Blunt History

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK

by Mikhail Shatrov

Snow flutters to the ground. Church bells peal. A widowed mother carrying a swaddled child paces despondently, then wheels and, in the accents of old Russia, jeers at the leaders of the new Soviet state: "Liars! Killers! You don't know Christ!" The time is the last day of 1917, and the central object of her rage is V.I. Lenin. His revolution has succeeded, but his nation's economy is failing, its armies are in retreat, its enemies are demanding territory, and its ideology has failed to take hold anywhere beyond the borders of traditional Russia.

That opening confrontation is not only dramatic but also, by erstwhile Soviet standards, outright dangerous. It portrays Lenin as a fallible man, not a mythic hero. It admits that the Bolsheviks were detested by many of the peasants they purported to help. And the play commits the once unpardonable sin of bringing Trotsky onstage -- showing him, in fact, as shrewder than Lenin. The theme is ideological purity vs. practical necessity, with pragmatism favored all the way. Compromise with the West is extolled as sensible; worldwide revolution is dismissed as a daydream.

Not surprisingly, The Peace of Brest-Litovsk was suppressed for more than two decades. When it finally debuted in 1987, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing times. And of countless cultural exchanges between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in recent years, none has had greater symbolic significance than the play's current run in Chicago, in the original production starring Ulyanov. (The play is performed in Russian with simultaneous English translation delivered via headphones.)

For the many U.S. skeptics who doubt that glasnost and perestroika are sincere and enduring, the welcome this blunt depiction of history received in Moscow is bound to be reassuring. Says its author: "The most important question now is what legacy we are rejecting. This play is a firm rejection of Stalinism." It is also a poignant and at times eerily apt echo of the present -- as when Lenin and his colleagues sadly conclude that the apparent Communist revolution in Germany, where Marx expected his workers' revolt to start, is instead a brief outpouring of rage and envy from a still conservative people. This Lenin says his duty is to feed, clothe, house and employ the Russian people; until this goal is achieved, there is no point in expansionist ambitions. Afghanistan comes to mind.

Yet Shatrov's play works as more than a political curiosity. Staged by Robert Sturua of Soviet Georgia's Rustaveli Theater, which this month presented a striking King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the show marks the U.S. debut of Moscow's venerable Vakhtangov Theater and of Ulyanov, its artistic director as well as its star. Although the bulky, brooding Ulyanov in no way resembles the vulpine Lenin, he and his troupe seem wholly at ease. Amid the symbolic flutters of cloth, abrupt bursts of music, caricatures of the old bourgeoisie and odd lighting shifts, they keep a tight focus on the most troubling aspect of politics anywhere, the need to compromise principle.

The choice facing Lenin is stark: cede large territories that seem naturally part of his country, or face all-out war without being sure his army is able or willing to fight. At first he is alone in seeking peace; at the end the ballot is almost unanimous. Lenin's mood is not triumphal but exhausted, almost embittered. The last line is "I don't want you to believe me. I want you to understand me." For Soviets that is a haunting answer to the years when blind faith was obligatory. For Americans it is a sorrowful reminder that any leader, however inspirational, runs into the greatest trouble when he tries to spur people to think.

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/Moscow