Shvernik Commission was an informal name of the commission of the CPSU

Communist Party of the Soviet Union

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...

 Central Committee

Central Committee

Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...

 Presidium

Presidium

The presidium or praesidium is the name for the heading organ of various legislative and organizational bodies.-Historical usage:...

 headed by Nikolay Shvernik

Nikolay Shvernik

Nikolay Mikhailovich Shvernik was a Russian politician, who was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from March 19, 1946 until March 15, 1953...

 for the investigation of political repression in the Soviet Union during the period of Stalinism

Stalinism

Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...

. Other members were Alexander Shelepin

Alexander Shelepin

Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin was a Soviet state security officer and party statesman. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its Politburo and was the head of the KGB from 25 December 1958 to 13 November 1961.Shelepin was born in Voronezh...

, Zinovy Serdyuk, Roman Rudenko

Roman Rudenko

Roman Andreyevich Rudenko was a Soviet lawyer. He was the prosecutor of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1944-1953 and Chief prosecutor of the entire Soviet Union from 1953. He is also well known for acting as the Soviet Chief Prosecutor at the main trial of the major Nazi war...

, Olga Shatunovskaya

Olga Shatunovskaya

Olga Grigoryevna Shatunovskaya was a member of the Shvernik Commission....

, N. Mironov, and Vladimir Semichastny

Vladimir Semichastny

Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny was the head of the KGB from November 1961 to April 1967....

.

It was the second major commission of the kind. (The first one was the commission headed by Vyacheslav Molotov

Vyacheslav Molotov

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...

.) The commission worked during 1961-1963 and produced about 200 pages of two reports, which detailed the mechanism of falsification of the show trial

Show trial

The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...

s against Bukharin, Zinoviev

Grigory Zinoviev

Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...

, Tukhachevsky and many others. The commission based its findings in large part on eyewitness testimonies of former NKVD

NKVD

The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....

 workers and victims of repressions, and on many documents. The commission recommended to rehabilitate every accused with exception of Karl Radek

Karl Radek

Karl Bernhardovic Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution....

 and Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Yagoda

Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...

, because Radek's materials required some further checking, and Yagoda was a criminal and one of the falsifiers of the trials (though most of the charges against him had to be dropped too, he wasn't a "spy", etc.). The commission stated:

"Stalin committed a very grave crime against the Communist party, the socialist state, Soviet people and worldwide revolutionary movement... Together with Stalin, the responsibility for the abuse of law, mass unwarranted repressions and death of many thousands of wholly innocent people also lies on Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov..."