August 25, 1936: Stalin's Show Trials

Lev Kamenev

August 25, 1936: Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev are executed, ending the first of what became known as the Moscow Show Trials, designed to consolidate the power of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin formed a ruling triumvirate in 1923, after Vladimir Lenin, founder and dictator of the Soviet Union, had become incapacitated from a stroke. He died in 1924, enabling the triumvirate to effect the marginalization of the People's Commissar, Leon Trotsky. But as Stalin took more and more power for himself, Zinoviev and Kamenev sided with Trotsky. Stalin expelled Trotsky from the country in 1929, and his allies, including Zinoviev and Kamenev, were marginalized.

In 1934, Stalin ally Sergei Kirov was assassinated. No one has ever proven who did it, or ordered it. Both Kamenev and Zinoviev had been secretly tried for it in 1935, but it appears that Stalin decided that, with suitable confessions, their fate could be used for propaganda purposes.

On August 19, 1936, the first of the Moscow Show Trials began, conducted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, and presided over by Vasiliy Ulrikh, who would preside over most of the trials to come. Russian historian Anton Antonov-Ovseenko would eventually describe him as "a uniformed toad with watery eyes."

He looks like he would have fit in more

in Germany at the time.

And those trials, including those of Zinoviev and Kamenev, were pure bred sivoy kobyly. That's Russian for "bullshit." All the "evidence was lies." The verdict was preordained. Zinoviev and Kamenev were convicted on August 24. The next day, Kamenev was executed by firing squad. Zinoviev begged for his life, and resisted being taken to where he was to be shot, until the guards finally got tired of him, dumped him in an open cell, and shot him. Both men were 53 years old.

Grigori Zinoviev

More trials were to come in 1937 and 1938, all with the aim of making Stalin look good and making Trotsky look bad. In 1940, Stalin sent an agent to Mexico City, where Trotsky was living in exile, and had him assassinated. In 1941, Stalin's purges continued, trying and executing generals he thought were disloyal.

Then Adolf Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact their countries had signed 2 years earlier. Stalin could have used some of those generals in the Eastern European phase of World War II, known in Russia and the other former Soviet "republics" as "The Great Patriotic War." That war began because Stalin was a shortsighted paranoid egomaniac who thought he knew more than his generals did. It ended because all of those things were true of Hitler as well.

Vasiliy Ulrikh died in 1951, of natural causes, unlike most of those over whose trials he presided.

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August 25, 1936 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the St. Louis Browns, 13-1 at Yankee Stadium. Lefty Gomez was the winning pitcher. Lou Gehrig went 2-for-2... with 4 walks. Bill Dickey went 4-for-6 with 4 RBIs. And Joe DiMaggio, putting together perhaps the best rookie season in baseball history, went 5-for-6 with a home run and 2 RBIs.

* The New York Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-5 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Mel Ott went 0-for-5.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-1 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-0 at Fenway Park in Boston. Jimmie Foxx went 0-for-3 for the Red Sox. Hank Greenberg was injured early in the season, and was unavailable for the Tigers.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 13-11 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Two teams, 24 runs -- and none scored on a home run. As Mel Allen, 3 years away from becoming the radio "Voice of the Yankees," would say, How about that?

* The Washington Senators beat the Cleveland Indians, 5-3 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* And the Boston Bees -- as the Braves were known from 1936 to 1940 -- swept a doubleheader from the St. Louis Cardinals, 20-3 and 5-4.