Imagine attending a trial where the defendant is a legendary revolutionary — someone who fought in the actual revolution, who helped build the Soviet state, whose name appears in history textbooks. Now imagine watching this person, broken and humiliated, confess to crimes that sound impossible: working with foreign intelligence services, plotting assassinations, deliberately sabotaging Soviet industry.
The confession is detailed. It names other conspirators. It describes meetings that supposedly took place. It provides evidence. And because the defendant is confessing, not resisting, the trial appears to be justice working. The person is guilty. They admit it. Therefore, the execution that follows appears justified.
This is the show trial mechanism: a performance designed to make injustice appear as justice. Not through lying (the confessions are part of the trial record), but through the structured performance of guilt. Radzinsky documents how Stalin's regime used show trials as one of the most effective weapons in the purge machinery.1
The Transformation of the Person Into the Role
Before a show trial, the defendant has been tortured into confession. They have been broken. Radzinsky describes the process: sleep deprivation, psychological threats, physical beating, until the person's will collapses.2
But simply torturing someone into confession is not sufficient for a show trial. The person must be transformed into a performer — someone who can walk into the courtroom, face the cameras and crowd, and deliver their confession with conviction. They must become the role of guilty criminal, so thoroughly that their performance is convincing.
This requires a specific kind of torture: not just physical, but psychological and dramaturgical. The tortured person is given a script — the confession written for them. They are tortured when they deviate from it. Gradually, they internalize the role. The confession they are forced to recite becomes, in some disturbing sense, their narrative. They stop resisting the identity imposed on them.
Radzinsky documents how this transformation worked: the defendant arrives at trial already broken, already having internalized the guilty identity, already prepared to perform it. The trial is not about discovering guilt; it is about performing guilt that has already been constructed through torture.3
The Courtroom as Theater
The trial itself is meticulously staged. The courtroom is filled with observers — party members, workers, journalists. The press publishes transcripts. Radio broadcasts the proceedings. This is not a private legal proceeding; it is public spectacle.
The prosecutor presents the confessions. The defendant confirms them, often adding details. Other defendants confirm the confession, naming the first defendant as conspirator. The web of conspiracy expands: each defendant implicates others, creating a picture of a vast network of hidden enemies.
The evidence is the confession itself. In normal trials, confession alone might not be sufficient proof — you need corroborating evidence. But in show trials, the confession is the evidence. The confession is public, detailed, and confirmed by multiple defendants, so it must be true.
This creates a logical trap: if you confess, you appear guilty and are executed. If you refuse to confess, you are tortured more and eventually confess anyway. Either way, you end up performing guilt in public. The only "choice" is whether the performance happens quickly or after more torture.
The Legitimation Function
The show trial serves a crucial function: it legitimates the purges. The executions appear to be justice, not murder. The state appears to be enforcing law, not enforcing ideology. The population appears to be witnessing a legal proceeding, not a ritualistic performance of power.
This legitimation is powerful because it allows observers to experience the trial as just. A person watching the trial can think: "Well, they confessed. They must be guilty. The government is right to execute them." The observer doesn't have to confront the possibility that the confession was coerced, that the trial was staged, that the person is innocent. The trial provides a coherent narrative that appears to be justice.
Radzinsky documents how the show trials were tremendously effective propaganda. They convinced many people — including some party members — that the regime was genuine in rooting out enemies. The trials appeared to be evidence that the regime was legitimate, that it was enforcing law, that it was protecting the revolution from saboteurs.4
The Implication of the Audience
By attending the trial, by reading about it, by hearing about it from state media, the population participates in the ritual. They become witnesses to the confession. They become part of the machinery that validates the execution.
This is not accidental. The trials were public precisely to implicate the audience. By making you watch, by forcing you to read the confessions, by making you hear about the trials from state media, the regime made you complicit in the violence. You watched an innocent person confess. You read their confession. You heard them named as enemy. Therefore, you participated in their elimination.
This implication is crucial to the terror mechanism. If the entire population participates in the ritual of the trial, then everyone is guilty of the executions. No one can claim innocence. Everyone is implicated. This creates a condition where the population cannot effectively oppose the trials because everyone has already participated in them.5
The Defendants
The defendants in the 1936 show trial were Old Bolsheviks — men who had participated in the actual October Revolution, who had fought in the civil war, who had helped build the Soviet state. These were not obscure party members; they were legendary figures. Radzinsky names several: Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and others who had been close to Lenin and had significant roles in early Soviet history.6
The Confessions
The confessions were elaborate. The defendants confessed to forming a hidden "Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc" that had been working to sabotage Soviet industry, to assassinate Stalin, to undermine the revolution. They confessed to receiving money from foreign intelligence services. They confessed to conspiracy meetings that supposedly took place.
The problem: much of what they confessed to was impossible. Trotsky was in exile in Mexico; communication with him would have been difficult. The conspiracies described in the confessions often contradicted each other. The timeline didn't make sense. But none of this mattered because the confessions were performed with apparent sincerity, and no one in the courtroom was permitted to challenge the narrative.7
The Execution
After the trial, the defendants were executed. But before execution, Radzinsky documents something remarkable: some of the defendants recanted their confessions, claiming they had been coerced through torture. This recantation came too late to matter. They were executed as confessed traitors.8
Theater and Drama — Performance as Reality Construction: Theater and performance studies document how compelling performance creates an alternative reality — that audiences, watching a convincing performance, suspend disbelief and accept the performed narrative as true.9 The show trial operated identically: the defendant performed guilt convincingly, and the audience accepted the performance as evidence of actual guilt. The parallel reveals that the show trial was a theatrical form before it was a legal form. It worked through the same psychological mechanisms that make theater work: compelling performance that audiences find emotionally and narratively coherent. This explains why show trials were so effective — they operated at the level of theatrical engagement, not legal argument. You didn't have to rationally evaluate the evidence; you just had to watch a convincing performance and accept it.
Narrative Theory — The Construction of Coherent Story Through Witness Testimony: Narrative theory documents how stories become coherent through multiple witness testimony — that when multiple witnesses tell the same story with details, the story gains credibility through redundancy and consistency.10 The show trials used this mechanism: multiple defendants testified, each confirming the conspiracy, each naming others as conspirators. The redundancy of testimony created narrative coherence. Each defendant's confession filled in gaps in others' confessions, creating a complete, internally consistent narrative of conspiracy. This demonstrates how narrative coherence can be manufactured through coordinated testimony — how the structure of story-telling itself can be weaponized to create apparent truth.
Psychology and Confession — How Coerced Confession Changes Self-Concept: Psychological research documents how coerced confession and public performance of confession can change a person's self-concept — that after confessing (even under torture), people sometimes come to partially believe their own confession because the public performance of guilt becomes part of their identity.11 Some of Stalin's defendants appeared to genuinely believe (at least partially) their own confessions, not because the torture had destroyed their reality testing, but because the confession had become their public narrative, and humans construct identity partly through public narrative. This reveals that show trials don't just extract false confessions; they can actually reshape the defendant's sense of self through the performance of guilt.
Radzinsky presents the show trials as deliberately constructed theatrical performances designed to create appearance of justice while performing injustice.12 This interpretation emphasizes the regime's sophistication and intentionality: they knew the trials were unfair, but they staged them skillfully to make them appear fair.
But an alternative reading emerges: that the trials may have worked partly because the prosecutors and judges partially believed them. If the regime genuinely believed in the existence of Trotskyist conspiracies, if they believed the confessions were evidence of real plots, then the trials were not cynical theater but sincere proceedings within a delusional worldview. The staged nature of the trials then becomes not deliberate deception but sincere attempt to prove real (but imaginary) conspiracies.13
This tension suggests that show trials operate partly through the perpetrators' own belief. If the prosecutors thought the conspiracies were real, if they thought the torture was extracting truth rather than producing false confession, then they could conduct the trials as sincere justice proceedings. The trials were theater, but the performers believed they were performing reality. This made them more convincing, because the conviction in the performers' eyes was genuine.
The Sharpest Implication
If a justice system can be transformed into theater that appears just while performing injustice, then the protection against show trials is not better justice procedures, but transparency about what justice actually requires: access to the defendant's account of their own testimony (before torture), physical examination for torture marks, the right to call defense witnesses, the ability for observers to see that the evidence is insufficient. These procedural protections are not luxuries; they are the structural differences between actual justice and show trial. A system that looks like justice (trials, confessions, judges) can be pure theater if these protections are absent. Real justice requires boring, slow procedures that prevent performance from substituting for evidence.
Generative Questions