Shakhty Trial
Fifty-three engineers and managers from the North Caucasus town of Shakhty were arrested in 1928 after being accused of conspiring to sabotage the Soviet economy with the former owners of the coal mines.
In 1928, the local OGPU arrested a group of engineers, including Peter Palchinsky, Nikolai von Meck and A. F. Velichko,[3] in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty, accusing them of conspiring with former owners of coal mines, who were living abroad and barred from the Soviet Union since the Revolution, to sabotage the Soviet economy.
[5][6] The trial marked the beginning of "wrecking" as a crime within the Soviet Union, as found in Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code).
The Shakhty trials marked the beginning of a long series of accusations against class enemies within the Soviet Union, and were to become a hallmark of the Great Purge of the 1930s.
[10][11][12][13][14] Stalin, however, saw this as an opportunity to clean up the management of "the old specialists", professionals whose skills were critical to the industry but were not sufficiently engaged with communism politically.
[8] Stalin mentioned later that the Shakhty arrests proved that class struggle was intensifying as the Soviet Union moved closer to socialism.
[16] German Secretary of the state Karl von Shubert felt that the Soviet Union handling of the Shakty trials was wrong.
[4] Peter Palchinsky was executed in 1929 for his political positions, as well as Nikolai Karlovich von Meck, Tchaikovsky's nephew by marriage, who was accused of "wrecking" the state railway system.
[5][6] The trial marked the beginning of "wrecking" as a crime within the Soviet Union, as found in Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code).
The Central Committee stated that more communists should be enrolled into the universities and that control over the technical faculties and schools should be transferred over to the Vesenkha.
This helped lead to the creation of a new group of intelligentsia elites of "cultured and educated workers" that included later soviet leaders Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
[19] Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky opposed Stalin's new policy on repression from within the Politburo, but Stalin insisted that international capital was trying to "weaken our economic power by means of invisible economic intervention, not always obvious but fairly serious, organizing sabotage, planning all kinds of 'crises' in one branch of industry or another, and thus facilitating the possibility of future military intervention".
