Here's the man himself standing in the foyer of the Noel Coward theatre, where the Sovremennik's short season opened last night. This is a free artistic choice by the Moscow theatre company and nothing to do with Roman Abramovich, who sponsored the visit, or Cameron Mackintosh, who owns the theatre, I'm told. Artsbridge, the production company behind the visit, emailed me to say the statue is part of the set for Into The Whirlwind, based on Evgenia Ginzburg's classic Gulag memoir, and 'is representative of the esteem held for Stalin durng this period and the realisation of the horrors later in life'. It's part of the play, in other words, and not a publicity stunt. On either side of Stalin are red banners singing his praises (see below) but no other written material or explanation.
I won't be seeing the play, alas, as I'm busy with my own production of a play set in Russia at a fringe theatre a couple of miles away. And the tickets are out of my price range anyway. So I can't judge how the display in the foyer relates to the anti-Stalinist play on stage. My initial reaction is that the statue is the kind of kitsch you might see in the kind of Moscow restaurant frequented by lesser oligarchs, but that's just my taste. When I decorated the Courtyard theatre bar for my own play with Soviet-era posters, I decided to leave out Stalin on grounds of taste -- though A MORNING WITH GUY BURGESS features a bust of Lenin on stage. You can, of course, turn images of Stalin into art, as Komar and Melamid did with their Nostalgic Socialist Realism series of dream-like portraits in the early 1980s.
Why? It shouldn't be necessary to remind people of Stalin's status as one of the 20th century's two great mass murderers, though some veteran supporters of the Soviet system like Eric Hobsbawm might prefer to gloss over his crimes. Read Robert Conquest's classic books or Timothy Snyder's outstanding new history Bloodlands about the joint destruction of eastern Europe by Hitler and Stalin, and it's impossible to part the two dictators with a cigarette paper. This moral equivalence was very much in my mind as I wrote the story of Burgess, who spied for Stalin for nearly two decades but hated life in the Soviet Union. So the question remains -- would it be okay to put a portrait of Hitler up in the foyer of a theatre for a production of an anti-Nazi play such as Brecht's Arturo Ui? Personally, I wouldn't, though I accept other people who share my views on the dictators might make a different choice.
I'm not advocating any kind of censorship here, and I'm all in favour of the artist's right to offend and disturb. But images such those of Hitler and Stalin are extremely powerful, and I'm left a bit queasy when they are used to help sell anything -- even theatre tickets.
Make up your own minds.
Here are the slogans:
'Long live comrade Stalin - father of all peoples, our friend and teacher'
'Let us elect to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR the best people, devoted to the end to the cause of Lenin and Stalin'