Their confessions spanned thousands of pages and they gave deep political reasons for how they got there
That doesn't really change the context under which they were produced. Were they tortured or nah? Because people who are tortured tend to say whatever gets the torture to stop.
I have no doubt that at least some of the trials were legitimate and justified, like with the actual Trotskyists, but god, I remember looking into some of the early leaders of the various SSRs and like almost all of them were executed. It just strikes me as really unlikely that every single one of them was in on one big plot to destroy the USSR from within. That's not to say it wasn't necessarily true, but I would need to see some more analysis than just Furr's.
My position (and I still have a lot more reading to do; I just ordered [not on Amazon] a few more books on Soviet history that I'm waiting to read) more or less is that there were divisions within the party early on, with cynical opportunists and traitors but also a bunch of factions with different and often wrong albeit sincere beliefs about what direction to take the USSR in. Stalin and his supporters, I think, were right, but these purges weren't so much just an uprooting of corrupt elements of the party but also a lot of chaotic infighting between these different camps. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter all that much even if they were all arbitrarily murdered in the grand scheme of things, given how few of them there were relative to the whole population of the USSR that benefited so much from the revolution and the leadership that followed.
The Tukhachevsky transcript was classified under Kruschev and only in 2018 released
Can you hit me up with a link to the transcript? I couldn't find it in the article or FinBol's sources page.
That doesn’t really change the context under which they were produced. Were they tortured or nah? Because people who are tortured tend to say whatever gets the torture to stop.
Alexander Zinoviev (no relation to Grigory Zinoviev) was a political dissident in the USSR and was eventually exiled from the country. In 1939 he was accused of a plot to murder Stalin as part of an underground organization, but was eventually released.
He spoke of those years after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually admitting to his guilt.
“I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen …. The idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings …. We studied the ‘technical’ possibillities of an attack …. We even practiced. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn’t that a crime? When Stalin was still alive, I saw things differently… Until Stalin’s death I was anti-Stalinist”
–Alexander Zinoviev (The remorse of a dissident: Alexander Zinoviev on Stalin and the dissolution of the USSR
Not only was he not tortured by the NKVD but was released due to lack of conclusive evidence despite him freely admitting his guilt
If you wish to believe that torture of these hardened men, who most of them had worked in the underground against the Tsar and suffered some form of abuse by Tsarist police, can be tortured in such a way they can be filmed in front of the worlds press and ambassadors (and therefore not have any debilitating signs of torture) detailing lengthy confessions admitting guilt to some crimes but innocence to others, spanning thousands of pages as to why they had come to the political position they had come to...
Surely you see we are entering 1950s "Communist brainwash" propaganda here.
The 1936 trial can be read here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro0000piat/page/n7/mode/2up
The 1938 one here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro000214mbp
Can you hit me up with a link to the transcript? I couldn’t find it in the article or FinBol’s sources page.
FinBol did that video before the release of the transcript (2017). I've yet to find it but have been trying to keep up with how i can access an english copy of it. This is what Colonel Alksnis (who got advance reading of the transcript in 2000 due to the fact he was the Grandson of one of the officers executed and that he was a colonel in the Russian army )
“My grandfather and Tukhachevsky were friends. And grandfather was on the judicial panel that judged both Tukhachevsky and Eideman. My interest in this case became even stronger after the well-known publications of procuror Viktorov, who wrote that Iakov Alksnis was very active at the trial, harrassed the accused. . . . But in the trial transcript everything was just the opposite. Grandfather only asked two or three questions during the entire trial. But the strangest thing is the behavior of the accused. Newspaper accounts claim that all the defendants denied their guilt completely. But according to the transcript they fully admitted their guilt. I realize that an admission of guilt itself can be the result of torture. But in the transcript it was something else entirely: a huge amount of detail, long dialogues, accusations of one another, a mass of precision. It’s simply impossible to stage-manage something like this. . . . I know nothing about the nature of the conspiracy. But of the fact that there really did exist a conspiracy within the Red Army and that Tukhachevsky participated in it I am completely convinced today.”
–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)
Judging by the materials of the case, the first interrogation took place only in January 1938. At the same time, judging by the 1956 rehabilitation materials filed in the same case, my grandfather was repeatedly summoned for interrogations and “beat out” evidence from him. But where are these protocols with “knocked out” testimonies, why were they not in the file?
After reviewing the transcript of the Tukhachevsky process, I realized that this process is also not so simple. My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.
I left the KGB building on Lubyanka in great dismay.
Firstly, I realized that my grandfather’s criminal case was “cleaned up” and some very important documents were removed from it. Obviously, these documents were seized during the Khrushchev thaw during the rehabilitation of the grandfather.
Secondly, there was still a “conspiracy of the military” in the Red Army.
That doesn't really change the context under which they were produced. Were they tortured or nah? Because people who are tortured tend to say whatever gets the torture to stop.
I have no doubt that at least some of the trials were legitimate and justified, like with the actual Trotskyists, but god, I remember looking into some of the early leaders of the various SSRs and like almost all of them were executed. It just strikes me as really unlikely that every single one of them was in on one big plot to destroy the USSR from within. That's not to say it wasn't necessarily true, but I would need to see some more analysis than just Furr's.
My position (and I still have a lot more reading to do; I just ordered [not on Amazon] a few more books on Soviet history that I'm waiting to read) more or less is that there were divisions within the party early on, with cynical opportunists and traitors but also a bunch of factions with different and often wrong albeit sincere beliefs about what direction to take the USSR in. Stalin and his supporters, I think, were right, but these purges weren't so much just an uprooting of corrupt elements of the party but also a lot of chaotic infighting between these different camps. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter all that much even if they were all arbitrarily murdered in the grand scheme of things, given how few of them there were relative to the whole population of the USSR that benefited so much from the revolution and the leadership that followed.
Can you hit me up with a link to the transcript? I couldn't find it in the article or FinBol's sources page.
Alexander Zinoviev (no relation to Grigory Zinoviev) was a political dissident in the USSR and was eventually exiled from the country. In 1939 he was accused of a plot to murder Stalin as part of an underground organization, but was eventually released.
He spoke of those years after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually admitting to his guilt.
Not only was he not tortured by the NKVD but was released due to lack of conclusive evidence despite him freely admitting his guilt
If you wish to believe that torture of these hardened men, who most of them had worked in the underground against the Tsar and suffered some form of abuse by Tsarist police, can be tortured in such a way they can be filmed in front of the worlds press and ambassadors (and therefore not have any debilitating signs of torture) detailing lengthy confessions admitting guilt to some crimes but innocence to others, spanning thousands of pages as to why they had come to the political position they had come to...
Surely you see we are entering 1950s "Communist brainwash" propaganda here.
The 1936 trial can be read here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro0000piat/page/n7/mode/2up
The 1938 one here https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro000214mbp
FinBol did that video before the release of the transcript (2017). I've yet to find it but have been trying to keep up with how i can access an english copy of it. This is what Colonel Alksnis (who got advance reading of the transcript in 2000 due to the fact he was the Grandson of one of the officers executed and that he was a colonel in the Russian army )
–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)
https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/07/15/the-moscow-trials-colonel-viktor-alksnis-read-the-tukhachevsky-transcript-and-came-away-convinced-he-was-guilty/