To what extent can Stalin’s political trials be said to possess any legitimacy? To even pose such a question will strike many as beyond the pale. Yet certain segments of the Left, echoing Stalin’s own justifications at the time, have long maintained that the trials were legitimate proceedings against saboteurs. In the dominant historiography, however, these events are instead understood as episodes of mass, senseless violence in which vast numbers of innocent people, including many prominent Bolshevik figures, were killed on spurious charges. This latter view has been substantiated by a large body of scholarship on the Terror, but revulsion at the neo-Stalinist line has perhaps led to an overcorrection in which the threats Stalin was reacting to have been confidently dismissed as either figments of his imagination or consciously fabricated charges used to consolidate personalized power.

Archival research has complicated this picture. Historians such as William Chase, Pierre Broué, and J. Arch Getty have shown that a clandestine Trotskyist opposition network did operate within the Soviet Union, maintaining contact with Trotsky and his son, Sedov. Trotsky and Sedov denied these claims, and, as Chase and Broué observe, most Western observers simply took them at their word. The archives, however, point to a more complex picture. Indeed, John Archer notes that Broué (2008) and his research team were able to demonstrate that the later terror had its roots in earlier events: “the charges in the Trial of the Sixteen [‘Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center’] in 1936 were not simply pathological inventions but had some rational basis in the events of 1932.”