[Leonid Brezhnev]

This all Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center' was nothing more from an excuse from Stalin to secure his position,not the goverment, from a new opposition within the Communist Party.The people that could threat his power where figures that still had direct links with the October Revolution.

Zinoviev: 35 years of his life in the Bolshevik party; Lenin's closest collaborator in exile and nominated by him as first chairman of the Communist International; chairman of the Petrograd Soviet for years; member of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the C.P. for years.

Kamenev: also 35 years spent in the Bolshevik party; chairman of the Political Bureau in Lenin's absence; chairman of the Moscow Soviet; chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense; Lenin's literary executor.

Bukharin: for years one of the most prominent theoreticians of the Bolsheviks; chairman of the Comintern after Zinoviev; editor of official government organ, "ISVESTIA" to this day.

The accused were compelled to confess to the most monstrous crimes which they did not commit, and before they were delivered to the executioner, forced to pour dirt over their own heads.Not a single genuine letter, not a single document, not a single impeccable piece of evidence was presented at the trials. The only "evidence" was the self confessions of the defendants - extracted under torture. Kamenev and Zinoviev, already morally broken by capitulation, actually demanded their own execution, having been promised that they would be spared.As Bukharin said in his letter :

"I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates organised slander, acts boldly and confidently...These 'wonder-working' organs(speaking for GPU) can grind any member of the Central Committee, any member of the Party, into dust, turn him into a traitor-terrorist, saboteur, spy...These days the newspaper with the hallowed name Pravda prints the most contemptible lie that I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the achievement of October, to restore capitalism. That is an unheard-of obscenity. This is a lie that in its obscenity could only be matched by the story that [Tsar] Nikolai Romanov devoted his whole life to the struggle against capitalism and the monarchy, to the struggle for the realisation of the proletarian revolution."

Of course these trials werent enough for some to "protect" USSR and a Great Purge needed to start...I say some people because I cant say exactly for now if Stalin wanted the trials to be continued,but definately helped him a lot to secure his position from threats that could come from not a high level(as the people in the Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist center' were).I am speaking for the Stalinist police butchers Yagoda and Yezhov and the other NKVD chiefs.Denunciations and informers were encouraged and every friend or relative of any suspected malcontent was imprisoned. In the mass paranoia, every zealous policeman found as many victims as could be manufactured, to avoid denunciation himself. Children were encouraged to denounce their parents. General Petro G. Grigorenko recalls how he was almost denounced by his own wife. Even that we accept that there were conspiracies,the conspiracies would have been made from reactionary groups that maybe survived and not from Oppositionists or any other communists.It would have made from people, that they havent participated in the Octomber Revolution or supported any Bolshevik leader, and wanted to discard everything that achieved by 19 years of the Russian Revolution in favor of a Nazi regime.As Trotsky said about the Purges:

"The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism".