Tom Streithorst
The fearsome dictator: why did he spare Bulgakov?
Stalin’s favourite play, The White Guard, opens next week in London and it is magnificent. No, don’t worry, it’s not about tractors, or Stakhanovite workers, or even the glorious Red army. Quite the contrary. The play is an ode to the bourgeois intelligentsia destroyed by the revolution. The Bolsheviks come out very badly, described as men “with no name, no past, no love… born of loneliness and frustration.” So why did Stalin admire this play, watch it 20 times, insist it be revived at the Moscow Art theatre, and—most uncharacteristically of all—not order the murder of its anti-Soviet author?
Mikhail Bulgakov, best know for his magical realist novel The Master and Margarita, based the play on his own family: proud Russians, committed supporters of the old order, soldiers of the White Guard, loyal to the tsar. Bulgakov (1891-1940) was the eldest son of a liberal professor at Kiev’s theological seminary. Both his grandparents were priests. Educated, cultured, and middle class, the family enjoyed theatre, opera, and literature. War and revolution destroyed their world.
The play opens in the Turbins’ large and comfortable apartment as they and their friends eat, sing songs, drink vodka, flirt, philosophise, laugh at each others jokes, and fret about the future. Outside is chaos; inside, their old world is still alive. Bulgakov believed the intelligentsia was “the best social stratum in our country.” You cannot watch this play and not feel heartbroken at the destruction of the civilization of pre-revolutionary Russia.
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
Clinging to Stalin
John Sweeney’s documentary on the return of Stalin-worshipping in Russia, which aired last night on BBC2 and can now be viewed on iPlayer, raises some provocative questions about the writing—and rewriting—of history. Is it so very shocking that Stalin was voted third greatest Russian ever in a nationwide TV poll last year? Shocking or otherwise, it’s a valuable reminder that, whatever our cosy liberal perception of Stalin in the west, his legacy in Russia is very different.
As Arkandy Ostrovksy wrote in “Flirting with Stalin,” his Prospect cover story in September 2008, Russia has been suffering from a worrying “absence of an indigenous ideology” since the mid 1990s—and this gap is being filled by an “old-fashioned nationalism, a neo-Stalinism in costume.” Moreover, it is this nostalgia for former-Soviet greatness that “brought Russian tanks into Georgia and scares most of Russia’s neighbours.”
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Elizabeth Kirkwood
The Brandenburg Gate, 10th November 1989
To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall we’ve made several articles from Prospect’s archive free to read online.
For an overview of the complex cross-currents that fed into the collapse of the Soviet Union see historian Victor Sebestyen’s profile of its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in “The accidental hero of 1989”. A man of huge and fascinating contradictions, Gorbachev, and his particular form of communism, played a far greater role in the end of the USSR than the western powers of the time may have cared to admit. And while he is revered in the west as a hero, this reputation is based on failure: his failure to reform the system he passionately believed in.
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Tomas Hirst
Cult leader: the long process of de-Stalinization continues
We need to stop talking about political divisions in the heart of United Russia, and appreciate that Dmitry Medvedev’s speech against Stalin-era crimes is a truly brave step.
A brief visit to Red Square might leave many in the West confused; Stalin’s tomb, separated from Lenin’s only eight years after his death, remains one of the best decorated with tokens from his still enamoured supporters.
Let us not underestimate the scale to which he is still revered in the country. In December last year Josef Stalin was voted the third most popular Russian in a nationwide poll conducted on state television.
Seen by the West as a puppet of the former president and current prime minister, Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s touching on a subject as sensitive as the heritage of such an emotive figure might seem alien to such a definition.
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Hans Kundnani
Katyn opens in cinemas today
Katyn, the Oscar-nominated film by the octogenarian Polish director Andrzej Wajda that opens in the UK today, can be seen as a 20th century version of the story of Antigone – the woman who defies the city-state of Thebes by giving her dead brother a fitting burial. In this version of the myth, there are thousands of dead who have already been buried—by bulldozers. They make a different, even more basic demand of the living: to speak the truth about how they died and in particular at whose hands. In Wajda’s film, Creon, the king of Thebes, is both Hitler and Stalin.
Katyn tells the story of the massacre by the Red Army of 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in a forest near Smolensk in 1940. The massacre—in which Wajda’s own father was killed—was discovered by the Germans three years later after they had invaded the Soviet Union. Joseph Goebbels immediately used it for propaganda purposes: the Nazis saw in it the chance to create fear about Bolshevik domination of Europe and to create a split between the allies. The Russians, meanwhile, blamed the fascists for the massacre. It was only after the end of the cold war that the Kremlin admitted the truth. Read more »
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