Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites": Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme court of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, March 2-13, 1938, in re: N.I. Bukharin, A.I. Rykov, G.G. Yagoda,; [Title continues] N. N. Krestinsky, K. G. Rakovsky, A. P. Rosengoltz, V. I. Ivanov, M.A. Chernov, G. D. Grinko, I. A. Zelensky, S. A. Bessonov, A. Irramov, F. Khodjayev, V. F. Sharangovich, P. T. Zubarev, P. P. Bulanov, L. G. Levin, D. D. Pletnev, I. N. Kazakov, V. A. Maximov-Dikovsky, P. O. Kryuchkov: Charge with crimes covered by Articles 58 1A, 58 2, 58 7, 58 8, 58 9, and 58 11 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R., and Ivanov, Zelensky and Zubarev, in addition, with crimes covered by Article 58 13 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R. : Verbatim Report

Moscow: The People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R., 1938. Presumed First Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Fair. 22 cm. [7], 799, [1] pages. Errata slip at last page. Cover shows wear and soiling. Edges rubbed and corners bumped. The third show trial, in March 1938, known as The Trial of the Twenty-One, tied together all the loose threads from earlier trials. It included 21 defendants alleged to belong to the so-called "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" It was now alleged that Bukharin and others had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin numerous times after 1918 and had murdered Soviet writer Maxim Gorky by poison in 1936. The group also stood accused of espionage. Bukharin and others were claimed to have plotted the overthrow and territorial partition of the Soviet Union in collusion with agents of the German and Japanese governments, among other preposterous charges. Even sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it hard to swallow the new charges as they became ever more absurd, and the purge had now expanded to include virtually every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin. Stalin also observed some of the trial in person from a hidden chamber in the courtroom. On the first day of the trial, Krestinsky caused a sensation when he repudiated his written confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. However, he changed his plea the next day after "special measures", which dislocated his left shoulder among other things. The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There were three Moscow Trials: the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center (Zinoviev-Kamenev Trial, aka "Trial of the Sixteen," 1936), the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center (Pyatakov-Radek Trial, 1937), and the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" (Bukharin-Rykov Trial, aka "Trial of the Twenty-One," 1938). The defendants of these were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism. The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants. They are generally seen as part of Stalin's Great Purge, an attempt to rid the party of current or prior oppositionists, especially but not exclusively Trotskyists, and any leading Bolshevik cadre from the time of the Russian Revolution or earlier, who might even potentially become a figurehead for the growing discontent in the Soviet populace resulting from Stalin's mismanagement of the economy. Stalin's hasty industrialization during the period of the First Five Year Plan and the brutality of the forced agricultural collectivization had led to an acute economic and political crisis in 1928-33, a part of the global problem known as the Great Depression, and to enormous suffering on the part of the Soviet workers and peasants. Stalin was acutely conscious of this fact and took steps to prevent it taking the form of an opposition inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to his increasingly totalitarian rule.