Thursday, June 8, 1922. The Show Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries

In part of what would end up being a decades long process, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began to the massacre of its fellow travelers. The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries began.

Scene from the trial.

The Socialist Revolutionaries were a left wing Russian Party that were pro-democracy and had participated in Kerensky's government.  Indeed, the Socialist Revolutionaries out polled the Bolsheviks in the 1917 election for a Constituent Assembly, and only the Bolshevik's illegal seizure of power precluded a democratic body from forming.  By 1922, they had been crushed, but Lenin's government opted for a show trial anyhow, resulting in death sentences for the party figures who were tried.

It turned into a pr disaster, with the victims of the show trial becoming a cause célèbre among non Communist radicals.  Marxist, but anti Bolshevik, Karl Kausky said about the event:

The Bolsheviki were first to use violence against other socialists. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly not by way of resistance against any violence on the part of the Socialists-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki, but because of their realization of their own inability to obtain the support of a majority of the peasants and workers by means of free propaganda. This was the fundamental cause of the Bolshevist coup d'etat against the representatives of the revolutionary workers and peasants. Hence, the abolition of all rights of all other socialists who refused to submit to the crack of the Bolshevist whip. Hence, the establishment of a political regime which leaves but one form of open political action for the opposition — civil war.... The real crime of which the Socialists-Revolutionists are guilty before the Bolsheviki at the present moment is not in the preparation of terroristic acts and armed uprisings, but in that...[they] are acquiring in ever increasing measure the confidence of the toiling masses of Russia. This bids fair to bring about the complete isolation of the Bolsheviki in a short time.

The results of the trial were that Central Committee of the SRP were found guilty, of course, and sentenced to death.  The Communists position was still sufficiently tenuous that disquiet over the results meant the sentences were commuted. All twelve were later murdered during Stalin's purges, of course.

While this trial was a well known event, and while mass killings were already a feature of Soviet rule, Stalin's later purges overshadowed these to such a degree that they're often treated as something uniquely Stalinesque.  In truth, the Communist Party everywhere featured the murder of its rivals as a norm, once in power, and murdering those who were closest to it in views, but not wholly their views, was not unusual at all.  In some ways, therefore, Stalin's murder of party members was a mere continuation to what had become the blood soaked norm already, different only in degree and that it was typically based on nothing at all.