ABSTRACT
A series of trials had been accompanied by purges: the Shakhty trial of 1928, the Industrial Party trial of 1930, the Menshevik trial of 1931, the Metro-Vickers trial of 1933. Mass arrests, deportations and executions without trial, added Nikita Khrushchev, 'created insecurity, fear and even desperation'. Khrushchev did not specify which leaders and which trials his formula applied to, but in 1957 the new official history of the cpsu described Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Rykov and Nikolai Bukharin as having been 'mistaken' and therefore 'objectively' anti-Soviet. This effectively undermines the vividly dramatic specific charges on which their trials were based. The trials had their supporters beyond the ranks of the Western Communist parties. Later, after Adolf Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Joseph E. Davies's best-selling memoir, Mission to Moscow, propagated the myth that the Russians had effectively eliminated the fifth column.
