shootings took place in the Lubyankaless than 48 hours after the
sentences were passed. Foreign diplomats and journalists, as well as
a select audience of Soviet citizens, witnessed the trials. According to
a British diplomat who was an observer of the process, Stalin
watched the trial from a secret room in the courthouse.
The trials were also designed to convince the Soviet people that the
rolling purges of the 1930s were a legitimate hunt for terrorists and
saboteurs, and that political vigilance was necessary. Soviet public
opinion was all but unanimous in demanding the defendants be exe-
cuted. A secondary audience was foreign political opinion. While
most liberal and left-wing journals accepted the verdicts, the Ameri-
can educator and philosopher John Dewey conducted an independent
probe of the trials to show that much of the evidence was preposter-
ously false. It was not until Robert Conquest’s The Great Terrorwas
published in the 1960s that the liberal West realized the causes and
consequences of the trials. Moreover, it was not until the late 1980s
that the trials’defendants were rehabilitated by the regime of Mikhail
Gorbachev. See alsoYAGODA, GENRYKH; YEZHOVSHCHINA.MOTIVATION. Most literature on espionage lists four reasons people
betray their country and become spies or defect: money, ideology,
compromise, and ego (or MICE). These indeed explain the bulk of
Cold Warespionage cases. While both Western and Soviet intelli-
gence service portrayed their own agents as selfless heroes and their
traitors as evil incarnate, some generalizations can be made about
what motivated Westerners and Soviets to spy against their country.
In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, many Westerners agreed to spy for
Moscow out of deep ideological commitment. The Ring of Fiveall
agreed to betray Great Britain and the ruling establishment out of
deep disgust with capitalism and British imperialism. Julius Rosen-
bergtold his Soviet case officer that he wanted to be a good soldier
of Stalin. For them, Moscow was the New Jerusalem. A jaundiced
former KGBofficer who worked in Washington believes that ideol-
ogy is not the reason people decide to change sides. Rather, retired
Colonel Viktor Cherkashinargues, ideology helps a person explain
after the fact why he or she became a spy.
Revelations about the Soviet system, especially Nikita Khru-
shchev’s Secret Speechof February 1956, put paid to the idea that168 •MOTIVATION06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 168