staged in August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938. Former leading members of the Bolshevik Party were put on trial for treason and generally confessed, often after being physically tortured, to participation in elaborate terrorist conspiracies against the Soviet state, ranking officials of the Communist Party, and Stalin personally. The trials were carefully staged and scripted, covered in the national and international press, and intended to justify in public the purges of the Party and the state apparatus that Stalin was implementing in 1937 and 1938.
The sixteen defendants at the first trial, including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, described by the prosecutors as the “Trotskyity-Zinovievite Terrorist Center,” were charged with plotting to kill Stalin and several of his top lieutenants, including Sergei Kirov, who had been assassinated in 1934, very likely on Stalin’s orders. All sixteen were found guilty and shot within twenty-four hours of the verdict.
The defendants at the second trial, including Yuri Piatakov, Karl Radek, and fifteen other prominent Old Bolsheviks, termed the “Parallel Center” by the prosecutors, were charged with plotting terrorist acts and engaging in active espionage in the service of Japan and Nazi Germany. Thirteen of the defendants were shot.
The final and most important of the three trials included several of the most prominent members of the Bolshevik old guard: Nikolai Bukharin, Politburo member and chief theorist of the NEP; Alexei Rykov, chair of the Council of People’s Commissars; and Genrikh Yagoda, head of the Secret Police (NKVD) until 1936. The twenty-two defendants in this trial, members of a putative Anti-Soviet Right-Trotskyite Bloc, confessed under extreme physical pressure to terrorism, conspiracy to kill Party leaders, espionage, the murder of Maxim Gorky, and the attempted murder of Vladimir Lenin in 1918, among other crimes. Bukharin, the most important defendant, accepted responsibility for all the crimes named in the indictment but refused to confess to specific criminal actions; nonetheless, he was sentenced to death along with eighteen of the other defendants. Stalin and his secret police tightly controlled all three trials from behind the scenes; the outcome was preordained.
The term show trials usually refers to the Moscow trials, but it can also denote the numerous other trials staged throughout the USSR in 1937 and 1938, under orders from Stalin and the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Politburo. The Bolsheviks organized these provincial show trials, at least seventy of which were approved by the Politburo, to show the people that saboteurs, “wreckers,” and traitors were a threat even at the local level.
Finally, the term can also describe any number of staged political trials held throughout the early Soviet period, especially between 1921 and 1924 and again from 1928 to 1933, such as the Industrial Party trial of 1930, in which eight prominent technical and engineering specialists were accused of sabotage and espionage and were sentenced to terms in prison. See also: GREAT PURGES, THE; GULAG; STALIN, JOSEF VIS-SARIONOVICH
Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1993). “How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces.” Russian Review 52:299-320. Medvedev, Roy. (1989). Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Columbia University Press.
PAUL M. HAGENLOH
(1552-1612), tsar of Russia (1606-1610).
Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky was a descendant of one of the oldest and most illustrious princely families of Russia. His uncle, Ivan Petrovich Shuisky, was one of the regents of the mentally retarded Tsar Fyodor I, and Vasily became a boyar at Fyo-dor’s court. During the late 1580s, Boris Godunov (Tsar Fyodor’s brother-in-law) managed to become sole regent, and Shuisky clan members were banished from Moscow; some of them died mysteriously while in exile. By 1591, however, Vasily and his three younger brothers (sons of Ivan Andreye-vich Shuisky) were back in the capital, where Vasily became the leader of the family and resumed his place in the boyar council. When Dmitry of Uglich (Tsar Ivan IV’s youngest son) died mysteriously in 1591, Vasily Shuisky was chosen to lead the investigation; he concluded that the boy accidentally killed himself.
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Upon the death of Tsar Fyodor in 1598, Shuisky made no attempt to prevent Boris Godunov from becoming tsar; nevertheless, Tsar Boris feared and persecuted the Shuisky clan. During False Dmitry’s invasion of Russia, however, Tsar Boris turned to Vasily Shuisky for help. In January 1605 Shuisky took command of the tsar’s army fighting against False Dmitry and defeated Dmitry’s forces at the battle of Dobrynichi. Shuisky then waged a terror campaign against the population of southwestern Russia that had sided with False Dmitry. In the meantime, the rebellion in the name of the true tsar spread like wildfire. After Tsar Boris’s death in April 1605, Shuisky was recalled to Moscow by Tsar Fyodor II, and he did not participate in the rebellions that overthrew the Godunov dynasty.
At the outset of Tsar Dmitry’s reign, Shuisky was convicted of treason but was only briefly exiled. Back in Moscow, he secretly plotted to overthrow Tsar Dmitry, claiming that Dmitry was an impostor named Grigory Otrepev. During the celebration of Tsar Dmitry’s wedding to the Polish Princess Marina Mniszech in May 1606, Shuisky created a diversion while his henchmen killed the tsar. Shuisky managed to seize power, but many Russians were unwilling to accept the usurper Tsar Vasily IV. His enemies circulated rumors that Tsar Dmitry had survived the assassination attempt and would soon return to punish the traitors. Within a few weeks, Tsar Vasily was confronted by a powerful civil war that spread from southwestern Russia to over half the country. In the fall of 1606, rebel forces under Ivan Bolotnikov besieged Moscow and nearly toppled Shuisky. Tsar Vasily’s armies drove the rebels back and eventually defeated Bolotnikov in late 1607, but by then another rebel army supporting the second false Dmitry challenged Shuisky’s weak grip on the country. For many months Russia had two tsars and two capitals, and chaos reigned throughout the land. In desperation, Tsar Vasily eventually turned to Sweden for support. In 1609 King Karl IX sent military forces into Russia to aid Shuisky and seize territory. That prompted Polish military intervention, and in June 1610 Tsar Vasily’s army was crushed by Polish forces at the battle of Klushino. In Moscow a rebellion of aristocrats (including the Romanovs) toppled Tsar Vasily, forcing him to become a monk. Soon Moscow opened its gates to the Polish army, and Shuisky was shipped off to Poland, where he was imprisoned and died in September 1612.
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See also: BOLOTNIKOV, IVAN ISAYEVICH; DMITRY, FALSE; FILARET ROMANOV, PATRIARCH; MNISZECH, MARINA; TIME OF TROUBLES
Bussow, Conrad. (1994). The Disturbed State of the Russian Realm, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s. Dunning, Chester. (2001). Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Massa, Issac. (1982). A Short History of the Beginnings and Origins of These Present Wars in Moscow, tr. G. Edward Orchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Skrynnikov, Ruslan. (1988). The Time of Troubles: Russia in Crisis, 1604-1618, tr. Hugh Graham. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
(b. 1945), Russian legislator.
Vladimir Shumeiko graduated from Rostov Polytechnical Institute with an engineering degree in 1972. He made his early career as an engineer in Krasnodar. After working at the Krasnodar Electrical Measurement Instruments Factory (1963-1970), he moved to the All-Union Research Electrical Measurement Instruments Institute (1970-1985), then returned to Krasnodar as head of the electrical instruments production association.
Shumeiko’s political career began in 1990, when he was elected to the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. He followed that victory with a seat in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Also in 1990, he was named deputy chair of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Committee on Economic and Property Reform. As “shock therapy” reforms unfolded, Boris Yeltsin brought several industrial directors into his government. Shumeiko, president of the Confederation of
