The Moscow Show Trials

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2018

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

An eyewitness account of Stalin's purge of top Soviet leaders during the 1930s, when millions of Soviet citizens were executed or sent to labour camps.British diplomat Sir Fitzroy Maclean, spoke to the BBC in the 1980s about his memories of Moscow during the Great Terror, when Stalin's repression was at its height. Maclean attended the show trial of one of the foremost Soviet leaders, Nikolai Bukharin who was accused of conspiracy and was later executed. Photo: Portrait of Russian Communist leader and theoretician Nikolai Bukharin ,a former editor of Pravda and a member of the Central Organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, circa 1920. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds. Choosing what to
0:32.1	watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:36.5	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:41.5	telly we share what we've been watching.
0:43.7	Cladie Aide!
0:45.7	Loads of games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:48.2	Lovely.
0:49.0	Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:51.2	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:54.7	searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds hello and thank you for
1:00.3	downloading the witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.
1:05.6	And today we hear an account from the BBC archives of one of the notorious Moscow show trials
1:11.0	of the 1930s when top communists were purged during Stalin's great terror. In 1937, a British diplomat Fitzroy McLean arrived in Moscow, walked into a dark world of paranoia arrests and executions on a terrifying scale.
1:36.0	It was a horrifying system. Secret police everywhere, everybody spying on everybody else, everybody suspicious of everybody else,
1:46.6	and people at that time being liquidated every night and the Black Mariahs were counting them away two or three in the
	...

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