the Trial of the Seventeen at which he 'confessed' that he had been party to a terrorist plot against Stalin since 1932, and that Trotsky was conspiring with Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess to incite a Nazi invasion of the USSR. He was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag. Even at the time, there were Soviet citizens who were not taken in by the trial and the forced confessions, such as the writer Isaac Babel, who was reported to the NKVD for saying, in private conversation with the film director Sergei Eisenstein "Lenin was very fond of Sokolnikov because he's a very smart man...and his whole struggle is the struggle against Stalin's influence." Reportedly, Sokolnikov was assassinated in a prison by other convicts on 21 May 1939. A post-Stalin official investigation during the Khrushchev Thaw revealed that the murder was organized by the NKVD official and ordered by Lavrenty Beria and Joseph Stalin personally. He was rehabilitated on June 12, 1988. Notes References Soviet Policy in Public Finance, 1917–1928, by Gregory Y. Sokolnikov & Associates; translated by Elena Varneck, edited by Lincoln Hutchinson & Carl C. Plehn. Stanford University Press. 1931. External links Grigory Sokolnikov Archive, part of Marxists Internet Archive. Grigorii Yakovlevich Sokolnikov and the development of the Soviet state, 1921–1929 1888 births 1939 deaths People from Sumy Oblast People from Poltava Governorate Jewish Soviet politicians Soviet Jews Ukrainian Jews Old Bolsheviks Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union candidate members Soviet Ministers of Finance Bolshevik finance Ambassadors of the Soviet Union to the United Kingdom Treaty of Brest-Litovsk negotiators University of Paris alumni Trial of the Seventeen Great Purge victims from Ukraine Jews executed by the Soviet Union Jewish socialists Soviet rehabilitations