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| Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875-1933) |
At the beginning of his service, there was actually a period
of considerable freedom of expression, and whereas there weren’t a lot of great
plays written in Russia after the death of Anton Chekhov, there were certainly
some good ones, and thanks to the likes of directors like Konstantin Stanislavky,
Vsevelod Meyerhold, Alexandr Tairov, Fyodor Kommissarzhevky, Mikhail Chekhov, and
Yevgeny Vakhtangov the Russian theatre was universally regarded as the best in
the world.
But then the restrictions came. Beginning about 1918, Socialist Realism, the idea that aesthetic concerns should be secondary to political ones, gradually became the de facto policy. (One of Curmie’s mentors in Russian theatre, a woman who was born in what was then called Leningrad, called these “boy meets tractor plays.”) Chekhov and Kommissarzhevky left the country; Stanislavsky, whose worldwide acclaim made him a little more impervious to governmental threats, did what he could to protect his friends and fellow artists, but his efforts, though significant, were rather like Cú Chulainn fighting the waves.
Socialist Realism wasn’t the official policy until 1934 (a year after Lunacharsky’s death), but it wasn’t a good idea to be even apolitical after the ascension of Stalin in 1924. Tairov found that out the hard way, getting into and out of trouble repeatedly, not for being counter-revolutionary, but for not being revolutionary enough.
Even
having been a champion of the cause wasn’t enough to save you. Just as Leon Trotsky was exiled by Stalin,
organizations like Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers,
once advocates for precisely the kind of censorship Stalin wanted, were also
suppressed. Meyerhold, once the most
outspoken Communist of the leading Russian theatre artists, was arrested in
1939 and executed a few months later.
Let me repeat: it wasn’t enough not
to do something the powers-that-be didn’t like.
If you didn’t want to end up in Siberia (or worse), you had to be an
active supporter of whatever Papa Joe happened to be thinking at a given moment
in time.
So why is Curmie writing about all this? Well, because he thought you might like a brief theatre history lesson, of course. After all, he has said that he’s not going to write about the Manchurian Cantaloupe and the Muskrats. If you start thinking about the Russian connection, the purges of career civil servants, that whole business at the Treasury Department, the perfect storm of narcissism and incompetence at the upper levels of government and the sloth and cowardice of the people who could put a stop do this nonsense… well, that’s entirely on you, Gentle Reader. 😉
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