I figured you’d trot out the Alksnis thing, yet all his essay does is state how he himself is unsure what happened because the records were tampered with again and again beginning with the Stalin era. So that’s neither here nor there.

Except for...you know the below but we all ignore what we want to ignore I guess

My conviction that Tukhachevsky and his colleagues were simply forced to incriminate themselves under torture was seriously shaken, because judging by the transcript, they gave their testimonies quite sincerely. After reviewing the transcript of the process, I came to the conclusion that there was still a “military conspiracy”, or something like that, in the Red Army.

As to

Grinding the Nazis to a halt through attrition, over the bodies of Soviet men who were an immense, nay irreparable loss to the Soviet society is anything but an ingenious strategy - it is squarely an atavistic step back.

Whew lad this is literal nazi propaganda that the Red Army "ground the bodies of soviet men". The losses of army personnel(soldiers) is quite comparable to Nazi losses. The Nazis did not give a fig for soviet civilian life which is where the immense 27 million dead in the USSR comes from

So no, phantom Trotskyism doesn’t cut it (imagine believing that Trotskyists were pulling the strings in capitalist nations which is why they surrendered so quickly, lmao).

Are you capable of reading? I said collaborators not Trotskyists in other countries.

As to Trotsky himself... Trotsky was busy writing about how the Ukraine should be independent in 1939 lol . All the Communist forces in Ukraine were pro Stalin and all the independence forces were bourgeois nationalists and fascists (who would go on to collaborate with Nazis and setup their own SS divisions in the occupied Nazi army). He wrote this knowing that Hitler had described occupying Ukraine for Lebensraum and the raw materials there. Trotsky also wrote in Revolution Betrayed

If the war should remain only a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union would be inevitable.

IN a technical, economic and military sense imperialism is incomparably more strong.

If it is not paralysed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution

And that

One swift kick in the doors of the Soviet Union will bring the whole rotten foundations crashing down.

Anyway the point is that Tukhachevsky was executed for wanting to portion off the Ukraine to Hitler - that was largely what the Moscow trials were about. To retain a rump Russian state with Trotsky as leader by giving concessions to Nazi Germany

I can provide the 1000 page testimony that the Soviet government released of the trials that were open to the worlds press

But apparently according to you AntiCommunists this is all faked and the lengthy, long 1000 pages of confessions and testimony were stage managed, scripted and beaten out of them. This is despite the fact a few of them (who Stalin thought were guilty) lived until after the Soviet collapse and said in 1993 that they were treated quite well by the NKVD interrogators and even when the grandchildren of those executed believe they were guilty and their testimonies were given frankly and honestly.

So there's no conversation to be had as you're fanatics

The Block of Rights and Trotskyites

Edit: I knew that Colonel Alksnis was more explicit regarding the trials so I found that source

“My grandfather and Tukhachevsky were friends. And grandfather was on the judicial panel that judged both Tukhachevsky and Eideman. My interest in this case became even stronger after the well-known publications of procuror Viktorov, who wrote that Iakov Alksnis was very active at the trial, harrassed the accused. . . . But in the trial transcript everything was just the opposite. Grandfather only asked two or three questions during the entire trial. But the strangest thing is the behavior of the accused. Newspaper accounts claim that all the defendants denied their guilt completely. But according to the transcript they fully admitted their guilt. I realize that an admission of guilt itself can be the result of torture. But in the transcript it was something else entirely: a huge amount of detail, long dialogues, accusations of one another, a mass of precision. It’s simply impossible to stage-manage something like this. . . . I know nothing about the nature of the conspiracy. But of the fact that there really did exist a conspiracy within the Red Army and that Tukhachevsky participated in it I am completely convinced today.”

–Colonel Alksnis (Elementy, 2000)

From a further interview of Alksnis by Vladimir Bobrov:

Alksnis: I turned the pages of the transcript and had more questions than answers. I came away with the impression that, obviously, there had really been a conspiracy. But this is what struck me: in the transcript there are parts which attest to the sincerity of what the defendants said (no matter who claims that the trial was an organized show, that they worked on the defendants specially so that they would give the necessary confessions.) Imagine this. Let’s say, Tukhachevsky is telling about a meeting with the German military attaché in a dacha near Moscow and at that moment Primakov interrupts him and says “Mikhail Nikolaevich, you are mistaken. This meeting did not take place in your office at the dacha, but was on the veranda.” I think that it would have been impossible to “direct” things such that Tukhachevsky said precisely that and that Primakov would then make a correction like that.

Bobrov: Very well. But was there anything there that made you think that the trial had been scripted and directed anyway?

Alksnis: No, it would have been impossible to script and direct a trial such as is in the transcript.

Bobrov: That is, you wish to state that, having read the transcript, you did not find in it any traces of any kind of staging?

Alksnis: Yes, yes. On top of that all of them confessed, and when they all admitted guilt in their last words, stating that they had been participants in the conspiracy and knowing that after that execution awaited them, it is just impossible to imagine that they forced them all to make such admissions and declarations.

Bobrov: What was the main point of accusation of the “conspirators”?

Alksnis: Everything was there: espionage, preparation for a military coup, sabotage, wrecking.

Bobrov: And what does “espionage” mean? You were talking about the meeting at the dacha.

Alksnis: Yes, yes, with the German military attaché. They were talking about arranging coordination with the German military, contacts were going on with them.

Bobrov: One last question. In your interview with “Elementy” you talked about some kind of “cannon” that might shoot at our own times from back in the 30s. What did you have in mind?

Alksnis: If an objective research project on the events of those years were to be done, free of ideological dogmas, then a great deal could change in our attitude towards those years and towards the personalities of that epoch. And so it would be a “bomb” that would cause some problems. (Bobrov)

During the last years of his life, long after de-stalinization Molotov spoke about this issue in an interview with Feliks Chuev published in 1993 as Molotov Remembers. The Khruschev government had made de-stalinization official policy, similarly in the Gorbachev years it was political suicide to oppose the anti-stalin line. However Molotov did so anyway. He testified to the accuracy of the Trial findings:

“The right wing already had a channel to Hitler even before this. Trotsky was definitely connected to him, that’s beyond any doubt…. Many of the ranking military officers were also involved. That goes without saying.”

-(Molotov Remembers p. 275)