Show trial
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A show trial is a public trial in which the guilt or innocence of the defendant has already been determined. It is a type of political trial. The purpose of holding a show trial is to present both acc
People's Court trial of Adolf Reichwein, Nazi Germany, 1944
Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky (centre) reading the 1937 indictment against Karl Radek during the 2nd Moscow trial
Captain Witold Pilecki, former prisoner at Auschwitz during a show trial conducted by communist authorities in Poland in 1948
Trial of József Mindszenty
Great Purge
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The Great Purge or Great Terror, also known as the Year of '37 and the Yezhovshchina, was a political purge in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nik
Show trial
…about class enemies and political enemies. Show trials became common during Joseph Stalin's political repressions, such as the Moscow Trials of the Great Purge period (1937–38). Such trials paralleled the institution of self-criticism within Communist Party cadres and Soviet society. Known show trials in Soviet…
Residents searching for relatives among the exhumed victims of the Vinnytsia massacre, 1943
Excerpt from NKVD Order No. 00447
Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov with Stalin and his daughter, Svetlana, in 1934
Bolshevik revolutionaries Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev