The Soviet theater: a documentary history

Abstract

The Soviet theater: a documentary history, edited by Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky, New Haven CT and London, Yale University Press, 2014, xxiii + 754 pp., US$125.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-300-19476-0Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky have produced an essential, welcome, and muchneeded sourcebook for all scholars - young or grizzled - studying Soviet, especially Russian, theatre. In a task that has taken 20 years, Senelick and Ostrovsky have followed an extensive paper trail. Happily, they have chosen to mimic their subject and, like the Soviet government, interpreted the concept of document in the widest possible sense; thus, they include not only official records, decrees, and other pronouncements, but also protocols, minutes of meetings, excerpts from memoirs, diaries, letters, reviews (occasionally foreign, as well as Soviet), and criticism, in addition to the occasionally quoted passages from plays and satires. This widely cast net has brought home great riches culled from the libraries and archives of the Russian Federation, the United States, and Israel. History comes alive with a multiplicity of voices and opinions: enthusiastic, admonitory, anxious, fearful, officious, declamatory, satiric. Together, these documents are witnesses to the constantly shifting, volatile, and often dangerous, commingled terrain of art and politics in the Soviet period.Indeed, the authors forcefully and necessarily emphasize the complete interconnections of art and politics throughout the whole Soviet period, from the heady days of experimentation through repression to the descent into stagnation. This tome thus provides a necessary corrective to the many English-language books and articles that focus on individuals and fail to recognize the inescapable embeddedness of culture in the politics of the period. As the authors insist in their preface:We are not dealing with independent artists creating in a vacuum, nor even with theater folk responding to the tastes of an audience. Art for art's sake plays no role here. In the USSR, almost from the first, the theater is, in one way or another, a reflection of the government's mood. How theater is to serve society is dictated from above: one may oppose that diktat or find idiosyncratic ways to serve it, but it cannot be avoided, (xi)In the introduction, they reiterate the fact that between 1917 and 1992 politics infused all theatres, traditional or experimental, Party dictated or dissenting, amateur or professional; yet, astonishingly, many extraordinary accomplishments saw the light of day (6).Written with verve and wit, the introduction lays out in a clear, lucid, and concise manner the histoiy of theatre in Russia, beginning with its late arrival in the nineteenth century, its hierarchical structure, and - most significantly - its ardent embrace of moral-ethical imperatives. More than just an entertainment, theatre was to offer moral and spiritual sustenance. This tradition of theatre as a service industry was adopted in the Soviet period, when its arsenal was, above all, to be deployed in serving the ends of socialism and communism. Other carryovers from the tsarist period were the systems of control and censorship, honed and perfected into efficiency by the Bolsheviks. Not simply prohibiting what was harmful, as did their tsarist forebears, the Bolsheviks also went further by prescribing what was wholesome for the community (7).The book is logically divided into 11 chapters corresponding to the generally accepted periodization of Soviet history, each prefaced by a succinct and incisive mini introduction: The Revolution, 1917-1919; The Civil War, 1919-1921; The New Economic Policy, 1921-1926; Stalin Consolidates Power, 1926-1927; The First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932; The Second Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror, 1933-1938; The Great Patriotic War, 1939-1945; The Cold War Begins, 1946-1953; The So-called Thaw and the Refrigeration, 1954-1963; Innovation within Stagnation, 1964-1984; Glasnost' and Perestroika, 1985-1992. …