The problem with staging a show trial is that the main actor has little incentive to follow the script. Yet that’s never tempered Russia’s thirst for judicial theater. In 1964, a Soviet court demanded to know who had given Joseph Brodsky permission to write poetry. That future Nobel laureate’s retort: “I think that it ... comes from God,” became a classic of artistic defiance.
Two years later, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel stood accused of purveying “slanderous inventions.” The defendants’ principled stance did not save them from the Gulag, but it earned the support of people like Hannah Arendt, who called the proceedings “an ugly reminder of something one had hoped had passed into history.”
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