The Great Terror

5 The Problem of Confession

fn1

We should note, incidentally, that some of the earlier crop of capitulations by “Trotskyites” had been much less abject than those of Zinoviev. Muralov had never made any declaration against the opposition. Ivan Stnirnov’s “capitulation” had been in rather noncommittal terms, and when he met Sedov in Berlin, they had been friendly. Trotsky recognized that Serebryakov’s capitulation, too, was “more dignified than some.”

fn2

The factual side of the confessions, as so often, contained impossibilities—as when the Head of the Congregationalist Church mentioned meetings with a British Vice Consul over a long period when the man concerned had not been in the country.