Urals Pathfinder: Theatre in Post-Soviet Yekaterinburg

URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG

Blair A. Ruble

KENNAN INSTITUTE OCCASIONAL PAPER # 307 The Kennan Institute is a division of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Through its programs of residential scholarships, meetings, and publications, the Institute encourages scholarship on the successor states to the Soviet Union, embracing a broad range of ﬁ elds in the social sciences and humanities. The Kennan Institute is supported by contributions from foundations, corporations, individuals, and the United States Government. Kennan Institute Occasional Papers

The Kennan Institute makes Occasional Papers available to all those interested. Occasional Papers are submitted by Kennan Institute scholars and visiting speakers. Copies of Occasional Papers and a list of papers currently available can be obtained free of charge by contacting:

Occasional Papers Kennan Institute One Woodrow Wilson Plaza 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20004-3027 (202) 691-4100

Occasional Papers published since 1999 are available on the Institute’s web site, www.wilsoncenter.org/kennan

This Occasional Paper has been produced with the support of the George F. Kennan Fund.The Kennan Institute is most grateful for this support.

The views expressed in Kennan Institute Occasional Papers are those of the authors.

ISBN 1-933549-77-7 WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS Jane Harman, President, Director, and CEO

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Joseph B. Gildenhorn, Chair Sander R. Gerber, Vice Chair

PUBLIC MEMBERS: James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress; Hillary R. Clinton, Secretary, U.S. Department of State; G. Wayne Clough, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution; Arne Duncan, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education; Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary, U.S. Depart- ment of Health and Human Services; David Ferriero, Acting Archivist of the United States; James Leach, Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; Melody Barnes

PRIVATE CITIZEN MEMBERS: Timothy Broas, John Casteen, Charles Cobb, Jr., Thelma Duggin, Carlos M. Gutierrez, Susan Hutchison, Barry S. Jackson

ABOUT THE CENTER The Center is the living memorial of the United States of America to the nation’s twenty- eighth president, Woodrow Wilson. Congress established the Woodrow Wilson Center in 1968 as an international institute for advanced study, “symbolizing and strengthening the fruitful relationship between the world of learning and the world of public affairs.” The Center opened in 1970 under its own board of trustees. In all its activities the Woodrow Wilson Center is a nonprofi t, nonpartisan organization, supported fi nancially by annual appropriations from Congress, and by the contributions of foundations, corporations, and individuals. Conclusions or opinions expressed in Center publications and programs are those of the authors and speakers and do not necessarily refl ect the views of the Center staff, fellows, trustees, advisory groups, or any individuals or organizations that provide fi nancial support to the Center. URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG

Blair A. Ruble

OCCASIONAL PAPER # 307 I have employed the Library of Congress Transliteration System exclusively in the notes as well as generally in the text. However, alternative transliterations for several place and personal names have become widely accepted in British and American usage (e.g., Chelyabinsk instead of Cheliabinsk; Bogayev instead of Bogaev; Kolyada instead of Koliada; Lukyanin instead of Luk’ianin; Presnyakov instead of Presniakov; and, most important, Yekaterinburg instead of Ekaterinburg). I have used more generally accepted transliterations in the text in such instances. URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG

If you don’t close your eyes from time to time, eternal Russian beliefs in the salvation to you can see these miracles. be found in the impact of theatre as a sacral —Agata Kristi Rock Band, from “Oni Letaiat’,” rite, in the potency of redemption, and in on the album Chudesa Miracles, 1998 the transcendental power of the human soul.2 The play by Sigarev premiering that night at the Royal Court—Plasticine—tried to square he mood in London the third week of the circle between spiritual degradation and March 2002 had been sour. Tony Blair salvation. was ploughing ahead to join his friend T Plasticine was not totally untried by the time George W. Bush in a seemingly unstoppable drive to invade Iraq. The Middle East already it opened at the Royal Court. It had debuted in was in fl ames, as the Israelis besieged Palestinian 2000, had won Sigarev the ironically revered leader Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah compound. Russian “Anti-Booker” Prize, and had already The World Meteorological Organization had been performed at Moscow’s prestigious released yet another, more strident, report Playwright and Director Center under the warning about the dire consequences of global inspired direction of Kirill Serebrennikov.3 warming. The newspapers and television news The Royal Court, in turn, had committed shows had little to offer that could bring joy itself to stage a full-fl edged production after a into anyone’s life. At least the fi rst signs of successful reading of an English translation of spring were taking hold, as rains early in the the text a year before.4 week gave away to clear skies with temperatures In writing his play, Sigarev drew on his own climbing into the upper 50s (when measured life to set forth a shocking tale of violence, by the scale conceived by the good physicist drunkenness, hypocrisy, humiliation, rape, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit). sadistic sexual relations, aggression, and At the edgy Royal Court Theatre on the vengeance. The play’s title is derived from the city’s tony Sloane Square, a young Russian material with which the hero “fi rst molds his playwright from beyond the Urals—twenty- double, then a phallus of socking size, and then fi ve-year-old Vasili Sigarev—was offering a the cast for a kuckleduster which he uses to premiere play with a strange-sounding title avenge his aggressors.”5 Sigarev was a native that was said to hold the promise of a new Verkhnaia Salda, a small city of about 50,000 era in Russian dramaturgy. And Sigarev, souls 120 miles or so north of the Urals city of despite the entire hubbub surrounding his Yekaterinburg. He had left home to study at arrival in London, was but one among many the Nizhny Tagil Pedagogical Institute, before young provincial playwrights who were seeking out the master dramatist Nikolai setting Russian theatre on edge.1 Together Kolyada at the innovative Yekaterinburg with dozens more authors who had come of Theatre Institute.6 The city’s cutting-edge age as the Soviet Union collapsed, Sigarev was theatre and cultural scene enveloped the small- seeking a voice for his country’s post-Soviet town youth, who arrived just as the restrictions confusion, violence, frustration, anger, and of Soviet life were crumbling before an carnivalesque debasement. Simultaneously, onslaught led, in part, by Yekaterinburg’s he and his colleagues had embraced more mercurial illustrious native son, Boris Yeltsin.

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 3 Yeltsin, Kolyada, and their local protégés Court, with premieres of inﬂ uential plays by enthusiastically embraced the advice of the the likes of Christopher Hampton, Athold American poet Walt Whitman to “unscrew Fuguard, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, the locks from the doors; unscrew the doors Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Daniels, Timberlake themselves from their jams!”7 Kolyada— Wettenbaker, Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, together with other talented local playwrights Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh, Simon such as Sigarev, Oleg Bogayev, and the Stephens, Leo Butler, and Edward Bond. They Presnyakov brothers—was busy preparing the were joined by works from such established ground for a revolution on the Russian stage, writers as Isaac Babel, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene what would become known as Russia’s New Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sarte, Drama Movement, that would prove to be as and Marguerite Duras, thereby cementing profound as that unleashed in politics by their the Court’s reputation as perhaps the single Urals brethren led by Yeltsin. most important English-language theatre in The Royal Court Theatre was a fully the world. In addition, the legendary Rocky appropriate setting for bringing Russia’s Horror Show opened in the Court’s small sixty- New Drama Movement to arguably the most three-seat studio Theatre Upstairs in 1973. important theatrical city in the world.8 The As a result, Sigarev and his play were sure to building itself dates from 1888, having been be noticed simply by virtue of the fact that constructed on the site of the earlier New they were debuting on the boards of the Chelsea Theater, which itself had opened in Royal Court. the converted Ranelagh Chapel eighteen years The initial critical reaction to Sigarev’s before. The sort of brick-and-stone confection play was confused. Michael Billington of The typical of the era, the Royal Court Theatre Guardian was not impressed. “But the real attained a lagniappe of elegance thanks to its problem,” Billington wrote, “is that [the] Italianate style and hierarchical arrangements play never analyses the source of [the main of stalls, dress circle, amphitheatre, and gallery character] Maksim’s alienation and at only two seating an audience of 841. The theatre moments rises above a generalized portrait of became known for staging some of the most urban squalor. One is when Luopkha’s mother innovative plays of the late nineteenth and bribes a teacher with a swimming-pool pass; early twentieth centuries, included several by the other is when Maksim’s gran urges the boy George Bernard Shaw as well as a number of to buy some cheap beef reduced in price for frolicking Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. But Election Day. Suddenly you get a glimpse of the Great Depression of the 1930s undercut its the endemic corruption that has survived the audience, so the owners switched to showing collapse of the Soviet system.”9 ﬁ lms until the roof collapsed under German The Independent’s Paul Taylor was more bombs during World War II. taken with what he saw as Sigarev’s “bracingly The theatre architect Robert Cromie clear-eyed tragicomic vision of a world where renovated the Royal Court in 1952 for a smaller a woman would think of the local elections audience of 500, which, after 1956, proved to principally as the opportunity to grab some be the perfect size for George Devine’s English of the cut-prime meat the politicians offer Stage Company. Devine and his actors made as bribes.” “Sigarev,” he continues, “sees the the Royal Court London’s premiere “writer’s chaos of contemporary Russia steadily, and theatre.” Beginning in the late 1950s—and he sees it whole. He’s an exciting talent and I continuing until today—the very best of look forward keenly to encountering more of contemporary writers and works have found his work.”10 Other critics agreed. The Evening their way to British audiences at the Royal Standard named Sigarev the “Most Promising

4 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Playwright of 2002.”11 In presenting the award rather than an administrative center (Perm to Sigarev, Tom Stoppard voiced his opinion served as the provincial capital for much of the that “if Dostoevsky were writing in the 21st period).16 It attracted a diverse population of century, no doubt he would have written workers and specialists—including a signifi cant Plasticine.”12 Billington, Taylor, and dozens of Jewish population at a time when the empire’s other critics would have plenty of opportunity Jews were largely prohibited from moving to write about Plasticine in the years ahead beyond the Pale of Settlement in the lands because the play—together with other Sigarev annexed following the fi nal partition of Poland works—would be performed regularly on in the late eighteenth century.17 stages around the world. Local mine and factory owners were less Russia’s New Drama Movement grew out of concerned with the details of such imperial many roots from across the enormous length of policies than they were with using engineering the newly formed Russian Federation. Sigarev’s knowledge to make their businesses profi table. Yekaterinburg proved to be one particularly As the political analyst Leon Aron has noted, powerful environment for nurturing and the city’s “industrialists and merchants disseminating new cultural forms that refl ected became well known for their wealth, the disorientation of a society in crisis. But the curiosity and civic-mindedness. They were city’s status as a hub of creativity looks much indefatigable travelers, collectors of nature’s more plausible in retrospect than it did at the curiosities and connoisseurs of the arts. They time. For all too many observers, Yekaterinburg founded museums, theatres, and libraries.”18 seemed destined for a postindustrial historical Consequently, they employed people who dustbin already fi lled by the likes of Manchester could do the job no matter how much they and Detroit. were discriminated against elsewhere. Jews, following the extension of the draft to non- THE GATEWAY TO RUSSIAN ASIA Orthodox Christians in 1827, and others came to the region to serve their twenty-fi ve-year compulsory military service and frequently Yekaterinburg, which would become 19 Russia’s fourth-largest city, was established never returned home. Many political exiles late in the reign of Peter I (“The Great”) and released prisoners similarly sought out in 1723 just on the Asian side of the Urals the region’s cities after having served their Mountains somewhat more than 900 miles Siberian sentences. The city was a place where east of Moscow. The city was named after smart outsiders could thrive. Even today, local Saint Catherine to honor Tsar Peter’s wife, residents often claim that they judge someone Ekaterina. It drew settlers from across the only by how hard he or she works. Russian Empire, slowly growing to achieve the Yekaterinburg became the sort of status of a town only in 1796.13 It eventually melting pot of empire that promotes emerged as a major mining and manufacturing unrefi ned interethnic, interconfessional, center prospering from the exploitation of the interprofessional, and interclass propinquity. rich mineral deposits throughout the Urals On the one hand, numerous arrivals to region, enriching great industrial dynasties in the Urals region maintained their religious the process.14 The arrival of the Trans-Siberian institutions and schools. According to the 1897 Railroad in the late nineteenth century further census, for example, between 85 and 97 percent secured Yekaterinburg’s status as one of Russia’s of Jews in the four Urals provinces (guberniia) 15 most important industrial centers. spoke Yiddish at home. On the other hand, The city, in fact, was unusual for Imperial residents from various backgrounds wore Russia in that it was an industrial headquarters Russian clothes and worked alongside people

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 5 different from themselves in jobs ranging from often became more grounded in the realities of the most menial to the professions.20 everyday life.24 This pattern was true for many religious and Yekaterinburg nonetheless was constantly at national groups, promoting a sort of rough- the center of many events that shaped Russia’s and-ready tolerance and mixing of cultures. destiny. The city was the focal point of intense As a result, some of the worst pathologies fi ghting during the Russian Civil War, and of Russian imperial ethnic relations largely the basement of one of the city’s merchant bypassed the city and region. For example, houses—Ipatiev House—became the scene of the only pogroms to take place in the city the bloody execution of Russia’s royal family— before 1917 were those provoked by police Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, his four agents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on daughters, and his son and trusted aides—on orders from their Saint Petersburg superiors in July 17, 1918.25 A half-dozen years later, in October 1905. Attacks throughout the entire 1924, the city was renamed for Yakov Sverdlov, Urals region remained remarkably tame by the Bolshevik who gave the fi nal order for Russian standards; only four Jews were killed their execution.26 This moniker would remain in Ufa, and one Jew and one Russian perished until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in Yekaterinburg at the time. Only slightly (while the surrounding region has retained the higher death tolls occurred in Vyatka and Sverdlovsk name). Chelyabinsk.21 Without question, local Black Stalin’s “Great Leap Forward,” beginning Hundreds, Bundist socialists, revolutionary with the inauguration of the First Five-Year socialists, Zionists, and Islamic Revivalists Plan in 1928, stimulated further growth as were all active in the years leading up to the the city became home to numerous heavy outbreak of World War I; yet they never gained industrial plants, including the largest the traction of their brethren in other regions machinery plant in a “European economy,” around the empire.22 the giant Uralmash works.27 The city exploded Many factors promoted a frontier-like with tens of thousands of new residents sensibility of live and let live, among them streaming in to fi ll the factories that were being the fact that Yekaterinburg was not springing up all around.28 Uralmash, which as large as it was economically important. opened on July 15, 1933, was not just a factory. People, no matter how different, were never The project included a gigantic new “socialist complete strangers to one another. Moreover, city” (sotsgorod) for more than 100,000 workers its intellectual achievements—though often and their families that had been built according considerable—were of a practical rather to the principles of “dis-urbanization,” which than ideological bent. Saint Petersburg, by called for massive decentralized housing— contrast, has arguably spawned or imported with commercial blocks covering between 6 every major Russian ideological movement and 10 hectares on which housing surrounded for the past three hundred years, from Peter by tree-lined allées opened onto green areas the Great’s imperial absolutist modernization with sports, education, and cultural facilities idea to today’s postmodernist hyperrealism. carefully spaced and mixed together with In Yekaterinburg, the best and brightest stores and worker kitchens ( fabrika-kukhnia).29 throughout the Urals region focused their In many ways, the new industrial city attention on how to get things done.23 became Sverdlovsk, while the historical center Intellectual, ideological, political, artistic, and evolved into an appendage (one that would even architectural fashions arrived with some eventually be connected to it by a single delay from the cosmopolitan artistic centers of subway line that opened in the 1990s). The European Russia; and when they arrived, they distinction between the older and newer cities

6 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG underscored a central cleavage within Soviet with engineers and mathematicians, artists society between the industrial proletariat and and lawyers, writers and musicians who had the urban intelligentsia. For the latter, the fallen prey to Stalin’s last purges against Jewish Uralmash neighborhood and its residents were “cosmopolitans” and other undesirables.36 only “semicivilized.” Several of contemporary Yekaterinburg’s The new “socialist city” that grew up cultural luminaries—such as the popular poet- around Uralmash is but part of the story of playwright-actor Vladimir Balashov—trace the city’s Stalinist reinvention.30 The entire their familial connections to the city to this town was being rebuilt, as German, Polish, era.37 Others—such as the local literary lion and Moscow architects representing the Valentin Lukyanin—arrived somewhat later to latest avant-garde styles designed one of the study and work in local industry.38 most impressive inventories of modernist The postwar city had grown to become Constructivist and Bauhausian buildings to be home to slightly more than a million people. found anywhere.31 Major cultural institutions Cold War Sverdlovsk was a focal point for sprang up. Although the local opera house Soviet military industrial production, which had opened in 1912 and featured opera and drew on both the city’s many factories together ballet companies dating back many decades with numerous research facilities. Uralmash before, the city’s musical comedy theatre was alone produced the famous T-34 tank and its founded in 1932; its puppet theatre, also in Cold War successors, together with critical 1932; the local conservatory, in 1934; various aviation and rocketry components as well as literary museums, throughout the 1920s the giant heavy machinery that propelled the and 1930s; and a renowned folk chorus, in Soviet industrial machine for decades. 1943.32 Consequently, the city’s growth as a vibrant cultural center paralleled its rise as DYNAMISM AND STAGNATION an industrial giant. Beyond performing, such institutions encouraged local youth to embrace The consequences of such a concentration of cultural pursuits through their connections military-industrial-research capacity in the to the city’s and region’s vast factories and city proved to be both positive and negative. industrial enterprises that had grown up at the In 1979, a local research site specializing same time.33 in biological warfare accidentally released Sverdlovsk escaped German occupation anthrax into the atmosphere, leading to one during World War II, becoming a major of the worst biological contaminations of a evacuation destination for important factories, civilian population in history.39 Moreover, educational, and cultural institutions from Soviet-era Sverdlovsk’s important role in cities further west, including Moscow and defense research and development as well as Leningrad. Today’s modern and effi cient industrial production prompted the authorities international airport at Kol’tsovo initially to limit access to the city, banning foreigners served as a landing strip for Lend Lease fl ights and unapproved Soviet citizens from crossing from the United States beginning in December its boundaries. 1943.34 All sorts of other facilities—together On a more positive note, the city’s overall with their specialists—remained after the war signifi cance for the Soviet defense effort to create a powerful urban center dominating amplifi ed the region’s political status and a vast region astride the Soviet Union’s power.40 Local political leaders developed geographic center.35 They were joined by their own distinctive style with roots in the exiled notables—including the World War II region’s past. As Yeltsin’s biographer, Leon hero Marshal Konstantin Zhukov—together Aron, writes, “Yekaterinburg’s unique history,

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 7 demography, and industry contributed to the Union’s leading outlet without peer for science emergence of what might be called the Ural fi ction. And the region’s more traditional, school of Communist Party leadership. As a “thick” literary journal, Ural, remained one of rule, the Ural Party bosses were competent, the leading outlets for creative writing outside tough, independent, strong, seemingly the political and cultural capitals of Moscow incorruptible, even austere, and direct.”41 and Leningrad. By the mid-1980s, incoming Communist Given the Soviet policy of establishing a full Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev range of cultural and educational institutions raided the local elite for effective administrators. in cities with more than 1 million residents, He brought Sverdlovsk Communist Party Yekaterinburg simultaneously offered a regional fi rst secretary Yeltsin to Moscow complete range of offi cial theatres, covering to tear apart the capital’s entrenched local all major genres of dance, opera, philharmonic party elite. Gorbachev similarly summoned and choral and chamber music, drama, musical Uralmash director Nikolai Ryzhkov to comedy and operetta, children’s theatre, the Kremlin, where he became the general and the circus arts. These institutions were secretary’s longest-serving prime minister supported by the local Communist Party (holding the offi ce from 1985 until 1991).42 leadership, though not without interference As home to the sorts of pragmatic and controversy.44 These offi cial state- intellectuals needed to produce giant supported cultural institutions steadfastly machinery and weapons of mass destruction, sustained high-quality ballet, opera, musical the city likewise generated a vibrant theatrical comedy, modern dance, puppet, and dramatic and musical life, which remained innovative theatre companies. during the years that became known as the But the city’s dynamism could also take “Brezhnev Era of Stagnation [Zastoi].” Because other, less savory forms. Multigenerational it was closed to the outside world, and therefore criminal gangs, which would win the city the out of the Soviet mainstream, the local scene dubious title of post-Soviet Russia’s “crime enjoyed many more degrees of freedom of capital” during the 1990s, in fact were created expression than larger, more open cities closer and thrived during the Brezhnev era. The same to the Soviet heartland.43 This vitality was advantages of geography that allowed the city especially visible in popular music. to link east and west also attracted criminal Brezhnev-era Sverdlovsk emerged as one groups, which easily penetrated a tough local of the Soviet Union’s most creative centers for working-class culture while attracting into rock ’n’ roll music, rivaled only by Leningrad their bands former convicts released from (now Saint Petersburg). Its distinctive “Urals camps to the east.45 Rock” movement—led by such bands as Urfi n Dzhyus, Chaif, Nautilus Pompilius, THE “SECOND FRONT” Nastya, Trek, Agata Kristi, and Smyslovye Galliustinatsii—transformed late Soviet and A distinctive Soviet youth culture at odds postindependence Russian popular music. with offi cial ideology began to emerge during Beyond rock, nonconformist artists such as the late 1950s as the harshest elements of the Evgeny Malakhin, known as “Bukashkin” (a Stalinist police state began to recede following small insect), sustained a vibrant underground the Great Leader’s death in 1953.46 Hip “stilyagi” art scene that was known as far away as Moscow, began to appear in Moscow and Leningrad as Saint Petersburg, and Odessa. The city’s well as in cities in western Ukraine and the homegrown literary journal, Ural’skii sledopyt Baltic republics that had not been incorporated (Ural Pathfi nder), established itself as the Soviet into the Soviet Union until the 1939 Stalin-

8 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Ribbentrop Pact just before World War II.47 Ever more portable recording technologies The term “stilyagi,” for funky Soviet-style allowed musicians to spread their sound across hipster fashionistas, derived from the fact that the entire Soviet Union so that, by the 1980s, a these “beatniks” wore “stylish” clothes beyond robust, complex, and varied rock music culture generally accepted attire.48 Jazz dominated, had taken root, ranging from ubiquitous disco though the early sounds of rock ’n’ roll had groups to punk and everything in between.55 reached the USSR by the time a massive youth Soviet rock easily survived a round of festival brought nearly 35,000 international repression unleashed in 1984 by disgruntled 49 youth to Moscow during the summer of 1957. cultural overlords who had taken advantage The fi rst Soviet rock ’n’ roll bands began to of the rapid turnover of Communist Party appear in Estonia and Latvia—and eventually general secretaries following Brezhnev’s late in Moscow and Leningrad—during the early death in 1982.56 1960s. The new music took off by mid- In some ways, the Soviet rock scene’s decade with the arrival of the Beatles over apotheosis occurred with an internationally shortwave radios and, eventually, contraband televised charity concert staged to assist 50 cassette tape recordings. As the Soviet rock the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl’ nuclear critic and historian Artemy Troitsky later accident.57 This landmark event nonetheless observed, “The Beatles’ happy, harmonious highlighted some of the limits of rock’s reach vocal choir proved to be just the voice for in Soviet society because its top headliner— which our confused generation was waiting, Alla Pugacheva—represented a much more 51 but was unable to create for itself.” By the popular style. Pugacheva became the Soviet 1970s, Soviet rock bands had found their own Union’s and the Russian-speaking world’s worldview. The genre swept the country, with most enduring and most popular performer. homegrown groups such as Mashina Vremini Her music blends elements of rock with strains (Time Machine), Akvarium (Aquarium), and of the era’s most beloved musical genre, a Zvuki Mu (The Sounds of Mu) grabbing bouncy yet nostalgic and sentimental blend large followings. Their popularity forced the known in Russian as estrada, or “variety show” Communist Party and state bureaucrats lording songs.58 Meanwhile, underground poet bards over offi cial culture to sponsor their own tamer such as Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, equivalents and to elevate politically neutral and Vladimir Vysotksy gave more fulsome 52 disco to the level of a cultural icon. voice to the era’s discontent through their The quasi-underground Soviet rock gravelly storytelling ballads about workers, scene thrived in the dark shadows of offi cial prisoners, soldiers, drivers, alcoholics, and institutions such as those attached to the intelligentsia generally and the artistic Sverdlovsk’s massive factories: in restaurants intelligentsia in particular, as well as others and workers’ clubs, in palaces of culture, and among the Soviet alienated and dispossessed. on festival stages often controlled by Young Their songs were quickly passed from hand Communist League (Komsomol), trade union, to hand on low-quality cassettes and tape and factory offi cials. Indeed, rock music and recordings.59 video salons became a meaningful source of But it was rock, as Richard Stites argues, income for such offi cial institutions as well as that became “the driving force behind 53 for their offi cers. Some speculate that these youth culture in large Soviet cities.”60 This revenues became the basis for the primitive was especially true in closed cities such as accumulation of capital during the Gorbachev Yekaterinburg. Writing about the similarly years, eventually enabling such offi cials to closed industrial city Dnepropetrovsk in move into the privatization of metals, coal, gas, Ukraine, Sergei Zhuk notes that rock became 54 and oil once the Soviet Union collapsed. a way of creating a new youth identity

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 9 through a “process of selective borrowing and culture and intellectual sensibility that seeks appropriation, translation, and incorporation to integrate a sharp critical perspective while into the indigenous cultural context.”61 not shying away from the ugly realities of life. According to Zhuk, music and other Western They help to defi ne their city’s special sense of cultural products tore through closed societies self, which the local writer Valentin Lukyanov such as the Soviet Union in general, and large has identifi ed as its distinctive “soul.”63 defense industry cities such as Dnepropetrovsk and Yekaterinburg in particular. The music THE “PROVINCIAL” WRITTEN WORD “contributed to the spread of cynicism among young people. The oppressive ideological Struggling to gain control over an entrenched atmosphere of Dnepropetrovsk as a closed Communist Party elite, the rising leader Nikita city contributed not only to ideological and Khrushchev undertook the fi rst of what would cultural confusion but also to the moral issue become an unending three-and-a-half-decade of ideological cynicism.”62 stream of failed reforms to make the Soviet Yekaterinburg’s rock scene, though part of economy more effi cient while breaking the these larger Soviet trends, remained distinctive stranglehold of the party’s elite (nomenklatura) in some important ways. By the early 1980s, over the country. In January 1957, Khrushchev a number of talented and creative bands had announced that he would reorganize the emerged in the city, which combined a pop country’s economic system by separating sound with sharp critiques of social problems. agricultural and industrial bureaucracies into Vyacheslav Butusov’s Nautilius Pampilius in parallel sets of regional economic councils the 1980s and the Samoilov brothers’ Agata (sovnarkhozy), which simultaneously would Kristi in the 1990s brought together the merge several political regions into larger gloomy longings of a “lost generation” with transregional units. Despite subsequent songs of love and social protest. The group refi nements, the new system created more chaos Chaif (from the local slang word for “pleasure,” than effi ciency, helping to lead to the October derived from the Russian word for tea)— 1964 internal Communist Party coup that removed Khrushchev from offi ce.64 As one of perhaps the longest-running group dating back the designated sovnarkhoz seats, Yekaterinburg to the 1980s and continuing on stage for a third was poised to receive a recognition normally of a century and more—proudly declared its reserved for the capitals of various union connection to its native city both in song and republics (e.g., Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, in charitable activities. and Kyrgyzstan). Literary journals were among These bands—and others like them—were the accoutrements of status. the creations of the “technical intelligentsia” The preponderance of literary publications that so dominated the city. Some band in the Russian Federation (R.S.F.S.R.) had members were trained architects; others were been based in Moscow and Leningrad, with new conservatory graduates. Yulia Chicherina, a regional journals being launched in Vladivostok descendent of Lenin’s and Stalin’s commissar at the end of the war, and in Arkhangelsk of foreign affairs, Georgii Chicherin, spent her to the far north in 1965.65 As a result, childhood years as a serious music student. Their “provincial” writers had little opportunity to bands and their songs combined philosophical publish their works independently from the thought, social criticism, musical sophistication offi cial overlords in Moscow. Some regional and a drive for a rollicking good time that journals from the early Soviet era—such as distinguished the “Urals Rock” sound from Sverdlovsk’s Shturn and Ural’skii sledopyt—held other Russian rock styles. Collectively, their on until Stalin centralized cultural institutions music refl ected the preoccupation of an urban during the mid-1930s. A number of annual

10 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG literary almanacs—such as Sverdlovsk’s as the editor of a second, broad-based literary Ural’skii sovremennik, which would continue to “thick” journal, Ural, which was intended to be published for thirty-seven years—sprang up showcase regional writers and themes. Given around the country to fi ll the gap. But none that it was managed by the local division of of these publications attained the reverence the offi cial Writers’ Union and overseen by preserved in Russian literary circles for the party offi cials, Ural focused on promoting a sacred “thick” journal, which, since the late regional identity among local writers.70 After a nineteenth century, has been the preferred number of political interventions by the party, outlet for Russian creative writing.66 including reprimands and dismissals of early Moscow’s and Leningrad’s prestigious editors, the journal fi rmly secured its stature “thick” journals—such as Novyi Mir, Znayia, as a leading regional literary journal when and Druzhba narodov—led the literary explosion Valentin Lukyanin assumed the editorship of once-banned works that would become in 1980. known as “the Thaw.” Seeing an opportune Lukyanin set out to promote the works of moment, Sverdlovsk’s and its region’s writers young authors; expand its focus to include moved quickly to replicate the success of plays as well as short stories, novels, and poems; the central journals at a regional level, using and reach out to a wider community through the city’s new status as a sovnarkhoz center discussion clubs and other events.71 He, too, to leverage support from regional party and would prompt political controversy. state authorities. In 1982, Lukyanin published Konstantin Vadim Ocheretin and other writers Lagunov’s novel Bronzovyi dog (The Bronze relaunched Ural’skii Sledopyt, a journal that Mastiff ) in the journal’s August, September, had managed to run for nine issues in 1935 and October issues.72 The novel included before succumbing to Communist Party almost documentary reportage tied together censorship.67 Ocheretin and his successor by fi ctionalized narratives offering a “portrayal Soviet-era editors—Vladimir Shustov, of the true face of the oil barons” of the West Ivan Akulov, and the two-decade-serving Siberian petroleum belt in the neighboring Stanislav Meshavkin—fi rmly established Tyumen Region. In his chronicle of shocking the journal as the premiere outlet for science transgressions against “Communist morality,” fi ction writing in the Soviet Union, gaining many of Lagunov’s characterizations presaged international recognition for their efforts. the behavior of post-Soviet Russian oil By publishing homegrown Soviet authors as oligarchs. Tyumen’ party and state offi cials well as translations of international writers, immediately expressed their outrage with Ural’skii Sledopyt developed a cult following Regional Party First Secretary Georgii that reached far beyond the Urals region. The Bogomyakov probably telephoning his journal’s Aelita Festival became the Soviet Sverdlovsk counterpart Boris Yeltsin about the Union’s premiere event showcasing science matter. Meanwhile, the journal’s readership fi ction, bringing the genre’s most talented skyrocketed, and letters of support started writers to Yekaterinburg each year.68 They pouring in from around the country. simultaneously used the journal as a platform The Lagunov Affair had hardly simmered to promote a discussion of environmental down when Lukyanin proposed publishing concerns both within the region and nationally Nikokai Nikonov’s story (povest’) “Starikova throughout the Soviet Union while focusing gora” (“The Old Man’s Mountain”) in the on regional literary history from time to time.69 journal’s January 1983 issue. Set in the fi ctional The Regional Communist Party village of Makarovka, Nikonov’s tale exposed Committee (Obkom) designated Ocheretin the social pathologies and degradations of Soviet

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 11 rural life a half century after collectivization, based journals and publishing houses were ending with the line “The land was waiting held captive by increasingly ossifi ed cliques for its owner.”73 Given the brutality of in the capital.76 Consequently, as with rock collectivization in the region—the infamously music, nonconformist artists, local novelists, legendary pioner (scout) Pavlik Morozov, who short story writers, poets, literary and condemned his father by denouncing him to theatrical critics, and playwrights maintained authorities, lived in the region’s Gerasimovka a distinctive voice. These efforts gained the village—Nikonov was poking at an even rawer additional outside support of many prominent nerve than Lagunov had. writers from throughout the Urals and beyond, Uncertain censors turned the galley proofs such as Lev Davydychev from Perm, Evgenii of the January 1983 Ural issue over to the Ananyev from Tiumen’, and Viktor Astafyev Regional Party Committee, which deleted from Krasnoyarsk.77 approximately one-sixth of the text. Once Ural became such a beloved institution that, published, Ural became the object of an array in the late 1990s when its existence was in of attacks by the Communist Party and KGB. question due to the various economic and other Eventually, in May 1983, Lukyanin was uncertainties of post-Soviet life, prominent summoned to a meeting of the committee’s local authors stepped in to breathe new life Executive Bureau, where he was excoriated into the journal. The internationally renowned by First Secretary Yeltsin and other members Yekaterinburg playwright and dramatist of his team for four and a half hours. After a Nikolai Kolyada took over the journal’s public admission of serious shortcomings, editorial offi ces in July 1999 at a time when its Lukyanin held onto his editorial position, offi cial subscription numbers had dropped to a while Lagunov and Nikonov avoided offi cial mere three hundred, and when there were no sanctions. Copies of the January 1983 issue of more manuscripts in the queue to be published. Ural remained hidden away in most regional He parlayed his connections to attract new libraries despite a Communist Party order that writers, linking the journal to theatre festivals they be destroyed. and generally making Ural essential reading Despite—or, perhaps, because of—these for anyone interested in the “New Russian political interventions, Ural exerted a primal Writing” movement. A decade later, he passed force of gravity around which regional literary the journal along to the worthy hands of his life could grow and fl ourish. It published articles protégé, the internationally renowned local focusing on local and regional history as well playwright Oleg Bogaev, who is expanding the as traditions, cultural life, and peculiarities, journal’s readership on the Internet.78 thus giving defi nition to a distinctive regional identity. Its offi ces and events came to play the UNCONTROLLED CARTELS role of the legendary renegade hangouts Gavan and Café Saigon in Leningrad, while never Both Ural’skii sledopyt and Ural served as turning its back on more traditional writers and important resources for the local theatre 74 cultural fi gures. Its very existence provided community as Yekaterinburg moved into the an outlet for regional authors of competing post-Soviet world. Like the various theatre styles and temperaments from across Siberia, companies and venues that took shape during both young and old.75 the middle years of the twentieth century, Lukyanin’s catholic embrace of a regional these journals and the networks nurtured by literary vision proved to be especially them provided a powerful base on which new important for promoting local writers during forms of drama could take shape. the height of the Brezhnev era, when Moscow-

12 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Brezhenev-era Sverdlovsk was home to Centrals (Tsentral’nye) dominated the city more than posses of writers. As mentioned during the late Soviet period as they exerted above, the city held a reputation as one of the control over an energetic black market trade in most criminally violent in the entire Soviet goods and services that initially was based at Union.79 The same factors that enriched its the central market and spread out from there. economic and cultural life also made it a natural With the decline of the Uralmash plant, a center for vice.80 The city was suffi ciently far group of former professional sportsmen, their from Moscow to be beyond direct control yet friends, and relatives from the neighborhoods close enough to remain within reach and close surrounding the factory began to seize the enough to the Siberian prisons to become a assets of the once-gigantic plant. Their gang, magnet for newly released prisoners. It stood which coalesced by 1991, entered into turf astride major transportation routes connecting battles with the older Centrals, unleashing narcotics-growing fi elds to the south and east a brutal and massive gang war between the and drug markets to the west, with a vast two groups following the June 16, 1991, population of factory workers and their families assassination of the Uralmash boss Grigorii who were beginning to feel the fi rst indications Tsyganov. Explosions, shootings, and murders of a national economic collapse that would shut became a daily occurrence from 1992 until down their factories. Everything about the city 1994, with Yekaterinburg becoming known as promoted the emergence of vast, disciplined, the most criminal city in Russia.85 aggressive, and malevolent bands of armed The Uralmash gang clearly emerged as criminals, hangers-on, and wannabes.80 victorious by late 1994, forcing the Centrals Criminal cartels—known in Russia as out of much of their original territory. “m a fi y a s ”—quickly moved in as the Soviet Uralmash operatives allegedly expanded their industrial economy collapsed to lay claim to horizons, reputedly laying claim to various the vast mineral wealth of the region; to seize local, regional, and national political positions. and dismantle the vast factories that could only Having become increasingly secure, Uralmash be used as scrap; to sell off light and heavy began to go “legit,” reportedly taking over weaponry from military bases that were no legal real estate, hotels, industrial, fi nancial, longer under any form of discernible control; and construction businesses in Russia and to traffi c in desperate human beings trying to abroad in Europe and the United States.86 fi nd some way to survive; to push drugs, and to Gang control of the native city hardly launder their profi ts; and to extort more. The disappeared even as tactics evolved from less larger “mafi yas”—such as Tsentral’nye (which to more licit activities. By the late 1990s, an grew up around the Central Market), the estimated 60 percent of all enterprises in Afgantsy (made up of Afghan war veterans), Yekaterinburg were controlled by criminal the Siniye (a gang of former prisoners), and organizations, while between 70 and 80 the Azerbaizhantsy (consisting of criminals percent of private and privatized fi rms and from the former Soviet republic)—branched commercial banks were said to pay protection out into many areas. Other gangs, which were money to criminal groups, corrupt offi cials, often rooted in specifi c enterprises—such as the and racketeers.87 powerful and massive Uralmash gang, and the More generally numerous successful gangs less potent Miko-Invest and Sakirtan cartels— expanded their drug, arms, and nuclear tended to specialize in their operations. materials trading worldwide through outposts The transition taking place in the criminal in Cyprus, India, the United States, Poland, world paralleled the larger transformations Germany, and China.88 Many still busied in the Soviet and post-Soviet economy. The themselves by victimizing local residents. A

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 13 quarter of all city residents claimed themselves in 1994, began to write about his experiences to have been victims of crime in November with vibrant, colorful verve. Two years later, 1997. 89 The mayhem would come under offi cial he was dead, the victim of the sort of story he control slowly during the late 1990s and early himself celebrated as an author.94 His last story, 2000s as local, regional, and national political “Smiling before Death,” appeared in a special leaders persistently began to impose coherence double issue of Ural, bringing local literary and on the Russian state. criminal life full circle.95 The Uralmash band in particular had A world in spectacular meltdown places all become well situated to avoid a direct sorts of human vice on prominent display and confrontation with a more centralized Russian forces survivors to fi nd meaning wherever they state by the time Vladimir Putin became can. Where is human dignity to be found in Russian president, in large measure because a world so full of violence and degradation? it had already left its more overtly criminal Does it matter? Are there limits to unbridled activities behind. But the underlying network cynicism? What does it mean to be human? of criminal power undoubtedly remained How can one show the human being at his in place.90 or her absolute most perverse and still fi nd Foot soldiers were easily recruited in a honor? Such themes, not surprisingly, came city where tens of thousands of young factory to dominate local literature and dramaturgy. workers could not fi nd a job. M a fi y a bands— They provided the fodder for the creative some associated with the Centrals, others with impulses that could be supported by the Uralmash, and others not, including at least institutional foundations provided by journals seventy-six organized and countless more and theatres enriched by a distinctive urban unorganized groups—fought over turf, leading “soul” fervently being expressed in pop music to an outburst of especially widespread urban and culture. violence, death, and havoc that surpassed that As was the case everywhere across Russia, found even in out-of-control Moscow and Saint local leaders in Yekaterinburg were left on Petersburg.91 As younger and younger gang their own to confront the terrible dislocations members fell in the onslaught, a local culture of post-Soviet deindustrialization. They tried grew up promoting opulent funeral services with varying degrees of success to parlay in which the deceased gangsters were laid to connections with their former colleagues in rest under ever more ornate tombstones.92 Moscow to open the city and its economy to Two competing cemeteries on opposite sides the world at large in order to sustain a city of town fi lled with the extravagant graves of population hovering above one million souls.96 criminals who had been rubbed out by other Two decades later, the city’s continued criminals. The 1994 tombstone of Central vitality demonstrates the local leaders’ general boss Mikhail Kuchin, for example, is a ten- success. At a time when many Russian cities foot-high malachite monument encrusted with were losing population, Yekaterinburg slowly precious stones with Kuchin’s carved visage grew, in no small measure due to the arrival holding the keys to his beloved Mercedes and of migrants from neighboring Central Asian wearing a designer suit over an unbuttoned countries.97 In 2009, census takers counted shirt displaying an Orthodox Christian cross.93 1,332,264 residents in the city (just below At least one local gangster, Evgenii Monakh, third-ranked Novosibirsk, which had 1,397,191 turned his attention to writing detective stories. residents; and just ahead of fi fth-place Nizhny The son of a well-placed family that included Novgorod, which was home to 1,272,527).98 a teacher of philosophy in a Communist Party Soviet-era cultural institutions, struggling school, Monakh turned to a life of crime and, to fi nd their way in the new post-Soviet

14 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG environment, spun off a number of established cultural fi gures to hear and come to semilegitimate theatre companies and music terms with what is being said. clubs that gave voice to some of the most As Beumers and Lipovetsky argue, “Looking creative Russian playwrights and rock back at the history of the twentieth century the musicians of their generation. Yekaterinburg best plays were written not at the beginning of nurtured many of the voices who would the 1920s but at the end of that decade and the defi ne post-Soviet Russia. The leading local early 1930s.... The best plays were written not playwrights Vasily Sigarev, Oleg Bogayev, at the peak of the [Khrushchev-era] Thaw or and the Presnyakov brothers wrote for the the early 1960s... but at the end of the 1960s Volkhonka Chamber Theatre. Nikolai Kolyada and early 1970s.... In Europe, the heyday of created his own highly celebrated theatre, intellectual theater occurs not during the which performs his own works together with vibrant 1920s, but in the depressive atmosphere those of other contemporary and classical of the 1930s, . . . and the emergence of the Russian and international authors. They Theatre of the Absurd—probably the most enjoyed critical success and global acclaim in important event in dramatic writing of the part because of their accomplishments at home, postwar—coincides not with the revolutionary and in part because they helped to create 1960s, but the stagnant 1950s.” something new that spanned Russia as a whole. “Perhaps drama,” they continue, “becomes Their success was only partially homegrown. the main fi eld for literary experiments It also was promoted by a national “New precisely when—after rough times, revolution, Russian Drama,” which would catapult upheavals, and shifts—there comes a period local playwrights onto the stages of such of stabilization (stagnation, depression). global theatre centers as Moscow, London, and This writing reacts to the hardening of a New York. new sociality, previously nonformalized and open to change. When drama is on the rise, THE NEW RUSSIAN DRAMA it almost always focuses on unfulfi lled hopes MOVEMENT and aspirations. It is interested in those people who pay for the social shift, who receive slaps in the face, who have been pushed somewhere Plasticine’s London premiere was more than into the gutter or abandoned there as history happenstance. Sigarev was but one of a score of young Russian playwrights identifi ed with toppled: In the beginning they beckoned, 100 a drama movement that had been formed in when they were cast aside.” By the late response to funding opportunities provided by 1990s, Russia had no shortage of those who the British Council in cooperation with the had been slapped in the face, pushed into the Royal Court. gutter, and abandoned by the history of the As Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky post-Soviet collapse; and no shortage of writers observe in Performing Violence, a study of the and artists trying to give form and meaning to New Russian Drama, that innovation in their travails. theatre lags behind economic, social, and Theatre requires more than setting down political upheavals by a decade or so.99 Such a ideas from a single mind with pen and paper period represents the amount of time required (or keyboard and screen). Plays are social acts, for new voices to be heard, for established and requiring playwrights and actors and directors fresh writers to assimilate society’s profound and sponsors, and stages, and audiences, and transformations so that they can form and money. Early in the 1990s, many observers express a new point of view; and for more argued that Russian theatre was just one more victim of the post-Soviet transition.

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 15 Commercially unviable and bereft of fresh by the veteran Moscow playwrights Mikhail ideas, Russian theatre entered a period that Roshchin and Alexei Kazantsev. Roshchin to many was marked by death throes of and Kazantsev’s success prompted the creation excruciating pain. of other new venues, such as Theatr.doc, But just as some were sounding the death the Praktika Theatre, and other infl uential knell for the Russian stage, the New Russian performance spaces. Drama Movement was coalescing around the nexus of a booming late-1990s economy THE BRITISH ARE COMING! THE that spun off dozens of new cultural venues BRITISH ARE COMING! in Moscow and beyond; talented writers and directors liberated by the end of censorship The New Russian Drama nonetheless that accompanied the collapse of Communism; required a defi ning event, when the various actors increasingly exposed to the rich tapestry elements fl owing into it could coalesce into of competing styles unencumbered by the an identifi able phenomenon. This moment legacy of the ossifi ed psychological realism of came in July 1997 over the course of a six- the Soviet stage; and audiences trying to fi nd day British Council–supported seminar led their own life amid the wreckage of a post- by a delegation from the Royal Court, which Soviet culture overrun by the most degraded met at the ramshackle remains of Konstantin and least creative artifacts of an increasingly Stanislavsky’s country estate at Liubimovka, 103 globalized pop culture.101 The movement’s near Moscow. dominant feature has been “its neo-naturalistic Within months, the fi rst Russian Festival aesthetic, with unprecedented prominence of Documentary Theatre would open with given to representations of violence,” whereas support from the George Soros–supported its “main thematic preoccupation is the deep Open Society Institute; theatre festivals and crisis of identity that has characterized post- workshops would convene; and, in February Soviet society.”102 2002, Elena Gremina and Mikhail Ugarov Each of these developments needed to come would open the basement Teatr.doc on central together at just the right moment to produce Moscow’s Trekhprudnyi Pereulok. Their a genuinely innovative dramatic form. After success was followed in October 2005 by the all, the extraordinary theatre of the Gorbachev opening of Eduard Boyakov’s Praktika Theatre years in the late 1980s was followed in the nearby, as well as the creation of countless early 1990s by the collapse of the theatre similar companies around the country, such scene, particularly in Moscow, as increasingly as Saint Petersburg’s Chelovek.doc Theatre, impoverished audiences had little patience to Kemerovo’s Lozhe Theatr, Chelyabink’s Baby sit through an evening of “fi lth” (chernykha). Theatre, and the subsequent Kinoteatr.doc 104 Psychological realism, which had become the cinema movement. only permissible Soviet theatrical style during As the then–British Council Moscow the 1940s and 1950s, had been preceded and program offi cer Sasha Dugdale tells the succeeded by periods rich with the grotesque, story, “In 1998 when I was working at the the symbolic, and the political. British Council in Russia, I was introduced The late 1990s, then, were years when a to Elena Gremina and Alexei Kazantsev, number of theatrical tendencies that fed into two playwrights who devoted themselves to the New Russian Drama Movement aligned in supporting a culture of playwriting in Russia. unprecedented patterns. These events occurred Kazantsev and Gremina together with other simultaneously with the establishment in playwrights and critics had set up Liubimovka in 1998 of the Playwright and Director Center 1992—a retreat for playwrights and directors,

16 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG where young writers, chosen from the quality documentary theatre being promoted by the of their work, rehearsed readings of their plays Royal Court.109 with actors and directors. Liubimovka was Newcomers to the stage from fringe areas— named after Stanislavskii’s estate, just outside such as Sigarev, Vladimir and Oleg Presnyakov Moscow, where the retreat took place. At the from Yekaterinburg; Maxim Kurochkin and times when I attended a wild and shambolic Natalia Vorozhbit from Kyiv; Yury Klavdiev, event, a storm of creativity studded readings of and Vyacheslav and Mikhail Durnenkov the plays, which would become legendary in from Togliatti; Evgenii Grishkovets from Russia’s New Writing tradition, and after the Kemerovo; Yaroslava Pulinovich from reading a protracted and heartfelt discussion of Omsk, Ivan Vyrypaev from Irkutsk, together the play would ensue.”105 with the already established incomparable The British Council brought the Royal Olga Mukhina, who had grown up in the Court Theatre to Russia. Already having Far North—found a coherent new voice to won the “Europe Theatre Prize,” the Royal express the traumas and pathologies of their Court had been running workshops around daily lives during the post-Soviet collapse.110 the world, taking such leading British writers Though it had never been characterized as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and Jez by overtly political documentary theatre, Butterworth along with them. They tried to the New Russian Drama Movement encourage others to adapt the documentary nonetheless provided a means for discussing theatre style known as “verbatim,” whereby the country’s cascading traumas, such as the a text taken directly from the street would war in Chechnya and the bountiful injustices be spoken onstage.106 The resulting theatre of a corrupt judicial system.111 became associated with an aggressively Within a matter of months, documentary shocking style of drama that had emerged in theatre swept across Russian stages. The British Britain during the 1960s, known as “In-Yer- Council’s support led directly to the translation Face” theatre. Moving to the mainstream of of plays into English, and their production British theatre by the 1990s, “In-Yer-Face at the Royal Court. The Royal Shakespeare theatre shocks audiences by the extremism of Company similarly commissioned and its language and images, unsettles them by its performed a number of new works by young emotional frankness and disturbs them by its Russian playwrights.112 Just as important, the acute questioning of moral norms.”107 Liubimovka workshops connected the new Although the Royal Court had experienced writers to Moscow’s mainstream theatres, only sporadic success in proselytizing verbatim leading to production of New Russian Drama documentary theatre—primarily in the Movement scripts at such venues as Svetlana Balkans and Poland—Russia immediately Vragova’s Theatre on Spartakovskaya Square, proved to be exceptionally fertile soil for such Oleg Tabakov’s Studio Theatre, Anatolii theatrical aggression.108 Both nineteenth- Vasiliev’s School of Dramatic Art, Sergei century revolutionaries and later Soviet Artsybashev’s Theatre on Pokrovka, Mikhail cultural bureaucrats promoted sending writers Shepenko’s Chamber Theatre, Petr Fomenko’s out to the countryside, to factories, and to Workshop Theatre, Mark Rozovskii’s Theatre provincial cities as a way of connecting the arts at Nikitskii Gates, and Sergei Zhenovach’s with the Narod (the People). The notion that Theatre Art Studio in converted factories writers and theatre troupes should interact with near Taganka Square once owned by the everyday life and not just amuse comfortable Stanislavskii and Alekseev families.113 Plays patrons has a distinguished history in Russia, by authors associated with the New Russian one very consistent with the style of verbatim

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 17 Drama Movement soon were being performed reveal more than the pathologies of their own on stages around the world. society. Their characters retain a core human dignity in the face of the most degrading HOW “RUSSIAN” CAN A PLAY AT circumstances. Plays are infused by a larger THE ROYAL COURT BE? spirituality, in mocking contrast to the events taking place on stage. Unsurprisingly, the New Russian Drama was At the close of the Togliatti playwright not to everyone’s taste. Nationalists complained Yury Klavdiev’s powerful 2006 play The Polar about its association with Britain, especially Truth, about the ugly underside of Russian life, at a time when NATO planes were bombing the HIV-positive character “Kid” proclaims fellow Slavs in Serbia; others simply deplored in the closing monologue: “The truth? That’s the playwrights’ fascination with sex, violence, what we are. Those of us who live. Who work. depravity, and general chernukha (fi lth).114 Yet Who earn wages. It’s people who don’t beg the New Russian Drama was never merely for anything from anyone—gimme money, derivative of British verbatim documentary gimme trust, gimmie an offi ce, gimme taxes, and In-Yer-Face theatre. gimme soldiers, gimme, gimme, gimme and First, audiences in search of Russian- I’ll just go and do as I please. People like language cultural expression had begun to that don’t know anything about life—look at fl ock to theatres at the initial signs of the post- all the sciences they went out and invented. Soviet economic recovery the decade before. Organizations. Administrations. Welfare This new theatre emerged from an increasingly offi ces. All that to explain to us why we still vibrant Russian scene, which had spawned keep living so stupidly. But we don’t live dozens of studio theatres, scores of theatre stupidly. We just live.”117 festivals, and hundreds of innovative works This underlying attitude of profound by more established companies. Talented humanity beneath the surface horror of post- playwrights such as Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Soviet life attracted audiences back to theatres Alexei Kazantsev, Eduard Radzinsky, and in ways in which the earlier era of aggressive Vladimir Sorokin had begun to transform and frank theatre a decade before had simply Russian theatre before the Soviet Union had driven people away. The new works proved come to an end; and Olga Mukhina’s landmark to be about more than portraying society’s plays Tanya Tanya and You had appeared well “fi lth.” Chernukha was coming to serve a larger before visitors from the Royal Court arrived at end rather than just to shock; it was coming to Liubimovka.115 create moments for redemption. Second, Russian verbatim documentary In Klavdiev’s Martial Arts, to cite another theatre is never quite verbatim. Russian example, a ten-year-old boy and girl are saved authors simulate verisimilitude, characters, and from the vengeance of elders, drugs dealers, circumstances rather than merely lifting them addicts, thieves, thugs, and corrupt policemen straight from life and placing them on stage. In by the magical Queen of Spades, who contrast to their British counterparts, Russian intervenes just as they are about to be killed by writers are much more likely to juxtapose their tormentors.118 Although the appearance languages and events and texts from a number of this traditional Russian folk heroine could of different sources and to meld them into have made a mockery of the entire tale (can something new and distinctly their own.116 only a miracle save us?), Klavdiev instead drew Third, and perhaps most important, many of on the imagery to humanize and domesticate a the authors and plays categorized as constituting situation of unbelievable horror. the New Russian Drama Movement seek to

18 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Fourth, Russian directors—traditionally Service’s (FSB) that the Council was a cover the dominant force in the national theatre for British intelligence.122 Similarly, the New tradition—have over time creatively York–based Trust for Mutual Understanding— interpreted the texts of the play. As a result, frequently working with the Center for performances have moved further and further International Theater Development in away over the course of the past decade or so Baltimore—promoted new Russian playwrights from the documentary stance encouraged by and their works in the United States.123 the Royal Court’s missionaries.119 At the same time, the New Russian Drama The New Russian Drama Movement was, Movement remains profoundly “Russian” without question, “new.” Many of its authors in innumerable ways. Beyond its portrayal consciously sought to abandon long-standing of Russian circumstances and characters, its cultural references from past Russian and practitioners retain a deeply Russian fascination Soviet traditions as a means for embracing a with spirituality in the face of degradation. This contemporary Russian reality that is distinct “Russian-ness” rests, as well, on the provincial from what preceded it.121 Yet they could not backgrounds of so many of its leading lights. escape the powerful force of a great theatrical Several of its playwrights were born and tradition. References to Chekhov, for example, raised in a provincial Russia far removed from abound in the work of many movement Moscow. Their preoccupations are those of playwrights. Moreover, in Nikolai Kolyada’s Russian life outside the capital.124 They are ﬁ rst 2011 play Baba Shanel’ (The Old Gal Chanel), and foremost products of alternative cultural one of the members of the Ordzhonikidze centers in places that generally are not thought District Invalid Folk Ensemble “Naitie” of as having a culture at all. This pattern is joins in the celebration of the group’s tenth nowhere more evident than in Yekaterinburg, anniversary following a wildly successful a city that, it turns out, somewhat surprisingly performance at the Omsk Institute for the Deaf has produced a post-Soviet culture that now by speaking conversationally only in the verse circles the globe.125 of the iconic twentieth-century Russian bards 121 Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. THE POWER OF PERSONALITY Such devices melded the new with the old in Russian life. Nikolai Kolyada became a center of gravity Equally important, the authors were not around which much of the new drama world of content to limit their creative horizons to Yekaterinburg revolved. He was born in 1957 Russia alone. International connections and the in the bleak and remote provincial settlement integration of several movement playwrights of Presnogor’kovka in the Kustanay Region into a global theatrical community ampliﬁ ed just across the Russian-Kazakh border south the movement’s impact. Performances at of the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk.126 He London’s Royal Court and commissions from trundled off to the Sverdlovsk Theatre School the Royal Shakespeare Company ensured a at a young age, graduating at twenty to begin a lasting impact that would have been impossible career on stage with the Sverdlovsk Academic in the isolation of any one country. Continuing Theatre of Drama. The aspiring actor played support from the Goethe Institute brought the sort of wide range of ever more prominent Russian contemporary theatre and its creators roles that are typical of the Russian repertoire, onto Berlin stages when British support waned including increasingly important parts in in the wake of the British Council’s forced plays by Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Ostrovsky, departure from Russia in 2008, which resulted and Mikhail Bulgakov. Drawn to writing, from allegations by Russia’s Federal Security Kolyada enrolled at the prestigious Gorky

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 19 Literary Institute in Moscow to study with the a nineteenth-century mansion, where it prominent writer Vyacheslav Shugaev. This performed a contemporary repertoire for adults move brought him to Moscow at the height and children’s plays for younger audiences. of the excitement and ferment prompted by But trouble loomed, with the company being Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and displaced after a fi re and only regaining very perestroika (restructuring) policies. cramped temporary quarters after raucous Kolyada immediately became a cause. protests, hunger strikes by Kolyada himself, An early 1986 play, Slingshot, which was and the eventual intervention of Sverdlovsk sympathetic to a gay relationship, shocked governor Alexander Misharin in November Moscow readers and was prohibited from 2010. Plans for a newly constructed permanent being staged.127 Then Roman Viktyuk, a home for the company were announced in March controversial Moscow director born in the 2011, with construction set to begin in 2012.130 Western city of L’viv when it was still part of Kolyada’s plays focus sharply on the inner interwar Poland, arranged for this work to be disorientation of post-Soviet life. As Birgit performed at the San Diego Repertory Theater. Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky suggest, Kolyada found an enthusiastic reception “Kolyada’s characters fail to communicate with and became an international sensation for each other and with the world because of . . . the fi rst time.128 After graduating from the problems of transfer and reception. They resort Gorky Institute in 1989, Kolyada returned to often to performative ways of expressing their Sverdlovsk and, since 1994, has taught at the inner world, exploring the borderline between Yekaterinburg Theatrical Institute, offering reality and the imagination.”131 one of the few playwriting and dramaturge In Kolyada’s play The Old Hare, for example, curricula in Russia. the audience sees two newly arriving guests Once back in the Urals, Kolyada began at a less-than-deluxe provincial hotel bump to write plays (more than one hundred, of into each other wandering the halls trying to which more than half have been performed in fi gure out how to get service from the hotel Russia and abroad), to teach others to write staff. They strike up a conversation that begins and act (his students include some of Russia’s with complaints about telephones and quickly most exciting young playwrights, e.g., Anna becomes a discourse about the meaning of post- Baturina, Anna Bogcheva, Oleg Bogyaev, Soviet life. At one point late in the play, the Nadezhda Koltysheva, Yaroslava Pulinovich, woman—an actress from Moscow—becomes and Vasilii Sigarev), to direct and produce unwound, declaring one of the central realities plays, to organize theatre festivals (e.g., the of the last Soviet generation: Everyone lived Eurasian Drama Competition Festival, which and lives in fear. “Cursed life!” she explodes,” began in 2003, as well as the Kolyada-Plays Cursed life! Hellish life! For what, for what, Festival, which began in 2006, together with for what is all this—this, this torment, for the earlier “Real Theater Festival,” which has what? Sir, I have lived my entire life in fear. been an annual event since the beginning of This isn’t just because I am an artist. Even if I the decade), and to serve as an intellectual were not an artist I would have lived my entire leader in the Urals region (as confi rmed by his life in fear just the same, in fear, in fright just decade-long editorship of the journal Ural).129 to survive.”132 In December 2001, Kolyada founded As important as Kolyada has been for the his own theatre company, which initially theatrical and cultural scene in Yekaterinburg, performed at the Pushkin House in a historic his ambitions extend far beyond its boundaries. Yekaterinburg neighborhood. In 2004, the He is seeking to free Russian theatre from its company moved to its own small stage in traditional fi xation with director-producers

20 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG (rezhissery) to fi nd a new focus on writers. In the end, these plays are about how Although many abroad think of great Russian society relates to events more than about the playwrights such as Anton Chekhov, the events themselves. Sonya, in Pavel Kazantsev’s national theatrical tradition—in a pattern Hero, speaks of a fundamental conundrum of reinforced during the Soviet period—has life in contemporary Russia as being a strange tended to elevate director-producers to a detachment from reality. Speaking with her higher status than actors and writers. The New new lover, a returning war hero, Egor, Sonya Russian Drama Movement is revolutionary declares, “When I watch stories about the war in part because of its fascination with the on the news, it seems to me that nothing is underside of life, but in large measure because real. Well, in the sense that there are tanks, of its attention to the act of writing—as revealed and soldiers, and destruction everywhere, and in Kolyada’s activities in Yekaterinburg.133 shooting every day, and it is dangerous to be out This commitment to writing becomes on the streets. But you hear this on television, especially evident in the city’s Eurasian Drama eating a large sausage and cheese sandwich. It’s Competition, which has become a showcase simple. It’s all the same for you.”139 for Russian-language playwrights living in More than just telling a story, though, the Russia as well as abroad and attracts as many writers seek humanity among even their most as fi ve hundred submissions from aspiring questionable characters. In Kazantsev’s and authors each year. Winning plays are published Yaroslava Pylinovich’s The Cleaners, a young in Ural, thereby promoting their performance man and woman meet in a supermarket, where far beyond local stages.134 The Kolyda-Plays the woman apparently is trying to buy a new Festival concentrates more directly on the dress. As the play unfolds, the audience learns work of Kolyada himself and his students. For that both are shoplifters. The man, who is example, the 2011 festival presented twenty- driven less by material vanity than by a need three productions and readings of works by to survive, fi nally confronts the young lady. his top students—Vasily Sigarev, Yaroslava “What do you want?” he asks. “A magical Pulinovich, Oleg Bogayev, Vladimir Zuyev, wand? A sling with arrows? That’s all I know, and the twenty-six-year-old Anna Baturina.135 all I learned from you. The rest is improvisation. These efforts built on the success of the “Real . . . The world exists even without money, but Theater” Festival, which was spurred by the money does not exist without the world. Your Liubimovka workshops at the start of the money can open a theatre, a cinema studio, a previous decade to showcase works by authors kindergarten; but you, except for your money, participating in the emerging New Russian are nothing of interest.”140 Drama Movement.136 At the same time, there is often a humane A number of leading playwrights and sympathy for an older generation that survived lesser authors have emerged from Kolyada’s the travails of life in the Soviet Union. In Nina “incubator,” as Yana Ross has called it.137 Their Sadur’s Pilot, which was published in early works include plays about troops returning 2011, eighty-year-old Paolo berates thirteen- from Chechnya, haunting encounters by year-old Lena for criticizing her father for his soldiers with their past, living spirits and dying life during the Soviet period. “He knew how souls, the tragedy of terrorism (e.g., plays about to dream,” Paolo tells Lena, as if the youngster the 2004 attack on a school in the Caucasus does not. “He believed in Stalin. I excuse town of Beslan), and harsh depictions of you—what do you know about him? You corruption, infi delity, alcoholism, drug abuse, didn’t live then! He would say: It is so cold and the indignities of age, and social inequality.138 lonely driving trucks along the roads of our motherland. It happens, he told me, when he

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 21 was a young long-range driver that he would similarly won considerable praise in London. drive for days without meeting anyone. He told More recently, he has expanded his writing me about all he had on those long routes was to include screenplays. He won international a portrait of Comrade Stalin fl apping on the praise and attention for both his writing and rearview mirror, watching over him as he fl ew his fi lm direction with his 2009 fi lm Wolfy, a along—as he was fl ying somewhere through tale about a young girl left to her own devices the endless deserts of this land. And Comrade by an alcoholic and abusive mother.144 Stalin had such a harsh gaze. You looked at Of all these works, Black Milk perhaps has him and you could not fall asleep. This is the had the most success internationally, being country you were born in.”141 staged across Europe and North America. One Sadur—who was born in 1950, well before of its fi rst U.S. productions, at Washington’s many practitioners of the New Russian Drama, Studio Theater in early 2005, brought and has no direct connection to Yekaterinburg— particular acclaim, helping to promote the play is well respected by many who identify with to other theatres around the country.145 The the New Russia Drama Movement, despite story transpires in a provincial train station from being considerably older. She chose to publish which two small-time con artists—a young her work in Ural in recognition of the journal’s couple representing the urban “sophistication” national scope and reputation. of the “new” Russia—travel to small towns around Russia selling outrageously priced and STUDENTS AND DISCIPLES ultimately useless toasters in order to bamboozle the unsophisticated locals. The play paints an especially bleak picture of post-Soviet Russia Beyond Kolyada, several Yekaterinburg in which everyone, it seems, is a ruthless, playwrights have contributed to the transformation of writing for the Russian sleazy, violent, and/or alcoholic predatory con stage. At least four among them—Vassily artist, and in which even the wise old peasant Sigarev, Oleg Bogayev, and the Presnyakov lady selling train tickets turns out to have been brothers Vladimir and Oleg—have become selling poisoned moonshine from under the international sensations on their own terms. counter. A moment of possible redemption— As noted at the outset, Sigarev set the after the toaster saleswoman gives birth, claims London stage world abuzz with the premiere to have seen God, and proclaims her desire to performance of Plasticine at the Royal Court remain in the virtuous country—collapses, so Theatre. Born in 1977, the native of the small that at the end, the message is clear: One new Sverdlovsk Region settlement of Verkhnaia child—or many—will not alleviate Russia’s Salda made his way to study with Kolyada physical and spiritual suffering. via a two-year stint at the Nizhny Tagil Oleg Bogayev, whose Russian National Postal Pedagogical Institute.142 Sigarev was a fully Service was staged by the Studio Theater during formed writer by the time he came to work its 2004–5 season, presents a no less chilling with Kolyada. In 2000, he completed Plasticine, account of human relationships in Boris Yeltsin’s which immediately began to attract attention Russia.146 Bogayev takes us to the cluttered, in Russia. The play was produced in Moscow’s tiny apartment of a lone retiree, Ivan Zhukov, Playwright and Director Center following who, like many of his generation, worked all the award of his Russian “Anti-Booker” his life only to end up with nothing following Prize, and from there was translated into the collapse of the Soviet economy. Living on English and brought to the Royal Court.143 an inadequate pension that barely covers the Simultaneously, he wrote two other successful cost of his food, he holes up at home, slowly plays, Black Milk and Ladybird, both of which entering into a fantasyland in which the Queen

22 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG of England, Lenin, a cosmonaut, Martians, and has continued to work with the local drama others visit for tea. He continues his friendship scene, mentoring younger writers, producers, with these imaginary characters once they and directors. He began serving as editor of depart his abode through correspondence Ural after Kolyada stepped down from that sent via the Russian National Postal Service. position in August 2010.150 The journal has And he quietly slips from life as his upstairs continued to promote young writers and neighbors are busy loudly celebrating New playwrights under his stewardship. Year’s Eve (and the dawn of a “new” Russia). The Presnyakov brothers—Oleg, born in Bogayev’s dark and offbeat humor humanizes 1969, and Vladimir, born in 1974—represent an otherwise tragic character who has been yet another face of the Yekaterinburg theatrical degraded like many of his compatriots by age, scene. The Presnyakovs are not students insanity, and economic collapse.147 of Kolyada, even having had a tumultuous Bogayev simultaneously is playing his own relationship with their elder. Following the game with classical Russian literature. Zhukov New York run of their play Terrorism, Murph shares his name with the protagonist of Anton Henderson wrote in American Theatre magazine Chekhov’s short story “Van’ka Zhukov.” that the Presnyakovs once had visited the As the dramatist Andrei Maleev-Babel has editorial offi ces of Ural to ask Kolyada if observed, the character in Chekhov’s story, an they could call themselves his students even abused boy, writes a letter to his grandfather, though they had never studied with him. who lives in the village, asking the grandfather “Three years later,” Henderson reports, they to come to town to rescue him. The boy “publicly disavowed the connection, declaring addresses the letter “To my grandfather, at the Kolyada’s theatre a kolkhoz—that is, a [Soviet- village,” and takes it off to the post offi ce to era collective] farm worked by peasants—and mail it, absolutely convinced that the letter will calling themselves ‘intellectuals.’ Kolyada reach his grandfather. This hopeless situation has posted a sign above his offi ce door at the is repeated in the Russian National Postal theatre that reads ‘head of the kolkhoz.’”151 Service, which makes the play in part a holistic The Presnyakov brothers were sons of an reference to Chekhov and his work.148 Iranian mother and a Russian father, and they These works earned Bogayev several graduated from the Philological Faculty at awards, including the Russian “Anti-Booker” Urals State University, where they have both Prize and Russia’s highest theatrical award, taught. Oleg completed graduate school in Moscow’s Golden Mask, as well as leading to literature, while Vladimir studied pedagogy his being celebrated at the Royal Court. The in graduate school.152 Their most successful success of his works at Washington’s Studio plays—Playing the Victim, Killing the Judge, Theater led to numerous other performances and Terrorism—make direct reference to the around the United States. Several of his three- Russian classics. By drawing on one of the dozen other plays have had wide success around grand themes of Russian literature—confl ict Russia, Europe, and North America, including among generations—the Presnyakovs bring a an especially well-received production of bittersweet sensibility to confl icts that often Maria’s Field at Chicago’s highly regarded prove fatal.153 Their version of the fairy tale Tuta Theater.149 The Humpbacked Little Horse revealed a similar Bogayev, who was born in 1970, retains a compelling sympathy for the more magical strong commitment to his native Yekaterinburg dimensions of Russian cultural and literary despite his wider success. He was one of the traditions. Several of their plays have moved fi rst graduates of Kolyada’s program at the successfully from the stage to fi lm, with Kirill Yekaterinburg State Theatre Institute, and he Serebrennikov’s retelling of Playing the Victim

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 23 earning major awards at fi lm festivals in Sochi the composer Sergei Dreznin and lyricists and Rome.154 Mikhail Roshchin and Alexander Anno of the The success of several Presnyakov plays sprawling epic Catherine the Great proved as abroad speaks to their ability to address fears controversial for its slyly satirical stance toward shared by many far beyond the boundaries Russian history as told by contemporary of today’s Russian Federation. In Terrorism, a “patriots” as for its widespread use of the latest group of disgruntled passengers and policemen staging techniques from London’s West End bicker, commit adultery, make fun of one and New York’s Broadway. another, and even commit suicide while delayed This Catherine the Great was considered by by an airport bomb scare. Deeper connections some critics to be Russia’s fi rst homegrown among the passengers slowly emerge once the musical, as the genre is understood in the plane fi nally takes off. In Playing the Victim, a Anglo-American world, and the Yekaterinburg university dropout fi nds work with the police production raised standards for musicals to the playing the victim in the reconstruction of level of the “Hollywood blockbuster or a West murders. The young Silver Age poets Andrei End hit.”159 Yet even after being nominated for Bely and Alexander Blok, and his mother, seven Golden Masks in 2009, the production Alexandra Kublitskaia-Piottukh, roam ultimately challenged too many Russian through a cheerful farce in Captive Spirits, and assumptions about history and musical drama the carnival of contemporary Russian life is to fi nd acceptance in Moscow. portrayed in Europe-Asia. On one level, these works are about a “global f*#k-up” that is A WONDROUS MIRROR shared by all twenty-fi rst-century humans; on another, they offer a penetrating critique of Recent Yekaterinburg theatre seasons have violence and an emerging Russian fascism.155 included new directors, new plays, new As the Presnyakovs’ evolving relationship writers, and new stars as the local opera with Yekaterinburg suggests, the local theatre company, ballet company, academic dramatic scene is far wider than any single writer or theatre, children’s theater, and smaller chamber group of writers and performers. The Kolyada theaters (e.g., those organized by Kolyada group thrives within a wide theatrical scene in and the Presnyakovs). They generated, in the which all varieties of performing arts engage words of the critic Kasia Popova, “a living and the city around them. Beyond classical drama, disturbing organism which has its own laws the city is home to a highly innovative and that are no less wondrous than those of the artistically successful puppet theatre that has laws of nature.”160 won various national and international prices, As Popova concludes in a review of the including the Golden Mask.156 entire 2006–7 drama season, Yekaterinburg The Yekaterinburg Theatre of Musical theatre in all its rich diversity has become a Comedy similarly collected many honors mirror for the city itself. Local productions— under the talented directorship of Vladimir whether they are tragedies or dark comedies, Kurochkin during the late Soviet period. multi-act or single-act productions, allegories Kurochkin was the fi rst Soviet director to bring or high realism—share a concern with the joys Hello, Dolly, in 1974, and he tried but failed to and pains of everyday life as seen in a turbulent follow with Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof.157 society. They emerge from the individual The theatre has continued to garner awards keyboards of writers who are embedded in such as the Golden Mask in more recent times a wider community of writers and theatrical while pushing the boundaries of the Russian institutions; writers engaged in a common musical.158 For example, the production by search for meaning in a city, a society, and a

24 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG country where every marker of stability and Perm has made an ambitious commitment identity has vanished.161 to the visual arts by allocating 3 percent One young man in Oleg Bogayev’s Thirty of the regional budget to promote cultural Three Happinesses captures the ethos of the development.164 These policies are producing twenty-fi rst-century Yekaterinburg stage when a vibrant and noteworthy theatrical world all he declares, “You know,... there is nothing. its own. Tellingly, Russia’s and Yekaterinburg’s There is nothing in our fl ags, in our laughs, in new theatrical life exists largely beyond our songs,... around any home, any person, any the reach and control of Moscow’s artistic song, are the slogans of an important language. Mandarins. Kolyada, Sigaryev, Bogayev, the All around us in any city there is nothing of Presniakovs, and their counterparts elsewhere ours. We have awoken in a different country. around Russia have their own direct paths They tell me that we live in a new world. to the outside world. Collectively, Russian We now live in a capitalist country.”162 The playwrights have given meaning to life in an New Russian Drama Movement—as it has era of Russian history when nothing other blossomed in Yekaterinburg and elsewhere— than material wealth seems of value. Through is a search for how to make this new country their frank, bleak, and brutal portrayals of one’s own. everyday life outside Russia’s “two capitals” The message of these works parallels (e.g., Moscow and Saint Petersburg) they have Valentin Lukyanin’s city “soul,” about which reinfused magic, spirituality, truth-seeking, he wrote in an ode to Yekaterinburg. “In fact,” a sense of awareness, and humanity into the the city’s literary master penned, “we need to Russian sense of self. recognize that nothing real has changed for the Yet as important as these individual writers past twenty years in the urban environment. and the cities that inspire them may be, Maybe there is graffi ti but in fact everything Yekaterinburg remains the leading center of is what it was. We have our socialist capital, a new approach to theatre and to writing that or our ‘almost Chicago,’ and all of what we holds the promise of a new “golden age” for see is a result of not just policy, but of human the Russian stage.165 Because it is a city full of activity, how we live in our city and how we the most troubling and vexing contradictions use it.” Yekaterinburg’s message to post-Soviet of Russia itself, Yekaterinburg’s turning of Russia seems to be to move beyond policies the urban kaleidoscope has been just fast and politics and to focus on how to live, how enough to produce the urban delirium that to make use of life. Only then does humanity has prompted human creativity for centuries. glimmer in even the bleakest landscape. A deep foundation in gritty daily reality Yekaterinburg’s playwrights, directors, simultaneously prevents even the most soaring producers, and actors are hardly unique on the fl ight of urban fancy from leaving the orbit of Russian stage, in that the travails of post-Soviet human existence. Russian life have inspired one of this new century’s most vibrant national theatre scenes. The Togliatti writers—Iurii Klavdiev, Mikhail and Vyacheslav Durnenkov, Rostov-na-Donu’s Sergei Medvedev, Khanty-Mansiysk’s Bulat Shiribazarov, and Nizhny Tagil’s Ekaterina Vasilyeva, to name just a few—have written works that have electrifi ed, shocked, disturbed, and inspired audiences on stage, screen, and television.163 Yekaterinburg’s Urals competitor

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 25 17 For an overview of the history of ENDNOTES the Pale of Settlement, see Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life 1 Brigit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky, and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement Performing Violence. Literary and Theatrical (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Experiments of New Russian Drama Press, 2011). (Chicago: Intellect, 2009), 152–59; John 18 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life Freedman, “Contemporary Russian (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 12. Drama: The Journey from Stagnation to 19 Antropova, “Iz istorii evreev Urala.” a Golden Age,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 3 20 Ibid. (October 2010), pp. 389–420. 21 Ibid. 2 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing 22 Ibid. Violence, 27–44. 23 This observation is developed further 3 Ibid., 152. by Arkadii Bartov, “Mif Sankt- 4 Ibid. Peterburga: Etalon giperreal’nosti i 5 Ibid., 156. kul’tura vtorichnosti,” Ural, 2005, no. 6 Ibid, 152. 8. The practicality of Urals intellectual 7 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855 life is reﬂ ected in the region’s primary edition. prerevolutionary scientiﬁ c honor, an 8 For a history of the Royal Court, see annual award established by Imperial Philip Roberts, The Royal Court Theatre chamberlain Pavel Nikolaevich and the Modern Stage (Cambridge: Demidov in 1831. The awards promoted Cambridge University Press, 1999). the work in physics, chemistry, geology, 9 Michael Billington, “Plasticine,” The biology, astronomy, and the earth Guardian, March 22, 2002. sciences before being suspended in 1866 10 Paul Taylor, “Plasticine, Royal Court in accordance with the original bequest Upstairs, London,” The Independent, a quarter century after Demidov’s March 27, 2002. death. Reconstituted in 1993, the 11 Philip Fisher, “Plasticine by Vassily contemporary incarnation of the Sigarev,” Theatreworld, April 2002. Demidov Prize more often recognizes 12 Hedy Weiss, “A Voice from Mother work in the humanities and social Russia,” Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, sciences. For discussion of this award November 21, 2003. and its history, see Andrei Ponizovkin, 13 A. A. Starikov, V. E. Zavgel’skaia, L. “Sobitie: Laureaty demidovskoi premii,” I. Tokmenninova, and E. V. Cherniak, Ural, 1996, no. 2. Ekaterinburg: Istoriia goroda v arkhitekture 24 This point is expanded upon along (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2008). various dimensions of cultural life 14 Dmitrii Bavil’skii, “Demidovskii in such articles as that by Ol’ga vremennik,” Ural, 1996, no. 2. Bukharkina, “Vdol’ po ulitse po 15 Edward Ames, “A Century of Russian glavnoi,” Ural, 2000, no. 12; and Railroad Construction: 1837–1938,” Sergei Beliaev, “Vecher budetlian: American Slavic and East European Review Nemuzykal’nie sametko o muzykal’nom 6, nos. 3–4 (1947): 57–74; the citation zale,” Ural, 2005, no. 11. here is on 67. 25 Robert Service, A History of Twentieth- 16 Irina Antropova, “Iz istorii evreev Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Urala,” Ural, 2004, No. 11. Harvard University Press, 1997), 107.

26 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Boris Yeltsin, then the Sverdlovsk 36 Aron, Yeltsin, 13. regional party fi rst secretary, dispatched 37 Luk’ianin, “Smotrie chashche v nebo, wrecking crews in the middle of an gospoda.” autumn 1977 night to tear the house 38 Luk’ianin, “Gorod i dusha.” down on orders from then–KGB 39 Jeanne Guillemin, “The 1979 Anthrax chairman Iurii Andropov. This story is Epidemic in the USSR: Applied Science told by Aron, Yeltsin, 112–14. and Political Controversy,” Proceedings of 26 James R. Harris, The Great Urals: the American Philosophical Society 146, no. Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet 1 (2002): 18–36. Union (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University 40 Aron, Yeltsin, 52–105. Press, 1999), 102. 41 Ibid, 14. 27 R. W. Davies, “Industry under Central 42 Ibid, 48–128. Planning, 1929–1941,” in The Economic 43 Luk’ianin, “Gorod i dusha.” Transformation of the Soviet Union, 44 Aron, Yeltsin, 106–8. 1913–1945, edited by R. W. Davies, 45 Stephen Handelman, Comrade Criminal: Mark Harrison, and S. C. Wheatcroft Russia’s New Mafi ya (New Haven, (New York: Cambridge University Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), Press, 1994), 135–57. 73–92, 234–37, 332–47. 28 Valentin Luk’ianin, “Gorod i dusha: 46 The heading above, “The Second Front,” Chelovek stroit gorod—gorod stroit is the title of the local rock band’s Agata cheloveka,” Ural, 2008, no. 8. Kristi’s 1988 debut album, Vtoroi front. 29 Andrei Rastorguev, Liudmilla 47 Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: Tokmeninova, and Astrid Fol’pert, The True Story of Rock in Russia (Boston: “Nasledie eksperimenta: Iz istorii Faber and Faber, 1988), 13–23. arkhitekturnogo avangarda na Uralem,” 48 Viktor Slavkin, Pamiatnik neizvestnomu Ural, 2011, no. 6. stiliage: Istoriia pokoleniia v anekdotakh, 30 Luk’ianin, “Gorod i dusha.” legendakh, baikakh, pesniakh (Moscow: 31 Ibid. Artist, 1996). 32 See Raisa Gilyova, “Boites’ snobizma: 49 S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate Otbiraite istinno prekrasnoe,” of Jazz in the Soviet Union (New York: Ural, 2010, no. 12; Igor Turbanov, Oxford University Press, 1983); Pia “Ekaterinburg: Piat’ blikov,” Ural, 2010, Koivunen, “The 1957 Moscow Youth no. 4; Sofi d Demidova, “Deistvo v Festival: Propagating a New, Peaceful Sverdlovske,” Ural, 2011, no. 6; Valentin Image of the Soviet Union,” in Soviet Luk’ianin, “Zhizn’ posle zhizni (o State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, ‘donnykh ottozhenniakh’ uralskoi edited by Melane Ilic and Jerremy Smith literatury),” Ural, 1996, no. 4; Aron, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 46–65. Yeltsin, 106–8; and these Web sites: 50 Troitsky, Back in the USSR, 22–29. www.uralopera.ru, www.muzkom. 51 Ibid., 23. net, and culture.ekburg.ru/institutions/ 52 bid., 30–50. theatre/. 53 This is a point underscored by Sabrina 33 Valentin Luk’ianin, “Smotrie chashche Ramet, Rocking the State: Rock Music v nebo, gospoda,” Ural, 2002, no. 10. and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia 34 Inna Gladkova, “Belyi dom iz krasnogo (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), kirpicha,” Ural, 2000, no. 11. as well as in Ruslan Trushchev’s 2006 35 Harris, Great Urals, 32–36. documentary fi lm about the Soviet rock

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 27 scene for MuzTV, Blizhe k Zvezdam: 67 Chronology from the Ural’skii Sledopyt Otpetye Devyanostie. Web site, www.uralstalker.ru. 54 Such was the case in other Soviet 68 Ibid. industrial cities, such as Dnepropetrovsk 69 Ibid. in Ukraine. Anecdotal evidence 70 Naum Orlov, “V teatre moei pamiaty… similarly suggests that rock music Ustnye passkazy, sapisannye Dmitriem revenues formed the basis of capital later Bavil’skim,” Ural, 2002, no. 3. used in the privatization of industries 71 Valentina Artiushina, “Dva resiatiletiia and resources in Yekaterinburg. Personal v Ural sovetskogo perioda,” Ural, 2007, correspondence on August 10, 2011, no. 8. with Sergei I. Zhuk, author of Rock and 72 This account of the Lagunov Roll in the Rocket City. The West, Identity, controversy is based on the discussion and Ideology in Soviet Dnepropetrovsk, by Aron, Yeltsin, 118–20. 1960–1985 (Washington, D.C., and 73 This account is based on ibid, 119–23. Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Nikonov’s full uncensored text may be Press and Johns Hopkins University found in a collection of his novellas: Press, 2010). Nikolai Nikonov, Povesti (Sverdlovsk: 55 Troitsky, Back in the USSR, 50–96. Sredne-Ural’skoe Izdatel’stvo, 1990). 56 Ibid., 97–100; Richard Stites, Russian 74 E. Kiseleva, “Strannyi gorod,” Ural, Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society 1996, no. 4. since 1900 (New York: Cambridge 75 Lidia Slobozhaninova, “Ural’: Yavlenia University Press, 1992). Locally, the obshchenatsional’noe,” Ural, 2008, no. KGB brought trumped-up criminal 1. charges against Sverdlovsk bard 76 Naum Leiderman, “Blagodaria i Aleksander Novikov in a case that vopreki: Provintsial’nyi zhurnal v gody quietly collapsed following General zastoiia,” Ural, 2000, no. 11. Secretary Yurii Andropov’s death in 77 Ibid. 1984. This incident is recounted by 78 Nikolai Nokyala, “Zhurnalu Ural: 50 Aron, Yeltsin, 125–26. let,” Ural, 2008, no. 1. 57 Troitsky, Back in the USSR, 117–31. 79 James O. Finckenauer and Yuri A. 58 Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 156–57. Voronin, The Threat of Russian Organized 59 Ibid., 157–60. Crime (Washington, D.C.: National 60 Ibid., 192. Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of 61 Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, Justice, 2001), 3–16. 308. 80 Blair A. Ruble, “Institutional Weakness, 62 Ibid., 317. Organized Crime and the International 63 Luk’ianin, “Gorod i dusha.” Arms Trade,” in Urbanization, 64 Andrei Markevich, Ekaterina Population, Environment, and Security: A Zhuravskaia: Career Concerns in a Political Report of the Comparative Urban Studies Hierarchy—A Case of Regional Leaders in Project, edited by Christina Rosan, Soviet Russia (Moscow: New Economic Blair A. Ruble, and Joseph S. Tulchin School, 2009). (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson 65 Valentin Luk’ianin, “Ural: Ural’ International Center for Scholars, 1999), fragment knigi,” Ural, 2008, no. 1. 6–7. 66 Ibid. 81 Yuriy Voronin, Organized Crime: Its Inﬂ uence on International Security and

28 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Urban Community Life in the Industrial 96 The offi cial population fi gure of 1.3 Cities of the Urals, Comparative million is to be found in 2002 All- Urban Studies Occasional Paper 17 Russian Census: Federal’naia sluzhba (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson gosudarstvennoi statistiki, Vserossiiskaia International Center for Scholars, 1998). perepis’ naseleniia 2002 goda: Chislennost’ 82 Ibid. naseleniia Rossii, sib”ektov Rossisskoi 83 Ibid., 7–8. Federatsii v sostave federal’nykh okrugov, 84 Ibid. raionov, gorodskikh poselenii, sel’skikh 85 “Yekaterinburg: Istoriya dvukh naselennykh punktov—raionnykh tsentrov i gruppirovok,” Fotografi i tiuremnykh sel’skikh naselennykh punktov s naseleniem nakolok Web site (www.nakolochka.in). 3 tysiachi I bole chelovek (Moscow: 86 “Organized Criminal Group or Social- Federal State Statistical Service, 2002). Politial Party ‘Uralmash,’” Afery 97 Izol’da Drobina, “Gastarbaitery domoi poddelki kriminal Web site (www. ne toropiatsia,” Urali’skii raobchi, January aferizm.ru/criminal). 23, 2009; Irina Artemova, “Patent dlia 87 Voronin, Organized Crime, 8. migranta,” Ural’skii rabochii, December 88 Ibid., 6–7. 21, 2010. 89 Ibid., 12. 98 Federal’naia sluzhba gosudarstvennoi 90 Adrian Bloomfi eld, “Russian Mafi a statistiki, Vserossiiskaia perepis’ naseleniia Killings Threaten Putin Legacy,” 2009 goda. Goroda s chislennost’iu Telegraph (London), February 22, 2008. postoiannogo naseleniia 1 mil. Chelovek i 91 Voronin, Organized Crime, 7. bolee (Moscow: Federal State Statistical 92 Yekaterinburg cemeteries became the Service, 2010), tablitsa 17, 80–88; the subjects of photo essays in many of citation here is on 80. the world’s leading newspapers such as 99 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Samuel Hutchinson, “Whacked but Not Violence, 27–34. Forgotten,” New York Times Magazine, 100 Ibid., 27–28. April 13, 1997; and variants in the 101 Ibid., 103–29. German magazine Forum, March 29, 102 Vitaly Chernetsky, “Review: Brigit 1997, and the Sunday Times Magazine in Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky, London, April 20, 1997. Performing Violence,” Theatre Journal 62, 93 Olga Matich, “‘Whacked but not no. 3 (October 2010): 478–80. Forgotten’: Burying the Mob,” 103 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing conference paper, Conference on Russia Violence, 211–12; Freedman, at the End of the Twentieth Century: “Contemporary Russian Drama”; John Culture and Its Horizons in Politics and Freednam, “Lending an Ear to Russian Society, Stanford University, Stanford Tradition,” Plays International 21, nos. Calif., October 1998. 9–10 (2006): 18–19. 94 Pilar Bonet, “Evgenii Monakh prevratil 104 Yana Ross, “Russia’s New Drama: svoi kriminal’nyi opyt’ v pisatel’skuiu From Togliatti to Moscow,” Theater, zolotuiu zhilu,” Ural, 1996, nos. 11–12. no. 1 (2006): 27–43; Valerii Kichin, 95 Evgenii Monakh, “Ulibnis’ pered “Izobrazhaya klassiku: Kino,” smert’iu: Povest,” Ural, 1996, nos. Rossiiskaya gazeta, June 20, 2006; 11–12. Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 211–12, 231–35.

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 29 105 Sasha Dugdale, “Preface,” to Beumers Development, New Russian Drama and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, Conference Program. 13–25. 119 John Freedman, “Winners at 19th 106 Ibid., 15. Moscow Times Theater Awards,” Moscow 107 In-Yer-Face Theatre Web site, www. Times, August 4, 2011. inyerface-theatre.com/what.html. 120 Freedman, “The Search for What Might 108 Dugdale, “Preface.” Be True: Thoughts from Inside and Era 109 An observation made by Moscow Times of Change,” unpublished manuscript, theater critic John Freedman in personal November 2010. correspondence, September 3, 2011. 121 Nikolai Kolyada, Baba Shanel’, as 110 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama”; performed in its premiere at the Kolyada Freedman, “Contemporary Russian Theatre, Yekaterinburg, September 13, Drama.” 2011. 111 E.g., Elena Fremina and Mikhail 122 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama.” Ugarov, “September.doc,” about the Concerning the British Council’s 2004 Beslan school massacre; Elena expulsion from Russia see Mark Gremina, “One Hour Eighteen,” about Franchetti, “British Council ‘front for the 2009 death of defense attorney spying in Russia’,” The Sunday Times, Sergei Magnitsky during pretrial January 20, 2008. detention. 123 Towson University Center for the 112 Freedman, “Contemporary Russian Arts and Center for International Drama.” Theater Development, New Russian 113 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Drama Conference Program. In the spirit Violence, 28–29; Towson University of full disclosure, the author has been Center for the Arts and Center for an adviser to the Trust for Mutual International Theater Development, Understanding between 1999 and 2011, New Russian Drama Conference Program and a trustee beginning in 2011. (Baltimore: Center for International 124 Marina Romanova, “Okolyadovannye,” Theater Development, 2010). Ekspert-Ural, 2008, no. 27. 114 Dugdale, “Preface,” 16–17; Seth 125 Kristina Matvienko, “Novaya Drama v Graham, “Chernukha and Russian Rossii: Kratkii kurs v nedavnee prosloe Film,” Studies in Slavic Cultures 1, no. 1 i eskiz nastoiashego,” Piterburgskii (2000): 9–27. teatralnyi zhurnal, 2008, no. 52. 115 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama”; 126 This biography is based on the ofﬁ cial Freedman, “Contemporary Russian Web site of the Kolyada Theater, www. Drama.” kolyada-theatre.ru. 116 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing 127 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 100–101. Violence, 144–48. 117 Yury “Strike” Klavdiev, The Polar Truth: 128 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama.” A Play, translated by John Freedman, as 129 Zlata Demina, “Klubinchnyi dnevnik performed at Towson University Center P’esa v odnom deistvii,” Ural, 2011, for the Arts and Center for International no. 6; John Freedman, “Kolyada-Plays Theater Development, New Russian Festival Under Way in Yekaterinburg,” Drama Conference, Baltimore, 2010. Moscow Times, June 26, 2011; Nadezhda 118 Towson University Center for the Arts Koltysheva, “Kaki a prishla robotat’ v and Center for International Theater zhurnal ‘Ural’,” Ural, 2008, no. 1.

30 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG 130 “Building for Kolyada-Theater ‘Will 2001, no. 12; Lilia Menchenko, “Pis’ma Begin in 2012,’” Russian Opinion real’nogo teatra,” Ural, 2006, no. 1. Web site, http://mysouth.su/2011/03/ 137 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama.” building-for-kolyada-theater-quot-will- 138 Ibid. See, e.g., Aleksander Arkhipov, begin-in-2012/. “The Dembel Train,” about the 131 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing demobilization of soldiers either for Violence, 142–44. fulﬁ llment of their service or for injuries 132 Nikolai Kolyada, “Staraia ziachikha: sustained in battle. Aleksandr Arkhipov, P’esa v odnom deistvii,” Ural, 2006, “Dembel’skii poezd: P’esa v odnom no. 8. Act 1. Passage translated by Blair deist’vii,” Ural, 2004, no. 5. Ruble. 139 Pavel Kazantsev, “Geroi: P’esa,” Ural, 133 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama.” 2006, no. 12. Act. 1, scene 4; passage 134 “Ot redaktsii,” Ural, 2007, no. 6. translated by Blair Ruble. For example of winning plays, see 140 Pavel Kazantsev and Yaroslava Zlata Demina, “Bog liubit: P’esa v Pylinovich, “Moishchiki: P’esa v odnom odnom deistii,” Ural, 2004, no. 5; deistvii,” Ural, 2007, no. 2. Act 1; Vladimir Zuev, “Mamochi: P’esa v passage translated by Blair Ruble. odnom deistvii,” Ural, 2006, no. 5; 141 Nina Sadur, “Lyotchik,” Ural, 2011, no. Sergei Medvedev, “Parikmakherska. 1. Act 1, scene 5; passage translated by Monolog s 13 kartinkami,” Ural, 2007, Blair Ruble. no. 7; Ol’ga Pogonia, “Glinianaia 142 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing iama: P’esa,” Ural, 2007, no. 7; Andrei Violence, 152–53. Il’enkov, “Pestraia lentochka, ili Dvorets 143 Ibid. beremennykh,” Ural, 2007, no. 7; Anna 144 Ibid., 166; Peter Knegt, “Russian Bogacheva and Iyrii Alesin, “Shpandrik ‘Wolfy’ Conquering Karlovy Vary i Klim: Gorodskaia skazka,” Ural, 2009, Pack,” indieWire Web site, July 9, 2009, no. 6; Vladimir Zuev, “Chernaia dyra: www.indiewire.com. Traikomediia v odnom deistvii,” Ural, 145 Paul Harris, “Black Milk,” Variety, 2009, no. 6; Oleg Kaporeiko, “Seraia January 15, 2005. sovushka: P’esa-skazka v odnom 146 Peter Marks, “Russian National Postal deistvii, semi kartinnakh s prologom,” Service,” Washington Post, September 14, Ural, 2009, no. 6; Mikhail Durenkov, 2001; Kenneth Jones, “Epistolary Elegy: “Samyi legkii sposob brosit’ kurit’: P’esa Russian National Postal Service Makes v odnom deistvee,” Ural, 2011, no. 3; U.S. Debut at D.C.’s Studio Theatre,” Nadezjda Kol’tsheva, “Tarakanishcha. Playbill, September 8, 2004. Neveroiatnaia istoriia dlia detei i 147 “The Russian National Postal Service vzyroslykh v dvukh deistviiakh,” Ural, by Oleg Bogarev,” http://nitish.9g.com/ 2011, no. 4; and, Tat’iana Vdovina, rich_text_2.html. “Motylek: Skazka v odnom deistvii,” 148 Andrei Maleev-Babel offered this Ural, 2011, no. 6. observation in correspondence in 135 Freedman, “Kolyada-Plays Festival August 2011. Under Way.” 149 Albert Williams, “Maria’s Field,” 136 Elena Krivonogova, Mariia Milova, Chicago Reader, January 27, 2009. Alena Berliand, and Natal’ia Vasil’eva, 150 “Ot redaktsii,” Ural, 2010, no. 9. “Ekho festivalia ‘real’nyi teatr’,” Ural, 151 Murph Henderson, “Who Needs Moscow? A guru of Russian playwriting

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 31 holds court in distant Ekaterinburg,” “A potom my poletim na Mars . . . P’esa American Theater, March 2006, pp. v dvykh destviiakh,” Ural, 2009, no. 6; 58—61. Ekaterina Vasil’eva, “Ya—idiotka: P’esa 153 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing v odnom deistvii,” Ural, 2009, no. 6. Violence, 273. 164 Finn-Olaf Jones, “A Bilbao on Siberia’s 153 Ross, “Russia’s New Drama.” Edge?” New York Times, July 22, 2011. 154 Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing 165 Moscow Times theater critic John Violence, 273. Freedman is among the ﬁ rst to refer to 155 These plays are discussed in detail by the contemporary period as a “Golden Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Age” for Russian drama; see Freedman, Violence, 273–300. “Contemporary Russian Drama.” 156 Ol’ga Didkovskaia, “Komichnyi I tragichgnyi Don Zhuan,” Ural, 1997, no. 7. 157 Aron, Yeltsin, 106–7. 158 Natal’ia Reshetnikova, “Moi dragostennye liudi: Liriko-teatral’nye zametki,” Ural, 2002, no. 10; Alla Lapina, “Nostal’gicheskie zametki na poliakh teatral’noi programmy,” Ural, 2001, no. 11. 159 Shaun Walker, “Catherine the Great Sings and Dances in Russia’s First Musical,” The Independent, December 8, 2007. 160 Kasia Popova, “Teatr kak zerkalo zhizni,” Ural, 2007, no. 8. 161 Konstantin Bogomolov, “Interv’iu s Olegom Bogaevym i Olegom Paiberdinym,” Ural, 2000, no. 7. 162 Oleg Bogaev, “Tridsat’tri chast’ia: Tragikomediia v dvukh deistviiakh,” Ural, 2004, no. 5. Act 1, scene 5, p. 9; passage translated by Blair Ruble. 163 Freedman, “Contemporary Russian Drama”; Towson University Center for the Arts and Center for International Theater Development, New Russian Drama Conference Program; Beumers and Lipovetsky, Performing Violence, 168–75; Sergei Medvedev, “Zhena. Komediia,” Ural, 2009, no. 6; Bulat Shiribazarov,

32 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge a continuing debt to Pilar Bonet, the longtime Moscow correspondent for El País, who has shared her knowledge and love of contemporary Russian theater with me, introducing me to its vibrant post- Soviet scene over the course of some two decades. She has been a genuine colleague and friend. I similarly would like to thank a number of generous colleagues, readers, and interlocutors for their assistance, comments, and goodwill during the preparation of this essay, particularly Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, for his insights into Soviet-era Yekaterinburg; Leonid Bykov and Valentine Lukyanin, Yekaterinburg writers and literary leaders extraordinaire, for their colorful and thoughtful observations about the city’s Soviet-era cultural scene; John Freedman, Moscow Times theater critic, for his assistance in preparing my discussion of post-Soviet theatrical life; Maxim Khomiakov and Elena Trubina of the Urals Federal University, as well as Natalya Vlasova of the Urals State Economics University, for their insights concerning how culture, academic life, and political power mix in today’s Yekaterinburg; Nikolai Kolyada, dramatist, teacher, and playwright, for his generous hospitality; Andrei Malaev- Babel, of Florida State University’s Asolo Conservatory for Acting Training and editor of The Vakhtangov Sourcebook, for his help in the discussion of late Soviet and post-Soviet theater; and Sergei Zhuk, of Ball State University’s History Department and author of Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, for his help in the preparation of the discussion of late-Soviet rock music. I also would like to acknowledge the support and collaboration of Kennan Institute Research Associate Liz Malinkin in conducting research about contemporary Yekaterinburg and her comments on various drafts of this paper, as well as Kennan Institute Intern Irina Kuzemkina for her energetic research.

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 33 Authors Biography

Blair A. Ruble is currently Director of the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he also serves as Program Director for Comparative Urban Studies. He received his MA and PhD degrees in Political Science from the University of Toronto (1973, 1977), and an AB degree with Highest Honors in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1971). He has edited more than a dozen volumes, and is the author of six monographic studies. His book-length works include a trilogy examining the fate of Russian provincial cities during the twentieth century: Leningrad. Shaping a Soviet City (1990); Money Sings! The Changing Politics of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Yaroslavl (1995); and Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka (2001) as well as Creating Diversity Capital (2005) examining the changes in such cities as Montreal, Washington, D.C., and Kyiv brought about by the recent arrival of large transnational communities. Second Metropolis has been published in Russian translation, while Second Metropolis as well as Creating Diversity Capital have appeared in Ukrainian translation. His most recent monograph – Washington’s U Street: A Biography – appeared in November 2010. A native of New York, Dr. Ruble worked previously at the Social Science Research Council in New York City (1985-1989) and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (1982-1985).

34 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG BLAIR A. RUBLE / 35

BLAIR A. RUBLE / 37 38 / URALS PATHFINDER: THEATRE IN POST-SOVIET YEKATERINBURG KENNAN INSTITUTE OCCASIONAL PAPER # 307

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars One Woodrow Wilson Plaza 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20004-3027 Tel. (202) 691-4100 Fax (202) 691-4247 www.wilsoncenter.org/kennan