“Dictatorship of Conscience”

Mikhail Shatrov’s “Dictatorship of Conscience” opened at the Lenin Komsomol Theater in Moscow in February 1986. The play was set in the editorial board office of a daily Soviet newspaper. A young journalist had recently come across a 1921 article about a village that staged a mock trial of Lenin as a way of determining the quality of his ideas. The young journalist suggested that she and her colleagues act out the transcript of the trial themselves. The editor in chief, initially reluctant to permit the exercise, became the judge in the trial. Witnesses included historical characters Winston Churchill and Andre Marty and fictional characters from Dostoyevsky’s Devils and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yet amongst all the characters who helped flesh out the pros and cons of Lenin’s ideas, the witness who carried the newspaper’s mock trial was Natasha Davydova, an adolescent girl from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. She had written a letter to the popular Soviet daily Komsomol’skaia pravda in which she denounced “double speak,” encouraged responsibility, and demanded that each person live “by their conscience.” Shatrov’s play sold thousands of tickets in Moscow and attracted esteemed viewers, including Gorbachev himself. It became an early indication of the revolution in the arts that would accompany Perestroika and of the growing conversation about what was politically correct to discuss in public. While Davydova ended up carrying the show, many (to use the words of the assistant to the editor-in-chief in the play) found “the very combination of words ‘trial against Lenin’ offensive.” While tens of playhouses across the USSR brought the show to their stages, many more explicitly banned the production. “Dictatorship of Conscience” also highlights the ways in which artists became fellow-travelers in reformers’ attempts to broadly rethink the direction of the Soviet Union during Perestroika. While many viewers considered the play controversial at first, Shatrov himself was a long-standing Party member, had produced many plays on commission from the state, and in a show of devotion, much like factory workers on a specially scheduled Saturday workday, went into overdrive to open the “Dictatorship of Conscience” in step with the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, where Gorbachev articulated vision of reform that largely guided the country for the next five years.