In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xi In March 1938, at the last of the great Moscow show trials organized by the triumphant Stalinist leadership of the Soviet state, Joseph Stalin’s disgraced rival Nikolai Bukharin confessed: “I admit I am guilty of treason to the socialist fatherland, the most heinous of possible crimes, of the organization of kulak uprisings, of preparations for terrorist acts, and of belonging to an underground anti-Soviet organization.”1 To historically minded listeners, Bukharin’s confession might have recalled the first major Soviet show trial, the trial of more than twenty leading Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in 1922. The crimes to which Bukharin confessed—maintaining treasonous relations with foreign interventionists , organizing peasant rebellions, and conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks on Bolshevik leaders—were the same charges that had been levied against the SRs in 1922. For much of that year the Soviet press had lavished enormous attention on charges that the SRs had been tied to Anglo-French imperialism throughout the civil war, were complicit in peasant rebellions against the Soviet state, and stood behind the 1918 terrorist attack that nearly took Lenin ’s life. At the conclusion of the trial in August 1922, the court condemned a dozen of the SR leaders to death, although the Soviet government suspended the execution of the sentences. For the rest of their lives Abram Gots, Evgenii Timofeev, and the other principal defendants at the trial were effectively captives of the Soviet state. Most of them perished in the paroxysm of political violence that took Bukharin’s life and that of countless other revolutionaries who faced charges of terrorism and treasonous links with foreign intelligence services and kulak conspirators in the 1930s. In a deeper sense, Bukharin’s 1938 trial neatly articulated the master plot that structured the SR trial and other major Soviet show trials. Soviet show trials combined a dread vision of the overthrow of Soviet power by “renegades of socialism” and a heroic account of vigilant, Bolshevik triumph over these unmasked enemies.2 This narrative loomed large in the Bolshevik imagination . It shaped the struggle against the Bolshevik opposition in the 1920s, and it intRoduCtion smith_text_3.indd 11 2/21/11 2:40 PM xii / intRoduCtion structured not only show trials but also the rituals of self-criticism and apology that Communist Party members who had deviated from the general line were expected to perform throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Soviet mass meetings and agitation trials often enacted a similar story, and the discovery and trial of hidden enemies was a staple of early Soviet literature and film. By exploring the many contexts in which Bolsheviks staged rituals of unmasking, recent scholarship has enormously enriched our understanding of the political culture of the Bolshevik elite and uncovered some of the meanings these performances held for their organizers, participants, and audiences in the 1920s and 1930s.3 This book explores the history and peculiar power of the narrative that underpinned the show trials and apology rituals by grounding it in a formative Bolshevik experience: the struggle against socialist and radical resistance to the Soviet state in the first years after the October Revolution. At the epicenter of that struggle stood the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), heir to the tradition of Russian revolutionary populism and the largest political party in Russia in 1917. From the time it coalesced in 1902, the PSR distinguished itself from Social Democracy and other currents of the Russian revolutionary movement by its commitment to a model of development that emphasized the possibility of a noncapitalist transformation of the Russian countryside and by its use of terror in the struggle against the imperial government . Each line of thinking and practice derived from SRs’ conscious embrace of the heritage of the People’s Will and the other Russian radical groups of the 1870s and 1880s. Each aspect of that heritage, however, had undergone substantial changes since the nineteenth century. Although Alexander Herzen and the populists of the nineteenth century may fairly be described as agrarian socialists , the PSR had long since made its peace with industrialization and sought to adapt its view of the socialist future to the unfolding processes of Russian economic and social modernization.4 Throughout its existence the PSR cultivated support among industrial workers.5 Like the other parties of the Second International, to which it belonged, the PSR tended to link socialism and industrial modernity. Sympathetic readings of Marx were also widespread among SRs, but they insisted, against Social Democratic orthodoxy, that peasants formed...

Share