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Trial as Theatre in the Russian Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Richard Stites
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Extract

In an extraordinary passage of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, the Hungarian journalist and philosopher, René Fueloep-Miller, made this observation in the 1920s on the innate theatricality of the Russian people:

If a Russian recounts an incident in company, in his political club, or even in the street, he does not for long confine himself to verbal description. Suddenly, he sends a gesture into space, like an arrow from a bow, at the same time giving a cue to another in the circle, who immediately becomes an actor in the drama. Though at first the whole thing looks like a very excited discussion, soon many emphatic gestures and words creep in and an increasing number of bystanders begin to take part in the scene. Suddenly the recital takes living form: chairs and tables are shifted with a few touches, and soon stand in a particular relation to each other and to the events being enacted. Men and things are now subject to new and different laws. Those taking no part look on in astonishment and soon become an audience, just as the story, which was at first merely related, becomes reality and attains complete actuality in the people acting and the improvised scenery … This lasts as long as the anecdote enacted, then the company at once returns to ordinary life … and the members of the circle sit smoking and talking again in their former quiet tones as if nothing had happened.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 7 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1998

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References

Notes

1. Fueloep-Miller, René, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (1926; 2nd edition, New York, 1965), p. 135.Google Scholar This article was originally presented to the Gauss Seminars at Princeton University in 1991.

2. Brooks, Jeffrey, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter 1.Google Scholar

3. Lavrov, I. I., Stsena i zhizn v provintsii i v stolitse (Moscow, 1889), p. 50Google Scholar; Thurston, Gary, ‘Theatre and Acculturation in Russia from Peasant Emancipation to the First World War’, Journal of Popular Culture, pp. 3–16Google Scholar; ‘The Impact of Russian Popular Theatre, 1886–1915’, Journal of Modern History, 55/2 (June, 1983), pp. 236–67.

4. Von Geldern, James, Bolshevik Festivals (Stanford, 1993), p. 109.Google Scholar

5. Kenez, Peter, The Birth of the Propaganda State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Mally, Lynn, The Culture of the Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Taylor, Richard, ‘Agitation, Propaganda, and the Cinema: the Search for New Solutions’, in Art, Society, Revolution: Russia, 1917–1921 (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 237–63.Google Scholar

6. On traditional peasant justice, see Frank, Stephen, ‘Popular Justice, Community, and Culture among the Russian Peasantry, 1870–1900’, Russian Review, 46/3 (1987), pp. 239–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Rosenberg, William, Liberals in the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 278–82.Google Scholar Panina was accused of pilfering funds from the People's House that she managed.

8. Fueloep-Miller, , Mind and Face, pp. 139–40Google Scholar; Winter, Ella, Red Virtue (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933). p. 189Google Scholar; Halle, Fannina, Women in Soviet Russia (London & New York: Routledge, 1933), pp. 227–31.Google Scholar

9. Sud nad materyu podkinuvshei svoego rebenka … Instsenirovka (Moscow, 1924).

10. Gorchakov, N. A., Istoriya sovetskogo teatro (New York, 1956), p. 88.Google Scholar

11. Stites, , Revolutionary Dreams, p. 157.Google Scholar

12. Stites, , The Women's Liberation Movement: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 381.Google Scholar

13. Moskovskii pechatnik, 21 (April, 1924), p. 19, cited in Koenker, Diane, ‘Class Consciousness in a Socialist Society: Workers in the Printing Trades During NEP’, in Fitzpatrick, Sheila et al. , eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 41.Google Scholar

14. Stites, , Revolutionary Dreams, pp. 108–110.Google Scholar See also Luukkanen, Arto, The Party of Unbelief: the Religious Policy of the Bolshevik Party, 1917–1929 (Helsinki: Studia Historica, 1994).Google Scholar

15. Gitelman, Zvi, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).Google Scholar For a sane treatment of the Beilis case itself, see Rogger, Hans, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 40–55.Google Scholar

16. A Soviet movie actor of the 1930s exhibited a similar reluctance to portray the villain, in this case in a Stalinized film version of the Kirov murder: Great Citizen. Ratchford, Moira, Stalinist Myth and the Popular Movie of the 1930s (MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 1989).Google Scholar

17. Vishnevskii, , ‘Dvadtsatiletie sovetskoi dramaturgii’, in Sovetski dramaturgi o svoëm tvorchestve (Moscow, 1967), pp. 149–50.Google ScholarVon Geldern, , Bolshevik Festivals, p. 110Google Scholar; Fueloep-Miller, , Mind and Face, p. 140.Google Scholar

18. Fueloep-Miller, , Mind and Face, 140–1 and passim.Google Scholar

19. Cinema in Revolution, edited by , L. and Schnitzer, J. and Martin, Marc (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), p. 78.Google Scholar Vertov had also filmed the trial of the Civil War hero and frame-up victim, Filip Mironov. Vertov's brother, Boris Kaufman, achieved cinematic glory in quite a different trial milieu as the cameraman for Sidney Lumet's Hollywood film, Twelve Angry Men.

20. Jansen, Marc, A Show Trial under Lenin: the Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow, 1922 (The Hague & Boston: M. Nijhoff & Hingham, MA, 1982), p. vii, and passim.Google Scholar

21. Bailes, Kendall, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978), 69–94Google Scholar; Lyons, Eugene, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), pp. 114–133.Google Scholar

22. See Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapters 9, 11.Google Scholar

23. Brooks, Jeffrey, ‘Public and Popular Values in the Soviet Press, 1921–1928’, Slavic Review, 48/1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 16–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition, XLIV (Moscow, 1970), p. 400.Google Scholar

25. It is not certain when the practice of agit-trial died away, but it was still being used during World War H: see ‘Teatr kak sredstvo sanitarnoi agitatsii’, Sovetskoe zdravokhranenie, 1–2 (1943). My thanks to Bart Goldyn of Georgetown University for finding this article.