The Trial (ПРОЦЕСС). 2018. Netherlands. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In Russian; English subtitles. 129 min.
Drawing on footage from Yakov Poselsky’s 1930 film The Industrial Party Trial, Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial is an astonishing and excruciating record of a Soviet show trial. In fact, Josef Stalin conducted two major show trials that same year, purging the regime of his political rivals to assume absolute dictatorship and sowing terror both within his government and among the general populace. First, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine Trial of March 9 to April 19, in which 45 Ukrainian intellectuals, scientists, and church officials were falsely accused of conspiring to promote an independent Ukrainian republic. Then came the Industrial Party Trial of November 25 to December 7, in which eight prominent Soviet engineers and economists were accused and convicted of conspiring with imperialist powers—France, England, and the Baltic countries—to sabotage Soviet factories and transportation networks and overthrow the government of the Soviet Union. Sensationalized on film, in radio broadcasts, and in the newspapers, these trials ultimately led to the roundup, imprisonment, exile, and execution of thousands of people in the Soviet Union. Many of the legal subterfuges used in the process—fabricated testimonies, doctored evidence, forced confessions, rigged juries—would be further refined in the Moscow Trials (1936–38) as part of Stalin’s Great Purge (“glaring abuses of Socialist legality which resulted in the death of innocent people,” as Nikita Khrushchev put it, rather mildly, in 1956). Vladimir Putin has taken these methods to heart in staging the trials and sentences of Alexei Navalny, Evan Gerskovich, Oleg Orlov, and Maria Ovsyannikova, to name only some of his most prominent targets.