Two Prosecutors

Soviet Union, 1937. Thousands of letters from detainees falsely accused by the regime are burned in a prison cell. Against all odds, one reaches its destination: the newly appointed local prosecutor Alexander Kornev. What follows is a haunting historical drama about the workings of evil bureaucracy in Stalin’s Russia.  

Kornev is an idealistic young lawyer who is promoted to a state prosecutor role. He has received a bizarre ‘letter’ from an ageing and ill high security prisoner, written in blood on a piece of torn cardboard. According to the letter, the security services, the NKVD, are using the prisons and judicial system to torture and murder an entire older generation of party veterans. The goal is to bring in a fanatically loyal cohort of Stalin loyalists – however incompetent they might be.

After meeting the prisoner, a horrified Kornev gets on a train to Moscow to raise his concerns with the highest possible authority. His quest for justice will take him all the way to the office of the Attorney General in Moscow. But at the height of the great Stalinist purges, this plunges him into the terrifying corridors of a totalitarian regime. Directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, and based on a story by dissident author and scientist Georgy Demidov, who was held in the gulag for fourteen years.