Deja vu effect

How censorship mechanisms worked in the USSR
I, like many people who remember Soviet life, have recently had a strong deja vu effect - familiar technologies are being tested, the old rhetoric is returning, public opinion is being processed, personnel are being recruited. Although it seems to me that those who are trying to return to Soviet forms of control over the repertoire and the performances themselves lack the imagination of what costs this will require. It will not be possible to copy what happened in Soviet times. I treat this with a sense of sad humor and recall A.K. Tolstoy’s message to the head of the censorship committee (in connection with the latter’s horror before the discovery of Darwinism): about the press.

In the history of the control of Soviet censorship over everything that moved and breathed, it’s not even interesting how they learned to hold on and not let it go, but something completely different: how they failed to save the system, how the meaning made its way through the asphalt. They kept the artists on a long or short leash, awarded orders and titles, threatened them with punishment, deprived them of their citizenship, sent them out of the country, but nothing helped. Crippled contemporary plays? Yes, but the theater of prose arose in response. Is it possible to change the text of the classic? Yes, but in the old texts, without changing a single letter, they read modernity, our whole life and burned the audience with their discoveries. In “Boris Godunov” on Taganka, in “History of a Horse” and “Petty Bourgeois” by Georgy Tovstonogov, in “Three Sisters” by Anatoly Efros, in “Death of Tarelkin” by Pyotr Fomenko, in “Profitable Place” by Mark Zakharov, deafening content was revealed.

They learned to guard signs on paper, but failed to censor the air of the performance, its pauses, its rhythms, light, mise-en-scenes, the actor's breathing, his intonations. I will give just one example, as they say, from my own life. In the early 1980s, a performance about Lenin, “So we will win!” A year after the ban, the performance still goes to the public. What happened? The will of Oleg Efremov? Yes, of course, but also many other things that the system could not overcome. They fought not with a play on paper, but with a ready-made performance, in which there was everything that makes the theater as an art alive. We rearranged phrases, gave away something, but the meaning of the performance did not change. He no longer depended on words. When in March 1982 they brought 75-year-old Leonid Ilyich to the performance, there was a clash of what can be called the audience's expectations of an official with the element of live theater beyond his control. The effect of Shakespeare's mousetrap in Hamlet. He knew that he was brought to a meeting with Vladimir Ilyich. He was not warned about only one thing: that Lenin would come out, but there would be no applause, as it should be according to the Soviet ritual. Director Oleg Yefremov created such scenic circumstances that baffled the General Secretary. Is this Lenin? - he asked loudly to the whole silent hall of Comrade Chernenko (he became General Secretary after Brezhnev and Andropov. - NT ), for his country-famous semi-paralyzed voice. "Should I say hello?" “No need,” Chernenko (he was five years younger) answered the deaf general secretary, without turning his head to the owner. They sat in full view of the entire hall, each of their comments caused a murmur or laughter. The hall lived at once with two performances: on the stage and in the government box. Then, after the premiere, Efremov was summoned to the Minister of Culture, asked to change some phrases. Efremov easily agreed. The performance already lived according to its own laws, and nothing could be changed by any small textual marks.

There were two types of censorship. First, the text was allowed to be performed, and then, at the end, the performance created according to this text. The repertory board acted as censors. She was in every republic of the country, and the structure was crowned with the main repertory board of union significance. People of different professional merit worked there. There were comrades specially trained for subtext, who, in the event of a hidden textual threat (“mines”), could confidentially inform the author: “Something is pressing me here.” There were other specialists who tried to compare the danger coming from the director with the danger coming from the text itself, including the classical one. Comrade Goldobin, who was in charge of the allied repertoire board, trying to influence Pyotr Fomenko, who at that moment was staging a play at the Mayakovsky Theater, carefully read Sukhovo-Kobylin's play The Death of Tarelkin at home. After reading it, he was deeply saddened and told the director: yes, there (that is, in the play) is even worse than yours.

In the case of the play about Lenin at the Moscow Art Theater, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism acted as the censors of the text. But the performance was prepared - contrary to the rules - without the permission of Glavlit and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism: this was Efremov's special audacity. Officials speaking on behalf of the state had no means of censoring the theatrical text. The theater addressed an almost childish request to the very top: permission to "improve our Leninist performance." Well, how can you stop improving? They allowed the text to be improved, but they could not censor the finished performance. There were no qualifications. The performance went out to the public, and it was necessary to deactivate its meaning by awarding the State Prize of the USSR. The award is a prize, and Sasha Kalyagin continued to do what was laid down by the director. "No one in the world will be able to prevent the victory of the Communists if the Communists themselves do not interfere with it, no one in the world will be able to compromise the Communists if the Communists themselves do not compromise themselves." Thus ended the performance about another fork in our history, about the real threat of a return to Stalinism. And the hall exploded with an ovation, which I would now call an ovation of understanding.

Before the collapse of the entire system of life, in which there was double protection from the impact of the theater, it was a stone's throw away.

* Anatoly Smelyansky - theater historian, doctor of art history, in 1980-1987 - head of the literary department of the Moscow Art Theater. Photo: Sergey Karpov/ITAR-TASS, Vasily Egorov/TASS Newsreel