The Trial (2018)

Directed by: Sergei Loznitsa | 127 minutes | documentary

Moscow, 1930. Eight suspects are brought before the special court in the colonnaded hall of the House of Trade Unions. They are engineers and professors. The youngest is 39, the oldest is 66. The Soviet Union accuses them of crimes against the State: colluding with foreign powers to undermine the Soviet economy and thus weaken the State. A crime that carries the death penalty.

Cameras capture the entire process from November 25 to December 7, 1930 – for 11 days. Special for that time: the sound with the images is also recorded. The images served as a means of propaganda: the entire process is staged and a ‘show’ is put on by everyone. Behind the scenes, the instigator and co-director is the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party: Joseph Stalin.

The Ukrainian documentary maker Sergei Loznitsa (1964) finds the original tapes in an old Russian archive when he prepares to make a documentary about the later and more famous “show trials” from the years 1936-1938. He decides to use this very film to expose the methods of the totalitarian state.

The archive footage of the 11 days has been put together by Loznitsa into a chronological account of the course of the process in just over 2 hours. Only at the very end does he make a short commentary. What is remarkable is that the same images that were used as propaganda in the Stalinist era now show how thoroughly rotten the communist legal system in the Soviet Union was.

Prosecutors Krilenko and Fridberg hardly have to make any effort: the eight suspects confess their guilt immediately at the start of the trial. They have, among others, colluded with the French politician and Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré under the banner of the ‘Industrial Party’ to sabotage the Five Year Plan and the industrialization of the Soviet Union. They would even have tried with other circles and forces at home and abroad to overthrow the communist state with a military center.

The truth: Stalin sought scapegoats for his failures. During the show process, one after the other, they act full of respect and admiration for the enormous success of the Soviet economy – despite their attempts to disrupt everything. President of the special court is Andrei Vishinsky, who was imprisoned with Stalin more than 20 years earlier. His ‘achievement’ during the trial helps him further up the ladder: from 1936 he will preside over the big, already mentioned, show trials at the time of the purges. During the Second World War, he first became Molotov’s deputy, before taking over as foreign minister himself in 1949.

The eight men on trial have been given good instructions on what to say, something that was undoubtedly obtained through intimidation and threats (for example from family – although this is not mentioned anywhere). The “leader” is Professor Ramzin, the others: Kalinnikov, Larichev, Charnovsky, Fedotov, Kupriyanov, Ochkin and Stinin, all participated in the sabotage through their “counter-revolutionary” actions. On rare occasions, ‘the script’ is accidentally deviated from. The images from the hall are interspersed with orchestrated night marches (through cold and snow) through crowds whipped up with banners. Although the texts are not translated and Cyrillic is difficult to understand for the uninitiated, you can guess what is on the canvases.

It is, even for those interested, quite tough. The judicial procedures are sometimes opaque and there are frequent references to articles in the criminal code that are not explained further. Each suspect is treated individually and at some point you as a viewer pretty much understand how it all works – and then it just keeps going in the same way. This bureaucratic, monotonous way of operating underlines the insincerity of the procedures, but Loznitsa could have cut a little more into his material.

Nevertheless, the film makes an impression. Especially if the suspects insistently request to save their lives and promise to use their talents in future only for further industrialization and improvement of the economy.

At the end, Loznitsa does show a great sense of irony (without getting into overly specific spoilers) that some of the eight men are relatively better off after their conviction than the prosecutor and the presiding judge. The paranoid dictatorship of Stalin (and the system that his successors inherited) ultimately also comes at the expense of loyal party members who previously eliminated alleged opponents so loyal.

The lesson is that institutions that function in a democratic constitutional state, such as a public prosecutor and an independent judiciary, are corrupted and here lead to a grotesque play for public consumption. Stalin could also have just executed the eight directly without going through the formality of a trial in court. A fate, incidentally, that befell countless victims of the regime. It is a deeply cynical and pitch-black parody of a democratic constitutional state, where the outcome is predetermined and everyone maintains the appearance of a ‘normal’ procedure.

The choice of title ‘The Trial’ / ‘The Trial’ is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s book ‘Der Proceß’ (in various spellings) in which a young bank employee is arrested, but never finds out what he is accused of and why . In Kafka’s surrealist book – published posthumously a few years before these trials, it is maddening for its protagonist Josef K. to get more and more entangled in the bureaucratic and bureaucratic mills and never find out what he actually did wrong. While very specific accusations are made here, this show process is otherwise just as maddening and surreal. The eight men know that they are innocent and that their counter-revolutionary network does not exist at all. However, escape is impossible. So, powerless and disenfranchised, they play along, little cogs in a ruthless machine where reputations, careers and human lives are worthless. This process is a step towards the “red terror” and purges that would be carried out later in the 1930s. It is an oppressive and haunting documentary.