There's loads of evidence for it. There's over 3000 pages of confessional testimony in which the Trotskyites state how they ended up in the camp of counter-revolution: the prime reason being they did not believe that the Soviet Union could last against "German Fascism which they saw as the most organised and militant form of capitalism". So it was "better to come to terms with them" and offer up the lands Hitler had called for conquering in MeinKampf(Western portion of Russia and the Ukraine for its oil fields) whilst removing Stalin and the Soviet leadership from power and putting in power the Trotskyists in charge of a rump state of Russia
"A military defeat threatens the social basis of the Soviet Union for the same reason that these bases require in peaceful times a bureaucracy and a monopoly of foreign trade – that is, because of their weakness. Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question, we will answer as frankly: 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 in incomparably more strong. If it is not paralyzed by revolution in the West, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October revolution."
-Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed 1936
"we considered that Fascism was the most organized form of capitalism, that it would triumph and seize Europe and stifle us. It was better therefore to come to terms with it'.
-Sokolnikov
But don't let me interrupt you you can read all their full confessions spanning hundreds of pages in public court which was open to the worlds diplomats and foreign press
But oh right there testimony is faked because Soviet torturers falsified their confessions. Despite them admitting to some crimes but denying others at lengthy testimony with huge back and forths between the defence and prosecutors. Despite the fact most of these men were hardened men who had been dealt torture and imprisonment at the hands of Tsarist police or sent to the Tsars gulags prior to 1917.
No, what really cracked these men was being tortured by Soviet torturers in such a way not a mark could be left on them for when they appeared at trial in front of the worlds press and the worlds diplomats then had a lengthy back and forth of contradiction, admitting to some crimes and not others in such a pantomime way. To have their entire legacy destroyed and ruined because actually they were innocent.
“With an interpreter at my side, I followed the testimony carefully. Naturally I must confess that I was predisposed against the credibility of the testimony of these defendants… Viewed objectively, however, and based upon my experience in the trial of cases and the application of the tests of credibility which past experience had afforded me, I arrived at the reluctant conclusion that the state had established its case, at least to the extent of proving the existence of a widespread conspiracy and plot among the political leaders against the Soviet government, and which under their statutes established the crimes set forth in the indictment… I am still impressed with the many indications of credibility which obtained in the course of the testimony. To have assumed that this proceeding was invented and staged as a project of dramatic political fiction would be to presuppose the creative genius of a Shakespeare and the genius of a Belasco in stage production. The historical background and surrounding circumstances also lend credibility to the testimony. The reasoning which Sokolnikov and Radek applied in justification of their various activities and their hoped-for results were consistent with probability and entirely plausible. The circumstantial detail… brought out by the various accused, gave unintended corroboration to the gist of the charges.”
-Joseph Davies, US diplomat to the USSR
“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)
For me, I.V. Stalin and his time is a very sore and relevant issue until now.
My grandfather – the commander of the second rank, deputy commissar of defense of the USSR for aviation Yakov Ivanovich (Jekabs Janovich) Alksnis, was shot in July 1938. His wife (my grandmother), Kristina Karlovna Mednis-Alksnis, as a member of the family of the traitor to the Motherland (CSIR), spent 13 years in camps and exiles. My father, Imant Yakovlevich, at the age of 10 was left without parents and until the age of 30 wore the stigma “son of an enemy of the people.” He found his mother only in 1957.
Therefore, our family always had anti-Stalinist sentiments and, accordingly, I was an anti-Stalinist.
When perestroika began, he eagerly read all the publications of those years, exposing the crimes of Stalin and his entourage.
In 1989, I was elected People’s Deputy of the USSR and after some time I sent an official deputy request to the then Chairman of the KGB of the USSR V.A. Kryuchkov with a request to acquaint me with the documents relating to my grandfather.
In particular, I asked to show me his criminal case and the materials of the trial of M. Tukhachevsky, since my grandfather was part of the Special Judicial Presence, which sentenced Tukhachevsky and other military leaders to death.
I was particularly interested in the materials of the trial of a group of military leaders led by Tukhachevsky, since M. Tukhachevsky and Robert Eideman (chairman of the Central Council of Osoaviahim of the USSR), who were shot by the sentence of the Special Judicial Presence, were close friends of my grandfather, and they were almost friends with Robert Eideman not since childhood. And for me it was not clear how my grandfather could sentence his friends to death.
After a while I was invited to the Lubyanka and two volumes were placed in front of me. The first is the grandfather’s criminal case, and the second is a transcript of the trial of a group of military men led by Tukhachevsky. I was allowed to make the necessary statements.
I was immediately struck that in the criminal case there were extremely few documents. Grandfather was arrested on November 23, 1937, and shot on July 29, 1938, i.e. He spent 8 months in Lefortovo. And while in the case there were only three or four protocols of interrogations, and almost all of these protocols were about nothing.
For example, one multi-page protocol was devoted to organizing the repair of aircraft of the Air Force. Moreover, the protocol is very detailed, as it seemed to me, the answers to the investigator’s questions were simply rewritten from the governing documents of those years on the organization of aircraft repair.
I was surprised that three days after the arrest, my grandfather wrote a handwritten note in the name of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Yezhov, about his readiness to give sincere testimonies about his counter-revolutionary activities, but there were no traces of these sincere testimonies in the criminal case.
Judging by the materials of the case, the first interrogation took place only in January 1938. At the same time, judging by the 1956 rehabilitation materials filed in the same case, my grandfather was repeatedly summoned for interrogations and “beat out” evidence from him. But where are these protocols with “knocked out” testimonies, why were they not in the file?
After reviewing the transcript of the Tukhachevsky process, I realized that this process is also not so simple. 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.
You can still choose to believe that Moscow Trials were faked and that these people if you want to. But to strawman that ML position that there "was no evidence" is disingenous - there's mountains of evidence you've just decided that it's fake because it fits in with your caricature of Stalin and Marxist-Leninists without doing any serious investigation of your own.
There's loads of evidence for it. There's over 3000 pages of confessional testimony in which the Trotskyites state how they ended up in the camp of counter-revolution: the prime reason being they did not believe that the Soviet Union could last against "German Fascism which they saw as the most organised and militant form of capitalism". So it was "better to come to terms with them" and offer up the lands Hitler had called for conquering in MeinKampf(Western portion of Russia and the Ukraine for its oil fields) whilst removing Stalin and the Soviet leadership from power and putting in power the Trotskyists in charge of a rump state of Russia
-Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed 1936
-Sokolnikov
But don't let me interrupt you you can read all their full confessions spanning hundreds of pages in public court which was open to the worlds diplomats and foreign press
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150911
https://archive.org/details/reportofcourtpro0000piat
But oh right there testimony is faked because Soviet torturers falsified their confessions. Despite them admitting to some crimes but denying others at lengthy testimony with huge back and forths between the defence and prosecutors. Despite the fact most of these men were hardened men who had been dealt torture and imprisonment at the hands of Tsarist police or sent to the Tsars gulags prior to 1917.
No, what really cracked these men was being tortured by Soviet torturers in such a way not a mark could be left on them for when they appeared at trial in front of the worlds press and the worlds diplomats then had a lengthy back and forth of contradiction, admitting to some crimes and not others in such a pantomime way. To have their entire legacy destroyed and ruined because actually they were innocent.
-Joseph Davies, US diplomat to the USSR
“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)
-Victor Alksnis, https://diplomaticpost.co.uk/index.php/2020/07/15/the-moscow-trials-colonel-viktor-alksnis-read-the-tukhachevsky-transcript-and-came-away-convinced-he-was-guilty/
You can still choose to believe that Moscow Trials were faked and that these people if you want to. But to strawman that ML position that there "was no evidence" is disingenous - there's mountains of evidence you've just decided that it's fake because it fits in with your caricature of Stalin and Marxist-Leninists without doing any serious investigation of your own.
Everybody gangster till @JoeySteel whips out his debunking comments