Show Trials Quotes

No one has murdered more communists than the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin

Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors - Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors' Plot of 1953.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.

There's hearings on everything. They're kabuki theater.

Stalin loved trials so long as everyone got shot at the end.

The Federal Building's large Ceremonial Courtroom, reserved for show trials, is veneered in executive teak. Bench, counsel tables, jury boxes, entrances, and exits -- all are as formally arranged as an Elizabethan stage. Only the drama is shapeless, at least to those of us who have never seen a trial before. We see only random movements, sequences, comings and goings, no form or agenda apparent. To us the action is less like watching a play than watching an aquarium.

In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.

For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

These are show trials. If the defendant is convicted, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. If he is acquitted, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. If the trial is abandoned, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. I don’t know why they are holding this trial.….

Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.