A hallmark of good storytelling is the coherence of its elements, each narrative component working both independently and in concert to guide the plot from exposition to resolution. Thus, a gun that fails to go off is as good, or as useless, as a broken compass on a hike through a treacherous terrain. As Chekhov himself put it, “one should not make promises (in a play) if one has no intention of keeping them.” In other words, one cannot violate the expectations of the audience unless upending those expectations is the point being made.

Little did the trio of Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim imagine that when they put the gun in Chino’s hand in New York to kill Tony in West Side Story, it would fail to serve its intended purpose thousands of miles away in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, in 1963.

But first things first.

A New Year’s Eve 1964 article on page 11 of The New York Times ran with the curious title “West Side Story is Staged in Soviet.” Interestingly, the Times’ framing of the story was not centered so much on the staging of the Broadway hit as an important cultural milestone in the USSR, (surely a quintessential Broadway work on a Soviet stage would have qualified), but rather as yet another case of intellectual property theft, which it certainly was.

“The Soviet Union,” the article observed dryly, “reached another free hand into Broadway’s musical repertory tonight and came up with West Side Story.” It went on to note that “Soviet authorities refuse to pay royalties for [the] production.” It was, perhaps, one of the clearest and, dare we say, most theatrical cases of disregard for intellectual property rights since the Lacy–Zarubin Agreement on cultural exchange between the U.S. and the USSR, signed in 1958. Lenin had decades earlier declared that “art belongs to the people,” and so it was. Or so went the logic behind the Soviet refusal to pony up or plunk down.

Even more interestingly, however, it was not the first time that West Side Story had been staged in the Soviet Union. As it turns out, that honor goes to the performers of the Alexander Spendiaryan Opera and Ballet Theater Company in the Soviet Armenian capital of Yerevan. This unauthorized staging, however, went largely unnoticed in the West and barely registered in the Soviet press, with the exception of a few brief mentions in the Armenian press, such as in the magazine Sovetakan Arvest (Soviet Art) and the flagship party organ Sovetakan Hayastan.

Meanwhile, the program booklet, an ephemeral souvenir of the production, survives today only in an obscure online auction listing in Poland.

We learn about the staging through a brief, five-sentence report in the American trade magazine Variety from October 1963, titled “An Armenian Ballet to Tour Soviet; Inspired by West Side Story.” A more substantial testimony survives in the form of British diplomatic cables.

It remains unclear why a Moscow-based diplomat would travel to the Soviet periphery to attend a musical production and write up a report. But if we are to speculate, then an article published in the Armenian newspaper may offer a plausible clue: the presence in the audience of Anton Kochinyan, Chairman of the Armenian Council of Ministers.

According to the unnamed British diplomat who attended the premiere, “Bernstein would have recognized his own work, the music, in a clearly unfamiliar idiom, was attacked by the Armenians with commendable vigour and rhythmic discipline. Jerome Robbins,¹ however, would not: the work demands singers who can dance or dancers who can sing, but the operatic and ballet companies of Erevan (sic) are two quite separate entities.” In other words, there were singers who could sing but not dance, and dancers who could dance but not sing.

The diplomat further noted that “for obvious reasons the work had to be presented as a massive anti-American indictment.” That feat was achieved in no small measure through the “radical” liberties taken by the producers. His (or her) assessment was echoed in a review that appeared in Sovetakan Hayastan under the title “Story About Concrete Jungles.”² According to that review, the “story is about the American youth, the same youth which is devoid of high ideals, true calling, which does not know where and how to expend its passion and its strength, and is confused in the tangles of racist prejudices. In short, it is a story about New York’s concrete jungles.”

Unlike the anonymous British diplomat, who found the audience’s reaction lukewarm, the Armenian reviewer stressed that the premiere was a resounding success, and was received warmly by art lovers.

And then, of course, there was the matter of Chino’s gun.

At the beginning, Chekhov’s gun in Chino’s hand was invoked. It would be remiss not to have him fire it if we are to stay true to Sondheim’s libretto and Chekhov’s axiom. According to our anonymous diplomat, “Chino’s pistol failed to fire at the critical moment when he shoots Tony as he rushes into Maria’s arms in the last scene: Tony commendably coolly died nonetheless, but the pistol went off three seconds later.”

Chekhov would have appreciated the irony.

Some of the materials in this post are found in East View’s Soviet Union Political Reports, 1917–1970 via the Archive Editions, the vast collection of British archival documents, now fully digitized.

1. Jerome Robins to the famed American choreographer who designed and directed the dancers during the original production of West Side Story. ︎
2. Sh.M. Avetisyan, “Patmutyun betonakert junglineri masin” (Story about concrete jungles), Sovetakan Hayastan, October 9, 1963, p. 4. ︎

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“People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!” But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

The front page of the inaugurating issue of Tribuna Energetika (Energy Worker’s Tribune), announcing the publication of the newspaper and its lofty mission, features a black-and-white photograph of a welder who has just lifted his mask and is looking as if into the future with what appears to be a genuinely warm grin. There are a couple of reasons why the image is arresting, despite its bland aesthetics and rather mediocre artistic merit. It is not in the same league as, say, the iconic portrait of the ebullient Lilya Brik by Alexander Rodchenko, shouting with a cupped hand towards the invisible masses. It lacks Rodchenko’s compositional dynamism and “meme potential,” and yet, despite all that, it gets the job done all the same. Insofar as it was meant to convey the ‘exuberance’ of the builders of communism, it certainly did so. 

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a grin from a fellow human, whether genuine or feigned, can elicit positive emotions. My son, at a tender ten years of age, is particularly well-versed in manipulating this basic, and by all accounts overpowering, human urge to answer a smile with a smile. He knows well that when he has misbehaved and is about to invite my loving disapproval, all he must do is smile, knowing full well that, like a Pavlovian canine at the ring of a bell, I am conditioned to smile back. Smile means mitigation. Smile means an averted punishment. Then comes the hug, then the rinse, then the repeat. Maybe I am gullible, particularly when it comes to smiling counterparts. It is a trap, however, that I walk into every single time. It also happens to work for propaganda purposes. And none were privy to this psychological perspicacity more than Soviet propagandists. They not only manipulated images, they manipulated with images. 

A second reason why the photo is arresting is because of what was to come 17 years after it was taken. We don’t know whether the smiling subject of the photo was alive and well at the time of the Chernobyl disaster and still lived in his flat in Pripyat. But this lack of knowledge does not take away from the uncanniness of the photograph. Here’s a smiling worker, who was building communism by building a nuclear reactor. Knowing what we know now, was this worker also an unwitting gravedigger, building a future gravesite? Perhaps even his own?

This tension between hope and tragedy is further exemplified on the pages of Tribuna Energetika in a poem penned by another resident of Pripyat, N. Shakura, whose poem Peaceful Atom contained following lines

The real irony of course lies in the fact that far from strengthening the erstwhile motherland Chernobyl’s “peaceful atom” would accelerate its demise. As Mikhail Gorbachev would put it 20 years later, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl …, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”

Some of the materials in this post are found in Chernobyl Newspapers Collection and are available through East View Information Services.

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In his bilingual compendium of Soviet underground jokes Forbidden Laughter, Emil Draitser makes the pointed, if ironic, observation that “The anecdote in the Soviet Union substitutes for lots of expensive medication. It heals bleeding spiritual wounds, eases nervous tension, and lowers high blood pressure.”¹ In that regard, the medicinal and curative aspects of Soviet jokes and humor were no different from their capitalist counterparts, albeit the malaise of the “Soviet soul,” (insofar as it was a thing), was qualitatively different from the one gripping souls under capitalism. But I suspect that is not what Dreitser had in mind when he made his observation. Rather, to Dreitser and many others, Soviet-era jokes, both underground and over the counter, were seen as a coping mechanism in a society devoid of the Marxian “opium of the people” (i.e. religion),² that other famous social crutch that allowed otherwise limping walkers to straighten their posture and strengthen their gait.

An illustrative case in point is to be found in the dispatches by British diplomats stationed in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. These dispatches, available through East View’s Archive Editions, provide a unique glimpse into the issue. In a 1964 confidential dispatch, for instance, an unnamed British diplomat writing to his or her superiors in the Foreign Office made sure to note that “We have heard from several informants that the authorities are starting to take a tougher attitude towards political anecdotes. One inveterate raconteur was called in at his place of work and warned that: ‘This is not a season for political jokes.’” The writer then would go on to continue the dispatch by cheekily noting that Armenian Radio was still in business, cracking jokes at the expense of the Soviet leadership and making fun of the recently deposed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s bald cranium.

In conclusion, Soviet-era humor was more than met the eye. It was meant to be amusing, to be sure, but also served as a vital mechanism for social and psychological survival. And insofar as it had political content, it was a subtle form of rebellion against a repressive and fundamentally mirthless regime. The irony, as British dispatches reveal, was that no matter how hard authorities sought to clamp down on “unauthorized” humor, the unnamed Soviet “raconteurs” and “tiny revolutionaries” kept defying the regime through wit and laughter.

The materials in this post are found in East View’s Soviet Union Political Reports, 1917–1970 via the Archive Editions, the vast collection of British archival documents, now fully digitized.

NOTES

1. Emil Draitser, ed., Forbidden Laughter: Soviet Underground Jokes (Los Angeles: Almanac Press, 1978), 3. ︎
2. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm ︎
3. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 284. ︎

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For people familiar with American religious history of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries and the ubiquity of televangelists, the mise en scène in one particularly famous megachurch looked tried, true, and familiar. The music and the choir slowly fade out in the background while another camera, with the same deliberate speed, steps in to present into the foreground the reverend protagonist and his (it was usually his) VIP guest or the minister du jour. The church is the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The year, 2000. The minister, donning his iconic gown, is Robert Schuller. His VIP being none other than Mikhail Gorbachev, the late president of the late Soviet Union.

Schuller, who was no stranger to celebrity and counted many of them among his friends ranging from John Wayne to Evel Knievel to Frank Sinatra, was clearly pleased to host Gorbachev, a professed atheist and a former leader of an officially atheist former superpower.

Introducing Gorbachev to a capacity crowd, Schuller recounted the start of a “wonderful relationship with a man that I respect I think as much as I would Abraham Lincoln if I had lived in his day.” Schuller then went on to note that “there is no doubt that no one person brought an end to the Cold War like Gorbachev. And we had to celebrate our anniversary year by having this man come here so we can thank him for the faith that is now reaching millions and millions in his country. The Cold War was still on in 1989. And the Berlin Wall was still there. And when he put me on television, I was an enemy.” Schuller then takes a pause allowing the translator to convey to Gorbachev what had been said. The camera slowly zooms in on Gorbachev who is seen nodding in agreement and then lets out a surprised, if wry, smile after the translation of the word “enemy” has landed. Gorbachev then moves towards Schuller who embraces his old “enemy” (and new friend) while exchanging kisses on the cheeks to a standing ovation. A more dramatic, almost Shakespearean, irony could not have been imagined. A witness to this amiable episode between two unlikely and friendly dramatis personae could not be faulted for thinking that she was living in the era of plowhshares made from weapons, as the ancient Hebrew prophet Isaiah had envisioned. We were at the end of history, to steal from Francis Fukuyama, or at least nearing it.

But even more dramatic than Schuller’s introduction were the words spoken by Gorbachev himself, at one point declaring that “the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most important gains of perestroika.” Reminiscing about his late mother’s support of him during one of the hardest periods of his rule, the 1991 failed coup d’état, the teary-eyed Gorbachev went on to declare that his entire family had been Christians for generations: “My entire family consisted of believers. … Our rooms were adorned with icons. My grandmother was always praying. And the most interesting part perhaps was the fact that right near those icons there was also a little table on which my grandfather kept portraits of Lenin and Stalin.” For scholars of the Cold War and Soviet history, Gorbachev’s appearance alongside a religious leader let alone an American one would be from the realm of fantasy just a decade before.

Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s “sermon” was indeed a dramatic departure from his professed atheism and the militant secularism of the Soviet state he once presided over. Lest we forget, it was the Soviet Union that gave us the League of Militant Atheists, the publisher of Bezbozhnik, the flagship atheistic propaganda publication ceaselessly and venomously ridiculing religion and clerics, all in the “interests of our communist education, our cultural socialist construction,”¹ as Boris Kandidov, one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent propagandists of atheism, had put it.

It would be an exercise in futility to look for some sort of profound insight from a private citizen’s appearance in a church an ocean away while on a public speaking tour. It would be even more so to assign it some grand political significance. Nevertheless, Gorbachev’s appearance at the Crystal Cathedral cannot be dismissed out of hand either if only because it was a solid indicator of the changing perception of public religiosity by former and current officials in Russia.

Materials cited in this post are courtesy of Izvestiia Digital Archive and Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda e-book collection, both of which are available through East View Information Services.

NOTES

1. Boris Kandidov, Legenda o Khriste v klassovoi bor’be (The legend about Christ in class struggle), (Moscow: Ateist, 1930), 82. ︎

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On April 8, 1991 Pravda published an article about the 12-th International Symposium of Gravitational Physiology held in Leningrad entitled Love Amongst the Stars. And no, the article was not about international celebrities descending into an orgiastic bender. Rather, it was dedicated to a round table discussion held on the sidelines of the symposium on the theme of Sex in Space moderated by one of Pravda’s own journalists – Andrey Filippov.

The initial question and the answer, reproduced in translation below provide a glimpse into the fast-changing parameters of accepted social discourse in the Soviet Union, albeit in its latter-day, on-the-verge-of-collapse iteration.

The materials cited in this post are a courtesy of Pravda Digital Archive and Soviet Woman Digital Archive, both of which are available through East View Information Services.

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