ABSTRACT
The Moscow Trials are revolutionary trials presented as if they were ordinary trials. Considered from the standpoint of common law, Bukharin’s trial hardly got underway. The confessions in the Moscow Trials are only the extreme instance of those letters of submission to the Central Committee which in 1938 were a feature of daily life in the U.S.S.R. They are only mystifying to those who overlook the dialectic between the subjective and objective factors in Marxist politics. Every Marxist is quite familiar with this ambiguity of a history in wounds. Marxist politics is not primarily a system of ideas but a reading of ongoing history; and as a Marxist Bukharin was not trying so much to set on foot a plan as to discover what he believed to be the forces on the move inside the U.S.S.R.
