The Frontline Club and Theatre Royal Plymouth in association with Sputnik Theatre present four nights of new Russian drama. Featuring exciting and topical plays by British theatre directors and cast – translated into English by Sputnik’s artistic director Noah Birksted-Breen. Each evening will touch upon various aspects of life in Russia covering an array of issues, from the clampdown on theatre and freedom of speech to growing social tensions and immigration.

Grandchildren. The Second Act by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky

Running time: 55 mins

How do the grandchildren of prominent Stalinists feel when they find out who their beloved grandparents really were? Interviewed by the playwrights over the last couple of years, the protagonists’ grandparents were from Stalin’s inner circle – or members of the Soviet Communist Party or NKVD – and their testimonies bear witness to the very human desire to forgive those we love, even when we know their worst crimes.

Chaired by Gabriel Gatehouse, BBC foreign correspondent who has extensively covered the Ukrainian – Russian crisis. In June 2015, he conducted an exclusive interview with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in Moscow for Newsnight.

The panel:

Alexandrina Markvo is an art advisor and entrepreneur, and a leading figure in the arts sector in Moscow. She was forced to flee to the UK in April 2014 following persecution by the Russian government – her application for political asylum is currently under consideration by the UK authorities.

Vladimir Ashurkov is executive director at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-profit established in 2011 by prominent Russian opposition politician, Alexey Navalny. On 1 December 2015, the Anti-Corruption Foundation released a film titled Seagull, accusing the general prosecutor Yuri Chaika’s sons of large-scale corruption and connections to organised crime. The film has made waves in both public and political circles and has garnered over 3.5 million views on YouTube to date.

Prior to pursuing civil and political activities, Ashurkov had a career in finance and served as a director at one of Russia’s largest investment groups, Alfa Group Consortium. He was granted political asylum in the UK in April 2015.

Oliver Bullough is a prize-winning writer, broadcaster and journalist, who has written in, around and about the former Soviet world for the last decade and a half. His book The Last Man in Russia: And the Struggle to Save a Dying Nation is about the effect of Stalinism on future generations. Bullough is currently investigating fraud, money-laundering and international corruption.

John Freedman is an American writer, translator, critic, and scholar of Russian drama and theatre. He has been a theatre critic for The Moscow Times since 1992.

Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism.

This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm before a sold-out audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 21 January.

“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” she wondered before starting the book.

“Describe the scene for us,” Kamm began.

“It’s hard,” Applebaum answered. After the war, “the level of physical destruction…you had absolutely flat cities…totally destroyed transportation systems…economies that didn’t function – at all.”

“One of my most interesting interviews…was with a Polish writer… He was a Stalinist [at first], and he described that to me… Everything his parents had told him, and everything his schools had taught him, turned out to be wrong… The army failed. The government failed society collapsed… And that caused a kind of break in his mentality… he said…’you know, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the communists are right’.”

Applebaum described what followed:

“You had no good choices. You couldn’t just decide to be a freedom fighter and stand up for democracy. I mean, you could, then:  A. You would be arrested. B. Your wife would be arrested. C. Your child would get kicked out of college. D. Your mother would be thrown out of the hospital. Because the State had control over so many aspects of society, people had really very bad and hard decisions to make.”

But not even Stalin, totalitarianism’s maestro, couldn’t pull it off.

“The idea is that everyone will become convinced. They will be re-educated…and there will be no opposition… But somehow, it never works…[Even] at the very height of Stalinism in 1951 or ’52, they never actually made it.”

Yet for four decades, the Soviet bloc lived, and its unraveling still boggles Applebaum.

“It all seems so implausible to me. I mean: how did it happen? How can you explain it? Why did Gorbachev do what he did? Why did he just give up that enormous empire? Nobody was making him do it… Really, it could have gone on a lot longer.”

In much subtler shades, it has – under Vladimir Putin.

“He does care a lot, pretty inexplicably, in fact, about Pussy Riot,” Applebaum said. “There is a direct line from Putin to [Yuri] Andropov,” Soviet Ambassador to Budapest during Hungary’s rebellion 1956, and head of the KGB in the early 1980s.

“Putin came of age in Andropov’s KGB… He remembers ’89. He was taught by Andropov, who remembers ’56… The kind of treatment that dissidents or artists got in the Soviet Union in the first half of the ‘80s when Andropov was in power was almost as severe as in Stalin’s time… What was the conclusion? … all of these little groups who you thought weren’t important…you can let them go, [but] it can all unravel, and you can have an armed rebellion.”

Watch the full discussion here:

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The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw was a despised gift from Stalin and after the fall of communism, some suggested pulling it down. Today, the palace is still standing, and is home to a theatre, a concert hall, a cinema, a swimming pool, and hundreds of offices.

Director Tomasz Wolski takes us on a cinematic journey through what is more than just a building: The Palace of Culture and Science is both a reflection of Poland’s everyday life and its rich history. Wolski also shows how the building is kept alive, how the Soviet machines are still working 50 years on.

Urszula Chowaniec, Ph.D., teaches at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she is also head of  eMigrating Lanscapes, a project on literary and artistic representations of emigration. She is currently writing a book on the notion of displacement as seen in literature in post-communist Poland.

Directed by Tomasz Wolski
Duration: 82′
Year: 2012

The evening will start with the short film Returns (PL)

On 10 April 2010, one of the most important dates in modern Polish history, 96 people, including the Polish president and government representatives died in a plane crash near Smolensk. They were on their way to Russia to participate in a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, the mass murder of Polish officers carried out by the NKVD. Returns shows the preparations for the commemoration ceremony, resulting in a film as surreal as the events themselves.

Directed by Krzystof Kadlubowski
Duration: 7′
Year: 2010

900 Days is a haunting documentary about a tragedy that took place 70 years ago in Russia during the blockade of Leningrad. From September 1941 to January 1944, the German army had Leningrad under siege with nearly three million inhabitants were trapped inside the city. During these 900 days approximately one million lives were lost due to mass famine and subzero temperatures.

Through old letters and diaries, survivors recall what life was like in this period and dismantle the myth created by Stalin. For decades they were not allowed to talk about the siege to prevent the undermining of the ‘the land of victors’ illusion, a myth now being revived by President Putin.

Director Jessica Gorter captures the distance between individual memory and the way history can be exploited by politics. She shows how censorship, propaganda and fear can get a grip on people’s memory.

Directed by: Jessica Gorter
Year: 2011
Running Time: 77′

Awards:
Prize of the Interreligious Jury, Visions du Reel 2012
Special Jury Price, ArtDoc 2011
Best Dutch Documentary, IDFA 2011

George Carey brought his Storyville documentary Hitler, Stalin and Mr. Jones to the Frontline Club on Friday night, exploring the life and tragic murder of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935).

Jones grew up in Barry, south Wales, attended Cambridge University on a scholarship, became fluent in Russian and German, and showed a flair for networking into circles of power.

In early 1933, he found himself invited to fly with Hitler and Goebbels across Germany. Carey’s narration:

"Gareth’s diary that day makes for real reading:  ‘The Leader is coming […]  out steps a very ordinary looking man […]  surprised me by his smile: quite intelligent, natural.’"

In mid-air Jones jotted:

"If this aeroplane should crash, the whole history of Germany would change."

But it was Jones’ reporting from the USSR that defined his legacy, and which may have resulted in his death.

Stalin had launched his First Five Year Plan, breaking the back of the Soviet peasantry by enforcing collective farms that required all grain to be given to the State.  Massive famine resulted, but few in the West were aware of such events.

Jones sidestepped Soviet officials, wandering into the Ukrainian countryside himself.  In his diary he noted:  

"Everyone with whom I’ve talked, they all have the same story:  ‘there’s no bread.’"

Upon returning, he issued a press release detailing grisly experiences, of bloated stomachs, lying officials, and death on a scale of millions. His writing fell on deaf ears.  

In the midst of the Great Depression, Communism and Fascism competed with war-weary democracies to provide the most compelling vision of the future.  Many Western intellectuals sided with Communism, and Jones’ report threatened to shatter their dream.

Foreign correspondents at The New York Times and other outlets published denials of Jones’ accounts, thus preserving their ties to Moscow.  The Kremlin banned Jones and wrote scathingly to his major benefactor, former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had launched Jones’ career but then promptly cut ties.

Two years later, Jones was captured and killed by bandits while reporting in Inner Mongolia.  Carey’s film hints that a German double-agent for the Kremlin had befriended and subsequently betrayed Jones.

After Jones’ death, Lloyd George remembered his former protegé:

"I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many.  Nothing escaped his observation […]  he had an almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered."

George’s words haunt in relief against the memory of Jones’ death shared by his niece in the film, and of a letter Jones had written his mother years before.  Jones wrote:

"I should consider myself a flabby little coward if ever I gave up the chance of a good, interesting career, for the mere thought of safety."

Yet his niece remembered the family reacting to the news of Jones’ killing:

"We were all miserable.  It was such a sad thing to have happened.  I don’t suppose that any of us could have expressed how we felt, really and truly.  We were just devastated."

I have read many sagas of Russian families, but Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews has facets that make it poignant. It is both tragedy and love story by a distinguished chronicler of the East. Matthews has covered Moscow for Newsweek since 1997 and has witnessed the Chechen, Bosnian and latest Iraqi wars. He knows something about the drama and tragedy of turbulent times. He also had his own story, his own Russian life. Half-Russian himself, he listened to his family and searched the archives to uncover what happened to his forebears. Stalin’s Children is not one story, but several.  
 
At its heart is the rise and fall of a single Bolshevik, Boris Bibikov, Matthews’ grandfather. He rose in the Bolshevik Party under Stalin, one of the heroic and tough generation who achieved collectivisation and industrialization at a terrible cost. Bibikov was a senior industrialist manager. Stalin’s old friend and industry chief, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, arrived at Bibikov’s factory to inspect it and urge ever greater efforts. Bibikov lived a high energy existence “spending nights at the office for days on end, but also balancing mistresses with his wife.”

Then in 1937, the atmosphere started to change: Bibikov’s boss, Sergo, opposed the rising arrests in his industrial commissariat and confronted Stalin at a Central Committee plenum. The conflict ended with Sergo’s suicide and the start of mass arrests of top officials. Bibikov was the classic and typical victim of the Great Terror, a senior official and loyal Bolshevik, who had experienced the revolution and known leaders other than Stalin. Soon he was arrested and disappeared. The family were told he had been sentenced for a long term but was alive. His daughters, Ludmilla and Lenina, although there was no Stalina, were truly Stalin’s children. They were taken into orphanages, and their story is at the heart of the book.

This is also the story of how Ludmilla fell in love with Matthews’ intellectual father, Mervyn, who found himself drawn into a KGB trap to “turn” him into a spy. He barely escaped. Here also is the story of how Ludmilla and Mervyn struggled to be together.

The last facet of this three generational story is Matthews’ own life as a journalist in the decadent and wild Moscow of the Nineties and how he uncovered his grandfather’s terrible fate. He writes engagingly about the wild frontier town excesses of Moscow Babylon, such as the notorious Hungry Duck night club. Simultaneously, he tells how he found the truth about Bibikov. The family had believed that he had somehow survived for a long time after 1937. They sent him letters and packages for years. Matthews finds his execution warrant, which showed he had been shot soon after his arrest.

Reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore is author of a two-part biography of Stalin and a new novel about three generations of a Russian family, Sashenka. Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War by Owen Matthews is published by Bloomsbury and costs £17.99.