How the mice buried the cat : scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian provinces (Reading 12)

The villainous Kochetov was a small-time Soviet boss in a rural district (se/'souet) in Russia's agricultural heartland . In 1937 he fell victim to the Great Purges that swept the Soviet bureaucracy. Along with his immediate superior, the chairman of the raion soviet, he was one of a group of local officials indicted for 'counterrevolutionary' crimes and put on trial in Aleshki, the administrative center of an obscure rural raion in the Voronezh region.

The Aleshki trial was one of dozens held in raion centers in the Soviet Union in the autumn . of 1937. These trials were not products of the normal workings of the judicial system. They were show trials with a political message. Nineteen thirty-seven was the height of the Great Purges, in which hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet Communist elite - party and government officials, industrial managers, military
officers - as well as members of the intellectual elite were arrested and subsequently sent to labor camps or shot as 'enemies of the people'. In the notorious Moscow trials of August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938, Bukharin, Zinoviev and other former leaders of the Soviet Communist Party astonished the world by confessing that they had long been secret counterrevolutionaries, wreckers, terrorists, agents of the exiled 'Judas-Trotsky', and spies for hostile capitalist powers.

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