“Dictatorship of Conscience”

Playwright Mikhail Shatrov’s (1932-2010) daring and controversial Dictatorship of Conscience opened at Moscow’s Komsomol Theater in March 1986, just as the Twenty-Sixth Party Conference took place at the Kremlin. It was Gorbachev’s first Party Conference as General Secretary, and, although the convention was routine—Party leaders had convened every five years to approve the next five-year plan since Stalin introduced the First Five-Year Plan in 1929—in 1986, the event was accompanied by an enormous buzz. Politicians and citizens alike expected great political and economic changes in the coming years. In his two-day speech as General Party Secretary, Gorbachev issued the clearest articulation of his vision of reform to date. The opening of Shatrov’s play during the Party Conference signaled the playwright’s intent to participate in increasingly robust political discussions. It also showcased reformers’ openness to the participation of the Soviet intelligentsia in reform. Gorbachev and others even attended a performance during the Party Conference.

        

Dictatorship of Conscience was set in the offices of an unnamed youth newspaper. It opens with a scene familiar to most newspaper editors: the daily discussion of the paper’s previous issue. During this meeting, journalist Svetlana Savelyeva approaches editor Ivan Batashov with an article from 1920 describing a “trial of Lenin,” in which the leader’s ideas were put on trial to allow listeners to sort them out for themselves. Savelyeva asks Batashov if it would be possible to publish the accompanying script in the upcoming issue of their publication. Batashov rebuffs this request, but encourages the journalist to explore the script with colleagues—which is exactly what she does, for the benefit of Dictatorship’s extradiegetic audience. 

 

Newspaper staffers take on different roles in the play-within-a-play, performing the roles of various witnesses—from Winston Churchill and Pyotr Verkhovensky from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons (1871-2), to the French communist André Marty and the writer Ernest Hemingway, along with four characters from his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Yet Dictatorship’s central message was ultimately delivered by one Natasha Davydova, a schoolgirl living in Gorbachev’s USSR, who wrote a letter to Komsomol’skaia pravda calling for an end to doublespeak and a more honest engagement with Soviet values.

        

Even as a work that supported the Party’s program (albeit in a reformist version), written by a playwright with strong Party credentials, Dictatorship of Conscience challenged accepted norms for Soviet theatrical productions. After its debut in Moscow, the play was published, in full, in the journal Teatr (June 1986). It was also performed in hundreds of theaters across the USSR, although just as many theaters banned the production on their stages. The controversy stemmed from the open evaluation not just of Stalin—whose reputation had already suffered significant damage in the wake of Khrushchev’s destalinization—but of Lenin, even though, in the end, the play upheld the Soviet founder’s ideas. Shatrov’s creation illuminates the interconnections among perestroika-era arts, media, and politics, exemplifying how the media itself—along with its spaces and practices of production—became the subject of public discourse during the public reevaluation of the future of Soviet society.