sional process was helped by the blackjack, continuous interrogation and the swan dive, where towelling was put between thejaws and the feet and tightened, arching and breaking the back. But often, the confessionwas voluntary because the Party demanded it. As one survivor recalled, "serving the partywas not just a goal in life but an inner need." In January 1937 a second great show trial was held in which seventeen leading Bolsheviksdeclared that they had knowledge of a conspiracy between Trotsky and the German andJapanese intelligence services by which Soviet territory was to be transferred to Germanyand Japan. A crowd of 200,000 packed Red Square in frigid weather to hear NikitaKhrushchev read out the death sentences. All seventeen were executed. Then on June 11,1937, the cream of the Red Army, stripped of their medals and insignia, were ushered intothe courtroom. They included Marshal Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant soldier of hisgeneration and the pioneer of armored and airborne warfare. The generals were accused ofspying for the Germans, found guilty, shot and dumped in a trench on a construction site,all within eighteen hours. Six of the officers who condemned them were soon shot. Of 85corps commanders 57 disappeared within a year. Of the 100,000 Red Army officers onactive duty in 1937, perhaps 60,000 were purged. The last of the public trials took place in March 1938, as twenty-one leading Bolsheviks,including Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), confessed to similar charges and were executed.Also to go was Yagoda, Stalin's hand-picked head of the NKVD. These public show trials and the secret trials of the generals provide only a faint idea ofthe extent of the Great Terror. Every member of Lenin's Politburo except Stalin andTrotsky were either killed or committed suicide to avoid execution. A partial list of thosewho ceased to exist would include: --two vice-commissars of foreign affairs--most of the ambassadors in the Soviet diplomati...
