The Menshevik Trial was one of the early

purges In history, religion and political science, a purge is a position removal or execution of people who are considered undesirable by those in power from a government, another organization, their team leaders, or society as a whole. A group undertak ...

carried out by Stalin in which 14 economists, who were former members of the

Menshevik party The Mensheviks (russian: меньшевики́, from меньшинство 'minority') were one of the three dominant factions in the Russian socialist movement, the others being the Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. The factions em ...

, were put on trial and convicted for trying to re-establish their party as the "Union Bureau of the Mensheviks". It was held 1–8 March 1931 in the House of Unions. The presiding judge was Nikolay Shvernik.

Defendants

The defendants were: *

Boris Berlatsky Boris Markovich Berlatsky (1889—1937) was a senior official of the State Bank of the USSR. He was 41 when he was a defendant in 1931 Menshevik Trial, one of the first show trials in the Soviet Union. Berlatsky's "confession" included an account ...

Aleksandr Finn-Enotaevsky Aleksandr Yule'vich Finn-Enotaevsky (1872, Kaunas – 1943) was a Soviet economist. Finn-Enotaevsky was an active Bolshevik until 1915 when he decided to focus his attention on his career as an academic economist, becoming a professor in the subje ...

Abram Ginzburg Abram Moiseevich Ginzburg (russian: Абра́м Моисе́евич Ги́нзбург; 1878-1937) was a Russian revolutionary and economist. He was a defendant at the 1931 Menshevik Trial. Ginzburg was born in Ilyino in Zapadnodvinsky Distric ...

Vladimir Groman Vladimir Gustavovich Groman (russian: Влади́мир Густа́вович Гро́ман; 21 February, 1874, Khalturino – 11 March, 1940) was a Menshevik economist active in Gosplan, the Soviet Union's central economic planning agency and ...

* Mikhail Yakubovich *

Vladimir Ikov Vladimir may refer to: Names * Vladimir (name) for the Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak and Slovenian spellings of a Slavic name * Uladzimir for the Belarusian version of the name * Volodymyr for the Ukra ...

* Kirill Petunin *

Isaak Illich Rubin Isaak Illich Rubin (russian: Исаа́к Ильи́ч Ру́бин; 12 June 1886, in Dvinsk, Russian Empire (now Latvia) – 27 November 1937, in Aktyubinsk, Kazakh SSR) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work '' Essays on Marx's Theory o ...

Vasili Sher Vasili, Vasily, Vasilii or Vasiliy (Russian: Василий) is a Russian masculine given name of Greek origin and corresponds to ''Basil''. It may refer to: *Vasili I of Moscow Grand Prince from 1389–1425 *Vasili II of Moscow Grand Prince fro ...

Aron Sokolovsky Aron L'vovich Sokolovsky (1884–?) was a Soviet economist who was put on trial in the 1931 Menshevik Trial. He was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Political development Sokolovsky's political trajectory took him from the Zionist Socia ...

Nikolai Sukhanov Nikolai Nikolaevich Sukhanov (russian: Никола́й Никола́евич Суха́нов; 29 June 1940) was a Russian Menshevik Internationalist and chronicler of the Russian Revolution. Life Nikolai Sukhanov (a pseudonym, his real name ...

* Moisei Teitelbaum *

Ivan Volkov Ivan () is a Slavic languages, Slavic male given name, connected with the variant of the Greek name (English: John (given name), John) from Hebrew language, Hebrew meaning 'God is gracious'. It is associated worldwide with Slavic countries. T ...

Lazar Zalkind Lazar Borisovich Zalkind (1886, in Kharkiv – 1945, in Komsomolsk-on-Amur) was a Jewish Ukrainian economist and chess problemist A chess composer is a person who creates Endgame study, endgame studies or chess problems. Chess composers usu ...

Six out of the fourteen defendants were Jews. It was suggested in

Bundist Bundism was a secular Jewish socialist movement whose organizational manifestation was the General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia ( yi, אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין ליטע פויל ...

circles that this large proportion of Jews among the accused had been specially arranged to organize feeling against the Jewish Socialists. This was denied by Stalin.

The trial

The defendants were accused of setting up the "All-Union Bureau of Mensheviks."

gave a public testimony that he and Vladimir Bazarov (who was not on trial) headed a counterrevolutionary group in Gosplan, purportedly organized in 1923, which attempted at "influencing the economic policy of the Soviet authorities so as to hold the position of 1923–25." Groman, being a member of the Presidium of the Gosplan the star figure among the accused, damned himself and his colleagues with testimony that at Gosplan they had spent their time

Putting into the control figures and into the surveys of current business planning ideas and deliberately distorted appraisals antagonistic to the general Party line (lowering the rates of expansion of socialist construction, distorting the class approach, exaggerating the difficulties), stressing the signs of an impending catastrophe (Groman) or, what is close to this, assigning a negligible chance of success to the Party line directed toward the socialist attack (Bazarov, Gukhman) ...

Final day

On the final day, the prisoners made confessions of their "crimes". "In the last minutes before my death", one of them was quoted saying, "I will think with disgust of the evil I have wrought; evil for which not we, but foreign Menshevists and the Second International must share responsibility." Nikolai Krylenko, the Public Prosecutor, declared that Groman, Sher, Yakubovitch, Ginzburg, and Sukhanov were the principal leaders of the counter-revolutionary organization, and therefore, must suffer the death penalty. For the others he asked that they should be isolated "for long periods".

Verdict

At 9 March 1931, after deliberating for twenty-five hours, the court sentenced seven defendants to ten years' imprisonment. The seven other defendants were sentenced to different terms of imprisonment, ranging from five to eight years. Those who received the ten years' sentence were Groman, Sher, Sukhanov, Ginzburg, Jakobovich, Petunina, and Finn-Enotaevsky.

Reactions

Rafail Abramovich, a prominent Menshevik in exile in Berlin, helped to mobilise Western socialist and labour support for the persecuted economists. At a rally in Berlin, organised by the

SPD The Social Democratic Party of Germany (german: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, ; SPD, ) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany. Saskia Esken has been the ...

, he denied there was an underground Menshevik organisation that existed in the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky also commented on the trial, condemning both Stalin and the Mensheviks. Leon Trotsky
The Trial of the Russian Mensheviks; The Real Disposition of the Figures on the Political Scene
''

The Militant ''The Militant'' is an international socialist newsweekly connected to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Pathfinder Press. It is published in the United States and distributed in other countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Aus ...

'', Vol. IV No. 8, 15 April 1931, p. 3. via the ''Leon Trotsky Internet Archive'' (

marxists.org Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Enge ...

)

Defendants

The trial

Final day

Verdict

Reactions

See also

Footnotes

Further reading