Meaning
A trial whose verdict is predetermined by the state and whose proceedings are staged as political theatre rather than as a genuine test of evidence. Confessions, often coerced, are performed in public so that the outcome serves as an example and a warning to would-be dissidents. Strongly pejorative and almost always used of other people's justice; also common attributively (a show-trial conviction). Calling a trial a show trial implies the confession and evidence are worthless because the verdict was fixed in advance. Kangaroo court, already catalogued here, is a rough near-synonym but stresses sham procedure rather than political display. Regional use: Global English; strongest historical association with the Soviet Union and other authoritarian states.
Origin
Coined in the Soviet era but before its most famous trials: the OED's earliest evidence for show trial is from 1928, in the Times of India, and Merriam-Webster independently gives 1928 as first known use - so the English word predates the Moscow trials of August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938, with which it is inseparably linked. Wikipedia traces the term to the Russian for a demonstration trial: as early as 1922 Lenin advocated staging several model trials in Soviet Russia, and the device became a fixture of Stalin's repressions, most notoriously the three Moscow Trials of the Great Purge. Earlier political prosecutions - of Thomas More, Charles I, Louis XVI - are often retroactively labelled show trials, but the label itself is a twentieth-century coinage.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- show trials
- staged trial
- trial for show
Usage Examples
- Human rights groups denounced the espionage proceedings as a show trial staged to silence the opposition press.
- Broadcast confessions and a pre-written verdict turned the courtroom into a show trial in every sense.
- Western diplomats walked out of the hearing, calling it a Soviet-style show trial.