It was suggested in Bundist circles that this large proportion of Jews among the accused had been specially arranged to organize feeling against the Jewish Socialists.
Putting into the control figures and into the surveys of current business planning ideas and deliberately distorted appraisals antagonistic to the general Party line (lowering the rates of expansion of socialist construction, distorting the class approach, exaggerating the difficulties), stressing the signs of an impending catastrophe (Groman) or, what is close to this, assigning a negligible chance of success to the Party line directed toward the socialist attack (Bazarov, Gukhman) ...[5]On the final day, the prisoners made confessions of their "crimes".
Nikolai Krylenko, the Public Prosecutor, declared that Groman, Sher, Yakubovitch, Ginzburg, and Sukhanov were the principal leaders of the counter-revolutionary organization, and therefore, must suffer the death penalty.
[7] Rafail Abramovich, a prominent Menshevik in exile in Berlin, helped to mobilise Western socialist and labour support for the persecuted economists.
[9] However, Trotsky would later publicly regret his mistake and for his belief in the initial charges due to the previous obstruction from Groman to the proposed five-year plan and industrialisation.