Review: Stalinin suloinen ruoska

Brilliant Lundberg and Heiskanen

From time to time, the Helsinki City Theatre has staged plays dealing with our recent history, such as Mannerheim and the German Kiss or Kekkonen and the Kremlin Dance School.

The latest play, Stalin’s Sweet Whip, directed and written by Kari Heiskanen, opens up the period after the Continuation War, the “years of danger”, as they have been called, but does so from the perspective of the Soviet Union. The events take place in the Hotel Torni, where the Soviet Control Commission was located.

Heiskanen himself admits that the story began to falter in the direction of comedy. More or less half-hearted comedy has already been seen at the City Theatre this year. Sometimes they have left laughing, sometimes not. Now comedy is intertwined as a fine part of the serious narrative.

I believe that Stalin’s Sweet Whip is meant for lovers of more visionary theatre, and that’s a good thing.

The main character of the play is Colonel General Andrei Zdanov, (Sixten Lundberg) Stalin’s trusted and ironclad man, who came against his will 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. Lundberg’s performance is masterclass.

“The special challenge of this play is that the Soviet Union was a country with a high level of 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,” as the theatre’s own magazine states.

The play features Mannerheim, Kekkonen, Yrjö Leino, Hertta Kuusinen, Paasikivi, Malenkov and other key names of the Control Commission, such as Grigori Savonenkov, Orlov and Kuznezov. The casting of these celebrities of the time was top-notch: Jari Pehkonen, Risto Kaskilahti, Tuukka Leppänen, Aino Seppo, Merja Larivaara, Pihla Pohjolainen, Pekka Huotari and Joachim Wigelius as the Marshal in the video. Marjatta Nissinen, costume designer, had found outfits for Hertta Kuusinen/Larivaara in particular, which could be imagined to have been found directly in Kuusinen’s nest.

For many viewers, at least from the adult end, the events and characters are familiar by name. But the younger ones (and those who have received modern history education) might have been delighted if the program had told something about the Control Commission, the weapons cache, the war guilt trials, and the time when bread was scarce and shoes were made of wood or paper. Even if you can find them by googling. The crisp video background shed light on the time nicely.

Kari Heiskanen has done a great job as a director and writer. I had a quick discussion about what I had seen with two theatre freaks, Paula Kokkonen and Maija Perho. Both were of the opinion that theatre would not get much better than this. I agree.