Between August 1936 and March 1938, the men who had made the Russian Revolution stood in a Moscow courtroom and confessed to having spent their lives working for Nazi Germany, Britain, Japan and Trotsky, to poisoning livestock, wrecking industry, and plotting to assassinate Stalin.
Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936. Pyatakov and Radek in 1937. Bukharin, Rykov and Krestinsky in 1938 — the Trial of the Twenty-One, prosecuted by Andrey Vyshinsky, whose summations described the defendants as a foul-smelling heap of human garbage.
Almost everything they confessed to was fabricated, and much of it was physically impossible. Foreign journalists and diplomats attended, and a number of them believed it. There was no visible coercion in the courtroom. The defendants spoke fluently and accused themselves.
The preparation is what produced this, and it is documented from NKVD records opened after 1991.
The conveyor: continuous interrogation by teams working in relays over days and weeks, so that the prisoner never sleeps while the interrogators are always fresh. Sleep deprivation on this scale is among the most reliably destructive interrogation techniques known. Threats against families, which in this system were entirely credible and were frequently carried out regardless. Isolation. And, for those who resisted longest, physical torture, authorized explicitly by the Central Committee in 1937.
Modern false-confession research — Kassin's work, Gudjonsson's suggestibility studies, everything in Part 4 of this guide — establishes that these conditions produce confessions from innocent people reliably, and that they produce two kinds: compliant confessions, where the person knows they are innocent and confesses to end the situation, and internalized ones, where they come to doubt their own memory.
There was also a specifically Bolshevik lever. Several defendants appear to have been persuaded that a final service to the Party was being asked of them — that the confession was required by history, and that refusing it was a last act of factionalism.
The trials' function was not judicial. It was demonstrative, and its audience was the population.
When the men who founded the revolution denounce themselves as traitors, the effect on a bystander is not to establish that those particular men were guilty. It is to establish that there is no position from which dissent can be defended, and that anyone can be shown to have been an enemy all along. Chapter 8's unanimity operates here as a national instrument.
One moment broke the surface. On the first day of the 1938 trial, Nikolai Krestinsky retracted his confession in open court and pleaded not guilty. He was taken away overnight. The next morning he withdrew the retraction and said he had been unable to admit the truth. Everyone in the room understood what had happened in the interval.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: False Confession Science