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.

One final note: I'm not saying that all of the people Stalin had executed, including the 47 former Party officials convicted in the Show Trials of 1936, '37 and '38, were good people. As dedicated Communists, they probably led to the deaths of innocent people themselves. But they were almost certainly not guilty of the specific charges that Stalin saw to it were leveled against them. Even the guilty deserve a fair trial.

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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.

August 20, 1940: The Assassination of Leon Trotsky

August 20, 1940: Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City, 23 years after helping bring about the Bolshevik Revolution, and 13 years after being expelled from the country.

He was born on November 7, 1879, in Yanovska, the Russian Empire, what is now Berslavka, Ukraine, under the name Lev Davidovich Bronstein. He began actively fighting the Czarist regime in 1896, and joined the Bolshevik Party in the fateful year of 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution was completed on November 7, his birthday -- not that he cared, because Russian was still using the Julian Calendar, which placed his birthday on October 26 and the revolution's completion on October 25, hence it is also called the October Revolution.

New dictator, and old friend, Vladimir Lenin appointed him Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and he negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that pulled Russia out of World War I. He was then appointed the leader of the Red Army, and won the Russian Civil War.

But when Lenin died in early 1924, his replacement, Josef Stalin, forced Trotsky out of power, expelling him from the country in 1927. Trotsky fled to Mexico, and, paranoid that he might lead a revolution against him, Stalin chose to have him assassinated.

Two attempts, in 1939 and earlier in 1940, failed, before August 20, when NKVD agent Ramón Mercader took an ice axe and hit Trotsky in the head. Not only did he not die immediately, but he had enough strength left to subdue Mercader himself before the authorities could take him. Trotsky died the next day, at age 60.

Mercader confessed, and served 20 years in a Mexican prison. Stalin awarded him the Order of Lenin. Upon his release, Mercader went to nearby and Soviet-friendly Cuba, and died there in 1978. He was buried in Moscow, as no later Soviet regime "rehabilitated" Trotsky's legacy.

To this day, though, some Communists call themselves "Trotskyites" to differentiate themselves from "Stalinists." The murder of Trotsky, every bit as much as the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of the year before, split American Communists, and many who still identified with Trotsky turned against the Stalin regime. While Communism is minimal in America today, those who believe in it tend to be more Trotskyist than Stalinist.

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August 20, 1940 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees swept a doubleheader from the Detroit Tigers at Yankee Stadium, 4-3 and 4-2. Over the 2 games, Joe DiMaggio went 4-for-8 with an RBI, and Hank Greenberg went 3-for-8.

* The New York Giants lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 3-2 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Mel Ott went 3-for-3 with a walk.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers were swept in a doubleheader by the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-0 and 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Clyde Shoun pitched a 6-hit shutout in the 1st game.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Red Sox, 11-6 at Fenway Park in Boston. Bob Feller was the inning pitcher. Jimmie Foxx went 1-for-5 with an RBI, and Ted Williams went 1-for-2 with 2 walks and an RBI.

* A doubleheader was split at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Chicago White Sox won the opener, 6-1. The Philadelphia Athletics won the nightcap, 4-3. Benny McCoy stole home plate in the bottom of the 10th inning.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Washington Senators, 6-3 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Bees, 6-3 at National League Park in Boston. This was the last of 5 seasons before the Bees went back to calling themselves the Braves, and their ballpark Braves Field.

* And the Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Claude Passeau pitched a 3-hit shutout.

January 21, 1924: Vladimir Lenin Dies

Lenin's mummy

January 21, 1924: Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, dictator of the Soviet Union ever since, and the leader of the worldwide Communist movement, dies of a stroke at his home in Gorki, about 6 miles south of central Moscow. He was 53 years old, and had been dealing with ill health the entire time he was in power.

His body was embalmed to preserve it for long-term public display in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square. It's still there, as shown in this photograph.

His death led to a power struggle within the Politburo. Ultimately, it was Joseph Stalin who won out, forcing out Leon Trotsky and other Lenin loyalists. Stalin also inherited Lenin's cult of personality, and took it to new levels.

Lenin had governed a nation wracked with civil war, great poverty, and extensive hunger. And while he made inspirational speeches and wrote stirring papers, he was guilty of atrocities, just as Stalin turned out to be -- although Stalin went on to perform them on a scale not previously imagined.

Charles Kuralt and retired U.S. Army General Norman Schwarzkopf co-hosted a 1994 CBS Reports broadcast: Hitler & Stalin: Legacy of Hate. After the opening segment, about Hitler's rise, they went to commercial, and, upon coming back, Schwarzkopf said, "The world didn't know it at the time, Charles, but 1924 was a very bad year. That was the year that Adolf Hitler formed the Nazis into a national party, and Joseph Stalin became the Premier of Russia." Before addressing Stalin's rise, Kuralt added, "Both their mothers wanted them to be priests."

After Stalin died in 1953, there was another power struggle, won by Nikita Khrushchev. In a 1956 speech, Khrushchev revealed some of Stalin's atrocities, denouncing him, and recommitting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the ideals of its founder, Lenin -- an official hero there, but not to the free world.

Following viewer demands for a battle with a Russian as a character, a 2013 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, featured a five-man "battle royale": "Nice" Peter Shukoff, himself of Russian descent, played Rasputin, Vladimir Lenin and Vladimir Putin; while "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev.

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January 21, 1924 was a Monday. English comedian Benny Hill was born on this day.

Baseball and football were in their off-seasons. There was, as yet, no major professional basketball league. And there was only 1 game played in the National Hockey League that day. The Ottawa Senators beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-2.

The Senators had won the Stanley Cup in 1920, 1921 and 1923, so they were the defending Champions at this time. They were led by Hall-of-Famers Frank Nighbor, Jack Darragh, Harry "Punch" Broadbent, Cy Denneny, Eddie Gerard, Frank "King" Clancy, and goaltender Clint Benedict.

In spite of this game, the Canadiens would go on to dethrone the Senators as Cup winners, led by Hall-of-Famers Howie Morenz, Aurel Joliat, and the man for whom the trophy for best goaltender would be named, Georges Vezina.