Review: Stalinin suloinen ruoska

The Second Feast of the Despotic Emperor’s Lackey at the Helsinki City Theatre – Kari Heiskanen has tried to get a glimpse into the Russian soul through the tongue

In an interview with Yle, Kari Heiskanen talks about the traditions of the Helsinki City Theatre. This tradition of making includes uncompromising acting.

These traditions are also reflected in Heiskanen’s play TheSweet Whip of Stalin, written and directed for the Helsinki City Theatre. Sixten Lundberg, Jari Pehkonen and co. acted wonderfully at the premiere of the play.

The premiere also showed Heiskanen’s own strengths. Heiskanen knows how to write snappy dialogue, and as a director, he is a true virtuoso. The timing of the scenes was in a class of its own, and the doors of the rooms of Hotel Torni, built on the small stage of the City Theatre, opened and slammed shut to signal entrances and exits, as if to the rhythm of a metronome.

Stalin’s Sweet Whip is a continuation of the City Theatre’s series of plays dealing with Finland’s recent history. It began with Mannerheim and the German Kiss, written by Juha Vakkuri and continued by Heiskanen himself, with Kekkonen and the Kremlin Dance School.

I haven’t seen Vakkuri’s play. The latest play differs from Heiskanen’s own play Kekkonen and the Kremlin Dance School in that Stalin’s sweet whip no longer has a clear plot.

Heiskanen himself, relying on extensive source material, has imagined what the Russian leaders of the Allied (Soviet Union) Control Commission, which supervised the implementation of the terms of the armistice agreement, have said and thought. Stalin’s Sweet Whip is not a documentary, but a fictional drama.

The final scene of the play, in which the audience is made to believe in the authenticity of the play’s discussions, was just a fine dramaturgical effect. It is true, of course, that Finnish military intelligence eavesdropped on the phone calls of the members of the Control Commission. I don’t know if these results of eavesdropping have ever been publicly documented, but Heiskanen’s play is not based on such material.

Heiskanen himself has defined his play as a hilarious comedy in a radio interview.

The Control Commission occupied Hotel Torni on Yrjönkatu in Helsinki and, with its extensive powers, in a way the whole of Finland from 1944 to 1947. In Finland, it was feared that the country would drift down the path of Czechoslovakia, that the communists would seize power with the strong support of the Soviet Union, and that the country would drift into the communist dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. It is customary to refer to this period of the Supervisory Commission as the years of danger.

The fears of the Finns were not diminished by the fact that Stalin appointed Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Zhdanov, who had just acted as the architect of the communist coup d’état in Estonia, as the head of the Control Committee. This fear was also expressed in the play’s finely executed and really impressive first scene.

However, Heiskanen has also had difficulties with his extraordinarily extensive material while writing the play. What to take and what to leave?

The time of Finlandization, the exercise of power in the so-called “Central Slovakia”, is not an exhausted topic. While writing the play, Heiskanen has come across an even more essential and interesting phenomenon. In connection with this play, this set of issues can be turned into questions: who was Andrei Zhdanov, what was he like and what were his motives?

At least from the point of view of Finns, the answer to the second question was obvious. Zhdanov was a gambler, Stalin’s henchman and throat-splitter, who had already shown his obvious inability as a leader when he was the leader of the defense of Leningrad during the extremely brutal siege of the Germans in 1941–1944.

Or at least Stalin did not allow his favorite to be a responsible front commander after that assignment. The real head of the Control Commission was also Colonel General Grigory Savonenkov, who also served as Zhdanov’s “second-in-command” during the siege of Leningrad.

In Heiskanen’s play, Savonenkov, played by Risto Kaskilahti, is left with a supporting role, which was a good indication of how closely related theatre and politics can sometimes be.

Heiskanen tries to give Zhdanov a human face with his play. In an interview with the radio, Heiskanen said that there is very little source material about him. Zhdanov in the play is based on one of Heiskanen’s discoveries in English and descriptions in Juho Kusti Paasikivi’s diaries.

According to Heiskanen, the life of the paranoid dictator’s subordinates must have been very difficult both mentally and physically. No one could be completely sure of their place or even of their life.

In the play, Zhdanov’s head was penetrated through language. Zhdanov rages and speaks the brutal language of the streets, which is completely different from the YYA liturgy that used to describe the good and trusting relations between the two countries after the war in the Soviet Union and also in Finland at the time.

According to the play, Zhdanov was a sick man, an asthmatic and a nicotine addict who smoked cigarettes in a chain. He was a human, not some monster that had popped here from outer space.

The core question of the play was, should we feel compassion for him? In addition to the inhabitants of the besieged Leningrad, Estonians and Finns, many Soviet-era artists were also under Stalin’s sweet whip. Zhdanovism, named after him, required artists to follow the party’s narrow cultural policy line. Zhdanov’s approaches to culture have been described, for example, in David Bolwall’s Master Class, which was performed at the Helsinki City Theatre in 2006.

The Soviet Union and later Russia have never been able to settle accounts with the Bolshevik reign of terror personified by Joseph Stalin. What was the responsibility of Zhdanov and Stalin’s henchmen and henchmen like him for the use of slave labour, the forced deportation of the population and genocide?

In the Soviet Union, laws and practice written in the spirit of noble principles were two completely different things. This is still the case in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Pumaka is pumaka and praktika is praktika, as the Russians put it.

However, Stalin’s reign of terror did not appear out of nowhere. Atrocities have a long tradition in Russia. Heiskanen also referred to this in one scene of the play, where clips from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible were shown on the video wall of the stage. The film was one of the favourites of the film-crazy Stalin.

In one respect, the Helsinki City Theatre has had to save money in the wrong place in terms of production. Stalin’s sweet whip would open up better to the audience, where a proper script would have been made for the performance, in which Heiskanen would have told about the writing phase of the play and the thoughts he had had while writing it.