“It took me years to make sense of my own history, and Russian society will take a similar time.”– Vladimir Ashurkov, Russian opposition politician

In collaboration with Theatre Royal Plymouth and the Sputnik Theatre, on Thursday 14 January the Frontline Club presented a staged reading of Grandchildren: The Second Act by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky as part of its Power, Politics & Performance in Russia series.

Told through a series of overlapping testimonies, Grandchildren explores how people construct and ultimately justify the actions of family members who – as members of Stalin’s inner circle or of the secret police – contributed to the atrocities and purges of the Soviet era.

Chairing the subsequent debate that covered the performance itself and the question of collective memory, BBC foreign correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse began by asking the panel what parallels they saw between the period depicted in the play and contemporary Russia.

John Freedman, theatre critic and former theatre critic for The Moscow Times, said that one of the strengths of the piece was that it “points no fingers, it has no answers, it does not say somebody is guilty or innocent.”

“What it messes with is life and the reality of a life that people live. Any one of us can look back into our own pasts and find difficult moments that we rationalise.”

And it was this, said Freedman, that causes him to despair, “because I see the same thing happening now. People around me are finding the exact same answers to similar questions.”

Writer and broadcaster Oliver Bullough stressed that each nation seeks to define itself by its past, but that in the case of Russia it is far harder to simplify into didactic terms and to challenge the narrative that has already been established. “People need stories to live their live by,” he said, “in order to make sense of it.”

Watching the Sputnik Theatre performance at #FrontlineClub with Cameren – Power, Politics & Performance in Russia pic.twitter.com/w0iNfLAhKv

— Catie Dear (@Catie_Dear) January 14, 2016

Touching on a recurring theme that a lack of lustration – a process of reckoning akin to the Nuremberg trials – was one of the primary causes of the current situation in Russia today, Vladimir Ashurkov, a prominent opposition politician and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, said this is perhaps best illustrated by the resurgence in mass support for Stalin.

Russians have a long history of authoritarianism, said Ashurkov, but key is the role that government plays. “It can take steps to bring people closer, to make sense of their history and to be in touch with reality.”

He added that, over the past 15 years, the Russian government has sought to rehabilitate the cult of Stalin as a means of inspiring and imposing a new wave of xenophobia and nationalism.

Freedman touched on the building of this Stalin brand as an increasingly powerful tool: “What I see is people using the name of Stalin, using the picture of Stalin, as a sign to say ‘this is good, this is strong, this is part of the Russia I want’ – and running towards that.”

Alexandrina Markvo, a leading figure of the Moscow art scene currently living in exile, added that this use of the Stalin-myth as a tool for propaganda was resoundingly clear when you examined the teaching of history in schools across Russia, and specifically the way in which Stalin is presented.

On the subject of complicity, one audience member reiterated the panel’s earlier argument that the historical divide between victims and perpetrators had become far harder to define in Russia, and – over the course of 70 years of Soviet rule – had frequently become interchangeable. He argued that this had made it more difficult to point fingers of guilt, and suggested instead the existence of a complex of collective guilt versus collective innocence.

Ending with the question of whether Russia had entered a period akin to that under Soviet rule, speaking from the floor, artistic director of Teatr.doc Elena Gremina said: “Of course not, because the current government is much more dangerous and, in a sense, much more anti-people, and anti-state than even the Soviet government.”

In April 1953, George Blake returned to Britain as a national hero, one of a small group of British diplomats who returned alive from three hard years as prisoner of the North Koreans. When the new Queen was crowned a couple of months later, he was among the select few invited to celebrate the day in No 2 Carlton Gardens, a discreet building overlooking the Mall from where the men who ran Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service were watching the royal procession. Little did they know that during his time as a prisoner he had become a Communist and decided to work for the KGB.

George Blake worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union until he was discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR.

All traitors are complicated, but no one more so than Blake. In The Righteous Traitor, director George Carey speaks to Blake’s close acquaintances, historians and other former spies to chronicle his curious history. A close friend of his, Louis Wesserling, describes Blake: “He was a gambler…He spied to fill a void. It gave him a sense of enormous importance”. According to Tim Weiner, the famous historian of the CIA, “the revelation of Blake’s treachery did more damage to relations between Britain and America than all the Cambridge Five put together.”

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 90′
Year: 2015

The young Harvard-educated economist Miklós Németh didn’t dream he would play a decisive role in the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was appointed Prime Minister by Hungary’s Communist Party to fix the nation’s finances in late 1988. Only a year later he was at the centre of it all.

On Wednesday 5 November, the Frontline Club tuned in to the world premier of 1989, a new documentary by Anders Østergaard detailing the months and days of Németh’s tense political manoeuvring that precipitated demolition of the wall, as it was shown in 57 cities across Europe during the 2014 Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX).

Stitching together archival footage seamlessly with reenactments of behind-the-scenes political moves, 1989 shows how Németh’s decision to dismantle one of the biggest drains on Hungary’s budget – a 240 kilometre-long electrical fence bordering Austria – reverberated through the former communist block. Just months later, tens of thousands of East Germans were scrambling across the divide.

Post-screening, Németh joined Danish Broadcast Corperation news anchor, Lene Johansen; professor and EU analyst, Lykke Friis; Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre, Hans Martens; and former Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, to reflect on 25 years of changes his decisions brought to Europe.

Continuing Conflict
The continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine was at the top of the agenda. “I am a great believer in dialogue and compromise. That is the way of finding your way out of a difficult situation,” Németh said of the fighting, adding that his good rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev helped guide him through difficult times.

“Putin is not stupid. I don’t like seeing a comment or an article in the paper that now we’re facing Cold War number two. This is not cold,” Németh said. “Last month Ukraine, Russia, and the EU signed a very important contract on the gas supply. So dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.”

What we’re seeing in Russia is a generation of people who never really accepted what happened in 1989, added Hans Martens. “I think they’re striking back now,” he said. “It’s not just about Ukraine and Crimea, it’s also about trying to reestablish a kind of Soviet Union or at least an empire like that. So dialogue is very good.”

Find out more about 1989 on the film’s website, where director Anders Østergaard will answer questions submitted by audiences from audiences all over Europe participating in this simultaneous screening.