The Industrial Party Trial (November 25 – December 7, 1930) (, Trial of the ''Prompartiya'') was a
show trial
A show trial is a public trial in which the guilt (law), guilt or innocence of the defendant has already been determined. The purpose of holding a show trial is to present both accusation and verdict to the public, serving as an example and a d ...
in which several Soviet scientists and economists were accused and convicted of plotting a coup against the government of the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Krylenko
Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko (, ; 2 May 1885 – 29 July 1938) was an Old Bolshevik and Soviet politician, military commander, and jurist. Krylenko served in a variety of posts in the Soviet law, Soviet legal system, rising to become Minis ...
, deputy
People's Commissar
Commissar (or sometimes ''Kommissar'') is an English language, English transliteration of the Russian language, Russian (''komissar''), which means 'commissary'. In English, the transliteration ''commissar'' often refers specifically to the pol ...
(minister) of Justice, assistant Prosecutor General of the
RSFSR
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR), previously known as the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic, and unofficially as Soviet Russia,Declaration of Rights of the labo ...
and a prominent
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...
, prosecuted the case. The presiding judge was
Andrey Vyshinsky
Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (; ) ( – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.
He is best known as a Procurator General of the Soviet Union, state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow Trials and in the Nuremberg trial ...
, later Krylenko's opponent who became notorious as the prosecutor at the
Moscow Trials in 1936–1938.
The
defendant
In court proceedings, a defendant is a person or object who is the party either accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case.
Terminology varies from one juris ...
s were a group of notable Soviet economists and engineers, including
Leonid Ramzin
Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin (; 26 October 1887 – 28 June 1948) was a Soviet thermal engineer, and the inventor of a type of flow-through boiler known as the straight-flow boiler, or Ramzin boiler. He was a laureate of the Stalin Prize Firs ...
, Peter Osadchy, Nikolai Charnovsky, Alexander Fedotov, Victor Larichev, Vladimir Ochkin, Ksenofont Sitnin, Ivan Kalinnikov, and Sergei Kupriyanov. They stood accused of having formed an anti-Soviet "Union of Engineers' Organisations" or ''Prompartiya'' ("Industrial Party") and of having tried to
wreck the Soviet industry and transport in 1926–1930.
In a related development, a number of prominent members of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences
The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991. It united the country's leading scientists and was subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (un ...
(
Yevgeny Tarle
Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle (; – 6 January 1955) was a Soviet historian, Marxist scholar, and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who studied and published on topics such as the Napoleonic invasion of Russia and the Crimean War. ...
,
Sergei Platonov
Sergey Fyodorovich Platonov () (28 June Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="6 June Old Style and New Style dates">O.S. 1860 – 10 January 1933) was a Russian historian who led the official St Petersburg school of imperial historio ...
,
Nikolay Likhachov
Nikolay Petrovich Likhachyov (), alternatively transliterated as Likhachev (12 April 1862 – 14 April 1936) was the first and foremost Russian sigillographer (that is, an expert on seals) who also contributed significantly to an array of auxi ...
,
Sergei Bakhrushin
Sergei Vladimirovich Bakhrushin (Russian: Сергей Владимирович Бахрушин; 8 October 1882 – 8 March 1950) was Russian Soviet historian, medievalist and university professor.
Biography
Bakhrushin was a prominent Moscow fa ...
, etc.) were arrested in 1930. They were mentioned during the "Industrial Party" trial as co-conspirators. However, no subsequent trial took place and they were quietly exiled to remote areas of the country for a few years.
Accusations against the "wreckers"
The Industrial Party Trial was the first post-
NEP trial in which the defendants were accused of plotting a
coup against the Soviet regime. The plot was supposedly hatched by emigre Russian
industrialist
A business magnate, also known as an industrialist or tycoon, is a person who is a powerful entrepreneur and investor who controls, through personal enterprise ownership or a dominant shareholding position, a firm or industry whose goods or ser ...
s in Paris, and allegedly involved the governments of France, England and some smaller countries like Latvia and Estonia. For participating in the coup France would supposedly be rewarded with parts of Ukraine while the English would get a share in the Caucasus oil. Upon the arrival of the invasion forces the defendants would sabotage Soviet industry and create chaos in the transportation networks (charges of this kind were to become standard in later show trials of the 1930s). The trial was also notable in that it was the first Soviet show trial at which the defendants "confessed" their supposed crimes, including co-operating with the
prime minister
A prime minister or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. A prime minister is not the head of state, but r ...
of France
Raymond Poincaré
Raymond Nicolas Landry Poincaré (; 20 August 1860 – 15 October 1934) was a French statesman who served as President of France from 1913 to 1920, and three times as Prime Minister of France. He was a conservative leader, primarily committed to ...
. The latter had to issue a public refutation, published in ''
Pravda
''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, 'Truth') is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most in ...
'', which was presented at the trial as an additional "proof" by the prosecution.
The prosecution stated that "the Industrial Party consisted of the top old engineering-technical
intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the i ...
, of major specialists and professors, who held privileged positions during the capitalist regime". According to the prosecution, all of the organization's members had been raised in the
bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...
environment and hence were alien to the Soviet system, which served to reinforce an important point of contemporary Soviet propaganda.
It was also alleged that ''Indparty'' wreckers had deviously moved beyond direct, crude, easily recognizable sabotage to ''wrecking'' in the areas of planning and resource distribution. Virtually any conceivable course of action could be construed as wrecking: for example the engineers' decision to invest in a particular area could be construed as wrecking by withholding resources from other vital areas, while by the same token their decision to not invest could also be construed as wrecking: the
opportunity cost
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives. Assuming the best choice is made, ...
of any decision could be used to indicate guilt. In other words, the engineers were made
scapegoat
In the Bible, a scapegoat is one of a pair of kid goats that is released into the wilderness, taking with it all sins and impurities, while the other is sacrificed. The concept first appears in the Book of Leviticus, in which a goat is designate ...
s for well known economic problems in various areas of Soviet industry.
The trial was a refinement of the
Shakhty Trial
The Shakhty Trial () was the first important Soviet show trial since the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of c ...
in 1928 and an important precursor to the
Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. In one of those minor glitches that would plague later trials, Ramzin was accused of having plotted with Russian emigre industrialist
Pavel Ryabushinsky in 1928, even though Ryabushinsky had died in 1924.
Verdict and follow-up
On December 7, five defendants were given the
death sentence
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in s ...
, which was commuted to long prison terms, while other defendants were sentenced to different terms in prison.
During his imprisonment, Ramzin was allowed to continue working. He was amnestied in 1932 and eventually showered with Soviet awards (the 1943
Stalin Prize, the
Order of Lenin
The Order of Lenin (, ) was an award named after Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution. It was established by the Central Executive Committee on 6 April 1930. The order was the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Soviet ...
and the
Order of the Red Banner of Labour
The Order of the Red Banner of Labour () was an order of the Soviet Union established to honour great deeds and services to the Soviet state and society in the fields of production, science, culture, literature, the arts, education, sports ...
) for his scientific work, especially the Ramzin straight-flow boiler. In February 1936 some other defendants were also pardoned. Two years later, in January 1938, the prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko, was arrested and shot during the
Great Purge
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovshchina ( , ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. After the Assassination of Sergei Kirov, assassination of ...
.
See also
*
Alexander Bogdanov
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (; – 7 April 1928), born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion, a ...
*
Industrial Party (China)
*
Metro-Vickers Affair
The Metro-Vickers Affair was an international crisis precipitated by the arrest of six British subjects who were employees of Metropolitan-Vickers, and their public trial in 1933 by the authorities in the Soviet Union on charges of " wrecking" an ...
*
Pandora's Box (British TV series)
''Pandora's Box'', subtitled ''A Fable From the Age of Science'', is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993.
Curti ...
*
Shakhty Trial
The Shakhty Trial () was the first important Soviet show trial since the case of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1922. Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of c ...
*
Technocratic movement
*
Tectology
Tektology (sometimes transliterated as tectology) is a term used by Alexander Bogdanov to describe a new universal science that consisted of unifying all social, biological and physical sciences by considering them as systems of relationships and ...
References
* Andrew Rothstein (Ed.). ''Wreckers on Trial''. London, 1931.
* N. V. Krylenko. ''A blow at Intervention. Final indictment in the case of the counter-revolutionary Organisation of the Union of Engineers' Organisations (the Industrial Party) whereby Ramzin, Kalinnikof, Larichef, Charnowsky, Fedotof, Kupriyánof, Ochkin and Sitnin, the accused, are charged in accordance with article 58, paragraphs 3, 4, and 6 of the Criminal code of the RSFSR''. Pref. by Karl Radek. Moscow, State Publishers, 1931.
Notes
* See Volume 21 of the ''Great Soviet Encyclopedia'', New York; 1978.
External links
''Science in Russia and the Soviet Union'': ''A Short History'' By Loren R. Graham Published by Cambridge University Press, 1993{{ISBN, 0-521-28789-8 - Russian technocratic influence of engineers, subsequent deaths, trials and imprisonments.
1930 in the Soviet Union
1930 in law
November 1930 in Europe
December 1930 in Europe
1930s trials
Soviet show trials
Persecution of intellectuals in the Soviet Union