Springtime for Stalin

Russian Playwright Artur Solomonov on his Country’s Response to Putin

By Steven Leigh Morris

Some five years before the Russian army was amassing troops along the Ukrainian border, Russian journalist-novelist-playwright Artur Solomonov was commissioned by a Russian theater to write a satirical play about his nation’s earlier despot, Joseph Stalin. Even then, the director got anxious about the official reaction to the lampoon, and the show never went on. 

In March of this year, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine got underway, accompanied by the Russian president’s Stalin-esque crackdowns on public protest against all public speech opposing it. Meanwhile, Solomonov’s subsequent play, How We Buried Joseph Stalin, and inspired by that earlier experience in the theater, was taking flight, as it responded to a kind of climate change within Russia — what Solomonov describes as a rediscovered love within Russia of authoritarianism in general, and Stalin in particular.

Solomonov describes the mood in the Russian theaters in the wake of the invasion as “complete shock . . . the realization that our way of life has ended.”

In March of this year, however, Solomonov was invited to Tel Aviv for a reading of How We Buried Joseph Stalin. Throughout the bloodshed in Ukraine, Solomonov has remained in Israel, and spoke with Stage Raw from Jersusalem. (His English-language interpreter, Natasha Seyfi joined us from Vancouver, Canada.)

How We Buried Joseph Stalin has now been published in three languages by the Austrian publishing house danzig&unfried. (Ross Valley Theatre in Marin County recorded an English-language Zoom reading of the play.) It satirizes how Russia simply can’t be rid, spiritually, of the genocidal despot.

(Stalin lay in a tomb next to Lenin for decades, was discredited by the comparatively liberal president Nikita Kruschchev. Stalin’s embalmed corpse was removed under cover of darkness from the tomb in 1961 and interred in a plot outside the Kremlin walls. His grave was then covered with cement in order to ensure that he would never return.)

And yet he has returned, and that is Solomonov’s joke, though in the context of Vladimir Putin’s demonization of the West, his actions in Ukraine, and his subsequent banishment of foreign press, his threats of incarcerating anybody who speaks out in public against the regime, what a grim joke it is.

Still, Solomonov defends Russian stage, movie and TV stars who have spoken out in support of Putin and his war. “It’s not necessarily what they believe,” Solomonov says, “They have no choice,” in a nation governed once again by internal terror.

“Choice” is a key word. They have a choice. The choice is whether or not to risk the career-ending and potentially life-crushing consequences of their words and deeds, framed within the calculus of who around them will compromise and submit. Among the choices is lion-hearted bravery, as in the choices made by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who sits in a Moscow prison with a nine-year sentence – having returned to Moscow after surviving being poisoned in August 2020 by agents of the Russian security service (FSB) in Tomsk, Russia with the nerve-agent Novichok. Or in the case of Russian journalist and human rights activist Anna Politovskaya, gunned down outside her Moscow apartment in 2006.

And then there’s the choice made by Russian star actor-director Nikita Mikhalkov, who not only continues to praise Putin but is advocating for the Russian president’s theory that Ukraine is infiltrated by Nazis, and that Putin, like Stalin, is battling a Western-supported swastika-bearing menace, as in World War II.

A war is never just a battle for territory, but the battle for a prevailing narrative, regardless of how fantastical.

In March, 2021, Soviet and Russian journalist (and former member of parliament) Alexander Glebovich Nevzorov recorded this prescient take-down of Putin’s then-plans to invade Ukraine, predicting with stunning accuracy, a year in advance, not only the numbers of Russian troops that would be lost in the first seven days, but the scale of corruption and ineptitude within the Russian military. Putin’s military analysts, he said, play on an imaginary piano, their faces impersonating the rapture of Van Cliburn, “but then some bastard comes along and sticks a real piano under their hands, and that’s when the humiliation begins.” Nevzorov is currently “under investigation” by the Russian authorities.

Solomonov predicts that the outcome of Putin’s tragic miscalculation will be national humiliation for decades to come – the kind of decentralization that Moscow loathes, as Russia has neither the resources nor the energy to retain its former empire.

“Russia is a diverse nation,” Solomonov says – fully cognizant of what that adjective means in the West. His use of the word “diverse” is a riff: “We have people living in the 21^st century, others living in the 20^th century, and others living in the 19^th.” Because of that diversity, he suggests, Russia’s inevitable contraction is going to be a “long and painful process, as Moscow will be compelled to get along with other Russian-speaking republics” rather than dominating them.

All of this is a cautionary tale for the United States, and for its sporadic love affair with domestic authoritarianism – each time coming in the wake of a progressive administration: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s career-and-life-destroying anti-Communist witch-hunts — ironically using a particularly Russian brand of internal terror to weed out perceived communism from American shores — came in the wake of the decades-long FDR administration, with its expansion of the Supreme Court to counter conservative domination, its creation of Social Security and federally-funded public works anti-poverty programs. It’s also true that Lefty FDR authorized the incarceration of American citizens into prison camps simply on the basis of their Japanese heritage. Tyranny is a serpent.

Russia’s curse is that authoritarianism is woven into its historical DNA, whereas – despite our extremely spotty implementation of them – democracy, a free press and free speech are woven into ours. Even if being non-White still comes with a variety of systemic dangers in the U.S, we can nonetheless speak out against our president without fear of jail or death. This was almost never the case in Russia, despite its waves of liberalism. Whether or not we can continue to keep authoritarianism at bay will be the test of our character, and of our times.

The interview with Artur Solomonov will be posted on Animal Farm in early April.