Yegor Gaidar, New and Old Vocabularies and the Revival of Russian Theater

It so happened that ten minutes after learning about the death of Russian politician Yegor Gaidar on Wednesday, I had to sit down to write an introduction for a contemporary Russian play in an American theater journal. And, as if without warning, I suddenly found myself doing what I almost never do: I began writing about contemporary Russia in the light of its Soviet past.

Why do I never do that? A short anecdote will do for explanation.

Five or six years ago I happened to see a BBC report on a fire that ravaged the Mariinsky Theater. The reporter stood before the beautiful soft green building on Theater Square in St. Petersburg. He looked earnestly into the camera and said, "The poor Mariinsky Theater. It used to have to deal with Joseph Stalin. And now this…" He turned and the camera honed in on a burned section of the building.

This has never failed to get a laugh from audiences I speak to, but for me it is bitter humor. Some Western journalists, I have found, even good ones, will do anything to lean on the public's knee-jerk responses. They love phrases like "Joseph Stalin," "the Communist-era," "Russia's totalitarian past" and the like. It gets the blood flowing while at the same time allowing people not to think at all. The journalist doesn't have to explain anything, and you just stick to the comfort zone of your old prejudices and preconceived notions.

But, you see, I believe that a journalist has a unique opportunity to help people grow, change and see the world in a new light. For that reason I invariably avoid those old, tired cliches. There are other ways to say the same thing, and I try to seek them out. New vocabularies, after all, do help new worlds and new visions come into being.

Then yesterday I found myself discussing contemporary Russian drama in the light of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Gaidar. I even found Vladmir Lenin creeping into my text.

The fact is this: The passing of Yegor Gaidar reminds us of a true and clear turning point in history. The late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gaidar rose to a position of power and influence, was &mdash let's be honest &mdash a time of mass chaos. I remember it well: the outrageous lines, the empty shelves, the hordes of people showing up on the streets overnight to begin selling their old books, socks and silverware.

I remember passing by the Detsky Mir children's department store one day and there was no one on the street. A day or two later when I approached it going the other way I was dumbfounded &mdash there were thousands of people lined up selling whatever they didn't need. I made my way over to Tverskaya Ulitsa and the astonishing sight was just the same.

For me, as a person involved in theater, it was an amazing time for another reason, however. People stopped going to the theater. They sat at home and watched history being made on their television sets. Or they simply stayed home because they were tired, broke or disillusioned.

In Russian theater history ,this time of upheaval coincides with a period of so-called "crisis." Everybody in the theater screamed "crisis!" in those days. There were, they said, no new directors, no new playwrights, no productions of interest, no theaters worth going to. There was nothing. People seriously asked, "Is Russian theater dead?" It was the mantra of the era.

What does Yegor Gaidar have to do with this? Let's look at a few dates.

Throughout 1991 and 1992, Gaidar held various high posts in Yeltsin's government. In 1993 he was elected a member of the State Duma. Continuing to serve in the Duma, he left his last post in the federal government in January 1994. That same year, he became the chairman of the political party that he helped found, Democratic Choice of Russia.

All the while, the Russian theater world continued to cry that the sky was falling.

However, in the first half of 1993, the playwright Alexei Kazantsev began publishing an influential journal called Playwright as a direct response to all those claiming that Russia had no new playwrights of interest. In May 1993, Pyotr Fomenko opened what would become his legendary production of "Guilty Without Guilt" at the Vakhtangov Theater. In November 1994, Kama Ginkas opened what was to become his legendary production of "K.I. From 'Crime'" at the Theater Yunogo Zritelya. In 1995, Russian theaters were flooded by plays by the unknown Nadezhda Ptushkina. Suddenly a popular new playwright had broken through. In 1996, the Fomenko Studio staged Olga Mukhina's landmark play "Tanya-Tanya," giving rise, we now can say, to what soon became an internationally recognized boom in Russian writing for the theater.

The list can easily go on, but the point is clear.

Gaidar was one of those politicians who helped Russians seek out new vocabularies and new ways of doing things and find new visions that would allow them to change their world.

It surely would be a gross exaggeration to draw a direct line from Gaidar to the renewal of Russian theater. But by the time Gaidar began moving onto the fringes of politics &mdash or, more properly, by the time he was pushed out of the big picture &mdash his work was showing tangible results in all spheres of life. Theater artists proved willing and able to accept and exploit the challenge that the new era offered. As a result, Russian theater shook off the era of "crisis" and entered one of its greatest periods of exploration and accomplishment. Yegor Gaidar can take some of the credit for that.