Review: Toveri K

The Finnish politician who ended up in the Kremlin and remained silent

Tracksuits and gym equipment. Movements rhythmized to music, theatrical gestures and shouting. Helsinki City Theatre’s Comrade K is all of this, but it is also interesting theatre. Gradually, the performance begins to take off, and Ukrainian director Roman Viktyuk’s seemingly strange solutions are forgotten.

At the centre, however, is the story, the dramatic life of the Red politician Otto Wille Kuusinen, who has become Stalin’s confidant, from which he has drawn from something: love, betrayal, treason and homesickness. His closest comrades were sentenced to death, and his wife and son were sent to camps. But according to playwright Edvard Radzinski, Kuusinen remained silent and alive.

The Russian writer’s view of history is pro-Finnish, and Mannerheim , whom Kuusinen hates, is portrayed as a sensitive patriot. There are no less than four actors in the role of Stalin, of whom Esko Roine plays the foolish man of old age deliciously.