All charges are considered fabricated except those of Valerian Kuybyshev, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, and Maxim Gorky who might indeed have been poisoned by NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda with the assistance of "Kremlin's doctors" Pletnyov and Lev Levin, but they did it on the orders from Stalin himself.
The former leader of the Left Opposition Leon Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union, Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinoviev held low ranks in the party, and the rights were sidelined.
Observers have speculated that Bukharin had reached some sort of agreement with the prosecution: while he admitted guilt to general charges, he undercut that by denying any knowledge when it came to specific crimes.
Bukharin had been allowed to write four book-length manuscripts, including an autobiographical novel, How It All Began, a philosophical treatise, and a collection of poems – all of which were found in Stalin's archive and published in the 1990s – while in prison.
Yagoda, who had overseen the interrogations that led to the previous show trials, made a plea for mercy directly to Stalin, who may, according to Solzhenitsyn, have been observing the proceedings:
And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.
[9]In his final word, Vyshinsky said: "All our country, from small one to old one, awaits and demands one thing: traitors and spies who sold to the enemy our homeland to be shot like mad dogs.
[13] Even sympathetic observers who had stomached the earlier trials found it hard to swallow new charges as they became ever more absurd and the purge by now expanded to include virtually every living Old Bolshevik leader except Stalin.
For some prominent former communists, such as Bertram Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Arthur Koestler, and Heinrich Brandler, the Bukharin trial marked their final break with communism and turned the first three into ardent anti-communists.
[16] Bukharin's testimony became the subject of much debate among Western observers, inspiring Koestler's acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon and a philosophical essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror, among others.
Ambassador Joseph Davies, author of Mission to Moscow, wrote that "It is generally accepted by members of the Diplomatic Corps that the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty".
As a former member of the Communist party, Koestler rises above the dichotomy of much of the Cold War, showing a deep understanding for the origins of the Soviet Revolution, while at the same time severely criticizing its results.
[citation needed] Fitzroy Maclean's autobiography Eastern Approaches has a chapter devoted to this trial, which he witnessed while working in Moscow for the British Foreign Office.