In 1931, a group of Soviet engineers were put on trial for industrial sabotage they had not committed.
The injustice was double. First, the false accusation. Second, the fact that survival required public confession to crimes they had not done. The choice was explicit: confess and live, or maintain innocence and be destroyed.
Who could blame them for choosing life? The cruelty lay not just in punishing the innocent, but in forcing them to collaborate in the lie that justified their punishment – for the good of the cause.
By the early 1930s, the Bolsheviks had learned that mass executions created only silence. But silence teaches no lesson. The show trial solved this.
Its features were structural:
• Guilt precedes adjudication.
The accused was already guilty. The trial existed to display that guilt, not test it.
• Elastic offences.
“Wrecking” and “counter-revolutionary consciousness” were not concrete acts but interpretive categories – applied retrospectively to fit predetermined outcomes.
• Accusers author the narrative.
Prosecutors constructed charges and coordinated confessions. Evidence was assembled to support conclusions already reached.
• Forced collaboration.
Survival required performance – contrition, self-criticism, adoption of the regime’s moral framing. Maintaining innocence proved deeper guilt.
• Process as punishment.
The trial itself inflicted damage regardless of verdict – public humiliation, exhaustion, financial ruin.
• Legal form without legal restraint.
Courts, procedures, transcripts – not to limit power but to legitimise it.
The purpose was not to establish what the engineers had done. It was to teach everyone else what would happen if they stepped out of line.
Contemporary professional regulation displays similar architecture at lower temperature:
• Guilt often inferred before investigation concludes.
• Codes of Conduct function as elastic categories – “unprofessional conduct,” “bringing the profession into disrepute” – applied retrospectively.
• The regulator investigates, prosecutes, and recommends sanction within the same institutional structure.
• Administrative tribunals operate under different evidentiary rules than courts, providing procedural separation without independent investigation of the regulator’s case.
• “Insight,” “remediation,” and “education” are rewarded. Contesting allegations is interpreted as lack of insight.
• The violation is rarely the act alone. It is whether the practitioner accepts the authorised moral narrative about it.
Such systems invariably regard themselves as necessary and proportionate while operating. Retrospective judgment comes later, when institutional distance restores clarity.
By then, the damage to the individual and the credibility of the professional regulator is already done.