The main blow was directed at institutions headed by Sergey Platonov: the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Pushkin House.

The Leningrad Joint State Political Directorate began to fabricate a "monarchist counter-revolutionary organization" to use as the basis for charging scientists associated with the Academy.

In January 1930, Platonov and all his closest employees were arrested in Leningrad, as well as Yevgeny Tarle, who was accused of being an "interventionist" and a "traitor" destined to be the foreign minister in a restored capitalist government.

Former employees of the Academy of Sciences (Georgy Gabaev, Aleksey Arnoldi, Nikolai Antsiferov and others) who were already in exile or in custody were also implicated in the supposed conspiracy.

In February through August 1931, by the decisions of the OGPU, a number of former employees of various institutions of the Academy of Sciences (Alexei Kovanko, Yuri Verzhbitsky and others) were sentenced to death, imprisonment or exile: The "Academic Trial" damaged historical science and local history in the Soviet Union by interrupting the training of historians, stopping research for several years, and terminating studies of Narodniks, the history of the church, the nobility and the bourgeoisie.