From Bashkim Trenova
Part Twenty‑Eight
– NAZIBOLSHEVISM – LITERATURE AND THE ARTS –
FOREWORD
Memorie.al / Historians, political philosophers, intellectuals of various schools or positions have devoted thousands upon thousands of pages, entire volumes, studies and articles to the comparison between Nazism and Communism. In general, their publications and studies focus on the police control of society by these dictatorships, the role of the dictatorial state hierarchy and the head of state as suppressors of free thought, the omnipresence of official propaganda in society, the mass massacres and the network of concentration camps, the activity of the police – the NKVD in the USSR (later the KGB) and the Gestapo in the Third Reich. In his book *Le Passé d’une illusion* (The Past of an Illusion), François Furet notes that Nazism and Communism share the same opposition to liberal democracy and to what they call “capitalist bourgeoisie”. Both ideologies claim to be socialist and use the image of socialism. Communist countries called themselves “socialist”. “Nazism” is an abbreviation of National Socialism.
Continued from the previous issue
THEATRE
Earlier, in 1936, the works of playwright Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov were also banned, after he was personally and very severely criticised by Stalin. Bulgakov’s play Кабала святош (The Cabal of the Hypocrites) was performed on 16 February 1936 and was very successful. But on 9 March, an article in Pravda dedicated to this performance described the play as “attractive on the surface, deceptive in depth”. In October of that year, Bulgakov left the Moscow Art Theatre, calling it in his diary “the grave of my plays”. During these years, the plays of Evgeny Lvovich Schwartz were also added to the list of banned works. The year 1939 was filled with trials and punishments of Soviet writers, poets and playwrights. On 15 May 1939, the poet and playwright Isaac Babel was arrested.
Under torture, he denounced Ehrenburg, Konstantin Fedin, Leonid Leonov and others. Later he retracted these violently extracted confessions. Isaac Babel, aged 45, was shot on 27 January 1940. He, too, has no grave. In the years 1937‑1939, the Bolsheviks continued arrests and killings. They arrested the director Aleksei Diky, one of the fanatical communist authors. In October 1937, playwright Ivan Kondratievich Mikitenko was arrested accused of being an “enemy of the people”. Two weeks after his arrest, he was found dead from gunshots. According to the authorities, Mikitenko had committed suicide. During 1939, specifically on 20 June 1939, Vsevolod Meyerhold, theatre director, was arrested. Meyerhold was sent directly to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow.
“They made me lie face down on the ground. They beat the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my legs from above,” he writes in his letter to Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. Terribly tortured, he declared that he had been recruited by the writer Ilya Ehrenburg into a Trotskyist organisation in which Leonov, Pasternak, the composer Shostakovich and the director Eisenstein had participated. According to Meyerhold’s statements, the organisation had given information to the British and Japanese secret services. Later he retracted these “confessions” and signed only those that concerned him.
The totalitarian regime would not be satisfied with that. Three weeks after his arrest, “unknown” men entered the playwright’s apartment and brutally stabbed his wife, Zinaida, who died of her wounds. Meyerhold, meanwhile, was tried on 1 February 1940, immediately after Mikhail Koltsov (writer), accused of espionage. Both Meyerhold and Koltsov were shot on 2 February 1940. His work was declared “alien to the Soviet people”. His burnt body was thrown into a mass grave at the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow.
Before arresting Meyerhold, the Bolsheviks closed his theatre. Earlier they had also closed the second studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by M. Chekhov, as well as Leningrad’s TRAM. The man who refused to abandon his belief in communism was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1955. Other theatre directors, playwrights and actors were arrested and ended up in the Stalinist gulags.
Among them we can mention Leondi Varpakovski, who survived thanks to the theatre. “It is accepted to say that in the Gulag, everything is possible,” writes Solzhenitsyn in the eighteenth chapter of *The Gulag Archipelago*! In fact, on two pages the writer speaks about the gulag theatres, composed of troupes of arrested professional actors (there were thousands of them). The most famous, in his view, was that of Mavrino, directed by the MVD colonel Mamulov.
Amateur theatre troupes were formed in many camps of Soviet Russia, such as in the Pechora camps, where Yuri Kogeviny became director. The hall of that theatre had 420 seats, plus four boxes on a higher level reserved for the local gulag administration. The troupe did not perform pieces from the Russian repertoire but, above all, plays written by Yuri Kogeviny, in which no character had a Russian name. Children of the gulag, Yuri and his sister were declared “enemies of the people”.
The repressive and discriminatory policy of the Bolsheviks towards theatre, playwrights, actors and their directors continued even after the Second World War. In 1946, the playwright Mikhail Zoshchenko was expelled from the Writers’ Union and forbidden to publish. During that year, the Party “uncovered” a so‑called “anti‑patriotic theatre group”. The year also began with a harsh anti-Semitic campaign against so‑called “rootless cosmopolitanism”. Solomon Mikhoels, actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre (GOSET) for 20 years, did not escape it. He was executed in 1948.
In 1953, it was seen that the central authorities in charge of controlling theatre repertoires did not allow the publication or staging of 1,200 plays. In the following years, the condemnation of playwrights, theatres and dramatic works continued. In 1956, the play Фабричная Джевочка (The Factory Girl) written by Alexander Moiseyevich Volodin was condemned. It tells the moving story of four Russian girls – Zhenya, Lelya, Nadya and Ira – who believe in love and defend the right to a private life. The accusations are the same, the same stamp, as in previous years: “slander against the pure and healthy Soviet society”.
Another example of Soviet censorship is certainly Живой (Alive), written by Boris Mozhayev. The action of the play takes place in the early 1950s, in a Russian village near Nizhny Novgorod. It deals with the miserable and irregular incomes of the peasants, the lack of pensions, the incompetence and carelessness of the administrative staff. The central character, an intelligent and capable man just returned from the front, must fight against bureaucratic distortions.
The performance was banned by the then Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva. Furtseva, accompanied by a suite of thirty‑four people, attended a rehearsal of the first act. After this act, she declared the play anti‑Soviet, claiming it attacked the political power and deformed life in the village. She also condemned the “subversive” role of the Taganka Theatre, which had undertaken to stage the piece. In the eyes of the censors, Alive discredited the socialist system. On 12 March 1969, by means of a decree, the performance was declared ideologically suspect. The play was removed from the repertoire.
In subsequent years, the same policy, the same censorship, the same persecution exercised by the Soviet authorities towards theatre can be observed. In 1973, the stage version Деревянные кони (Wooden Horses) was blocked by the censors, who demanded the removal of the dekulakisation episode. “The Party and the Soviet power,” the censors emphasised, “pursuing a determined class policy in the countryside and relying on the support of the masses, broke the resistance of the kulaks, taking extreme measures against them. This is material for a performance about the history of the Revolution.
“This great political process of the years 1928‑1929 must not be evoked in a few lines that, moreover, mention only the negative sides, the excesses committed at that time. (…) Through the character of Pelageya, we can show absolutely what is new and progressive in the life of the Soviet village. (…) We ask you to take our wishes into account in the final adapted work.”
Cuts are also requested regarding post‑war repressions, supposedly “incomprehensible to the young”. Censorship also declares unnecessary the banquet scene where the guests get drunk, as well as Pelageya’s monologue about the poverty of the collective farmers. According to the Bolshevik censors, ugly, poorly dressed elderly peasant women should not be allowed to be part of a performance dedicated to the Soviet village.
When speaking of censorship and persecution in the Soviet theatre, one cannot fail to mention here also the role of the political police – the KGB, as well as its predecessors, the Cheka, GPU and NKVD, as a faithful weapon in the hands of the Party to crush the agencies and its many‑coloured and ubiquitous enemies! The Soviet political police sought and recruited agents and informers in all environments, in all spheres of social life.
Mikhail Kozakov, a famous and very devout actor of the Sovremennik Theatre, wrote his memoirs in 1995, in which he also tells how he was recruited by the KGB in 1956 and how he cooperated with it until 1983. To convince him, the KGB promised the actor that it would never use him against Soviet people, and that it needed his help to “fight against the external enemy, American imperialism”. Those who undertook to convince the actor also assured him that if he helped, he would be “freer than others”.
Indeed, from the end of the 1950s, the KGB gave those who agreed to cooperate with it the opportunity to travel to the West – that is, to have access to what remained forbidden for the vast majority of their compatriots. As a reward for his cooperation, as early as 1957 Mikhail Kozakov took part in a festival in Canada, and later he would travel to other countries. For his part, Kozakov asked the KGB for only one thing: that his son serves in the Soviet Army theatre, instead of being sent to Afghanistan. In his memoirs he admits: “The KGB helped me a lot with this.”
The actor received a specific assignment in 1958: he had to seduce an American female journalist. For this, the KGB sent him to Crimea for two weeks, all expenses paid, but under surveillance. However, Kozakov did not fulfil his mission. “After that, the KGB did not entrust him with any specific task for a long time, but sometimes ‘we’ would call him and ‘we’ would meet him in a hotel, in an apartment or on the street.
“Then ‘we’ would ask him what he thought about the Americans he met during evenings at the embassy. And if the KGB does not ask him questions about the Soviets present at these evenings, this happens, Kozakov will emphasise, because it already knows everything, including how the actor himself has behaved.”
Kozakov relates how, from the end of 1960, all the personalities of the Sovremennik Theatre were invited by the KGB to a special hotel on Chekhov Street. After performing in front of 100‑150 political police officers, the guests were called to a banquet. In his memoirs, among other things, Kozakov writes: “While we were eating and drinking vodka (and also cognac), the high‑ranking person in the place of honour (he was in civilian clothes) began to speak with us about theatre, culture and literature. Being under the influence of alcohol fumes, and driven by the friendly tone of the conversation, we sincerely told him everything about ourselves.”
According to Kozakov, meetings of this kind were also held with other Moscow theatres. In 1983, Mikhail Kozakov went to Austria. The KGB understood that the actor would take the opportunity to call his friend, the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who had immigrated to Paris, and asked him to advise Nekrasov to return to the USSR, promising that he would be well received there. Kozakov does not advise Nekrasov to return to the USSR. In Moscow, he is summoned by the KGB and realises that they know everything the actor did and said in Austria.
After Stalin’s death, the KGB no longer followed some of the practices of the past. Nevertheless, the essence did not change. After the end of the USSR, the daughter of Alexander Galich, a talented playwright who emigrated in 1974, was allowed to consult her father’s KGB file. As she herself admits, she felt “a terrible shock”.
Indeed, the denunciations collected there, signed with pseudonyms – some of which have been deciphered – testify that the authors were part of the same circles, the same milieu as Alexander Galich, and that the KGB had undoubtedly offered them certain privileges in exchange for their reports. “Agents” and “informers” were numerous.
No study of the relationship between art and politics in the USSR, or of any other problem of Stalinist or post‑Stalinist society, can be complete without mentioning the role of the KGB in shaping, controlling and verifying norms, practices, works and individuals. But this is not the object of this publication, which merely gives a general idea of this role, including in the field of theatre. / Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
