Edina Mátyás: The possibilities of freedom
Zoltán Balázs has come back to stage because of „The matter of Kravchenko”, who has not performed for ages, he has only put performances on stage. He has made a performance from Victor Kravchenko’s book, I Chose Freedom, he calls it not a monodrama but a „one-man manifesto”, as he does not see first of all the possibility of the artistic performance in the material, but the possibility to express those kinds of historical facts, which can have warning nature for the present too. It is Edina Mátyás writing.
Zoltán Balázs heard Viktor Kravchenko’s name (1905–1966) for the first time, when some years ago, Ariane Mnouchkine in an interview mentioned the book of I Chose Freedom between the five most important books of her life. In reality, it is a memoir, which Kravchenko wrote after that in 1944 he asked for political asylum in the United States. The book has dealt with the writer’s life with the aim of making obvious for the Western world, the real nature of the Soviet Union, which is led by Stalin. The book, which was published in 1946, became a great bestseller, only in the United States it was sold in four million copies, but in France there was a huge interest in it. Its existence has not reached Eastern Europe so much, even after the change of the system. It was published only in 2008 with Polish edition. It had anyway a huge press coverage, and generated important arguments. Besides it the book has been published in Bulgarian language, but in Russian only fragments have been published so far. Zoltán Balázs has accepted Kravchenko’s matter so much, that the members of Maladype with the stubborn work of many years, found the owner of the rights (Kravchenko’s son, who was born in America), and got the rights of edition from him. Than Péter Konok historian was made to translate the book, and the Maladype has published the book on their own. In connection with it Zoltán Balázs has made his one-man manifesto on stage. (In connection with the program, a dramatic pedagogical series have been formed, in which the students can learn about Kravchenko’s dilemmas and they can make decision in connection with them.)
Zoltán Balázs tells almost 65 pages of the book that is more than 800 pages long – he does it in two parts, during almost two hours. As we can hear almost ten percent of the book, because of it the choice and edition of the material is very important. It tells a lot about those things, which are important for the actor – director in connection with the Kravchenko material. Zoltán Balázs tells about the selection, that in reality he has a longer material to use, than that he tells during an evening, as it always depends on the momentary situation, on the viewers’ interests (and of course on the performer’s concentration too), that what we can listen to, about which he gives more details, what he leaves out, so those parts can be left out, which can be heard the other times. This openness and flexibility are characteristics of the method of performance too. Originally this evening has been advertised as reading theatre, and in the earlier reports, critics, we can read about prepared manuscripts too, but they have disappeared by today. Zoltán Balázs tells the text by heart – letting himself the right of getting stuck, thinking for a while, or jumping back to an earlier action, which he has left by accident, but he feels important anyway, from the point of view of the connections of the story. But Zoltán Balázs tries to avoid any stage-like things, any theatrical effects. A man is sitting on a raised chair and he is obviously talking to us, to the viewers. As he does not have any partners during this performance, he treats us to the ones. Sometimes he even asks us: “can you follow me? Should I be a little bit slower?” – as his speaking tempo is a little bit too dynamic. But he says, that with it he only wants to follow Kravchenko’s passion. Other times the performer holds a bottle of water to a coughing viewer, then he stops, because he has to drink to be able to speak on. Then he reacts on a falling pack, and automatically says bless you to a sneezing viewer.
This directness does not seem to be a pose at all, it is the natural result of a performing decision instead. Zoltán Balázs now emphasises that he speaks as Zoltán Balázs, he does not become Kravchenko, he does not perform a figure, he does not want to tell more about him, that what can be found in Kravchenko’s text. As first of all, he – mainly the lesson of the book – wants to express it. He identifies with it, and not with a blurry historical figure, about whom we should know more to be able to judge him. Kravchenko’s memoir – even because of the circumstances of its birth – has originally some allegorical meaning, Zoltán Balázs can connect to it too, he tells the text as some kinds of parable. Meanwhile we cannot see a history lesson at all, not the remembering of the event that have lost in the past, is the important thing. Instead of it, the personal asking of those questions are stressed, which were similarly important to Kravchenko, as to Zoltán Balázs or to the viewers of the performance. It turns out obviously from the selection of the texts too (here we have to refer to the question of editing). Zoltán Balázs has formed a script, in the centre of which we can find the problems of human freedom, the life possibilities of the individual man. He asks it as a moral question as well as a social problem. This is the leading line, which can guarantee not to get lost in the overarching story, when with strong skips – with some marking references sometimes – tells an almost (whole) life to us. Kravchenko got the desire of freedom as some kind of inheritance from his father, who was in the prison of the system of the tsar (where he was whipped almost to death). “Without freedom the life is not a life” – he said to his son, even in his childhood. “Anything can happen to me, but you have to work, study and fight with all possible tools for the freedom. We are whether pigs or humans.” And when during a family argument his other son ask his father, why he never thinks about his family, then he tells with deep belief: "Through the sacrifice of a single generation, future generations may live more happily and more civilized. Darkness reigns in Russia, people are exploited, but it can become a country where there are no more slaves. I want everyone to be able to live a life worthy of a human being." Obviously because of this inheritance from his father, Kravchenko at his young age, connected to the “minority of the Communists”, because he thinks, “that if they show the way, then it will the good direction” where he goes. It would be an interesting question, that how this minority could build a total system, but the performance does not tell anything about it. We can feel the proud sense of mission, as Kravchenko thinks that he has become the “member of that elite”, “which has been chosen by the history, to lead my country and the whole world from the darkness towards the light of Socialism”. He knows himself, that it sounds a little bit ostentatious, but that time the communist spoke and felt that way. The Communist belief meant at the beginning for Kravchenko, that he could work more and harder than the others – first as a coal miner in a mine, then after an accident as a supervisor in a machine factory. Then he was called in to be a red soldier, where his life was simplified into that basic question that he whether killed or he was killed. At the end of the 20s, at the age of twenty-three he watched the world with the eyes of a young man, who was formed to be an adult by the Komsomol and the Red Army. “My life was made up of deprivation and effort” – he said. "I was annoyed by the whining of liberals who watched things with a peevish discontent and criticized from the outside. In the eyes of committed believers in the ideas and the faith like myself, the sufferings at that time were merely the pledge of a glorious future awaiting the country and its people." And all of it was strengthened by the fact, that the newspapers were full of the new slogans of the new era.
Only his father tried to make Kravchenko face up with the reality at that time, whom the Soviet reality could not make remember at all the dreams of the young revolutionists. He warned his son about the growing social differences behind the slogan of equality. And about the fact that “the power is a dangerous thing.” That is why he asked him to stay close to people, did not measure himself with the reached positions, but with the fact, how the working people around him (maybe under his management) can live instead; could they have a better life, would they be happier, would they feel themselves freer. Only this can show, how many things are true from the slogans of newspapers and Communists’ ideas. Kravchenko, similarly to the great part of the population of the country, believed in the first show trials, that between the educated elite of the old world, there have been people, who were cooperating against the communist state, and they even admitted it without hesitation in front of the public. He could not see that these show trials were made to destroy the old elite, and to put that kind of generation on their place, which has not connected anyway to the past, they have not had any memories about a different kind of system, and that way absolute loyalty could be expected from them. As the part of this play, many young communists were sent to the university. Kravchenko got to the engineering university of Kharkov that way. While “the newspapers were reporting about the tales of the glorious results”, Kravchenko did not even think about to ask that what “was the reality, what was the illusion” from it. He only faced up with it sometimes – suddenly. For example, one of his lovers, who is the wife of a party official, told him about all these. “We are wearing masks and we are parts of a great prank” – she said. “How lucky are the honest young communist, who are similar to you” – she added. "You still have faith, and you know nothing of the filthy intrigues and the monumental, deadly duels that go on at the peaks of leadership. I get so close to it that sometimes I feel I'm suffocating." (Next to the happenings of work, politics, society, the turns of individual life are presented like flashes in Zoltán Balázs’ performance.)
When Kravchenko returned to the factory, he could not “get closed from the news of tragedies, which have happened in the countryside. The workers were talking openly about the violence, the cruelty, the famine”. But he unconsciously tried to protect himself against the erosion of the facts. The one thing, which could really open “his eyes and mind, to be able to see without blinking again”, was when the group of communists were sent to the agricultural sites, to help during the harvest period, and make the it faster. "We felt as if we had been thrown into the midst of a bloody war." The farmers were protecting their lands, properties, many of them burnt the crop, their land and houses up instead – the work of their whole life – not to let them get into the hands of communists. After the mass deportation of the farmers the remained ones “voluntary” enter the kolkhoz. "Those who experienced the horrors of collectivization first-hand became marked people; we bore the wounds. The arithmetic of the atrocities seemed senseless; we could not see any justification for the terror unfolding across the agrarian regions." – says Zoltán Balázs on behalf of Kravchenko. This feeling has been strengthened more by a later experience, when Kravchenko has to experience the horrific sight of famine in Ukraine. But meanwhile he has done strange discoveries too. For example, that during the period of famine, the international export of the butter is going on in an undisturbed way. Or which is even more shocking is, that while hundreds of men, women and children are starving to death in the villages, in the brick silos more thousand legs of crops are kept from the harvests of the previous years. "Why? Only Stalin’s Politburo could have told. And, naturally, it did not tell. Deep down, in the recesses of my consciousness, it was then that I began to break with the Party." -as we can hear it in the performance.
Another break has been caused in Kravchenko’s belief by the rise of the asserts, lawsuits, deports, executions. "In the party press, they were constantly writing articles about a 'Decembrist mood' that had to be radically uprooted. They were preparing the ground for the Great Purge within the party, which weeded out the doubters and the weak-stomached who had already grown sick of the endless blood and suffering." – he said. Later he told that in 1934, after the killing of Kirov, Stalin got into panic, and the number of the arrested ones have been rising from hours to hours. Finally, everybody can feel themselves in danger, who has ever formed any kinds of doubts against Stalin’s politics. "In Leningrad, hundreds of suspects were rounded up to be summarily executed without any trial." – he said. To all of it that fact was connected that the system of informers ensnared the whole society. Dossiers were led about everybody, and in their personal files they signed up carefully all words and acts. They kept there the charges of the secret agents, who were there in each workplace, offices, schools. They were completed with the voluntary informers, who wrote reports, because they were looking for the favour of authorities, or they were simply led by jealousy and hate. But not only the informers of the special departments were everywhere, but the party committee employed great amounts of informers. So, informers were spying against informers. This pyramid, which was built up with many covering layers, reached up to the centre of the party in Moscow, and the politburo led by Stalin was the peak of it. "Ordinary people were perhaps not aware of the scale of this system; - added Kravchenko - for the most part, they only knew that even the walls had ears. And that outspokenness was the shortest possible path to destruction." The compound system of informing was so real, that “they practically liquidated the old-styled personal life”.
Meanwhile, fewer words were said in the performance, about the way, how Kravchenko’s career rose up sharply. When he became the leader of an important factory, his father visited him. And after that he asked the statements from him, he wanted to speak with him. "You've become like an ostrich," he told him – you cannot see the reality.” The boy started apologized because of it: "Look, dad, don't think that I don't know what's happening, or that I've given in to the system. But what can I do? There are positive things too: new mines, new factories, railway lines." Then the father made his son face up with those ideas, which he had stood in for during his childhood: “When you communists speak of new factories, you say the goal is a better life for the people. Do they really live better than in tsarist times?" According to the father this comparison does not decide on behalf of the present: "At that time our life was much more economical than the life of a worker today." Then he talked about the concrete numbers very thoroughly. Today “20-25% of a worker's salary is withheld. In the old system, a worker could pay for all the healthcare and vacation they needed out of 20-25% of their salary. And they didn't have to be grateful to the government. As for the quality of healthcare, it's better not to be in need of it. If you get sick, do you go to the state clinic?" – he asked his son. And from the numbers it became clear, that the whole socialist industrial system worked unprofitably. "We risked our lives to wipe out tyranny and exploitation. But that doesn't mean we should be happy to see the same evils return under another name." – the dad said it. "To justify today's injustices with old troubles is cheap demagoguery. Today, everything is the property of the people, there are no capitalists, there are no exploiters. But the worker who remains hungry despite the fact that he and his family work intensely does not care much about who exploits him, a private individual or the state." So according to the dad, the situation was even worse. Anyway, if in the past at one capitalist they did not like the working conditions, then the workers could look for another workplace. Or they could organise protesting meetings, they could strike, they could publish the newspapers of the opposition. “Just try any of these today! You will instantly find yourself in a prison camp."
This basic nature of the system became a personal experience for Kravchenko, when in 1936 a process was started against him too. First, a party discipline was initiated against him, then the NKVD1 was on him (but for some reasons his arrest did not happen for some reasons, maybe because, he had a supporter near Stalin). Grotesque charges were stated against Kravchenko. "But in the distorted mirror of those feverish days, the absurdities had their own peculiar logic. If Trotsky himself had been a German spy when he organized the Red Army, and the giants who carried out the revolution by Lenin's side were actually mad dogs in the pay of foreign powers, then why wouldn't it be obvious that this Kravchenko down there in Nikopol wanted to ruin the Soviet system by wasting millions of dollars on completely useless pipe-manufacturing machines?" In the building of NKVD, Kravchenko’s night interrogations were going on for almost a month, while he was let out daytime to work. It was a bitter experience for him, that he asked for help from his relationships for nothing. This bitter experience was stated exactly by one of his father’s companion-in-arms: "In the Tsar’s time, if we got into political trouble, the comrades didn’t disown us. They came and made a fuss” – he said. "And now, everywhere there is only a deafening silence, keeping heads down. It is terrifying!" By the time, Kravchenko returned to his workplace from Moscow, he had been replaced, and his eviction had been ordered. Then they wanted to make him sign a testimony, which would have been equal to his capital sentence. But he did not do it, so he was beaten well.
At that time everything broke in him: at home he got Stalin’s picture from the wall, tore it into small pieces, then these pieces into tiny ones, then he threw it all into the toilet and pulled the chain. "Looking at the gurgling water, I felt that I would never feel again the same toward the party, the leader, and the cause as I had in the past. The umbilical cord was cut once and for all. I might accept assignments from the party, I might deliver speeches, but it would all be just acting and strategy. Meanwhile, I would patiently wait for the opportunity to escape." Finally, Kravchenko could make them let him stay alive for some reasons. But he had to look for another workplace. Meanwhile, he could see starving and robbed people around him in the country, "from whom even the most elementary freedoms had been taken. Looking back, I think the most terrible thing," - he says - was that people’s suffering was taken for granted, as inevitable as the Ural climate." Then suddenly his career rose upside again. In the May 1942, he formally became the member of the party. He got his assignment to America in this position. "It was not my fault that I had to leave my homeland, a corrupt, inhumane system." - he said. On the other place he even quoted his brother – who went to the battlefield with the first ones, as a soldier, to sacrifice his life – and made differences even between the homeland and the system too. According to his brother it would have been a great mistake to mix the two.
Zoltán Balázs’ performance finishes with the initial sentences of Kravchenko’s manifesto: "Those who believe that the liberation of the Russian people from the totalitarian yoke is the business of the Russians themselves are gravely mistaken. The security of civilization, the chance for a lasting peace, depends precisely on this liberation. To liberate our country from within is possible only if world public opinion gets to know and understand the Russian reality. Without a free and democratic Russia, without which there can be no enduring peace on Earth.”
Victor Kravchenko: I Chose Freedom
Maladype Theatre
Translator: Péter Konok
Compose and perform: Zoltán Balázs
Premiere: 14.11.2015.
Place: Maladype Base
Footnote:
1. People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, short for NKVD, it was the main part of the internal affairs of the public administration in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1946.
Edina Mátyás, Ellenfény, 2017
(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)
Zoltán Balázs heard Viktor Kravchenko’s name (1905–1966) for the first time, when some years ago, Ariane Mnouchkine in an interview mentioned the book of I Chose Freedom between the five most important books of her life. In reality, it is a memoir, which Kravchenko wrote after that in 1944 he asked for political asylum in the United States. The book has dealt with the writer’s life with the aim of making obvious for the Western world, the real nature of the Soviet Union, which is led by Stalin. The book, which was published in 1946, became a great bestseller, only in the United States it was sold in four million copies, but in France there was a huge interest in it. Its existence has not reached Eastern Europe so much, even after the change of the system. It was published only in 2008 with Polish edition. It had anyway a huge press coverage, and generated important arguments. Besides it the book has been published in Bulgarian language, but in Russian only fragments have been published so far. Zoltán Balázs has accepted Kravchenko’s matter so much, that the members of Maladype with the stubborn work of many years, found the owner of the rights (Kravchenko’s son, who was born in America), and got the rights of edition from him. Than Péter Konok historian was made to translate the book, and the Maladype has published the book on their own. In connection with it Zoltán Balázs has made his one-man manifesto on stage. (In connection with the program, a dramatic pedagogical series have been formed, in which the students can learn about Kravchenko’s dilemmas and they can make decision in connection with them.)
Zoltán Balázs tells almost 65 pages of the book that is more than 800 pages long – he does it in two parts, during almost two hours. As we can hear almost ten percent of the book, because of it the choice and edition of the material is very important. It tells a lot about those things, which are important for the actor – director in connection with the Kravchenko material. Zoltán Balázs tells about the selection, that in reality he has a longer material to use, than that he tells during an evening, as it always depends on the momentary situation, on the viewers’ interests (and of course on the performer’s concentration too), that what we can listen to, about which he gives more details, what he leaves out, so those parts can be left out, which can be heard the other times. This openness and flexibility are characteristics of the method of performance too. Originally this evening has been advertised as reading theatre, and in the earlier reports, critics, we can read about prepared manuscripts too, but they have disappeared by today. Zoltán Balázs tells the text by heart – letting himself the right of getting stuck, thinking for a while, or jumping back to an earlier action, which he has left by accident, but he feels important anyway, from the point of view of the connections of the story. But Zoltán Balázs tries to avoid any stage-like things, any theatrical effects. A man is sitting on a raised chair and he is obviously talking to us, to the viewers. As he does not have any partners during this performance, he treats us to the ones. Sometimes he even asks us: “can you follow me? Should I be a little bit slower?” – as his speaking tempo is a little bit too dynamic. But he says, that with it he only wants to follow Kravchenko’s passion. Other times the performer holds a bottle of water to a coughing viewer, then he stops, because he has to drink to be able to speak on. Then he reacts on a falling pack, and automatically says bless you to a sneezing viewer.
This directness does not seem to be a pose at all, it is the natural result of a performing decision instead. Zoltán Balázs now emphasises that he speaks as Zoltán Balázs, he does not become Kravchenko, he does not perform a figure, he does not want to tell more about him, that what can be found in Kravchenko’s text. As first of all, he – mainly the lesson of the book – wants to express it. He identifies with it, and not with a blurry historical figure, about whom we should know more to be able to judge him. Kravchenko’s memoir – even because of the circumstances of its birth – has originally some allegorical meaning, Zoltán Balázs can connect to it too, he tells the text as some kinds of parable. Meanwhile we cannot see a history lesson at all, not the remembering of the event that have lost in the past, is the important thing. Instead of it, the personal asking of those questions are stressed, which were similarly important to Kravchenko, as to Zoltán Balázs or to the viewers of the performance. It turns out obviously from the selection of the texts too (here we have to refer to the question of editing). Zoltán Balázs has formed a script, in the centre of which we can find the problems of human freedom, the life possibilities of the individual man. He asks it as a moral question as well as a social problem. This is the leading line, which can guarantee not to get lost in the overarching story, when with strong skips – with some marking references sometimes – tells an almost (whole) life to us. Kravchenko got the desire of freedom as some kind of inheritance from his father, who was in the prison of the system of the tsar (where he was whipped almost to death). “Without freedom the life is not a life” – he said to his son, even in his childhood. “Anything can happen to me, but you have to work, study and fight with all possible tools for the freedom. We are whether pigs or humans.” And when during a family argument his other son ask his father, why he never thinks about his family, then he tells with deep belief: "Through the sacrifice of a single generation, future generations may live more happily and more civilized. Darkness reigns in Russia, people are exploited, but it can become a country where there are no more slaves. I want everyone to be able to live a life worthy of a human being." Obviously because of this inheritance from his father, Kravchenko at his young age, connected to the “minority of the Communists”, because he thinks, “that if they show the way, then it will the good direction” where he goes. It would be an interesting question, that how this minority could build a total system, but the performance does not tell anything about it. We can feel the proud sense of mission, as Kravchenko thinks that he has become the “member of that elite”, “which has been chosen by the history, to lead my country and the whole world from the darkness towards the light of Socialism”. He knows himself, that it sounds a little bit ostentatious, but that time the communist spoke and felt that way. The Communist belief meant at the beginning for Kravchenko, that he could work more and harder than the others – first as a coal miner in a mine, then after an accident as a supervisor in a machine factory. Then he was called in to be a red soldier, where his life was simplified into that basic question that he whether killed or he was killed. At the end of the 20s, at the age of twenty-three he watched the world with the eyes of a young man, who was formed to be an adult by the Komsomol and the Red Army. “My life was made up of deprivation and effort” – he said. "I was annoyed by the whining of liberals who watched things with a peevish discontent and criticized from the outside. In the eyes of committed believers in the ideas and the faith like myself, the sufferings at that time were merely the pledge of a glorious future awaiting the country and its people." And all of it was strengthened by the fact, that the newspapers were full of the new slogans of the new era.
Only his father tried to make Kravchenko face up with the reality at that time, whom the Soviet reality could not make remember at all the dreams of the young revolutionists. He warned his son about the growing social differences behind the slogan of equality. And about the fact that “the power is a dangerous thing.” That is why he asked him to stay close to people, did not measure himself with the reached positions, but with the fact, how the working people around him (maybe under his management) can live instead; could they have a better life, would they be happier, would they feel themselves freer. Only this can show, how many things are true from the slogans of newspapers and Communists’ ideas. Kravchenko, similarly to the great part of the population of the country, believed in the first show trials, that between the educated elite of the old world, there have been people, who were cooperating against the communist state, and they even admitted it without hesitation in front of the public. He could not see that these show trials were made to destroy the old elite, and to put that kind of generation on their place, which has not connected anyway to the past, they have not had any memories about a different kind of system, and that way absolute loyalty could be expected from them. As the part of this play, many young communists were sent to the university. Kravchenko got to the engineering university of Kharkov that way. While “the newspapers were reporting about the tales of the glorious results”, Kravchenko did not even think about to ask that what “was the reality, what was the illusion” from it. He only faced up with it sometimes – suddenly. For example, one of his lovers, who is the wife of a party official, told him about all these. “We are wearing masks and we are parts of a great prank” – she said. “How lucky are the honest young communist, who are similar to you” – she added. "You still have faith, and you know nothing of the filthy intrigues and the monumental, deadly duels that go on at the peaks of leadership. I get so close to it that sometimes I feel I'm suffocating." (Next to the happenings of work, politics, society, the turns of individual life are presented like flashes in Zoltán Balázs’ performance.)
When Kravchenko returned to the factory, he could not “get closed from the news of tragedies, which have happened in the countryside. The workers were talking openly about the violence, the cruelty, the famine”. But he unconsciously tried to protect himself against the erosion of the facts. The one thing, which could really open “his eyes and mind, to be able to see without blinking again”, was when the group of communists were sent to the agricultural sites, to help during the harvest period, and make the it faster. "We felt as if we had been thrown into the midst of a bloody war." The farmers were protecting their lands, properties, many of them burnt the crop, their land and houses up instead – the work of their whole life – not to let them get into the hands of communists. After the mass deportation of the farmers the remained ones “voluntary” enter the kolkhoz. "Those who experienced the horrors of collectivization first-hand became marked people; we bore the wounds. The arithmetic of the atrocities seemed senseless; we could not see any justification for the terror unfolding across the agrarian regions." – says Zoltán Balázs on behalf of Kravchenko. This feeling has been strengthened more by a later experience, when Kravchenko has to experience the horrific sight of famine in Ukraine. But meanwhile he has done strange discoveries too. For example, that during the period of famine, the international export of the butter is going on in an undisturbed way. Or which is even more shocking is, that while hundreds of men, women and children are starving to death in the villages, in the brick silos more thousand legs of crops are kept from the harvests of the previous years. "Why? Only Stalin’s Politburo could have told. And, naturally, it did not tell. Deep down, in the recesses of my consciousness, it was then that I began to break with the Party." -as we can hear it in the performance.
Another break has been caused in Kravchenko’s belief by the rise of the asserts, lawsuits, deports, executions. "In the party press, they were constantly writing articles about a 'Decembrist mood' that had to be radically uprooted. They were preparing the ground for the Great Purge within the party, which weeded out the doubters and the weak-stomached who had already grown sick of the endless blood and suffering." – he said. Later he told that in 1934, after the killing of Kirov, Stalin got into panic, and the number of the arrested ones have been rising from hours to hours. Finally, everybody can feel themselves in danger, who has ever formed any kinds of doubts against Stalin’s politics. "In Leningrad, hundreds of suspects were rounded up to be summarily executed without any trial." – he said. To all of it that fact was connected that the system of informers ensnared the whole society. Dossiers were led about everybody, and in their personal files they signed up carefully all words and acts. They kept there the charges of the secret agents, who were there in each workplace, offices, schools. They were completed with the voluntary informers, who wrote reports, because they were looking for the favour of authorities, or they were simply led by jealousy and hate. But not only the informers of the special departments were everywhere, but the party committee employed great amounts of informers. So, informers were spying against informers. This pyramid, which was built up with many covering layers, reached up to the centre of the party in Moscow, and the politburo led by Stalin was the peak of it. "Ordinary people were perhaps not aware of the scale of this system; - added Kravchenko - for the most part, they only knew that even the walls had ears. And that outspokenness was the shortest possible path to destruction." The compound system of informing was so real, that “they practically liquidated the old-styled personal life”.
Meanwhile, fewer words were said in the performance, about the way, how Kravchenko’s career rose up sharply. When he became the leader of an important factory, his father visited him. And after that he asked the statements from him, he wanted to speak with him. "You've become like an ostrich," he told him – you cannot see the reality.” The boy started apologized because of it: "Look, dad, don't think that I don't know what's happening, or that I've given in to the system. But what can I do? There are positive things too: new mines, new factories, railway lines." Then the father made his son face up with those ideas, which he had stood in for during his childhood: “When you communists speak of new factories, you say the goal is a better life for the people. Do they really live better than in tsarist times?" According to the father this comparison does not decide on behalf of the present: "At that time our life was much more economical than the life of a worker today." Then he talked about the concrete numbers very thoroughly. Today “20-25% of a worker's salary is withheld. In the old system, a worker could pay for all the healthcare and vacation they needed out of 20-25% of their salary. And they didn't have to be grateful to the government. As for the quality of healthcare, it's better not to be in need of it. If you get sick, do you go to the state clinic?" – he asked his son. And from the numbers it became clear, that the whole socialist industrial system worked unprofitably. "We risked our lives to wipe out tyranny and exploitation. But that doesn't mean we should be happy to see the same evils return under another name." – the dad said it. "To justify today's injustices with old troubles is cheap demagoguery. Today, everything is the property of the people, there are no capitalists, there are no exploiters. But the worker who remains hungry despite the fact that he and his family work intensely does not care much about who exploits him, a private individual or the state." So according to the dad, the situation was even worse. Anyway, if in the past at one capitalist they did not like the working conditions, then the workers could look for another workplace. Or they could organise protesting meetings, they could strike, they could publish the newspapers of the opposition. “Just try any of these today! You will instantly find yourself in a prison camp."
This basic nature of the system became a personal experience for Kravchenko, when in 1936 a process was started against him too. First, a party discipline was initiated against him, then the NKVD1 was on him (but for some reasons his arrest did not happen for some reasons, maybe because, he had a supporter near Stalin). Grotesque charges were stated against Kravchenko. "But in the distorted mirror of those feverish days, the absurdities had their own peculiar logic. If Trotsky himself had been a German spy when he organized the Red Army, and the giants who carried out the revolution by Lenin's side were actually mad dogs in the pay of foreign powers, then why wouldn't it be obvious that this Kravchenko down there in Nikopol wanted to ruin the Soviet system by wasting millions of dollars on completely useless pipe-manufacturing machines?" In the building of NKVD, Kravchenko’s night interrogations were going on for almost a month, while he was let out daytime to work. It was a bitter experience for him, that he asked for help from his relationships for nothing. This bitter experience was stated exactly by one of his father’s companion-in-arms: "In the Tsar’s time, if we got into political trouble, the comrades didn’t disown us. They came and made a fuss” – he said. "And now, everywhere there is only a deafening silence, keeping heads down. It is terrifying!" By the time, Kravchenko returned to his workplace from Moscow, he had been replaced, and his eviction had been ordered. Then they wanted to make him sign a testimony, which would have been equal to his capital sentence. But he did not do it, so he was beaten well.
At that time everything broke in him: at home he got Stalin’s picture from the wall, tore it into small pieces, then these pieces into tiny ones, then he threw it all into the toilet and pulled the chain. "Looking at the gurgling water, I felt that I would never feel again the same toward the party, the leader, and the cause as I had in the past. The umbilical cord was cut once and for all. I might accept assignments from the party, I might deliver speeches, but it would all be just acting and strategy. Meanwhile, I would patiently wait for the opportunity to escape." Finally, Kravchenko could make them let him stay alive for some reasons. But he had to look for another workplace. Meanwhile, he could see starving and robbed people around him in the country, "from whom even the most elementary freedoms had been taken. Looking back, I think the most terrible thing," - he says - was that people’s suffering was taken for granted, as inevitable as the Ural climate." Then suddenly his career rose upside again. In the May 1942, he formally became the member of the party. He got his assignment to America in this position. "It was not my fault that I had to leave my homeland, a corrupt, inhumane system." - he said. On the other place he even quoted his brother – who went to the battlefield with the first ones, as a soldier, to sacrifice his life – and made differences even between the homeland and the system too. According to his brother it would have been a great mistake to mix the two.
Zoltán Balázs’ performance finishes with the initial sentences of Kravchenko’s manifesto: "Those who believe that the liberation of the Russian people from the totalitarian yoke is the business of the Russians themselves are gravely mistaken. The security of civilization, the chance for a lasting peace, depends precisely on this liberation. To liberate our country from within is possible only if world public opinion gets to know and understand the Russian reality. Without a free and democratic Russia, without which there can be no enduring peace on Earth.”
Victor Kravchenko: I Chose Freedom
Maladype Theatre
Translator: Péter Konok
Compose and perform: Zoltán Balázs
Premiere: 14.11.2015.
Place: Maladype Base
Footnote:
1. People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, short for NKVD, it was the main part of the internal affairs of the public administration in the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1946.
Edina Mátyás, Ellenfény, 2017
(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)