Industrial Party Trial - Accusations Against The "wreckers"

Accusations Against The "wreckers"

The Industrial Party Trial was the first post-NEP trial in which the defendants were accused of plotting a coup against the Soviet regime. The plot was supposedly hatched by emigre Russian industrialists in Paris, and allegedly involved the governments of France, England and some smaller countries like Latvia and Estonia. For participating in the coup France would supposedly be rewarded parts of Ukraine while the English would get a share in the Caucasus oil. Upon the arrival of the invasion forces the defendants would sabotage Soviet industry and create chaos in the transportation networks (charges of this kind were to become standard in later show trials of the 1930s). The trial was also notable in that it was the first Soviet show trial at which the defendants "confessed" their supposed crimes, including co-operating with the Prime Minister of France Raymond Poincaré (all the confessions were extracted through various torture methods). The latter had to issue a public refutation, published in Pravda, which was presented at the trial as an additional "proof" by the prosecution.

The prosecution stated that "the Industrial Party consisted of the top old engineering-technical intelligentsia, of major specialists and professors, who held privileged positions during the capitalist regime". According to the prosecution, all of the organization's members had been raised in the bourgeois environment and hence were alien to the Soviet system, which served to reinforce an important point of contemporary Soviet propaganda.

It was also alleged that Indparty wreckers had deviously moved beyond direct, crude, easily recognizable sabotage to wrecking in the areas of planning and resource distribution. Virtually any conceivable course of action could be construed as wrecking: for example the engineers' decision to invest in a particular area could be construed as wrecking by withholding resources from other vital areas, while by the same token their decision to not invest could also be construed as wrecking: the opportunity cost of any decision could be used to indicate guilt. In other words the engineers were made scapegoats for well known economic problems in various areas of Soviet industry.

The trial was a refinement of the Shakhty Trial in 1928 and an important precursor to the Moscow Trials of the late 1930s. In one of those minor glitches that would plague later trials, Ramzin was accused of having plotted with Russian emigre industrialist Pavel Ryabushinsky in 1928 even though Ryabushinsky had died in 1924.