>>...Attempting to indoctrinate the public into a new society, the
>>Bolsheviks staged show trials...
>
>Considering that after the first ("Shakhty") all the show trials had
>Bolsheviks as their targets, and that all of them were scripted by
>the Tsarist police agent "Yosef" (Djugashvili alias Stalin), this
>statement is utterly vile.
The statement is, however, a poor summary made by an anonymous worker of Northern Illinois University Press, not what the author Julie A. Cassiday meant to convey. Her thesis is as follows:
1. Soviet show trials ironically put to use the dramatic means of representation which revolutionary artists had hoped to employ for the cause of human liberation: especially avant-garde and melodramatic styles of theater and cinema (such as direct audience participation breaking down the fourth wall).
2. The injustice of show trials originates not in their theatricality per se (as some have suggested, without recognizing theatricality inherent in all public trials that become media events, like the Scopes trial) but in "the severe imbalance in access to the dramatic means of representation," which she argues was "an essential part of the Soviet show trial from its earliest instances" (Julie A. Cassidy, "Marble Columns and Jupiter Lights: Theatrical and Cinematic Modeling of Soviet Show Trials in the 1920s," The Slavic and East European Journal, 42.4, Winter 1998, pp. 640-641).
3. Soviet show trials became progressively more scripted, e.g., from the 1922 trial of Socialist Revolutionaries, the 1928 Shakhty Affair, to the Great Terror. In the SR trial, the defendants denied their guilt, refused to perform confessions and repentances, and managed to stage their own dramatic moments such as a hunger strike; also, foreign defenders were allowed to enter the courtroom. The Shakhty Affair represented an intermediate stage: the prosecution expended most of its effort into extracting confessions and did extract them from the majority (over 90%) of the accused men on trial; but, many times, the "performances" were botched (e.g., when the engineer Skorutto admitted his guilt, his wife cried out in the courtroom, "It's a lie! Kolia, why are you doing this!" Skorutto retracted his confession, the court had to go into recess, and only after several days was Skorutto returned to the court to uphold his confession). By the time of the Stalinist show trials, the mechanisms and techniques of show trial production had become honed to "virtual perfection."
Much of Cassidy's analysis, in any case, consists of formal analysis, rather than a straightforwardly political one.
What is noteworthy is an emergent trend in scholarship: an interest in analysis of show trials in general, as theaters that shape cultural memories. E.g., Christopher D. Hunter, "Show Trials: Power, the Press, and Justice," <http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/chunter/show_trials.html>; Lawrence P. Douglas, _The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust_, <http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/084366.htm>; Gary Jonathan Bass, _Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals_, <http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/6925.html>; Silvija Jestrovic, "Theatricality as Estrangement of Art and Life In the Russian Avant-garde," <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v031/31.2jestrovic.html>; Juan E. Méndez, "Accountability for Past Abuses," <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/human_rights_quarterly/v019/19.2mendez.html>; Jeremy Rabkin, "Nuremberg Misremembered," <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v019/19.2rabkin.html>; _Hannah Arendt Revisited: "Eichmann in Jerusalem" und die Folgen_, ed. Gary Smith, reviewed at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shofar/v021/21.3barnouw.html>; etc. The interest in show trials, I think, is now motivated by the desire to intervene in the use of war crimes tribunals and the like in the age of "humanitarian imperialism" (some scholars are conscious about the roles they are playing here, others aren't, some seek to distinguish "good" show trials from "bad" ones, others caution us of the difficulty of drawing such a boundary). -- Yoshie
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