- It is March, 1938. The scene is the Hall of Columns in Moscow. Before the 1917 Revolution, it was the venue for extravagant balls where the Russian nobility would dance till dawn. Let's have a look at it. Now, in 1938, it's fitted with drab wooden benches and is hosting a criminal prosecution, the last of the so-called Moscow show trials. There are 21 defendants in the makeshift dock, many of them Bolsheviks who were instrumental in the events of 20 years earlier, and the creation of the Soviet state. They're now sitting in the dock, accused of the most monstrous crimes. Plotting the murder of Stalin and Lenin. Spying for Nazi Germany. Conspiring to wreck the Soviet economy. Conniving with foreign powers to attack their own country. The most famous of the defendants in that dock is Nikolai Bukharin, one of the principaL theorists of Bolshevism. A man, for many years, universally liked and admired before it became impolitic and uncomfortable to like or admire him in Stalin's Russia. A man who has devoted his entire life to the cause of revolution and the party. We hear to the right of the court, the prosecutor commencing his opening speech. Andrey Vyshinsky is now an old hand. He prosecuted the first of the Moscow trials in August 1936, the so-called Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, and also at the second, a year later in 1937. He's now perfected his denunciations into language of elaborate fury. There he is on the left of the screen. And here is a passage from that opening speech."Our whole country, from young to old, is awaiting and demanding one thing. Our people are demanding one thing. The traitors and spies who are selling our country to the enemy must be shot like dirty dogs. Our people are demanding one thing, crush the accursed reptile. Over the road that has been cleared of the last scum and filth of the past, we, our people, with our beloved leader and teacher, the great Stalin at our head, will march as before onwards and onwards towards Communism." Not a style of advocacy you'll hear in the Old Bailey nowadays. Whenever the prosecutor pauses, the large audience sitting on the benches at the back of the hall, made up, of course, of specially selected members of the NKVD, the security police, roars its approval and applauds. As one observer recorded, they looked like school children out on a Sunday treat. There are only a few defense advocates present in this courtroom, and they are representing only three of the 21 defendants. Kremlin doctors accused of, amongst other crimes, poisoning the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky. The other defendants are offered legal counsel. The judges are particular about this. Are you sure you don't want to be represented, they ask each of the other defendants. Each one of them says no. In the words of one,"I do not need counsel. I do not intend to defend myself. I am here to bear full responsibility for my crimes." It's fair to say that having a defense lawyer at these trials would not do you much good as a defendant. When the lawyers actually do speak, the defense lawyers actually do speak, they appear to be almost part of the prosecution team. Advocate Braude stands up at one stage in the trial. He is also an old hand. He's been present at the two previous show trials. Let me give you an example of his style of defending his clients at this trial. That I should say is the audience, a rather bad photograph of the audience, looking on intently and looking for the signs of when to clap. And this is one passage from Advocate Braude's speech."Comrade judges, I'm not going to conceal from you the exceptionally difficult and immeasurably hard position a counsel for the defense finds himself in in this case. After all, a counsel for the defense, comrade judges, is first and foremost a son of his motherland. He is also a citizen of the great Soviet Union, and the feelings of great indignation, wrath, horror, which all our country, both young and old, are now seized with. The feeling which the prosecutor expressed so clearly in his speech. These feelings are inevitably shared by the counsel for the defense as well." One can imagine that the morale of the defendants sunk yet further when they heard their lawyers speaking those words. Now, as I say, there are 21 defendants at this last trial in 1938. 20 of them plead guilty. Almost all of them then fall over themselves, not simply to formally admit their culpability, but to participate in a kind of orgy of self-abasement. Each of the defendants seeking to outdo the other in self and mutual denunciation. Let's hear the words of one of the defendants."The monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable, especially in the new age of the struggle of the Soviet Union, the USSR. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the USSR become clear to all. Everybody perceives the wise leadership of the country that is ensured by Stalin. It is in the consciousness of this that I await the verdict. What matters is not the personal feelings of a repentant enemy, but the flourishing progress of the USSR." And if you trace across the various trials, the statements of self-inculpation of the dozens of defendants across all the trials, they all have one similar prevailing tone. Let me just read out a few more snippets from across the three trials, from various of the defendants."I don't consider it possible to plead for clemency, comrade judges." But here's another."Only one conclusion can be drawn. We represent a most brutal gang of criminals who are nothing more nor less than a detachment of international fascism." And finally, "I depart as a traitor to my country, as a traitor who should be shot." Now, the accused's confessions are not merely fulsome, but extraordinarily detailed. The prosecutor Vyshinsky questions them at length to extract full narratives of their supposed crimes. For hour upon hour, the defendants provide answers. Elicit meetings with Trotsky to conspire to overthrow the state. Murder plots. Poisonings. Wrecking operations across the country. Now one of the 21 defendants at this trial is a man called Nikolai Krestinsky. Now he is a very senior figure, formerly a member of the Politburo. He was at one stage general secretary of the Communist Party, the role that Stalin occupied for over 25 years. He now is in the dock, and he's the 21st of the 21 defendants, and the one who does not plead guilty. He does something rather shocking in this trial. When asked how he pleads, he replies as follows, and I quote, "I plead not guilty. I am not a Trotskyite. I was never a member of the block of rightists and Trotskyites." I should say, this is this phraseology that is endlessly used, the block of rightists or rights and Troskyites. I quote again, "of which existence I was not aware. Nor have I committed any of the crimes with which I am personally charged. In particular, I plead not guilty to the charge of having any connection at all with the German intelligence service." Now this is not words that anyone in court is expecting to hear. The prosecutor looks thunderstruck. When Krestinsky's signed confession is put to him, he answers with devastating directness."I was forced to make that statement. It is not true." As the questions continue from Vyshinsky, this man, Krestinsky, looking, according to one spectator, I quote,"Like a small bedraggled sparrow," nonetheless stands firm. The prosecutor moves swiftly onto the less recalcitrant defendants, and the next day, the court reconvenes. Vyshinsky seems to have a renewed air of confidence about him. He returns to his questioning of the defendant Krestinsky. And let me, there he is, Krestinsky on the left, and this is the cross-examination that then ensues."Do you persist in your refusal to confirm your previous confirmation?""No, I confirm everything.""What then was the meaning of the statement you made yesterday?""Yesterday, influenced by a feeling of false shame, and by the atmosphere of the court and by my state of health, I could not bring myself to tell the truth and admit my guilt before the world. Mechanically I declared myself innocent. I now beg the court to take note of the statement I now make, to the effect that I admit my guilt completely and unreservedly, under all the charges brought against me, and that I accept full responsibility for my criminal and treacherous behavior." Now nobody in court seems to be remotely surprised by this, on the face of it, remarkable volt face. The chairman of the judges turns to the defendant Krestinsky."You may sit down." He slides back into his chair with a look almost of relief about him. The English diplomat, Fitzroy McClain, who wrote a very fine account of the trial, noted in that account, and I quote,"The words were reeled off like a well learned lesson. The night had not been wasted. The situation was saved." What we must remember about this trial and all the Moscow show trials, is that almost everything the defendants have said throughout the several days of this trial, is entirely untrue. They know it. The prosecutor knows it. The judges know it. Everyone knows it. Everyone is acting a part in a grand theatrical production. The outcome and the sentence of this trial is entirely predetermined. The judges have already prearranged what the sentence shall be in meetings with the prosecutor and indeed with Stalin. All the lines of each of the defendants has been written before. Only occasionally, as we see, do the defendants step out of character. And when they do, as with the miserable Krestinsky, a little gentle overnight persuasion brings them back fully into line. This is clearly no ordinary trial. It is, one might say, and is a trite thing to say, a grotesque parody of a trial. A display carefully orchestrated, after months, and I mean months, of planning. Each of the defendants in the dock at that trial has been in detention for almost a year. Everyone is playing their part, and everyone is motivated, to a greater or lesser extent, by one thing. Somehow, to stay alive if at all possible. We are, of course, in the middle of Stalin's Great Terror, and this trial is terror in action. Let me be clear. Everyone in that courtroom is worried. Some are terrified. The 21 defendants. Others are anxious. The prosecutor and the judges know that if they don't deliver a seamless production to the world, ending in the accused fully confessing their crimes and willingly embracing their fate, then they, the judges and the prosecutor, will be deemed to have failed in their job. And failure in your job can carry, even if you're a prosecutor or a judge, severe consequences in Stalin's Russia in the late 1930s. The year before there had been a trial, a secret trial of a number of very high-ranking generals in the Red Army, who had been tried before a panel of military judges, one of whom was heard to say, having delivered a sentence of death on Marshal Tukhachevsky, one of the most senior and celebrated commanders of the Red Army, "Tomorrow, I'll be put in the same place." And that judge was right. Most of the judges who had tried Marshal Tukhachevsky and his fellow generals, themselves were dead within 24 months of that trial. So the judges and the prosecutor of the show trials were not immune from anxiety. And indeed one of the defendants in the dock is no less a figure than Genrikh Yagoda, who until the year before had been the people's commissar for internal affairs, i.e. the head of the NKVD. Yagoda had orchestrated the 1936 trial, the first Zinoviev-Kamenev trial, and had orchestrated it with consummate skill. It had been in one sense a great triumph for Stalin, but that was not enough to save Yagoda, formerly one of the preeminent men of the Soviet Union, from now finding himself a defendant at this trial, accused of treason. Hence the consternation, one can understand the consternation of Vyshinsky, when the accused, Krestinsky, the man we see in the slide, decides to depart from the carefully preordained script that he's been given. Indeed, even the NKVD members of the audience, the ones we saw in the earlier photograph, they are worried because if they don't show a sufficient display of approval for the prosecutor's rhetoric, then of course they themselves might find themselves under suspicion. And indeed, in the period we are in, thousands and thousands of NKVD officers themselves met with their own deaths. The purge, Stalin's purges, did not stop anywhere in the Soviet Union of the period. As for the accused, over the years, historians and psychologists have been fascinated, grimly fascinated, by the thought processes that underlay their seemingly enthusiastic participation in their own destruction. Day after day, as we've seen in answers to questions put to them by the court, and the prosecutor, the defendants piled lie upon lie in their own incrimination, and did so with seeming gusto, as parodied by a contemporary cartoon. And there's, I think that is Bukharin himself. And there's Stalin in the face, as the judge. It seems likely that the principal motivation behind the defendant's own seemingly enthusiastic participation in their own self-destruction, was the fact that they had been given promises and assurances that the more they played along with the role they were allocated in the trial, and acted their part in it, the more likely that Stalin would save them from the gallows. And it was not their own lives that were at stake. Each of these defendants had wives and children, I should say all the defendants were male. And although it's now impossible to know precisely what accommodations were arrived at behind the scenes, of course much of the material is now lost, it is thought that each was warned that failure to cooperate would lead not only to their own inevitable execution, but to the murder of members of their family. Now, this was no empty threat, albeit even if you complied with your side of the bargain, as a matter of reality, Stalin rarely, if ever, complied with his side. One of the defendants at the 1936 trial, Lev Kamenev, a principal defendant of that trial, was personally promised by Stalin that if he pleaded guilty and pleaded guilty with vigor and gusto, then he would be saved. His life would be saved. On the very night of his conviction, having played his part to a T, he was shot, and not only was he shot, but within 24 months of his own death, his 17-year-old son, his 30-year-old son, and his wife, all were shot as well, without trial I should say, in their case. The murder of relatives of purge victims was practiced by Stalin on a massive, massive scale. So it is likely that Bukharin and his co-defendants, for all the joyful expressions of their guilt in that cartoon, were pretty pessimistic about their chances of survival. But possibly they latched onto some small spark of hope. They know they're going to be found guilty of the crimes they are charged with, in which they didn't commit. But if they assist in the process of hastening their own condemnation, perhaps, they think, they might earn a reprieve, at least for their family members. If we look at their motivations, there is something else at work here, I think. These were men who knew they were the victim of a monstrous and fictional injustice. Yet it seems that on another level, their devotion to the revolution had led many of them to the conclusion that if they were going to die, then they might as well die and give their lives to the revolution. They were men who really had, it seems, rooted out individualism from, like good communists, from their psyches. Somehow, by confessing to crimes they had not committed, they were serving the state. And it's an astonishing fact that many of them went to the gallows, continuing to the very last to proclaim their devotion to, even their love for Stalin. The very man who had personally brought about their judicial murder. We find Bukharin, the intellectual Bukharin, writing to Stalin from prison, professing his, I quote,"Boundless love" for the dictator, and congratulating him on the, I quote,"Great and bold political idea of using a purge to consolidate his regime." But in the same letter there is this poignant ending, or conclusion, where Bukharin says, nonetheless, I'm troubled by an, I quote, "Agonizing paradox," that I'm innocent. It was not a paradox that gave Stalin second thoughts, and I think there were 43 letters written by Bukharin to Stalin while he was in detention before he died, before he was executed, not one of which merited a reply from his former very close friend and comrade, Stalin. So the Moscow show trials which extended from '36 through to '38, were both monstrous, but also fascinating. Stalin certainly had no need of a judicial process and a finding of guilt in order to provide the platform for the liquidation of his perceived enemies. After all, the vast bulk of the victims of the Great Terror never went anywhere near a courtroom. They were simply shot without any form of legal process. Nonetheless, I think that Stalin had wider purposes in organizing these trials than simply the eradication of supposed opponents. They were, after all, held in public and attended, not just by party apparatchiks, but by foreign journalists and foreign diplomats who were welcomed to the trials. They continued over many days, these trials. They were not simple 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute events. They lasted for day upon day upon day, as we've seen. They were filmed, and you can now, if you so choose, listen to them and possibly shudder at them on YouTube. And indeed they were, if one reads the contemporary accounts of the period, of the newspapers in the United States or the newspapers in London or in Paris and wherever, vast coverage of these trials, we find. In one sense you might think, well, surely holding a public trial with so many defendants carried grave risks for the regime. After all, what if the defendants, knowing that they were in a public place with a foreign audience within that public place, what if they seize the opportunity to turn the tables on the prosecution and publicly denounce it for what it was, i.e. a pure and maligned fantasy. What if they seize the moment to detail the torture that they had endured, the threats they'd endured to extract their confessions, and the gruesome threats that have been leveled against each of them, as regards their own lives and their families' lives. What if the observers, both domestic and foreign, at the trial, saw through the sheer fictionality of it. Grave risks, you might think, attaching to having a public trial in such a public arena. Now, reading the transcripts now of each of the trials, and they're all, one can find them, they're all printed. And of course, bearing everything we now know about Stalin's atrocities in mind, it's easy to stand astonished that anyone was taken in by this production. I mean, some of the charges were just absurd. For instance, it was said against one or two of the defenders that they'd engaged in so-called wrecking operations, i.e. acts of deliberate sabotage against the state. So one of the defendants was charged with having infiltrated nails and powdered glass into butter supplies in Vladivostok. Another was charged with the willful destruction of 50 truckloads of eggs. And they all pleaded guilty to these charges, I should say, and they gave elaborate explanations about how they'd infiltrated the nails and the powdered glass into the Vladivostok butter supply. And nobody batted an eyelid. It's fair to say that the trials were stage managed with consummate skill. The prosecutors' displays of righteous indignation seems to be born out of genuine rather than confected outrage. The judges maintained the right degree of dignity. The defendants had rehearsed their roles, as I've said, over many, many months, to ensure that they brought a sufficient degree of verisimilitude to their new roles as murderers and traitors. Dates and places of meetings between conspirators were delineated. Secret communications with Trotsky described with geographical and chronological precision. One defendant told of how he'd been recruited at a particular restaurant off London's Oxford Street in 1926. The organizers of these trials realized that proof, or rather the appearance of proof, consists not in generalities, but in minutia. Of course, there were some who looked on on these trials with scorn, as nonsense, but many were not so taken in, were not so cynical about them. I'm going to quote to you now a passage from a book written by the United States Ambassador to Moscow, just two years later, writing about one of the Red Army trials. And I quote, "In view of the character of the accused, their long terms of service, their recognized distinction in their profession, their long continued loyalty to the Communist cause, it's scarcely credible that their brother officers," i.e. the officers sitting in judgment upon them,"should have acquiesced in their execution, unless they were convinced that these men had been guilty of some offense. It's generally accepted by members of the diplomatic corps, that the accused must have been guilty of an offense, which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty." And here's a quote from an English barrister and MP, Labour MP, Dennis Pritt, who attended the first of the trials. And I quote, again, "We can feel confident," this is him writing in a publication in London in 1936."We can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy, it will be realized that the charges were true, the confessions correct, and the prosecution fairly conducted. We shall know that the only regrettable thing was and is that Zinoviev and his associates should've sunk so low as to conspire to murder the heads of state." Such incredible credulity. Now, trials as fictional productions are certainly not an invention of the Soviet regime. If we go back a few years, Hitler's come to power in early 1933, and as you'll remember from your textbooks, your history textbooks, the Reichstag, the German parliament building, burns down within weeks of Hitler becoming the chancellor. And you'll also remember that Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as the opportunity for him to essentially proclaim a one-party fascist state. And part of the narrative of, and justification for his effective takeover of the state, was the suggestion that the Reichstag fire had been part of a communist conspiracy to overthrow the state, and hence he needed to take extreme measures. And part of that was to bring a trial against a whole mass of people, all alleged to have been party to the conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag. And the trial lasted for weeks on end, at the end of 1933. And no doubt Stalin looked carefully and studied carefully how the Nazis were using the court process to spin a particular conspiracy theory lie to justify their takeover of power. What Stalin realized and made sure he didn't fall into the same error was that what the Nazis didn't do in that trial was to make sure that all the defendants had been got at, so to speak, to ensure that they said the lines they were intended to say. In fact, a number of them were found not guilty by a non-Nazi court that still survived in late 1933. Stalin realized that if you want a trial that really is going to work for you politically, you make sure the defendants know exactly what they're going to say, and that is not not guilty, but it is guilty. He didn't make that mistake four years later at his own trials. But as we will see, there was a good deal of mutuality of influence between the Nazi and the Soviet regime, as regards the use of the court process. Just concluding on the Moscow trials, I think it's fair to say that Stalin had multiple purposes for them and reasons for instituting them, not withstanding the risks that I've identified. At the most brute level, the fate of the defendants, which was in almost all cases instant execution, no doubt cowed anyone contemplating any form of dissent against Stalin, into silent submission. The trials were also exercises in calculated humiliation. The sight of these wretched men being ground into the dust must've sapped the morale of even the most hardy oppositionist in Stalin's Soviet Union. And it was made sure that the defendants, previously, as I say, men of the highest rank in the Soviet Union, came before the court looking broken and crushed. Here is a photograph of Grigory Zinoviev, the principal defendant in the first of the trials, and former chairman of the Communist International. There he is on the third from right, with his close friend Stalin on the left, in happier days. And here is the same man after his detention in 1935, before his trial in 1936, a photograph taken by the NKVD. The pathetic sight of the conspirators in the makeshift dock seemed only to enhance the might of the Soviet state and the aura of invincibility, which Stalin wished to cultivate. There were other messages as well, being communicated by Stalin during these show trials, in my suggestion. Stalin wanted to project to the Russian population the proposition that there was a vast conspiracy, orchestrated of course by the turncoat Trotsky who was in Mexico by this stage, against the state, and only he, the great Stalin, could withstand this conspiracy's depredations. The conspiracy so outlined provided the wider justification for the purge that took place, in the main, in the extrajudicial arena, as I've said. What better way to create a fixed narrative that the state was in danger, and exceptional measures were required, than to tell the false narrative that was projected by the trial? Stalin also needed scapegoats for the appalling management of the Russian economy, and the terrible suffering of the Russian people that had occurred under his rule. Why, millions of people were no doubt asking, why are we hungry? Why is there nothing to buy in the shops? Why does the butter in Vladivostok taste awful? Now, through the formality of the trial, they had an answer. It was the fault, not of the government, not of Stalin, but of the shadowy conspirators intent on debilitating the state. And one can see that for all their modernity, the Moscow trials also drew on the medieval past. Surely, I suggest, we can trace some part of their ancestry back to the witch trials of the middle ages, when, in the middle ages and the early modern period, the crops failed and hardship ensued, the way the community rationalized economic disaster was to locate somebody to blame, to locate an outsider. It was the fault of somebody extraneous to the system, surely, somebody who could be punished, identified and punished. Better to think, both in the middle ages and perhaps in the late 1930s, that calamity had an individual human face, rather than being something that was somehow endemic in the system. And there was another theme that it seems to be the show trials drew from, which was the medieval inquisition. The inquisition realized the best way to inspire trust in its workings and in its mechanisms, was through the confession, and not just the confession in the sense of guilty, but the full, where the defendant or the accused or the individual who was being, comes before the inquisition, owns his or her own guilt, to use a modern phrase. What better way of saying this trial is a genuine and proper trial, than putting words of guilt into the mouths of the defendants themselves? Now, one of the people who attended the Moscow trials and was impressed by prosecutor Vyshinsky's methods, was a German jurist and committed Nazi called Roland Freisler. By 1944, six years later, Freisler had been, for two years, the president of the so-called, and I'll get my pronunciation wrong here, Volksgerichtshof, the people's court. Let's have a look at President Freisler in action. Can see where his sympathies lie. The court had been created in 1934 by Hitler, in part because of Hitler's disappointment at the failure of the civilian court to convict all the wrongly accused individuals for the Reichstag fire. This was a people's court exercising a political jurisdiction over what might loosely be described as political offenses. Not only active opposition to the Nazi regime, but any behaviors, by the time we get to war, that might be described as contrary to the war effort, fell within its remit. And it was a very bloody remit indeed. During the three years of Freisler's tenure as president of the people's court, 5,000 death sentences were pronounced. And if one looks at the total number of people who came before the court as defendants, I think the death sentence was probably pronounced on three quarters of defendants in total. Some were acquitted, not many it's fair to say. And one can get a sense of the extraordinary jurisdiction that the court exercised, over a whole manner of behaviors you might describe or describe, you might refer to as defeatism. To take one pathetic tragic example referred to in the histories of the court. In 1943, a doctor comes, a medical doctor comes before the court accused of defeatism. It is alleged against him that when tending to his patient, the pregnant wife of a frontline soldier, he had expressed his fears that the Eastern Front would not hold and that the Russians would inevitably overrun Germany, and that her husband would likely to be killed in the process. She denounced this doctor who was, of course, after all merely telling the inevitable truth, and he met with a death sentence. Now Freisler's moment of infamy came in late 1944. You'll remember that in July of that year, the plot, the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf's Layer in Poland had failed. And within hours, the regime was rounding up the conspirators. And in the weeks that passed, hundreds and hundreds of conspirators, or alleged conspirators, were detained and tortured. Now many of them, by no means all of them, but many of the principal conspirators were tried before President Freisler in his courtroom. And let's look at another photograph of the court in action, during those trials. Just as in the Moscow trials, the trials of the July plotters were attended by large audiences of army officers and Nazi Party functionaries, together again with dozens of journalists, this time of course not many foreign journalists came. And again, like the Moscow trials, the hearings were filmed. And so we now have, and one can again, can see them on YouTube, an extraordinary insight into a Nazi court exercising its functions during the terror that followed the July plot, during the autumn months of 1944. Now, although technically a prosecutor was appointed by the state to present the prosecution of the various conspirators, when one reads the transcripts of the trials and one looks at the copious footage of the trials, the lawyers seemed to be, both for the defense and the prosecution, seemed to be entirely redundant. Freisler, as president of the court, arrogates to himself the role of prosecuting advocate, judge and jury. There is now, in those autumn months in 1944, not even a pretense at due process. As we remember, in Moscow in 1938 and 1936, the judges were, at least on the face of it, ostensibly neutral, and the defendants were given an opportunity to mitigate on their own behalf, although, as we've seen, they chose the opportunity not to mitigate their offenses, but to sort of do the reverse. At least there was, on the face of it in the Moscow trials, some semblance of due process. Now in Berlin, before the people's court, any semblance of legality has been entirely cast away. And in that footage, which we can see, we hear savage denunciations of each of the accused, by a man supposedly sitting as a judge. He takes the Vyshinsky form of harangue to a new level of invective. The defendants are provided with intentionally ill-fitting civilian clothes. They were all soldiers who'd been stripped of their uniform and stripped of their rank in the army. They are led in to court, and then each of them is brought up to a little table before the bench, and stands beside this table. And they're then essentially shouted at for 10, 20 minutes, by President Freisler, by the judge. And perhaps the most unsettling of these scenes is of the former Field Marshall Witzleben, one of the generals who'd achieved the fall of France four years earlier, highly decorated general. He now appears before the people's court, stripped of his uniform, given trousers that don't fit, which are too big. So one finds him wandering, walking up to his appointed position behind this little table, one of his hands pathetically holding onto his trousers so they don't fall down. The other shakes uncontrollably. One can see that his false teeth have been removed, so his cheeks are hollow and sunken. And essentially all that happens is he is shouted at by Freisler, over minutes and minutes. Occasionally one can hear him mumbling an interjection, but he's then cut short by that. It's a very upsetting scene actually, and it's replicated time and time again with each of the defendants. And I read somewhere that it was reported that the film crew who was brought in to film these trials, had after the first or second day of the hearing, had gone up to Freisler and said look, we're very sorry to have to ask you this, but would you mind keeping your voice down because it's actually distorting the sound quality of the film. It's not clear how he responded to that particular suggestion by the film crew. Another of the defendants, General Steiff, is then led forward. Before we get to General Steiff let's look at, so this is, again, an example of the Field Marshall in his heyday, in 1942 I think. The same man standing before the people's court, and you can just about see his hand holding on to his trousers, to stop them falling down. Clearly a calculated exercise in humiliation. The man who comes up after Vitzleben, General Steiff, he is asked, explain why you perpetrated this treachery. He replies with two words, for Germany. Freisler responds, and this gives you the sense of the kind of invective that he deployed."For Germany? It's reprehensible that you are not ashamed to be still saying that, because I already told you what Germany is. Our Fuhrer is Germany, and we are his followers. You cannot speak for Germany." And what is really haunting about the film, of the footage of these trials, is the knowledge which we have now, and which surely the defendants had as they were led away from the courtroom, that they were going to be shot, I'm so sorry, not shot, hanged, literally that afternoon. When they're in that courtroom, they know they have hours left to live. And yet many of them comport themselves with extraordinary dignity in the last hours of their lives. Now, of course, the format of these hearings is entirely removed, I need hardly say, from what we would understand as the normal trial process. No evidence is called. Any attempts by the defendants to explain their motivations are swiftly suppressed. There are lawyers present, as I say, but they have literally no role to play in the trials. The findings of guilt and pronouncement of sentence are of course a pure formality. And in that sense, the purposes of these 1944 trials are strikingly similar to those of the Moscow trials of a few years earlier. To humiliate the defendants, to try to demonstrate the overarching strength of the regime. Of course, a message sorely needed in the face of the military reverses of the autumn of 1944 and early 1945. To dissuade other potential plotters, and Hitler didn't know whether there were other potential plotters ready to themselves make an attempt on Hitler's life. But these trials were intended, well part of their intention, was to prevent any other plotter from making an attempt. Finally they were, just like the Moscow trials, act as a kind of vanguard for the thousands of extrajudicial killings that followed against many thousands of, it's estimated I think 7,000 people were executed as a result of the July plot, and only a small handful, comparatively speaking, ever went near a courtroom. Just as in the purges of 1936 to 1938. And as I understand it, the footage of these trials was then shown in cinemas and to troops on the front line, to project these messages. But they were withdrawn after a while because the sheer horror of Freisler's conduct, the sheer nastiness of his behavior, shocked even the German population of late 1944. Just as Stalin and Hitler's terrors utilized the courts as part of the armory of the state's repression, so, in an earlier terror, the original terror you might say, the court process had served its purpose. We now go back to 1793, a moment of crisis in the French Revolution. And at the moment when the revolutionary tribunal is instituted. This is the moment when the war against Austria and Prussia is going badly. Hyperinflation is rampant. Food shortages are biting. In one sense, a similar situation to Germany in 1944. Fearful of internal dissent and agitation, the French National Convention infamously decrees that, I quote, "Terror is the order of the day." The tribunal was formed and expected to be the principal deliverer of that terror. It hears cases of treason, but it's fair to say that treason was not a narrow jurisdiction in the Paris and France of 1793 and 1794. It is widely defined indeed. And what the tribunal is expected to deliver is guilty verdicts. And guilty verdicts at an industrial level. Just as what Freisler is expected to deliver in the autumn of 1944. And we have the law, which is almost the template of terror regimes thereafter, is pronounced in June 1794. The so-called Law of the 22 Prairial Year II. You'll remember that the French Revolutionaries abolished the old months and brought in their revolutionary calendar. And this law, one can see in it the seeds of later terror laws instituted both in Soviet Russia and in Nazi Germany, and indeed many other countries in a revolutionary state. The revolutionary tribunal is instituted, says this law, to punish the enemies of the state. The enemies of the state are those who seek to destroy public liberty, either by force or by cunning. And then there follows a very lengthy list of people who are deemed to be enemies of the people. A list one finds resonances with time and time again, in the decades and centuries that follow. Those who've sought to impede the provisioning of Paris or to create scarcity within the Republic. Think about that. The butter in Vladivostok, scarcity in the Republic. Those who've deceived the people, or the representatives of the people, in order to lead them into undertakings, contrary to the interests of liberty. Those who have sought to inspire discouragement in order to favor the enterprises of the tyrants leagued against the Republic. Those who have disseminated false news, in order to divide or disturb the people. Those who have sought to mislead opinion and to prevent the instruction of the people. So each of those is a crime, and we know what the penalty for that crime is, because the law tells us. The penalty provided for all offenses under the jurisdiction of the revolutionary tribunal is death. There was no other penalty available to the tribunal, other than acquittal. And it will not surprise you to hear that acquittals were few and far between. And again, we see in the law of the 22 Prairial, a lot of the approaches to criminal litigation that we see again in the 20th century in the states I've referred to, defense counsel are in fact prohibited before the revolutionary tribunal. The defendant is not entitled to call evidence on his or her behalf. The mere fact of a denunciation in itself carries overwhelming evidential weight. The burden of proof is effectively reversed. And the tribunal, it's fair to say, got to work, this law having been passed by the National Convention, with alacrity. Within two months, 332 people have been condemned to death. And we see in the work of its chief prosecutor, we can just about see him in this, I think that's him there, it's a rather bad image, in the chief prosecutor of the tribunal we see the same fanaticism of Vyshinsky and Freisler 150 years earlier. Now, 150 years separate the French revolutionary tribunal and the courts of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. But I think we can trace in that law, and in the manner of the administration of that law in 1793 and 1794, the beginnings of a new conception of justice, or perhaps I should say injustice. The criminalization of any form of behavior, which challenges the interests of the state. The subordination of all individual rights to the exigencies of the state. And we can find in one of Robespierre's most famous speeches, justifying the terror. I think the philosophy that infuses many authoritarian states in the decades and centuries to come. This is Robespierre speaking in 1793, I think."If the basis of popular government in peace time is virtue," of course virtue had a special meaning in Robespierre's vocabulary,"the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror. Virtue without which terror is baneful, terror without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice. It is thus an emanation of virtue. It is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie," of the homeland. And that kind of, and I gratuitously put an image of Robespierre, who, as you of course, in the sense of the revolution eats itself, after he was shot, and a day or so before his own execution. That mentality that we see in those famous words, or infamous words of Robespierre, we can see at work in countless examples of so-called revolutionary tribunals across the ages. The tribunals of the Paris Commune in 1871. The tribunals in the Soviet Republic in Hungary in 1919. In Cuba in 1959. And in each of those, we also can see a key attribute of all courts working in times of terror. A tendency to extremity. Not simply because the laws that they are administrating. seem to mandate extremity, but also because they are themselves typically in a state of fear. The people presiding in the courts in a state of fear, that if they themselves do not show sufficient alacrity about their business, that they themselves might find themselves before the very tribunals. And of course in the end, most of them did find themselves before the very tribunals they had been administering months or years earlier. Now it would be a pretty trite conclusion to draw, to say that we are, when we look at the revolutionary tribunals in Paris, in Moscow, and in Berlin, looking at court processes that are very far removed from principles of the rule of law. Every ingredient of what we would today think of as necessary to a fair trial is missing. We are genuinely witnessing from the vantage point of the safety of England in the 21st century, ghastly parodies of what we understand a trial to be. But what I think these three examples show, and I could name many more examples, is how fragile the concept of justice is. It's perhaps because of that sense of fragility that we find across the world, and across history, nations giving human embodiment to the notion of justice. And of course, we know, we think of justice as a blindfolded goddess, holding the scales before her. Now that image of justice is not a purely European one. It's been adopted across the world. We find sculptures of justice in courthouses in Japan, Brazil, Iran. Many African states, we find that image of justice. And I think one of the reasons that we, as nations or as societies, like to give a human form to justice is because we realize quite what a fragile concept it is. We realize how brittle are the ideals that make up the rule of law are. Because we know that at moments of national crisis, or perceived national crisis, the concept of justice can evaporate, or at least change its colors fundamentally. Vyshinsky, the prosecutor in Moscow wrote in 1937, and I quote, "There are sometimes periods, moments in the life of a society, and in our life in particular, when the laws prove obsolete and have to be set aside." What this means, I think in practice, is that there are times when the state, or rather those who are then in control of the state, decide that the set of principles we might describe as making up the rule of law, is a hindrance to governance and a threat to the body politic. At these moments, the interests of the state must be given absolute priority. And when this happens, the concept of justice necessarily becomes perverted so that it ceases to exist independently of the interests of the state. Robespierre justified it by referring to the pressing needs of the patrie. And he would no doubt justify it, were he here now, by saying, when the state is at risk, and of course in 1793 and 1794 the French state undoubtedly was at risk and the revolution was in jeopardy, then everything must be subordinate to maintaining the state. And that includes concepts of justice, which existed, it's fair to say, in the 18th century, and which were abrogated by the revolutionary tribunals. Now, state terror might be described as a calculated policy of political repression and violence intended to subdue political opposition. Of course, in its purest iterations, state terror can dispense with courts altogether and simply engage in mass extrajudicial killing. Yet we find, time and again, that even at the most sanguinary moments across history, we see that the state prefers to maintain the illusion of some degree of legal formality. Even when the pronouncement of guilt is predetermined, the state likes to have the imprimatur of a judicial verdict to provide the veneer of justification to what would otherwise be simple state murder. And sadly, I'm afraid, history demonstrates that there are always lawyers on hand willing to give the state courts that imprimatur. But in conclusion, I think there is something more at work here than simply seeking the imprimatur of legal process and formality. Regimes know that the courtroom is a privileged space, and that the words spoken in it can carry very far indeed. Let me return to the man we started with, Stalin's faithful prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky. After the first of the trials in 1936, his biographer notes that the biting language that he used, laden with instantly memorable insults, sort of found its way, or permeated into the language and everyday conversation of the state. In the letters, newspapers, and books of the period, we find references to the, quotes,"Dogs of the fascist bourgeoisie, the despicable Pygmies, the decayed dregs of society." The language the prosecutor was using in the courtroom infiltrated the everyday discourse of the people, and of the journalists. And indeed, Soviet poets apparently were not immune. We find one poet, the justly forgotten Alexey Surkov, producing this masterpiece of lyricism, apparently an attempt to transform one of Vyshinsky's speeches into verse. And I'll conclude with his ringing words."The spite of jackals and the hatred of hyenas led the traitors down the path of murder. Poisoned are their black deeds, with the pungent stench of putrid corpses." On that ringing note of poesy, I will conclude. Thank you so much.(audience applauding)