[Maxim Litvinov]

This is following on from another thread on torture, where Potemkin wrote that Stallin quite possibly believed the prominent confessions during the Great Purges.

Stalin was scrupulous about obtaining confessions. If the Great Terror were truly arbitrary, then why the obsessive need to obtain signed confessions? Come to that, why torture them at all? Why not just make a 'confession' up and forge their signature? Why bother going through all the time and physical effort required to torture them to extract a confession, unless they believed the torture was effective in extracting the truth? In reality, far from the confessions being fabricated, the accused had to sign each page of their confession to avoid falsification by the interrogators. When the Red Army was being purged, Stalin read Uborevich's and others' confessions and said, "It's incredible. But it's a fact, they admit it." When Mikoyan doubted the confessions of Yenukidze's secretary, Stalin showed him the signed confessions and said, "He writes it himself, signs every page." And Zhdanov's son later testified that his father "did trust the denunciations from Yezhov. For some time, my father did believe there were Tsarist agents among the Leningrad leadership." There is no reason to believe that Stalin did not have the same attitude. See, for example, Simon Sebag Montefiori's 'Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar', pp. 198 and 216, among others.

Q - If the Great Terror were truly arbitrary, then why the obsessive need to obtain signed confessions?
A - Because the Soviets had a highly formalised series of rituals they needed to abide by. Their juridical system was different to ours, and based around confessions for starters - the idea is that you set up a series of pre-trial confrontations with the suspect until they admitted something. Then, the only way of getting a definitive judgement is to have an admission of guilt and the best way to control this is to have a signed confession in hand *before* the trial. For something you're staging deliberately to show off how just your country is, the last thing you want is an ambiguous decision.

Then is the whole Soviet tradition of samokritika though - it's really as important and stylised as the Catholic tradition of going to confession. Soviet people were supposed to publicly acknowledge their problems and seek the parties absolution. For people like Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin to be 'restored' in the 1930s involved very public admissions of guilt on their part, for example, but also self-criticism was a fairly common practice.

Q - Come to that, why torture them at all?
A - Because a signed confession often required torture. In circumstances where it didn't, there isn't necessary evidence of torture.

Q - Why not just make a 'confession' up and forge their signature?
A - Well, great store was put in the fact that a confession was made and for a confession to hold water you have to have some assurance it's not going to be recanted - if you just wrote something, signed it 'Bukharin' and took him to trial with it, he'd just say it wasn't him that wrote it.

Q - Why bother going through all the time and physical effort required to torture them to extract a confession, unless they believed the torture was effective in extracting the truth?
A - Because torture was effective in extracting a confession? Which is what Soviet officials needed to hear for the sake of the process.

S - In reality, far from the confessions being fabricated, the accused had to sign each page of their confession to avoid falsification by the interrogators.
A - As you say, the fact that the confessions were made was seen as important. Having signed pages of course didn't mean that the accused would *agree* to what was on the page if not under duress.

S - When the Red Army was being purged, Stalin read Uborevich's and others' confessions and said, "It's incredible. But it's a fact, they admit it." When Mikoyan doubted the confessions of Yenukidze's secretary, Stalin showed him the signed confessions and said, "He writes it himself, signs every page."
A - Yes. This is a good indication of how confessions were important - it's pretty hard to argue with a guy who can pull out confessions. What it doesn't really show is whether Stalin *believed* the confessions or was merely using them as a device. After all, the standard line is that the show trials were meant as a device - their very presence doesn't indicate any belief in their results by Stalin and others.

S - There is no reason to believe that Stalin did not have the same attitude.
A - Well, there are many reasons to believe Stalin did not think the testimonies of those on trial were accurate.
- For one there was the natural skepticism towards the idea that people they'd known for a long time had done such things.
- Secondly, at 'confrontations' members of the CC could actually see that their comrades had been tortured - Pyatakov, for instance, appeared as 'his shadow, a skeleton with its teeth knocked out' (Larina, p. 312) - and Politburo members seemed highly skeptical of their pronouncements.
- Thirdly, the nature of many of the allegations were quite absurd, if not impossible. Bukharin, for instance, was meant to have been trying to undermine the Soviet Union since before it existed and to have tried assassinating Stalin with a pistol in a public place (despite the fact that if he'd really wanted to kill Stalin right from the early years he would have had hundreds of opportunities), and Maxim Peshkov was supposed to have been plotted against by people spraying his walls with contact poison etc. etc. There are also factual inaccuracies in the confessions: places where people supposedly met when they were somewhere else, hotels they met at that didn't exist at the time etc. etc.
- Fourthly, Stalin was the only member of the Politburo in frequent discussions with Vyshinsky and Yagoda on the trials and the confessions and receiving frequent letters from those under investigation as well. Yet, despite having more access to all the details of the trials and confessions than anyone else (we'd need access to files off limits in the presidential archives to confirm he helped 'script' the trials), we're supposed to believe he was more naive than ordinary Bolsheviks like Molotov, Bukharin and Ordzhonikidze when it came to the nature of confessions.
- Fifthly, if Stalin was disconnected from the persecution of so many major Bolshevik figures from 1934 to 1938 (under Yagoda and Yezhov) then the great nature of the purge is placed almost alone simply on the 'over-zealousness' of NKVD workers etc: this seems to be a dubious characterisation - to state that the secret police just happened to get 'worked up' of their own accord without receiving any directions from on high.

Overall then, it seems highly unlikely that Stalin could have believed in the confessions from my point of view.

[Smilin' Dave]

Don't forget the role played by confessions in the trials. The defendant couldn't really say something contrary to his own position (although there a couple of examples of confessions being repudiated). Confession added legitimacy for the outside observer, who might see the clear errors in the prosecution's case, but would see the confession, and simply assume the defendant is guilty anyway.

Since the trials themselves fufilled an important role in ritual, propaganda etc. the importance of getting the confession follows naturally.

What it doesn't really show is whether Stalin *believed* the confessions or was merely using them as a device.

A perfectly good point. You see, we tend to study Stalin based on what others saw or were told, since Stalin didn't leave us very much of his own (relatively speaking). The problem is, Stalin isn't just talking to these people simple for amusement, it he playing politics. So what he said, and what he meant, is hard to prove.