Criminal indictment of the “Leningrad Affair”: Context Analysis

Abstract

This major campaign of repression that developed in the USSR between 1949 and 1951 remains obscured by myth and speculation to the present day. The present article analyzes how Stalin planned the show trial and what sort of a “signal” it was to send to his inner circle and lower-ranking officials. To that end, this article publishes the official criminal indictment for the “Leningrad Affair,” as well as commentary and an analysis of the crimes that were attributed to A. A. Kuznetsov and his comrades-in-arms. The criminal indictment is published in its totality here for the first time. This is an important historical source, insofar as it depicts the case in the way that the dictator intended it to be viewed. Its inconsistencies and poor argumentation testify to the authorities’ failure to successfully organize this political show trial and develop a persuasively constructed indictment. The article also investigates the process according to which the central “Leningrad Affair” show trial was prepared. The authors track the early versions of the indictment and show how Stalin altered the court case in an effort to make it more persuasive. The article also demonstrates the bankruptcy of the accusations within the indictment, which could have been leveled against any regional strongman in the USSR but were instead made against the leadership of only a single party organization. The text of the indictment is rendered here without ellipses and furnished with biographical information about the people named within the context of the criminal case. It contains more information than the already published sentence of the court in regard to the “Leningrad Affair,” allowing for an array of new conclusions to be drawn about the nature of this case.