Trotsky’s come-back trail

Press, 26 December 1984, Page 14

Trotsky’s come-back trail

NZPA-Reuter Moscow A new play by two leading Soviet writers is tampering with the Kremlin’s taboos and portraying Josef Stalin and his archenemy, Leo Trotsky, a name purged from most Soviet histories, as characters on stage. The writers are Sergei Bondarchuk, who is also one of the bestknown Soviet film directors, and Alexei Pryashnikov. The play, “Delay is Close to Death,” was published in the new edition of the stage magazine, “Teatr.” Dealing with the events leading up to the October Bolshevik revolution in 1917, it calls for actors to portray Trotsky as well as other Bolsheviks later to be purged by Stalin, as well as the dictator himself. Trotsky, one of the key 1917 revolutionaries, was ousted from the party after quarrelling with

Stalin and later was murdered on Stalin’s orders when in exile in Mexico. He became a non-person, painted out of photographs and dropped from most Soviet accounts of history. No actor would have dared portray Stalin during his lifetime and after he was denounced in 1956 by successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the former dictator became almost as unmentionable as Trotsky. Western analysts of Kremlin trends said that the decision to allow a play to depict these characters was part of an apparent increased readiness to come to terms with history. There have been signs that Stalin himself is due for a reappraisal, tied to next year’s fortieth anniversary of the end of World War 11, that will restore at least part of his reputation — as a wartime leader. The late president, Yuri Andro-

pov, who died in February after only 15 months in office, was the only Soviet leader known to have had a portrait of his immediate predecessor, in this case Leonid Brezhnev, adorning his office wall. Plays and films dealing with the life of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks revered as founder of the Soviet State, have been common since his death; but figures who fell from favour are habitually forgotten and not. referred to. Although departing from past practice in depicting such characters on stage, however, the new Bondarchuk-Pryashnikoy play does not go as far as rehabilitation. An accompanying textual commentary said that Lenin was shown arguing with Trotsky and his supporters, describing them as “dissenters and capitulationists.”