ABSTRACT
In 1935 Stalin decided to stage a show trial finally to destroy Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom he now branded podlye dvurushniki (vile double-dealers), suggesting that they had been Okhrana agents-provocateur.1 He ordered Yagoda to prepare documentary ‘proof’ to support this charge.2 In June 1935 Stalin appointed Andrey Vyshinsky to the post of State Prosecutor and assigned to him the leading role in the show trial. He first met Vyshinsky in 1907 in Baku. At that time Vyshinsky was a Menshevik, but this was the least blemish on his record. Stalin kept in Vyshinsky’s dossier an order, signed by Vyshinsky in 1917, to arrest Lenin. Vyshinsky kept in his safe a red file, sent to him by Stalin with a letter signed by a ranking Comintern official and the Soviet diplomat D.Z.Manuilsky, which Manuilsky had supposedly written to Stalin, warning him not to trust Vyshinsky, ‘a man without principles’, who had ‘worked for the tsarist Okhrana’. The letter contained the names of several ‘Baku Bolsheviks’ whom Vyshinsky had supposedly betrayed. Stalin forwarded this letter to Vyshinsky, having written across its upper left corner: ‘To Comrade Vyshinsky. I.St.’3 Manuilsky may indeed have written this letter to Stalin, but it is also possible that Stalin had it fabricated and had given it to Vyshinsky in order to make him ‘toe the line’, and, at the same time, to attribute to him the betrayal of Baku Bolsheviks whom Stalin himself may have betrayed. Whoever was the author of the letter, Stalin’s blackmail worked: Vyshinsky was his obedient tool. The Old Bolsheviks despised Vyshinsky, whom they called ‘a rat in human image’, and he hated them for this.4 Stalin first used Vyshinsky’s animosity toward the Old Bolsheviks in 1928 when he appointed Vyshinsky to preside over the Shakhty show trial.5 Vyshinsky performed to Stalin’s satisfaction, and Stalin chose him to play the leading role of prosecutor in the show trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and other defendants scheduled for the summer of 1936.
