The Moscow Trials (1936 to 1938) – Monstrous Plays of a Theatrical Transgression

In the Moscow show trials (1936–1938) the theatricalisation of law, tried out at first in the mock trials of early Soviet times, culminated in a monstrous amalgamation of justice and theatricality. By focusing not only the aesthetic and artificial orders of production, established by the principles of Social Realism, but also in view of the political developments in Soviet law in the 1930s, one can say that the Moscow trails – as they were directed by Stalin in a specific way that can be called as a kind of decisionism and conducted by Andrei Vyshinsky, who undermined the legal standards of Soviet law by his script-discriminating verbality – functioned as moral plays of an outrageous transgression of law and theatre.