An Extraordinary New Film Captures the Spectacle of Soviet Show Trials

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

17 January 19

he show trial was a show. “The Trial,” a new film by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, depicts it as a spectacle, complete with audience reactions, set in a stunning marble hall with grand crystal chandeliers.

Loznitsa initially set out to create a compilation of documentary footage of Stalin-era show trials. He was already assembling the collection when his assistant discovered hours of footage of a trial from 1930. It was an extraordinary find: a rare Soviet technique had been used to record sound and image synchronously, directly on film. A single camera had been used to shoot the trial, in four-to-five-minute takes, often sweeping from the judges to the defendants to the audience. Originally, the footage had been used in a forty-two-minute propaganda film, intended to demonstrate that the state had no mercy for enemies of the people. With this footage in hand, Loznitsa changed course and decided to make a film about a single trial; his two-hour-and-eight-minute project, which uses only original footage with no commentary, is a remake of sorts. (“The Trial” premièred at the Venice and Toronto film festivals and screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, in New York City, on Saturday.)

In the film, a bell announces that the show is about to begin. People are ushered into the Column Hall, an iconic Moscow space, which seats more than a thousand. The camera captures the audience and a large group of middle-aged men in suits, who are seated at cloth-covered tables dotted with bank lamps. It is a shock when some of these men approach the microphone to identify themselves and plead guilty—up until that moment, the men appear to be members of a single group. This is essentially accurate: the judges, the prosecutor, the court clerks, and the defendants are all members of the cast. They are performing their assigned roles. The rest of the people in the hall—men and women of different ages, some dressed in military uniforms and some in civilian suits, but all wearing their best—are the audience, and their job is to believe everything they see.

Eight men are on trial. The youngest is thirty-nine, and the oldest is sixty-six. All are either professors or high-level engineers. They stand accused of belonging to the Industrial Party, a sprawling organization whose goal was to sabotage Soviet industrial development and, ultimately, with the help of the French government and Russian émigrés abroad, to seize power. The Party and the plot were completely fictional. No such organization or effort ever existed.

And yet all eight men pleaded guilty. Outside the Column Hall, thousands were demonstrating, demanding that they be put to death. Loznitsa uses footage of the demonstrations to indicate breaks between the thirteen days of the trial. One can see the slogans on the signs carried by the demonstrators: “Firing Squad for Those Who Want to Restore Capitalism”; “No Mercy for Agents of Internationalism!”

Remarkably, there is no real narrative of the imagined crime. Witnesses and defendants are confused about what they should be saying. At one point, a defendant claims that he was not a member of the Industrial Party.

“You weren’t a member, you say?” the judge asks.

“I didn’t realize I was a member,” the defendant offers. Groping for what he was expected to say, he asserts that he was working with French interventionists to overthrow the Soviet regime.

A witness rambles—“Things didn’t go as planned. . . . The class struggle continued. . . . But it was weakened . . .”—until he talks himself into a confession, and admits to having been a part of a nonexistent plot. He proceeds to beg the court for mercy.

Finally, the prosecutor, Nikolai Krylenko, gives a rambling speech with no details. The camera shows the defendants listening intently—for their own final statements, they are going to need whatever story he creates. But there is no story, only a mood, a sense that the Soviet state is under extreme threat and that enemies of the regime may be lurking anywhere. Only at the end of his speech does Krylenko go into an oratorical mode. His voice suddenly booms. His gestures become sweeping. He throws down the book he is holding. “Anyone in the U.S.S.R. who might aid in an effort to destroy the state must be swept away once and for all,” he says. “The state prosecution demands that the special session of the court sentence every single one of the accused to death by firing squad!” The hall erupts in applause. People stand up and shout. The audience turns into a mob.

It is striking that the trial took place just thirteen years after the Bolshevik Revolution. All of the defendants would have been adults, even professionals, before the change of regime—they had not, it would seem, been shaped by totalitarianism. At the time of the trial, state terror had not yet been felt in the cities as strongly as in the countryside. This was the time before the purges, before the better-known show trials, during the year when the Gulag was just coming into existence. And yet everyone is dutifully playing his role. The defendants don’t defend themselves—indeed they cannot, because there are no specific accusations to deny. All they do is beg for mercy.

Five of the eight defendants are sentenced to death by firing squad; the three others are sentenced to ten years of incarceration. All or most of the sentences were soon reduced, but then some of the defendants were executed in the late nineteen-thirties, while others were released. One of the defendants even went on to be awarded the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honor. The prosecutor, on the other hand, was falsely accused of being a spy and executed. Terror continued to assign roles at random.

A palpable sense of randomness is Loznitsa’s singular accomplishment. As in the trial itself, there is no story in “The Trial”—only the spectacle of the transformation of people into totalitarian subjects.

A Night at the Theater With Trump's Accusers

By Alyssa Shelasky, The Cut

17 January 19

s soon as it became a reality that Donald Trump would run for president, I couldn’t stop thinking about one person: Natasha Stoynoff.

Stoynoff was my mentor when I worked at People magazine, about ten years ago. She was the brilliant, hilarious, confident, and warm writer who got all the good assignments because Larry Hackett, the editor-in-chief at the time, knew she was the best. Naturally, I worshipped her; so I was thrilled when after a year of working together we finally went out for drinks. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

Huddled at some midtown bar, I first wanted all the gossip. Who was the nicest celebrity she ever interviewed? Who were the secret druggies? She humored me and my adoration grew by the second. But the mood shifted when I asked something like, “Who’s the biggest scumbag you ever interviewed?” and she hesitantly told me that on a work trip to Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump had forced himself on her. The details were disgusting. I felt terrible that she had to relive it that night, and the story has haunted me ever since.

Years later, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was a reality, and as his popularity grew, I wondered if Natasha would come out with her story. Neither of us was working full-time at People anymore, and we never had drinks again (though we tried!). After the Access Hollywood tapes came out, I really wanted to reach out to her, but it felt insensitive, even salacious. And then a few days later, I read her heart-stopping essay on People.com and heard her name on CNN; she’d come forward to tell her story. She became a national hero — along with the 21 other brave women who have come forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault.

Last night, after years of relentless attacks, insults, even death threats from his supporters, Natasha and six other women who have come forward to publicly accuse Donald Trump of sexual harassment took their stories to the stage for one night only. In an eight-act play created by theater-makers Kate Pines (daughter of Tony Schwartz, who famously told The New Yorker that he had deep remorse over ghostwriting Trump’s book The Art of the Deal) and Sharyn Rothstein, professional actors performed the women’s individual experiences at New York’s Joe’s Pub. Pines and Rothstein contacted the Trump accusers and matched them with professional playwrights and actors (over 70 women worked on the event), and they all turned their collective pain into a play called The Pussy Grabber Plays — a title inspired by that vulgar Billy Bush interview. All proceeds went to the New York Women’s Foundation Fund for the Me Too Movement and Allies.

A few hours before showtime, I joined Natasha, Karena Virginia, Tasha Dixon, and Rachel Crooks — some of the women whose stories were told alongside those of Jill Harth, Samantha Holvey, and Jessica Leeds — for preshow drinks at the bar above Joe’s Pub. This was the first time many of the women depicted in the play met each other. Here were the women who were groped and stalked and degraded, whom we watched on the news in awe during the campaign, connecting in real life.

I was allowed to join them because of my connection to Natasha, but as I talked with these intelligent, poised women whose strength I admired, I realized they were extremely anxious about what they said in front of me, a reporter. They’d told their stories, and some of them would have them interpreted that night for an audience, but as many of them explained to me, after the promise of anonymity, they still live with fear. “I had death threats arrive in my actual mailbox, at my actual house,” one woman told me. Another said she’d been “sent a photo of my face slashed open.”

So I just listened as they compared horror stories. A few of the women have been repeatedly called “transvestites” online, and it made at least one of them deeply insecure about her looks. They each lost friends. One is frequently trashed-talked in her local newspaper. Someone was conned into an interview for her “fans,” but really, it was with trolls — in Russia.

When I asked what it felt like to be national heroes, pioneers of the #MeToo movement, many of them said the experience has not felt entirely victorious yet. That night, as they all came together, was certainly a high point. There were tight hugs. Everyone appeared to feel — momentarily — less alone, less (and I don’t use this word lightly) terrorized. That aside, most of the women still appeared to be in survival mode; noting that it’s too soon to understand the greater meaning of their courage.

The play itself was terrific. Each of its eight acts honored a victim and her story (one act actually honored the victims who haven’t yet spoken). Some were disturbing, some were hilarious, most were both. Actress Caitlin Fitzgerald played a hilarious and tragic beauty queen, Miss Texas, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, face the truth about Trump’s Miss USA pageant. I sat at a table with one of Trump’s accusers who wept uncontrollably when her story was told through a musical performance as powerful as “Seasons of Love” in Rent.

Natasha’s story was the last one. Called “The Interview,” it broke down the Mar-a-Lago nightmare through song. It was 2005. She was there to profile Donald and Melania’s first year of marriage. When Melania left for a wardrobe change, Trump forced himself on Natasha. He shoved his tongue down her throat. He commanded that they would have an affair. Then Melania, hugely pregnant, returned and he went back to being a doting husband. The next day Trump waited for Natasha at her spa appointment (he was NOT invited, obviously). Had she not been running very late, and had he not left for a meeting, she believes she would have been trapped, naked, in a massage room with him. This was all explained through laughter and tears in the musical piece that Natasha co-wrote and Broadway actress Lora Lee Gayer performed. It went something like this, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

I was overwhelmingly proud of my friend, my hero, and all the heros in that room. As all the women got onstage to take a final bow, I hoped they took in what it feels like to be only loved and respected and believed and supported, and that — for the first time since coming forward with their stories — all they could hear was wild applause.