“The story began to falter in the direction of comedy”
Why fluff up the past? As the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset reminds us, the past is revenant in nature: it returns, repeats, renews. If you throw it out the door, it will definitely come back. If you want to win it, you should not ignore it, but keep an eye on it all the time so that you can dodge it.
At the moment, Europe seems to be bulging with those who, out of desire, turn a blind eye to certain movements of the past, the threat of which has certainly not faded to this day. And unlike the EU, which recognises the contradictions of its history but seeks to understand their causes, populist parties across Europe are riding into their brave new world with flags that begin to reveal familiar symbols – sickles, hammers and swastikas. Because what else than totalitarianism can we compare the actions that trample on civil rights in Hungary, Poland or Russia, for example.
Finland relied on Germany in the civil war and then granted its supporter privileges to interfere in the country’s internal affairs. A couple of decades later, Finland tied its fate to Germany’s success and began a war of conquest against its eastern neighbour. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, put pressure on Finland with the Note Crisis in 1961 and interfered in our political life in a way that partly nullified our own decision-making power. These periods have been dealt with in the Helsinki City Theatre’s productions Mannerheim and the German Kiss and Kekkonen and the Kremlin Dance School.
My new play, Stalin’s Sweet Whip , continues the theme and opens up the period after the Continuation War, the “years of danger”, as they have been called, but does so from the Soviet Union’s point of view. The events take place in the Hotel Torni, where the Soviet Control Commission was located.
The main character of the play is Colonel General Andrei Zdanov, Stalin’s trusted and ironclad man, who came to lead the Commission’s actions. The topic has been written about quite comprehensively from the Finnish perspective, but not much about how the Soviets lived or experienced their assignment in a former enemy country.
The special challenge of this play is that the Soviet Union was a country of high context in terms of speech and the written word, the meaning of words depended on the context. Since the truth could not be told in a world of paranoia and lying, it was necessary to know the hidden meaning of the words. When black was claimed to be white and coloured with hollow party jargon, the result was a liturgy that literally shouted at mockers and dog jaws to shut up. Those who dared were in danger of ending up in camps.
Theatre recognises the complexity of the world precisely in that it does not offer just one correct concept, but invites us to make interpretations and think about the foundations of interpretations. This requires that the playwright makes a pre-selection, a restriction. It is necessary to choose a point of view, a protagonist, a timeline in which to act, and a genre in which all of the above takes its best form. And since there are several variables, the possibilities to put together the whole are innumerable. Ultimately, you have to trust intuition, that the story begins to lead the writer and bring up feelings and thoughts that only people living in the limitlessness of fiction can express.
Very soon I noticed that this time my intuition began to produce an ironic distance from these confidants and minions of Stalin. Blackish humour, warm and tasty like Russian bread beer, with the power of which the story began to stagger in the direction of comedy.
As I cleared out my studio and carried the books I had collected as a background for my plays to the car, I thought with plastic bags in my hand that the weight of history could feel like this, too. I had opened each book with the enthusiasm of an explorer, and each one pushed the text forward for its part. And none of them threw the threat of the past out the door, but made it more comprehensible and manageable.”
Kari Heiskanen