Attempting to indoctrinate the public into a new society, the Bolsheviks staged show trials - legal trials that incorporated theatrical elements such as coached defendants, memorized scripts for confession, and gruelling interrogatory rehearsals. This genre of legal spectacle, whose origins lay in Soviet theatre and cinema of the 1920s, moved from mass public spectacles to the courtroom, as the Bolsheviks sought to effect ever greater social change. In this interdisciplinary study, literature scholar Cassiday argues that the trials deliberately used avant-garde drama and cinema to educate the...