Communist Party leaders in most Western countries denounced criticism of the trials as capitalist attempts to subvert Communism. A number of American communists and "
fellow travellers" outside of the Soviet Union signed
The Moscow Trials: A Statement by American Progressives. These included
Langston Hughes and
Stuart Davis, who would later express regrets. Some contemporary observers who thought the trials were inherently fair cite the statements of
Molotov, who, while conceding that some of the confessions contain unlikely statements, said there may have been several reasons or motives for this—one being that the handful who made doubtful confessions were trying to undermine the Soviet Union and its government by making dubious statements in their confessions to cast doubts on their trial. Molotov postulated that a defendant might invent a story that he collaborated with foreign agents and party members to undermine the government so that those members would falsely come under suspicion, while the false foreign collaboration charge would be believed as well. Thus, the Soviet government was in his view the victim of false confessions. Nonetheless, he said the evidence of mostly out-of-power Communist officials conspiring to make a power grab during a moment of weakness in the upcoming war truly existed. In Britain, the lawyer and
Labour MP
Denis Nowell Pritt, for example, wrote: "Once again the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties," but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy it will be realized that the charge was true, the confessions correct and the prosecution fairly conducted," while socialist thinker
Beatrice Webb "was pleased that Stalin had 'cut out the dead wood'." Communist Party leader
Harry Pollitt, in the
Daily Worker of March 12, 1938, told the world that "the trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress." The article was ironically illustrated by a photograph of Stalin with Yezhov, himself shortly to vanish and his photographs airbrushed from history by
NKVD censors. In the United States,
left-wing advocates such as
Corliss Lamont and
Lillian Hellman also denounced criticism of the Moscow trials, signing
An Open Letter To American Liberals in support of the trials for the March 1937 issue of
Soviet Russia Today. In the political atmosphere of the 1930s, the accusation that there was a conspiracy to destroy the Soviet Union was not incredible, and few outside observers were aware of the events inside the Communist Party that had led to the purge and the trials. However, the Moscow trials were generally viewed negatively by most Western observers, including many liberals. The
New York Times noted the absurdity in an editorial on March 1, 1938: "It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton,
Jay and most of their associates. The charge against them would be that they conspired to hand over the United States to
George III." For
Bertram Wolfe, the outcome of the Bukharin trial marked his break with Stalinism.
The Dewey Commission In May 1937, the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against
Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, commonly known as the
Dewey Commission, was set up in the United States by supporters of Trotsky to establish the truth about the trials. The commission was headed by the noted American philosopher and educator
John Dewey, who led a delegation to Mexico, where Trotsky lived, to interview him and hold hearings from April 10 to April 17, 1937. The hearings were conducted to investigate the allegations against Trotsky who publicly stated in advance of them that if the commission found him guilty as charged he would hand himself over to the Soviet authorities. However, the proceedings put little pressure on Trotsky's statements and accepted much of them at face value, sometimes breaking the cross-examination when it was becoming "too improper" for Trotsky' case. The spirit of the proceedings of the commission fell short of a serious investigation even in the judgement of its own members: having resigned from the commission,
Carleton Beals said in a public statement: Having failed to prove Trotsky's innocence, the commission brought to light evidence which established that some of the specific charges made at the trials could not be true. The Dewey Commission published its findings in the form of a 422-page book titled
Not Guilty. Its conclusions asserted the innocence of all those condemned in the Moscow trials. In its summary the commission wrote: "Independent of extrinsic evidence, the Commission finds: • That the conduct of the Moscow trials was such as to convince any unprejudiced person that no attempt was made to ascertain the truth. • That while confessions are necessarily entitled to the most serious consideration, the confessions themselves contain such inherent improbabilities as to convince the Commission that they do not represent the truth, irrespective of any means used to obtain them. • That Trotsky never instructed any of the accused or witnesses in the Moscow trials to enter into agreements with foreign powers against the Soviet Union [and] that Trotsky never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR." The commission concluded: "We therefore find the Moscow Trials to be frame-ups." For example, in Moscow, Pyatakov had testified that he had flown to
Oslo in December 1935 to "receive terrorist instructions" from Trotsky. The Dewey Commission established that no such flight had taken place.
British Provisional Committee In Britain, the trials were also subject to criticism. A group called the British Provisional Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky was set up. In 1936, the Committee published an open letter in the
Manchester Guardian calling for an international inquiry into the Trials. The letter was signed by several notable figures, including
H. N. Brailsford,
Harry Wicks,
Conrad Noel,
Frank Horrabin and
Eleanor Rathbone. The Committee also supported the Dewey Commission.
Emrys Hughes, the British MP, also attacked the Moscow trials as unjust in his newspaper
Forward. ==Legacy==