The Courtroom Sketch: Journalism and Justice in Literaturnaia Gazeta

In the decades following Stalin’s death, the newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta shaped Soviet legal culture through the genre of the courtroom sketch (sudebnyi ocherk), a blend of fact-based reportage, personal memoir, literary narration, and social commentary aimed at the task of working through thorny questions of morality and legality. This article traces the emergence and early evolution of the genre from 1964, when it became a graphically delineated rubric, to 1970, when the newspaper hosted an extended debate on the role of the advocate (advokat, or defense attorney) in Soviet society. In the context of ongoing discussions of judicial reforms, the courtroom sketch endorsed the legal principles of the right to counsel and the presumption of innocence. It did so not only through analytical argument but also by rhetorically modeling the adversarial process of representation and judgment that reformers hoped to strengthen in the pretrial criminal investigation. The adversarial form of the courtroom sketch illustrated how a court that was genuinely committed to justice should function and, in the process, asserted the authority of journalists to sit in judgment on the judicial institutions of the state.