Capitulation To Stalin and Show Trials
On 10 July 1929, Radek alongside other oppositionists Ivar Smilga and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, signed a document capitulating to Stalin., with Radek being held in particular disdain by oppositionist circles for his betrayal of Yakov Blumkin, who had been carrying a secret letter from Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, to Radek. However, he was re-admitted in 1930 and was one of the few former oppositionists to retain a prominent place within the party, heading the International Information Bureau of the Russian Communist Party Central Committee as well as giving the main address at the First Soviet Writer's Conference in 1934. He helped to write the 1936 Soviet Constitution, but during the Great Purge of the 1930s, he was accused of treason and confessed, after two and a half months of interrogation, at the Trial of the Seventeen (1937, also called the Second Moscow Trial). He was sentenced to 10 years of penal labor.
He was reportedly killed in a labor camp in a fight with another inmate. However, during an investigation in the Khrushchev Thaw it was established that he was killed by an NKVD operative under direct orders from Lavrentiy Beria. Radek has also been credited with originating a number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin. He was exonerated in 1988.
Read more about this topic: Karl Radek
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