ABSTRACT
The villainous Aleshki Kochetov was a small-time Soviet boss in a rural district in Russia’s agricultural heartland. In 1937 he fell victim to the Great Purges that swept the Soviet bureaucracy. The threat intensified the activity of solidarity networks among cadres whose attempts to save each other reinforced the imagery of omnipresent ‘plots’. Collective representations of the omnipresent conspiracy were captive of the everyday reality of a system that became colonised by the Party-state’s political practice and discourse. Despite the existence of a ‘master plot’, Moscow’s hand in the framing and controlling of local show trials should not be exaggerated. In the Andreevka trial, two defendants persistently denied their guilt for any counterrevolutionary crimes, even at the retrial held as a result of Joseph Stalin’s unpublicized intervention. Peasant witnesses in the trials made many accusations that officials had done favors for former kulaks, presumably often as a result of bribes.
