How to Use Confessions Presenting evidence tracked down in various archives, Bobrov and Furr prove that Pyatnitsky and company did conspire. Since conspirators do not write down their conspiracy, the authors lay out the dense tangle of confessions by many persons.
Many historians refuse to examine confessions, to compare them with each other and with established facts. This includes historians who are largely free of anti-Stalin venom and are socialist in their own convictions. They maintain that confessions, especially if given under coercive police tactics, are useless as evidence. Furr and Bobrov recognize this view and refute it: Since confessions can be ‘forced’ by threats, and since we can’t reconstruct the exact conditions under which a confession was obtained, confessions should be discarded as evidence. This is all wrong. Any and all evidence can be faked: material evidence – photographs, appointment books, handwritten notes, anything. … Historians must deal with confessions in the same way as any other material evidence … compared, where possible, with each other and with other evidence. (p. 118f., emphasis added) Indeed, Furr and Bobrov quote at length and compare a wide set of confessions, trial transcripts and other documents. It is clear that no police agency could interrogate, threaten, and beat people to get testimonies that fit a consistent made-up story. The archives of different Soviet agencies have yielded abundant evidence, but no one has found a document that hints at, let alone spells out, a frame-up to guide the different interrogators of various witnesses. In Soviet history, evidence is controversial because it affects fundamentally opposed political interests. Compare civil lawsuits, where only two private parties are at odds. Every week in the U.S., juries hear conflicting testimony and establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. https://newworker.us/theory-history/trotskys-comintern-conspiracy-the-case-of-osip-pyatnitsky/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#32981): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/32981 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/109066864/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
