Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Amiel

The knife twist is in the phrase "lucky enough, if you will". Amiel borrows the language of privilege to describe something grotesque: that under a politicized justice system, the rare "luck" is not freedom but the procedural theater of a trial. It is a sly, journalistic inversion that exposes how authoritarian states hollow out normal expectations. When due process becomes exceptional, its presence reads less like a right than a concession.

The line works because it toggles between clipped understatement and indictment. "Among those people" sounds almost bureaucratic, like a footnote in a report. Then comes the devastating statistic-by-implication: "not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution". Even if you quibble with the absolute, the rhetorical move is clear: the outcome is pre-decided. Trials are not instruments for discovering truth; they're instruments for displaying power.

The subtext is aimed as much at comfortable Western readers as at Soviet history. Amiel isn't only describing a past regime; she's warning about the seductions of ideological certainty and the ease with which legal systems can be repurposed as moral pageants. The reference to "several historians" is a strategic appeal to authority that also hints at archival fog and contested numbers, which makes the absolutism feel less like a fact claim and more like a moral summary: when the state defines dissent as treason, acquittal is logically impossible.

Contextually, the Bolshevik Revolution stands in as the origin point of a modern political technology: show trials, coerced confessions, punishment disguised as procedure. The chilling point is that the courtroom still exists; justice is what’s been abolished.