CAPITALISTS EVEN IN PARADISE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3400, 30 July 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

CAPITALISTS EVEN IN PARADISE

MOSCOW’S NIGHTMARE. OTHER WORLDS AS DEPICTED IN RUSSIA. Demyan Byedny, who is a sort of unofficial Soviet poet laureate and whose j ngling rhymes have made him the most widely read among contemporary Soviet versifiers, has now written a coarse and violent anti-religious sketch eneit.ed “ Htow the Fourteenth Division Went Into Heaven ” wh ch is be.ng shown every night in Moscow’s leading music hall.

While the Soviet atheist organisations have always recommended the stage as a suitable propaganda agency this is the first specifically anti-re-ligious play which has been g ven for a long time before large audiences. It begins with a representation of the Russian and German armies moving against each other, while priests on each side wave the cross and invoke divine aid. Then the scene shifts to a Russian village, where the priest is depicted as a thorough-going hypocrite and speculator, who robs an old woman immediately after he has administered the last communion to her. Heaven, in the later episodes of the sketch, is represented as a combination of a cabaret and a ruthlesslypoliced state;; the personages of the Trinity, St. Peter, and the Archangel Michael are caricatured and shown carousing with Rasputin. The Fourteenth Division of the Russian army comes into heaven en masse, because it has been completely annihilated by a German-laid mine. The writer fills his Paradise with representatives of the classes which Communist propaganda always represents as obnoxious old generals, aristocrats landlords, capitalists, etc. The first shock comes when the old general who has led in the Fourteenth Division sees with anxiety the Bolshev;k Revolution of 1917. He eagerly looks forward fifteen years, and at first is overjoyed to see that Russia has a well-disciphned army and many new factories. But despair overcomes him when he sees that the hated Soviets are still in power. At this moment news comes that the Fourteenth Divis ; on has mutinied; the denizens of Paradise promptly pass into oblivion, and the sketch ends amid the strains of a chorus to the effect that the Revolution has destroyed all gods and that Communism will create a Paradise in this world.