| Biography | Mikhail Shatrov's historical plays subjected Stalin and his legacy to withering scrutiny and signaled a new era of artistic freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr. Shatrov (pronounced shah-TROFF), whose father was executed and whose mother was exiled under Stalin, was best known for his plays on Lenin. These dramas of fact, as he called them, turned a lens on pivotal events in the revolution and the early years of the Soviet state, when economic and political freedoms still loomed as possibilities.
After Mr. Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985 and ushered in the liberalizing policies of glasnost and perestroika, Mr. Shatrovs works were staged without the cuts or revisions imposed by the censors in the past.
An assiduous researcher, Mr. Shatrov gleaned historical details and even lines of dialogue from the minutes of party meetings, unpublished memoirs and his own interviews with participants in the events he described. In all of his historical plays the problems of the Soviet system begin with Stalin. Their solution lies in finding a way back to the Leninist path.
Mikhail Filippovich Marshak was born in Moscow on April 3 1932. On becoming a playwright he changed his last name to Shatroff to avoid confusion with a well-known author of childrens fiction and poetry, Samuil Y. Marshak.
When he was 5, his father was arrested and executed as the Stalinist purges reached their height. The case was typical. A veteran of the revolution and the civil war, Filipp Marshak earned an engineering degree and became director of a cellulose factory. He was, in other words, precisely the kind of old-line Bolshevik Stalin was keen to eliminate.
In addition he was related by marriage to the government minister Alexei I. Rykov, who was rounded up with the Communist theoretician and leader Bukharin in 1937 and executed in 1938 after a celebrated show trial.
He earned an engineering degree from a mining college in 1956 but had already begun publishing stories and plays, and with the cultural thaw under Khrushchev, the possibility of a literary career opened up.
From the outset Mr. Shatrov ruffled feathers. His first play, Clean Hands, presented an acerbic picture of Communist Youth League leaders. He constantly fell afoul of the censors, and during the 1960s he took the risky step of supporting the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. |