Abstract

There have been many scholarly efforts covering the period in the Soviet Union known as the Great Terror; most often these writings tried to contextualize and understand the inner working of the regime or its people. The present work shifts this lens, since it seeks to uncover how Anglo-American audiences grappled with one significant event from that era: the 1936 Trial of the Sixteen, the first of Stalin’s major show trials. As the Old Bolsheviks were led to the slaughter, people in the West received a myriad of information concerning this very public spectacle. A lack of functional newspaper scrutiny as the event took place, combined with the charged rhetoric of politicized post-trial publications, ultimately ensured that no outlet offered information about the trial beyond the apparent legitimacy that it gave to their specific causes. The trial itself therefore became more than the prosecution of sixteen individuals, as the entire affair allowed interested parties to manipulate the overall meaning to suit causes or ideologies that were either in favor of or completely against the current Soviet regime. Such an undertaking necessarily includes close readings of both works on the Terror and journalistic approaches to the period in order to demonstrate the conclusions of this thesis. In focusing on a single event, there is hope that some light can be shed on the larger problems associated with the spread of information across the globe during this significant period.