Answer:
Often based on forced confessions, the trials made a mockery of the idea of due process of law. All the participants of these so-called "show trials," including the judges, served Stalin's political evil.Stalin often persecuted people not for what they did, but for who they were. Anyone having anything to do with foreigners or foreign countries automatically became suspects of spying. This included entire groups of people such as foreign language teachers, members of pen pal organizations, even stamp collectors. Those with religious backgrounds like Catholic priests, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Jews were arrested in large numbers. Agricultural officials, factory managers, and engineers were frequently accused of economic sabotage known as "wrecking." They were blamed for railway accidents, livestock diseases, crop failures, and hundreds of other shortcomings in the Soviet economy. Finally, Communist Party officials at higher and higher levels were arrested and charged with being "oppositionists" or followers of Stalin's hated rival, Leon Trotsky.
Explanation:
Stalin demanded confessions from his victims. To extract these confessions, the secret police resorted to a variety of methods. The "conveyor" involved the continuous interrogation of a person by relays of police for hours and even days at a time. Intellectuals and the party elite were often subjected to the "long interrogation" by a single interrogator who carried on his questioning sometimes for weeks and months.
Some people confessed when police interrogators threatened family members. Others hoped that by cooperating they would save themselves. Many confessed under beatings and torture, at first an unofficial means of gaining a confession. In 1937, Stalin made torture the official and usual method of getting confessions. Stalin reportedly ordered the secret police to "beat, beat, and beat again."
Many caught up in the mass arrests invented "crimes" so that they could confess to something. Many admitted guilt without even knowing the charges. However, some top Communist Party officials arrested on orders from Stalin confessed for quite another reason. These members of the old generation of revolutionaries came to power with Lenin in 1917 and had such faith in the party that they refused to believe it could ever be wrong. In Arthur Koestler's novel, Darkness at Noon, the main character named Rubashov is falsely accused of plotting the assassination of "No. 1"(Stalin). Rubashov finally "confesses" after declaring, "I will do everything which may serve the Party." In the novel, he willingly took a bullet in the head after becoming convinced that he must be guilty because the party said so.
