Trifonov’s task was akin to that of a researcher: to understand, to analyse history, to re-establish the truth — not only to reconstitute true situations, but also to discover historical tendencies, to perceive the genesis of a society. In The House on the Embankment, the establishment of a new ruling class, the nomenklatura; in The Old Man, the development of anti-democratic tendencies and forces within Bolshevism. Trifonov’s novellas are written in an offhand sort of way; their form is not carefully realized, and sometimes — as for instance in The Old Man — matters appear that are incongruous with the subject: whole sentences taken from his book The Campfire's Gleam. The author is in a hurry; it is as though he knows that he is doomed not to live to sixty. In this situation the refining of artistic forms has no place. What matters above all is to provide a snapshot of social history. This photograph is imprinted in the destinies and personalities of the characters — hence the image ‘the campfire’s gleam’. History advances through Trifonov’s heroes. The main thing is to understand, and to explain to others. These are, in their way, the notes of an eye-witness, reconstituted with hindsight.
Analytical reconstruction of history is the essence of the work of M. Shatrov, the author of a series of plays about Lenin. Shatrov’s works flatly contradict official historical accounts. Here also we have a quest, the quest for ‘the real Lenin’. Shatrov turns his attention to crucial moments in the history of Bolshevism: 6 July 1918, the revolt of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, which led to the initiation of the one-party system and the restriction of Soviet democracy; 5 September 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars discusses the question of Red terror. In his later plays, in the seventies — Revolutionary Etude and This is How We’ll Win! — the subject is Lenin’s clash with the new bureaucracy. Shatrov undoubtedly idealizes Lenin; nevertheless, his hero differs markedly from the official ‘honeycake Ilyich’. Lenin’s revolutionary spirit is contrasted with the bureaucratized Communists whom Lenin sees as the worst enemies of the proletariat.
This theme of moral and political disparity between Lenin and his ‘heirs’ gave Shatrov no rest. His plays had great difficulty in getting past the censor: the latest of them, This is How We’ll Win! was for some time thought to be doomed. The question of letting it be performed was decided at the highest level and was the occasion of a clash between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ members of the state leadership. The ‘softs’ won the day: the statocratic upper circle preferred to put a brave face on what for them was a sorry business. On 3 March 1982 the Political Bureau, with Brezhnev at its head, went to the Moscow Art Theatre to see Shatrov’s play as produced by O. Yefremov. In its report, Sovetskaya Kultura added that the performance enjoyed ‘great success’.5 To be sure, the paper did not indicate precisely with whom.
The struggle for power at the top had caused yet another ideological crack to appear, into which Shatrov and Yefremov inserted themselves. The long review by M. Stroeva in Literaturnaya Gazeta, which millions of people had been able to read even before the ‘historic’ visit to the Moscow Art Theatre by Brezhnev & Co., was in its way no less an event than the performance itself. The theatre, wrote Stroeva, had resolved to show a Lenin who was ‘suffering and unable to understand’. There stood before the audience ‘a Lenin who was the victim of a tragedy’.6
Writing honestly about Lenin meant speaking up about the tragedy of Bolshevism; meant judging, on Lenin’s behalf, those who declared themselves his loyal successors. The performance ended with the words: ‘No one in the world can compromise the Communists unless the Communists compromise themselves. No one in the world can prevent the victory of Communism unless the Communists themselves prevent it.’7 Shatrov’s tragedy, however, was quite different from Lenin’s and the point here is not that the author, in trying to re-establish the truth, has constantly to add in his work at least a little of the official falsehood, for unless he did that he would not have been allowed to say anything. What is more important is that the author, when he wrote those lines just quoted, and the critic Stroeva, when she reproduced them for readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta, could not be unaware that Communism has indeed already been compromised, that the realization of Lenin’s hopes has already been prevented. It remained only to dream that new generations will be able to distinguish between the historical truth and the official lie — although the shadow of that lie falls upon those who try to re-establish the truth.
The history of Bolshevism is a question that is currently relevant in the highest degree for the fate of our society. Understanding it means finding the key to present-day reality, finding the method for interpreting it. In his plays Shatrov tried to understand the past through the present and the present through the past. He is not the only one working in thst direction. Of even greater importance are the plays of A. Gel'man, which are set in the present day.
German made his debut in the theatrical world as the author of ‘plays about production’. That sort of work was strongly fostered by the authorities, who saw in it a ‘healthy alternative’ to the problem plays of Rozov and other playwrights of the sixties. What was wanted was to take up problems of production rather than spiritual problems. But as things got worse in the economy, the sphere of production exhibited more and more those general social and psychological conflicts that were typical of the country as a whole. It became harder and harder to cover them up. The myth of the ‘socialist’ character of labour in the USSR collapsed in ruins. German, himself a ‘production writer’, showed that the economy is a field of fierce conflict of interests — between departments, between branches of industry and between classes.
A number of writers before German had already tried to deal with the ‘production theme’ from this standpoint. Very interesting in this connection was Shatrov’s play The Weather for Tomorrow, staged at the Contemporary Theatre. The economic discussion in the sixties revealed to the Soviet intelligentsia as a whole new problems and new ideas which had previously been the property of a narrow circle of people only. This discussion not only influenced the development of political thought among Soviet Marxists, it also had a certain cultural importance. This made itself felt in the ‘production’ writings of the seventies. Shatrov’s The Weather for Tomorrow was a sort of technocratic utopia, and interesting from that standpoint.
The play’s ideas are close to those of wide circles of the Soviet intelligentsia and middle strata who, although no longer satisfied with the system, at the same time lack the strength to break with it. Along with the idea of ‘true Leninism’, technocratic utopianism constitutes a definite ideological complex — albeit a very contradictory one, for Lenin’s thought constantly revolts against attempts to interpret it from the position of technocratic pragmatism or even Shatrov’s ‘technocratic humanism’.