Review: Beljakovin talvi

THE PUPPET GAME OF POWER

It begins in style with a group of young people singing the taistoiti version of the folk song Kalliolle kukkulalle. Their performance exudes discipline and straightforward certainty of faith. The year is indeed 1970, the time of the events that Professor Kimmo Rentola analyses in his book The Ghost of the Revolution: Vasemmisto, Belyakov ja Kekkonen in 1970, and on which the experienced playwright Ilpo Tuomarila has based his writing of the play Belyakovin talvi (Belyakov’s Winter).

The next scene is a flashback a few years back in time. The same young people engage in in Western underground culture, it is copulated on a grand piano and beat poetry flourishes in an atmosphere of freedom and unbridled sexuality. The young people are watched by two gentlemen dressed in suits at a restaurant table: the Social Democratic politician Väinö Leskinen , who has only recently apologized in Moscow, and the Soviet politician Belyakov, who will eventually become a short-lived but extremely enterprising ambassador to Finland. “A sexual revolution like this,” Belyakov remarks, “is usually followed by a political awakening.

Two other gentlemen are watching the young people – more from a distance and with increasing surprise. It is President Urho Kaleva Kekkonen and his communications officer and interlocutor, the Council of Mines. They see how the same young people who in August 1968 mobilize a furious protest against the Soviet actions in Czechoslovakia have barely two years later turned into missiles loyal to Moscow.

Here we have the basic constellation of Belyakovin talvi, where the Stalinist youth of the 70s become pawns for a political game that, according to Rentola, could have led – if not a revolution – then to a decisive change of power in Finland.

It’s political theatre of the best brand. Antti Litja plays a Kekkonen character that we are not entirely used to: a vulnerable, vacillating person, a leader who feels his position is threatened and who almost reluctantly resorts to the means that will bring him to unlimited power. Pekka Laiho is a charismatic, dynamically unstable Beljakov who plays his own game, not only as the seducer of youth but also as a manipulator of the puppet Leskinen, a mumbling, grey opportunist interpreted by Pertti Koivula.

And the young people, especially Vuokko Hovatta’s brainwashed little blue shirt and Niko Saarela’s nervous, at times doubtful and at times ecstatic poet, skilfully illustrate the “proletarian turn” from anti-authoritarian radicalism to Leninist fidelity to the letter – a phenomenon in Finnish politics that, according to researchers, is still a mystery that transcends the limits of sociological understanding.