The matter of Maladype, Victor Kravchenko the high-ranking soviet officer asked for political shelter in 1944 from the United States. He had been staying in New York for almost a year as a member of a Soviet purchasing committee. He had been preparing for this act for months. He chose a special way: he silently disappeared from the soviet authorities, as many of his peers had done it before, who could take part in some kinds of travelling abroad in some lucky way, but he gave to his act a great presence of the press and put himself under the protection of American public opinion. He wanted to connect his personal choice with the act of letting the great world know about the things, which were happening in the Soviet Union. On the day of his escape, he published an open letter in the press about his reasons, then in his memoir, I Chose Freedom, which was published in English in 1946, he explained over more than thousand pages, what happened to him, to his ideas, and to his homeland in the first part of the XX. century. The book became bestseller at once – the „weapon” of the cold war – it was translated into French, and it had a dramatic turn: Kravchenko was accused of lie by the newspaper of the French Communist Party (Les Lettres Françaises), mostly because of those parts, which he wrote about the labour camps, after it Kravchenko sued the newspaper because of defamation. In 1948 in Paris started (one of) the lawsuit of the century. Kravchenko and the West were on the one side, and the French Communist Party and the Soviet Union were on the other. The court agreed with Kravchenko. As well as Zoltán Balázs did, the leader, director, actor of the Maladype Theatre.

So much that in 2015 he asked Péter Konok to translate Kravchenko’s memoir and published it in Hungarian. He even went on. He made a one-man manifesto from the work, which he tells during two and half an hour with almost one breath, as he would be tied up while he is closed up with the viewers in a small place. And Zoltán Balázs has gone even further than this. He widened the Kravchenko story into a matter of the country. He has worked out together with his colleagues a year-long theatrical-educational programme on the base of Maladype, and he has been going to the disadvantaged secondary schools of the country, so with the help of Kravchenko’s fate, he could help the young ones feel: what is the weight and price of personal freedom, what does the act of decision making and facing up with oneself, taking responsibility for myself and the community mean.

There are three things here: the book, the theatrical performance and the project. This is the matter of Kravchenko, it is Zoltán Balázs’ matter. The first act is that the Hungarian text could be born. The second act is – the monodrama with extraordinary effect. With such a power, that even teenagers are listening to it without flinching, while an actor “is telling the story” in first person singular form, for more than hour, without any properties or set. And the text can have effects: from Borsod county until the VIII. district. Zoltán Balázs stands in front of the secondary school students, and gives them the roles of the judge, prosecutor and the lawyer. He tells his testimony and waits for his sentence. It is a brace act. His authenticity can touch suddenly the youngsters, who seem to be unmanageable many times, who know better many times, what is it like to be stand in front of the court than Zoltán Balázs, as they have experienced it. The third act, the last scene of the project, would be a great, stylised judicial procedure, where Zoltán Balázs in Kravchenko’s testimony would reveal those things, which have been experienced in the Soviet Union, and he would try to understand his own role and responsibility in it. The viewers would be the jury, which have to deliver a judgement. At the beginning of the 1920s in Russia this kind of genre was an everyday act: on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow amateur and professional troupes organised lawsuits together with the viewers – Vladimir Mayakovski performed in it many times. Maybe Maladype also referred to it, when they asked it in the “genre” of lawsuit: what is the responsibility of the individual one, for the formation and maintenance of the totalitarian systems? How long can be told: “mistakes happened but they were not my faults”? – as Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris said it in their book. The matter of Kravchenko is a project, which has been worked out extraordinarily demanding and carefully. It has been built up with the stimulating cooperation of lawyers, sociologist, psychologist, historian, litterateur, teacher, dramatic teacher, experts and writer of marketing, dramaturg, translator, director, actor, which can keep many surprises in it. It is a worthy continuation of Zoltán Balázs’ previous actions.

Zsuzsanna Gyimesi, Orosz Negyed Magazin, 2016

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)