Shakhty Trial

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The Shakhty Trial of 1928 was the first important show trial in the Soviet Union since the trial of the Social Revolutionaries in 1922.

Police arrested a group of engineers in the North Caucasus town of Shakhty and accused them of conspiring with former owners of coal mines (now living abroad) to sabotage the Soviet economy. This marked the beginning of the use of accusations of sabotage against class enemies within the Soviet Union, which was to become a hallmark of the Great Purge of the 1930s. On March 10, 1928, in response to the arrests, Pravda announced that the bourgeoisie were using sabotage as a method of class struggle. Joseph Stalin mentioned a month later that the Shakhty arrests proved that class struggle was intensifying as the Soviet Union moved closer to socialism.

Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky all opposed Stalin 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....We have internal enemies. We have external enemies. We cannot forget this for a moment."^{[citation needed]}

The trial resulted in five of the fifty-three accused engineers being sentenced to death and another forty-four sent to prison. The trial marked the beginning of "wrecking" as a crime within the Soviet Union, as found in Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code). Workers not producing as much as the government felt they ought to were suspected of conspiring with foreign capital to sabotage the Soviet economy and summarily tried and sent to prison (or sometimes executed). On this subject, G.M. Krizhizanovskii said, "Who is not with us is against us." This reflected the atmosphere of paranoia and fear associated with the Great Purge.