efforts to contend with Brezhnev for supreme political power in
1964–1970 failed, however, and he retired in semidisgrace in the
mid-1960s. He is remembered as an Iago, a man with an infinite ca-
pacity for conspiracy.SHOW TRIALS. Large public and fabricated judicial proceedings
were a constant of the early post-Revolution period. The trial of the
Petrograd Fighting Organization was organized by the Cheka in
1921 to publicize the link between dissidentintellectuals and rebel-
lious sailors and émigrés. Confessions were beaten out of witnesses,
false evidence was presented in court, and the defendants were con-
demned. In the 1920s and early 1930s, there were series of show tri-
als of “bourgeois specialists,” foreign engineers, and Mensheviks. In
each proceeding, the security service got better and better at handling
witnesses and testimony.
The greatest of the show trials were the Moscow Trialsin 1936,
1937, and 1938. In the dock were the leaders of Soviet Russia,
Vladimir Lenin’s closest friends and colleagues. In a series of stage
plays produced by Joseph Stalinand directed by the NKVD, the
prisoners confessed, begged for the death penalty, and went to their
deaths. The trials were not to be matched. Efforts to hold public show
trials of Polish soldiers who fought against the Nazis and the Soviets
in 1946, and of Jews accused of serving as American spies in 1952,
failed because the prisoners refused to play their roles. The MGB,
however, taught the services of Eastern Europe how to produce and
direct such political theater, and show trials continued until 1954.
The evidence and the verdicts of the show trials were widely be-
lieved inside the Soviet Union and among leftist intellectual circles
in the West. In the United States, left-wing intellectuals took out
space in major magazines to affirm that the Moscow Trials were
fair. In France, communist members of the Chamber of Deputies
defended the 1952 Slansky Trial in Prague. It was not until the era
of Mikhail Gorbachevthat the victims of the Moscow trials were
pardoned, and the regime admitted they had been convicted on per-
jured evidence.SHPIGELGLAS, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (1897–1941). One
of the few early Chekistswith a university education was Sergei238 •SHOW TRIALS06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 238