Outraged lawyer Alexander Kornyev, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov, trapped in a bureaucratic maze
Some of the most frightening films are not based on the depiction of actual violence or gory special effects. Instead, they work by referencing our fears about the world around us now—and what it might become.
So it is with The Two Prosecutors, a Russian language period drama set amid the 1937 show trials in Joseph Stalin’s Russia.
The film opens with guards in a Soviet prison in the city of Bryansk ordering an elderly inmate to burn sacks of prisoners’ appeal letters.
One is from an “old Bolshevik from before the revolution.” He appeals to “Comrade Stalin” to come to his aid after the NKVD secret police fitted him up as a supporter of the “Trotsky‑Zinoviev faction.”
One catches the inmate’s eye. It is written in blood by a prisoner called Stepniak and it demands redress for false imprisonment.
This note escapes the fire and finds its way to the newly qualified local prosecutor Alexander Kornyev, played by Aleksandr Kuznetsov.
Enticed by the letter, Kornyev eventually secures an interview with its author in his cell in the special wing for political prisoners.
To get there, Kornyev must worm his way through a maze of anonymous, dark corridors that reek of brutality yet remain eerily silent.
From his cell, Stepniak tells of how he, a veteran of the 1917 revolution, came to be incarcerated, brutalised and tortured. In doing so, he tells the story of the degeneration of the revolution itself.
Stepniak had been a senior Soviet lawyer and someone who believed in the Bolshevik justice system. The sense of outrage that he, and soon Kornyev, share assumes that truth has somehow been subverted.
In a line that resonates with our own times, Stepniak rages at the way “honest, knowledgeable experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans.”
Kornyev is quickly on a Moscow‑bound train in an attempt to bring news of the scandal in Bryansk to the attention of state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, played by Anatoliy Beliy. The journey provides the film’s only moments of light relief.
In Moscow, as in the prison, Kornyev has to travel through a warren of corridors before finally reaching the prosecutor’s office.
And just like in the prison, he waits for hours. Only then can he make his explosive allegation—that counter‑revolutionaries in the NKVD are using torture and imprisonment to undermine justice.
Vyshinsky hears Kornyev’s story but orders him back to Bryansk for more evidence.
Unknown to Kornyev—and not indicated in the film—Vyshinsky was the real state prosecutor during Stalin’s show trials.
And under his authority, all the old Bolshevik leadership were put to the sword.
Two men are already sitting in his compartment when Kornyev boards the train home. They are cheery and welcoming, and have food and alcohol, and sing together.
The men describe themselves as engineers fixing the work of factory “saboteurs.” But they are far from what they seem.
And by now viewers are all too aware that Kornyev, the young believer, is heading for a fall.
Two Prosecutors is a damning indictment of Stalinism and how it devoured the pioneers of October.
- Two Prosecutors is available to stream now
