Made in 2025, it is an historical drama directed by Sergei Loznitsa and is based on a 1969 novella by Georgy Demidov, a Soviet physicist who spent 14 years in a Siberian labour camp after being convicted as a Trotskyist in the late 1930, and tells the story of an idealistic young prosecutor who in response to a secret message from a loyal Bolshevik who has become one of many thousands of fellow party devotees to be incarcerated at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937. In the course of his investigation, he uncovers a web of corruption in the local NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and his sense of public service and commitment to the original ideals of the Revolution brings his concerns to his superiors in the State Prosecution Offices in Moscow. But he is gradually but steadily enveloped in the labyrinthine of intrigue, malfeasance and paranoia that was the culture of the Stalinist judicial system – office politics with lethal outcomes. The film shows how he is progressively sucked into a vortex of suspicion and risk culminating in the denouement of his own arrest.
Alexander Kornev, a newly appointed idealistic prosecutor in his 20s just out of university receives a rare, undestroyed letter from a prisoner named Stepniak, an old Bolshevik unjustly imprisoned in Block 84 for Political Prisoners in Bryansk prison 200 miles southwest of Moscow. The letter describes NKVD corruption, torture, and wrongful convictions. The first hour of the film is taken up with Kornev’s struggles with an obstructive prison management to seek permission to see Stepniak. It is on its own a vignette of the claustrophobia and the argot associated with any prison environment but with the particularly cruel quirks of the Soviet penal system with the jibes directed by prison guards towards the political allegiances of the prisoners and the knowing nods and winks between prison administrative staff about the quirks of the Gulag Archipelago that everyone knows about any yet do not know about. Throughout the prison officials treat Kornev with suspicion and hostility. The prison directors secretly report higher up the chain of command on Kornev’s inquiries placing him in certain jeopardy.
When he finally gets to see Stepniak, he witnesses firsthand the effects of the torture inflicted on him by his erstwhile comrades. The bastinado type bruising inflicted on his feet and ankles; the kaleidoscope of colours and weals that are the results of prolonged assaults on the chest and torso; the injuries inflicted to the head. When Stepniak begins to peel back one of the many lacerations on his skin, the camera mercifully pans away from the scene remaining silent throughout, Kornev listens to a stream of consciousness and cathartic outpourings of the crimes of the comrades; the purging, torture and liquidation of good revolutionaries deemed to belong to whatever faction the Party deemed deviant; Bukharinites, Kamevitres, Zinovievites, Trotskyist-Fascists or any other category artificially created in opposition to whatever current Party orthodoxy was in vogue.
Obsession with factions has always dogged parties of the Marxist and non-Marxist left; think of the factional civil wars that have dogged the British Labour Party, but they have been matters of career peril rather than life or death. Stepniak also details the fiddles around quotas of arrests and misappropriation of state monies within the local NKVD and how the Animal Farm dictum of some being equal but some more equal than others had already taken hold in the world’s first self-proclaimed workers’ state. On his train journey home he hears further confirmation of these social realities from a vox populi of disabled war veterans and those with barely a kopek between them.
So he travels directly to Moscow to appeal directly to Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky. Again he is forced to wait for hours for a meeting, and the film effectively conveys the petty fogging bureaucracy and the sheer opaqueness of the architecture of gatekeepers and clerks that he has to navigate. When he finally presents Stepniak’s case to Vyshinsky, the stony inscrutability of the Prosecutor General’s demeanour and his formulaic responses to the evidence he presents, Kornev realises that the judicial system is designed not to correct errors but to erase them. Vyshinsky who served as the Hanging Judge for Stalin’s purges and would go on to be a joint prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials is of course appraised of Kornev’s career background and his unwelcome interest in and pursuit of allegations of abuses of power in a supposedly egalitarian Utopia.
Kornev’s rubbing up against a regime built on feeding quotas and fabricated evidence will not end well for him. On his journey on the sleeper train back to Bryansk he enters into a - on the surface - jovial encounter with a team of engineers sent on a project to repair infrastructure sabotaged by “wreckers.” Wine flows and we are treated to a rendition of proletarian, revolutionary songs. However, when Kornev and his new accomplices board a taxi in his home town, the atmosphere turns perilous when after his responses to their boorish questions about the reputations of local women and on his own virginity status, he is suddenly arrested after being presumably briefed by one of the stool pigeons that such compulsively self-surveillance (a product of the need for self-preservation) societies generates.
The thematic carapace of the film can be summarised by the question “Where’s the way out?” asked of Kornev by a man, looking lost and terrified inside the maze of offices and corridors in Moscow. For his fear is ours too. [1] It conjures up the image of the perpetual panopticon. There is literally no way out of labyrinthine of unseen, hidden yet unhidden, self-reinforcing, internalising codes of subservience.
The film conveys a stifling claustrophobia as well as an omnipresent dread. Everything about it feels premonitory; a chronicle of the future foretold in real time, from the jibes of the prison guards to the surreal encounters that turn Kornev’s Moscow expedition into the stuff of nightmares[2].
Shooting entirely in Riga, Loznitsa cast actors from different corners of the former USSR, including Alexander Kuznetsov who plays the part of Kornev who fled Ukraine after the full Russian invasion in February 2022 and has lived in exile ever since. It is subtitled and runs for 1 hour 40 minutes. It is a valuable addition to the cinematic canon around the experiences of life under “actually existing socialism.” Regretfully it could not be made or shown in Russia.
[1] Leonaedi Gai” Everything Must Be Said Again” Loznitsa on Two Prosecutors. Notebook Interview MUBI 23 April 2026
[2] Ibid
So he travels directly to Moscow to appeal directly to Prosecutor General Andrey Vyshinsky. Again he is forced to wait for hours for a meeting, and the film effectively conveys the petty fogging bureaucracy and the sheer opaqueness of the architecture of gatekeepers and clerks that he has to navigate. When he finally presents Stepniak’s case to Vyshinsky, the stony inscrutability of the Prosecutor General’s demeanour and his formulaic responses to the evidence he presents, Kornev realises that the judicial system is designed not to correct errors but to erase them. Vyshinsky who served as the Hanging Judge for Stalin’s purges and would go on to be a joint prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials is of course appraised of Kornev’s career background and his unwelcome interest in and pursuit of allegations of abuses of power in a supposedly egalitarian Utopia.
Kornev’s rubbing up against a regime built on feeding quotas and fabricated evidence will not end well for him. On his journey on the sleeper train back to Bryansk he enters into a - on the surface - jovial encounter with a team of engineers sent on a project to repair infrastructure sabotaged by “wreckers.” Wine flows and we are treated to a rendition of proletarian, revolutionary songs. However, when Kornev and his new accomplices board a taxi in his home town, the atmosphere turns perilous when after his responses to their boorish questions about the reputations of local women and on his own virginity status, he is suddenly arrested after being presumably briefed by one of the stool pigeons that such compulsively self-surveillance (a product of the need for self-preservation) societies generates.
The thematic carapace of the film can be summarised by the question “Where’s the way out?” asked of Kornev by a man, looking lost and terrified inside the maze of offices and corridors in Moscow. For his fear is ours too. [1] It conjures up the image of the perpetual panopticon. There is literally no way out of labyrinthine of unseen, hidden yet unhidden, self-reinforcing, internalising codes of subservience.
The film conveys a stifling claustrophobia as well as an omnipresent dread. Everything about it feels premonitory; a chronicle of the future foretold in real time, from the jibes of the prison guards to the surreal encounters that turn Kornev’s Moscow expedition into the stuff of nightmares[2].
Shooting entirely in Riga, Loznitsa cast actors from different corners of the former USSR, including Alexander Kuznetsov who plays the part of Kornev who fled Ukraine after the full Russian invasion in February 2022 and has lived in exile ever since. It is subtitled and runs for 1 hour 40 minutes. It is a valuable addition to the cinematic canon around the experiences of life under “actually existing socialism.” Regretfully it could not be made or shown in Russia.
[1] Leonaedi Gai” Everything Must Be Said Again” Loznitsa on Two Prosecutors. Notebook Interview MUBI 23 April 2026
[2] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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