Soviet Union Artful Candor

By Sara C. Medina

One of the hallmarks of Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's regime has been its emphasis on glasnost, an officially sanctioned openness about Soviet society's shortcomings and difficulties. Now glasnost has spread to the realm of culture, where a renewed atmosphere of artistic freedom has allowed the appearance of controversial works, especially those dealing with the long- suppressed Stalin era.

Last week Soviet citizens saw stirring evidence of the new cultural freedom. A recently released film, Repentance, by Director Tengiz Abuladze, was screened for select audiences in Moscow and Tbilisi. Blending fact and fantasy, the film conveys the message that the Soviet Union has yet to acknowledge the horrors of Stalinism. In another dramatic first, a spring 1987 publication date was announced for Soviet Author Anatoli Rybakov's The Children of the Arbat, a major novel about the Stalin era in which the dictator himself is a leading character.

Repentance is set in Georgia, the southern republic that was home to both Stalin and his dreaded secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. Stalin never appears in the movie, but the main character, a local tyrant, is easily recognizable as Beria. Under his rule, people are arbitrarily arrested and then disappear. In one flashback, a woman searching for news of her missing husband hears about a delivery of logs carved with the names and addresses of prisoners. The woman searches in vain for her husband's name. Nearby another woman finds her loved one's name and caresses the log as if it were a baby. The two then watch in despair as a machine chews the logs into sawdust.

When the story returns to the present, the disinterred body of the dead despot repeatedly turns up in a garden. The grave robber is discovered to be the daughter of the woman with the missing husband. At her subsequent trial, the daughter argues that the actions of the past must not be buried, and is threatened with incarceration in a mental hospital -- a not uncommon fate of Soviet dissidents. The film ends with the woman's awakening to find it was all a dream. Repentance is exceptional because it is the first Soviet film to deal with Beria and the horrors associated with the Stalin era.

Novelist Rybakov, 75, is best known for his adventure stories and children's books, as well as the 1978 novel Heavy Sand, about Soviet Jews' persecution by the Nazis during World War II. He describes his new work, which is set in the year 1934, as a "group portrait" of his own generation at a time when Stalin was consolidating power before the Great Terror. In the manner of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel mixes fact and fiction, historical figures and imaginary ones. Most important, it contains a "full portrait of the man" Stalin, Rybakov told the New York Times, "multifaceted as he was, including his merits as a politician, his ambitions."

The current ferment is reminiscent of the early 1960s, when Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first detailed description of life in ! the Soviet Gulag. That thaw gradually congealed after Khrushchev's ouster. It remains to be seen how long Gorbachev will leave Soviet culture open to the winds of free inquiry.

With reporting by Nancy Traver/Moscow