial in January

1937 was called, again, these are the kind of names they were given, the anti-Soviet Trotskyist

centre trial, or named after the two leading defendants, though there were 17 in total,

the Piatok-Radek trial. The second trial

was not of people who had already been excluded from the party, who were already on the out.

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