The third trial, in March 1938, included defendants who were allegedly part of the so- called "Trotskyist and Right-wing Bloc" led by

Nikolai Buharin, former head of the Communist International, former prime minister Alexei Rîkov, Cristian Racovski and Nikolai Krestinski. All defendants were executed. It was also a secret trial of a group of Red Army generals, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky, held in a military tribunal in June 1937. Most Western observers present at the trials said they were correct and the guilt of the accused was proven. They based these assessments on the defendants' confessions, which were given freely in the courtroom, without any apparent evidence that they were obtained through torture or drug trafficking. For example, Denis Pritt, a British lawyer and member of parliament, wrote: "Once again, weak-hearted socialists are overwhelmed with doubt and anxiety," but "once again we can be sure that when the smoke goes out lift from the battlefields of controversy, it will be seen that the accusations were real, the confessions were obtained correctly and the prosecution objectively conducted its action. " In the political atmosphere of the 1940s, allegations of conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union were not unbelievable, and few outside observers were aware of events within the Communist Party that led to purges and trials. It is known today how the confessions were obtained: through great psychological pressures applied to the accused. According to the testimony of former GPU officer Alexandr Orlov and others, the methods used to obtain confessions included: repeated beatings, torture, forcing prisoners to stand or stay awake for days, threats that prisoners' families would be arrested and executed. For example, Kamenev's teenage son was arrested and charged with terrorism. After months of such treatment, the accused was exhausted and desperate. Zinoviev and Kamenev demanded as a condition of "confession" a direct guarantee from the Politburo that their lives and those of their families would be spared. In exchange for acknowledging the accusations, they received all assurances in a meeting with Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Ejov. After the trial, Stalin not only broke his promise to spare the lives of the two, but ordered the arrest and execution of most members of their families. Bukharin also agreed to "confess" on condition that his family be spared. In his case, the promise was partially kept. His wife, Anna Larina, was sent to a labor camp, but survived. In May 1937, Trotsky's supporters formed the Commission of Inquiry into Levi Trotsky's Prosecution of the Moscow Trials, generally known as the Dewey Commission, to establish the truth about these trials. The commission was chaired by philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey. Although the hearings were obviously held with a desire to prove Trotsky's innocence, they brought to light evidence that some of the allegations made could not be true. For example, Pyatakov testified that he had flown to Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist orders" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission determined that such a flight did not take place. Another defendant, Ivan Smirnov, testified that he took part in the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, at a time when he had already been in prison for a year. The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book entitled Not Guilty. The Commission's conclusions were that all those convicted in the Moscow Trials were innocent. In the summary of the findings, the commission wrote: "Regardless of the extrinsic evidence, the commission also found: The conduct of the Moscow Trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt had been made to find out the truth. Although so much attention has been paid to the confessions, these very confessions contain so many inherent improbability that the Commission is convinced, regardless of the means by which they were obtained, that they are not the truth.

Trotsky did not instruct any of the accusers or witnesses in the Moscow Trials to make agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union. Trotsky never recommended, plotted or attempted to restore capitalism in the USSR. The Commission concluded: "We therefore consider the Moscow Trials a scam."

Some contemporary observers who thought that these trials were inherently correct mentioned Molotov's statements that, while admitting that some of the confessions contained some unbelievable statements, he later said that they could be attributed to certain reasons, one of which was that , the few who made questionable confessions tried to undermine the Soviet Union and its government, and then, making dubious statements in their confessions, cast doubt on the fairness of the accusation. Molotov claimed that an accused could have sabotaged the government by inventing the story of a collaboration of some party members with foreign agents, so that these party members would be suspected of espionage despite the fact that they had done nothing wrong, but the false accusation was taken. good. Thus, in his view, the Soviet Government itself was the victim of false testimony. He also said that, without a doubt, the evidence of the conspiracies of most former high dignitaries, made to seize power in a moment of weakness due to the approaching war, was real. Purge the army The purge in the Red Army was based on fabricated evidence that German espionage was acting through an intermediary, the President of Czechoslovakia, Beneș. An attempt was made to prove the existence of correspondence between Tukhachevsky and members of the German High Command. By the purges made in the army, 3 out of 5 marshals, 13 out of 15 army generals, 8 out of 9 admirals were removed (here the purges were deeper, because the sailors were suspected of exploiting the opportunities they had to have contacts with foreigners), 50 out of 57 corps generals, 154 out of 186 division generals, 16 out of 16 army commissioners and 25 out of 28 army corps commissioners. Some observers appreciated that this disorganized the army, deprived it of experienced commanders and made it vulnerable to aggression. These observers believe that military purges encouraged Hitler to launch Operation Barbarossa after learning of the Red Army's weakness.

Extended purification Eventually, almost all the Bolsheviks who played an important role during the 1917 revolution or in the Soviet government during Lenin's time were executed. Of the six original members of the Politburo during the October Revolution of 1917 who lived until the Great Purge, only Stalin survived. Four of the other five were executed. The fifth, Lev Trotsky, went into exile in Mexico after being expelled from the party but was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1940. Of the seven members elected to the Politburo between the October Revolution and Lenin's death in 1924, four were executed, one, (Tomsky), committed suicide, and two (Molotov and Kalinin) survived. Of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Party Congress in 1934 (the last congress before the trials), 1,108 were arrested and almost all died.

The trials and executions of former Soviet leaders were, however, only a small part of the purges. Former scoundrels As long as the "social class of the scoundrels" had been "liquidated", on July 30, 1937, Order no. 00447 of the NKVD which directly concerned the "former chiaburi" and the "supporters of the chiaburi", among other antiSoviet elements. This order was a beginning that became a template for other NKVD actions targeting other specific categories of the population. National operations of the NKVD