BRITISH RADIO DRAMATIZES MOSCOW TRIALS
The radio audience in Britain is being offered a series of three dramatized historical programs of unusual interest, Dealing with Stalin's great purges that culminated in the Moscow frame-up trials of 1936-38, they have been prepared by Isaac Deutscher, the well-known biographer of Leon Trotsky.
"In my series of dramatised historical documentaries," Deutscher writes in the Radio Times of March 11, "the hangman and the victims, Stalin and Vyshinsky on the one hand, and Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin on the other, are the main actors. They speak with their authentic voices: all their utterances are taken from the official records and from archives, and, in a few cases, from eyewitness accounts. Khrushchev, who was among the hangmen during Stalin's lifetime but later spoke for some of the victims, appears in his dual character."
In Part I of the series, Deutscher introduces historic precedents going back to Oliver Cromwell. The purges of the Great French Revolution are presented and premonitions of forerunners and makers of the Russian Revolution.
"Part II," continues Deutscher, "presents crucial scenes of the Moscow Trials, acted out before the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., with Vyshinsky, Prosecutor General, delivering his fantastic indictments, and many famous defendants making their bizarre 'confessionst and declaring themselves guilty of huge, unheard-of crimes, which they could not have committed,"
In the final part, the scene shifts to Coyoacan, Mexico, where the Commission headed by John Dewey heard Leon Trotsky bring forward evidence to successfully prove what seemed to be an almost impossible task -- to clear his. own name and that of his son Leon Sedov and establish their complete innocence of the infamous charges levelled by Stalin.
The radio show picks up the famous revelations at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist party when the truth began to .. emerge in the Soviet Union itself, "But the story is not yet closed," says Deutscher. "In years to come we shall still be hearing a lot about the Great Purges because the revulsion against the Stalinist terror is now powerfully shaping and reshaping the moral and political outlook of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe.”