Monday, September 19, 2011

An actor's apology for Stalin

My Russia, by Peter Ustinov (Little, Brown, 1983). Beautifully designed in a larger format, with many prints, illustrations, and photographs. 

Not sure I should spend the time on this. Ordinarily, I would not buy such an odd book, or post about it. Ustinov was an actor, not a historian, and he did not grow up in Russia. He has no professional expertise as a historian or historical analyst. But we had seen him in a few movies that we enjoyed, so I bought it at Bryn Mawr Vasser used book store. The book is a breezy history of Russia, with a concentration on the cold war period. It's Ustinov's idiosyncratic take on Russian history.

What is perhaps worthwhile is that he represents Russians as I think many of them would like to be represented. He emphasizes that this is a country and a people that has forever had to defend itself against foreign threats -- the Mongols, the Swedes, the Germans, the Poles, Napolean, the Turks, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans again, and finally the United States and NATO. A country with a border that big naturally has a lot of neighbors, many of them with aggressive designs. That long, difficult and distant border shaped the behavior of the czars and of the Politburo.

He interprets many of the Soviet Union's actions in WW II and the cold war as reasonable behavior in light of Russian history. He doesn't get very specific. But this leads him to make some odd rationalizations, even suggesting that Stalin's pact with Hitler at the start of World War II was simply a way to buy time and prepare for when the German armies would invade the Soviet Union itself. There is nothing in the book about the Gulag Archipelago, although he wrote the book long after Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ustinov writes about Stalin's crimes involving "thousands" as opposed to the millions of dead. There's almost nothing about the domination of Eastern Europe following the war, or the oppressive clampdown on its own population for most of the twentieth century until the Soviet Union's demise. Ustinov comes across as a remote, sympathetic apologist for the old regime.














Friday, September 16, 2011

Wish we had not paid for Rent

Rent, at the New Repertory Theater in Watertown This was painful to sit through. It was hard to understand the screamed lyrics, and most of what I could hear was pretty thin. I don't know La Boheme to understand the reference to it, but it struck me as odd to call the characters poor. They were slumming, which is much different from being poor. I can't summarize the story because I'm not sure what it was. The program book indicates that much of the romance around this show involves the untimely death of Jonathan Larson, the show's creator, from an aneurysm just before it opened in 1996. There were a few decent songs, powerfully sung, Roger's One Song Glory, Seasons of Love, I'll Cover You. But I found a lot of this musical obnoxious. And I hate seeing naked people on stage.