MARK JUDGE: The Trial: A Rare Documentary Reveals the Hell of a Communist Show Trial.

It is a stroke of genius that in The Divine Comedy Dante depicts Satan as trapped in a giant bedrock of ice. Hell isn’t necessarily flames, which can be beautiful and life-sustaining, but ice – cold, non-generative, deadly.

A cold Moscow winter in 1930 is the setting for The Trial, a rarely seen but vitally important 2019 documentary by Ukrainian filmmaker  Sergei Loznitsa. The Trial – which should not be confused with Trial, the great 1955 anti-communist drama starring Glenn Ford – is constructed of restored black-and-white footage from one of Joseph Stalin’s first show trials, recorded in 1930 in Moscow. Stalin had falsely accused a political rival of seeking to sabotage the USSR at the behest of French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré and other Western leaders. In shocking footage, the accused, all innocent, confess to crimes they never actually committed.

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