The tightening pinch of goods and food shortage was making people grumble with pain. The ruthless extermination of Trotskyism and other communist deviations was eating into the faith of more conscious workers. The Shakhty trial offered a tangible object for the hatreds smoldering in the heart of Russia. That morning's newspapers in every city and town shrieked curses upon the bourgeois plotters and their bloodthirsty foreign confederates. Week after week the press, radio, schools, newsreels, billboards had waved the promise of traitors' deaths aloft like crimson flags. They had treated every accusation and every far-fetched implication as established facts.

This was no spick-and-span trial on the democratic model, with its hypocritical blindfolded justice dangling a silly pair of scales. This was Revolutionary Justice, its flaming eyes wide open, its flaming sword poised to strike. It was the same Revolutionary Justice that had presided over the guillotine in the French Terror, that had ruled men's minds whenever tyranny was overthrown. Its voice was not the whining of "fairness" but the thunder of vengeance. The charges would not be proved-the "preliminary investigations" behind closed doors presumably had done that. There was a sheaf of full or partial confessions that fitted neatly one into the other. No, the charges would merely be "demonstrated" before the whole country and the whole world, as theatrically as a powerful government with all the whips of mass indignation in its clenched fist could manage.

The accused men were coming into court pre-judged. Many of them had made fulsome confessions. And yet, there was surely a wide margin of the unpredictable. When half a hundred men are corralled for an ordeal of death in the sight of the entire world, the best-planned melodrama may go askew. Even Russians might refuse to die meekly, minds might crack, neat patterns might crumble, unsuspected peaks of courage or abysses of cowardice might be uncovered. Who knows what might happen! The crowds therefore pushed and clamored for a glimpse of the proceedings. It was the first large-scale public trial in some years and stirred the embers of the sacrificial romantic moods of the earliest years of the revolution.

Nikolai Krylenko, the prosecutor, was the first to stride to the platform. He took in the spectators, the foreign reporters, the cinema paraphernalia, and radio microphones with a slow, defiant scowl. This was to be his show. A small, tightly knit athletic figure, only a few inches over five feet, with a large shaven head and a flat face, he saw himself and made others see him as revolutionary vengeance incarnate.

Throughout the six crowded weeks of the trial he wore sports clothes-riding breeches, puttees, a hunting jacket. We called it a hunting outfit and its fitness for his role added to the drama of the proceedings. Krylenko, the man-hunter.

Then came Professor A. Y. Vishinsky, the blond, spectacled presiding judge. He sat behind a microphone on a raised dais, with two associate judges on either side of him. The defense lawyers, older men with something tentative and apologetic in their manners, took seats and fussed with brief cases and papers to cover their embarrassment. Their faces have faded out of my memory; they were timid supernumeraries, an empty concession to appearances. Then the accused men filed in and took seats in the fenced-off space: a motley collection of old men and young, gray, unsmiling. Ten or twelve of them were to emerge in the following weeks as distinct personalities, but the rest remained a blur of names and faces.

The Jupiter lights snarled and flashed as they were turned full on the judges, the defendants, the audience. Their glare and sputter rarely ceased. It was the raucous, distracting element in which the entire trial was immersed.

The names of the accused men were read off by the clerk and acknowledged from the prisoners' box. Every session began with this ceremony of roll-call. Suddenly there was a hitch. Prisoner Nekrasoff did not answer. There were only fifty-two men instead of fifty-three. His counsel explained that Nekrasoff, unfortunately, was suffering hallucinations and had been placed in a padded cell, where he screamed about rifles pointed at his heart and suffered paroxysms.

The vision of Nekrasoff howling in his padded cell was a sinister element that deepened with every passing day. Every so often, in the routine of questions and answers and quibbles, some casual statement or incident would thus light up the depths. Sometimes these flashes left us limp with the impact of horrors half-glimpsed. What had driven the man to madness? What had transpired in the G.P.U. dungeons and interrogation chambers in the months since the men were rounded up? How did men like Krylenko, who sneered and snarled while the world looked on, behave when there were no witnesses and no public records? Whenever the proceedings yielded a flitting glimpse of that mysterious background, the spectators were electrified, the judges leaned forward, the prisoners fidgeted, Krylenko tensed for a spring...

It was an awesome picture that emerged from the Act of Accusation. In its general charges and larger contours it was strangely convincing, particularly in this setting of radio microphones, red drapery, bayonets, livid lights and newspaper hysteria. Only when the document moved closer and focused on details did the picture seem to blur. The citations of specific words and acts were curiously trifling, petty, inconsequential in relation to the grandiose world-wide plots involving governments, gigantic private corporations, and a supposedly organized, heavily financed movement. A turbine that went wrong. A mechanized mine which in someone's opinion should not have been mechanized. A raincoat sent from Germany as a "signal" for sabotage. A servant girl whom someone else had supposedly denounced to the Whites. Where were the magnificent deeds of desperation called for by the big pattern? Throughout the long exhausting weeks we fluctuated thus between vast accusations and the closer scrutiny under which they dissolved into conjectures and hearsay.

We waited in vain for a genuine piece of impersonal and unimpeachable testimony - an intercepted letter perhaps, a statement or document that did not carry the suspicion of G.P.U. extortion. The "far-reaching international intrigue" never did emerge. There was ample evidence of individual chicanery and occasional collaboration, but hardly any conclusive proof of the organized, centrally-directed conspiracy charged by the prosecution and assumed to be a fact by the press.

I despair of summarizing the weeks of trial. It was a strain on one's nerves and credulity, watching men writhe under Krylenko's whip, watching them go one after another through their roles like puppets while cameras were grinding and the Jupiters hissed. Most fearful was the macabre miracle of puppets unexpectedly coming to life, struggling to escape their nooses, protesting, accusing, pleading, while the prosecutor pulled the rope tighter.

The traditional Russian court procedure is far more casual and informal than in the West and therefore provides more scope for dramatic surprises. Long speeches are in order, witnesses confront and harangue one another, lawyers are unlimited in their wiles in leading or misleading those whom they question. The defendant is not guided and guarded by expert lawyers and protected by rules of procedure or an Anglo-Saxon assumption of innocence. He is left to flail in a panic like a drowning man, or to save himself cleverly, depending on his own abilities and nervous make-up.

Each prisoner began with a statement of his career. A few of them talked for more than an hour, tracing their life's course from birth to the impending death. Often they achieved real eloquence, and even the most inarticulate among them occasionally found words that lit up the vistas of his ordeal. I doubt if half a hundred men from the same social layers in any other race could have done so well as these Russians. Certainly no other race would have offered so much natural histrionics. Those who confessed and willingly played Krylenko's game, tended to overplay their roles. With an artist's instinct for emphasis they built themselves into arch-traitors, into personifications of the bourgeois intellectual and everything communists despise. The Slavic talent for hyperbole was among the things most fully demonstrated in this demonstration trial.

Having told his whole story unimpeded, the prisoner was then questioned by Krylenko, by his defense counsel, and brought face to face with his accusers and with witnesses. He interrogated these people himself and called upon others in the prisoners' box for corroboration. Often four or five defendants were grouped around the microphone questioning one another, bickering over disputed points and shouting "Liar!" while Krylenko and Vishinsky prodded them expertly to involve one another. Often these men who had spent their lives in equipping and operating coal mines grew more excited in defending some technical point of mineralogy than in defending their lives.

We saw the color ebbing from men's faces, we saw horrified disbelief staring from their eyes, as too-willing fellow-prisoners calmly dragged them into their elaborate confessions. A web of mutual hatreds and suspicions was woven under our eyes among the fifty-two prisoners, none of whom cared to die alone. We watched the skill with which Krylenko, narrowing his eyes and twisting his lips into a sneer, inflamed these hatreds, setting man against man and sowing insinuations.

My job was to dash off bits of information that make headlines in the American papers. A piece of extempore drama that would provide a good feature somewhere among the department store ads. A startling hint of foreign intervention plotted in a Berlin cafe. The exciting confrontation of two prisoners, brothers or life-long friends, that would make good human-interest stories. Somehow I must wring more and better stories out of this performance than my competitors.

But the dispatches did not begin to reflect the reality of that tangle of passions, fears, suspicions and desperations. When I saw my reports in type they seemed to me only vaguely related to the Roman circus that I was witnessing. An American or English reader must see the exotic spectacle through the lenses of his own knowledge and experience, and these did not touch at many points the emotions and overtones of the Soviet political trial.

Nor did the published dispatches so much as hint at my own inner reactions or the disturbances set up in the deeper recesses of my mind. I readily accepted the great trial for what it was: a revolutionary gesture in which the concept of justice did not even enter. It was a court-rnartial in the midst of a strenuous social war, where ordinary notions of fairness must be suspended. We wrote of evidence and witnesses and judicial rulings, fortifying the illusion that this was, in a rough and strange way, a tribunal of justice. All the time I knew, as those around me knew, that the innocence or guilt of these individuals was of no importance. It was the indubitable guilt of their class that was being demonstrated. What were the lives and the liberty of a few dozen men against the interests of the revolution? They were merely a batch of exhibits, the best that could be gathered at the moment, to impress the populace with the fact that the revolution was still honeycombed with enemies.

I accepted this version, as I say, as a working hypothesis and did nothing consciously to throw doubts on the essential justice of the thing in my readers' minds. If their narrow, individualistic code of justice was violated at every point, that larger justice which is historical necessity was being served. Not one of the American correspondents was naive enough to regard the performance as in the literal sense a trial to assay men's guilt. Not one of them was so insensitive to the by-plays and under-currents as not to be aware of the "defense" as a cruel farce, of threads leading into mysterious Secret Service realms, and of purposes so far beyond the fate of the men in the prisoners' box that they might have been straw dummies instead of flesh and blood. If they described the proceedings as though it were a genuine judicial tribunal, it was because of the necessity of living on terms of friendship with the rulers of the capital where they worked, the difficulty of making outsiders see the thing in any other light - or a combination of these reasons.

As for myself, I counted it my specific duty to strengthen the illusion abroad that this was, indeed, a court of justice in the ordinary meaning of that phrase. But I could not bring myself to hate the fifty-two men who symbolized the capitalist enemy. My mind had been too deeply conditioned by the years when I fought for justice to political prisoners in America, by the realms of indignant words I had written for IWW prisoners, anarchist deportees, Charles Krieger in Tulsa, Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston. Despite myself I came increasingly, as the trial continued, to see the accused men as creatures baited, badgered, insulted and denied a sporting chance. I came increasingly to feel the demonstration trial as a hoax - not merely on the outside world which received it naively as a species of justice, but a hoax on the Russian masses themselves who were being offered a lightning rod to divert their resentments.

Stalin's anti-kulak campaign was only his earliest effort to undermine the Party's right wing. Even as he was compelled momentarily in March to disavow the "Urals-Siberian" methods, he probed his opponents' strength in other ways. The most important of these concerned the charges that he had brought in early March 1928 against fifty-five engineers and managers from the Shakhty mines in the Donbas region. Mistakes and mismanagement were common throughout Soviet industry at the time, but Stalin saw an opportunity to convert such acts into a political weapon by charging the men with sabotage and conspiracy with foreign governments. Though initially the Politburo right must have acquiesced in bringing the case to trial, it became clear as the trial progressed that Stalin was using it as leverage against his foes. The charges thus enabled him to denounce the reliance on such pre-revolutionary specialists, a policy that Bukharin had defended, and it allowed him to make allegations that Rykov's state apparatus and Tomsky's labor unions had failed to uncover or had concealed widespread economic sabotage.

The first major political trial to have the effect of seriously aggravating the internal political situation in the Soviet Union was the so-called Shakhty case. The defendants were engineers and technicians in the coal industry of the Donetz basin. They were accused of "wrecking," deliberately causing explosions in the mines, and maintaining criminal ties with the former mine owners, as well as less serious crimes, such as buying unnecessary imported equipment, violating safety procedures and labor laws, incorrectly laying out new mines, and so on.

At the trial some of the defendants confessed their guilt, but many denied it or confessed to only some of the charges. The court acquitted four of the 53 defendants, gave suspended sentences to four, and prison terms of one to three years to 10. Most of the defendants were given four to 10 years. Eleven were condemned to be shot, and five of them were executed in July 1928. The other six were granted clemency by the All-Union Central Executive Committee.