#2 - JRL 7232
Television series to break silence over Russia's Stalinist past
June 20, 2003
AFP

On a plot of land on the south bank of the Moskva river, old Moscow is rising out of the dark earth. Workmen hammer cobblestones into place, fresh crumbling paint is applied to slanting walls. A group of wooden onion domes wait to be hoisted onto towers.

Stalin's Russia, and in particular the narrow, twisting streets of working-class Moscow, provides the setting for a hugely ambitious project now taking shape at the Mosfilm studios, an adaptation of Anatoly Rybakov's world best-selling "Children of the Arbat" trilogy.

Shooting on the 16-part television series starts next month, and the first episode is unlikely to air before the latter part of next year.

When it does, however, the effect could be explosive for many Russians, director Andrei Eshpai believes.

"I'm not an admirer of television fiction normally, but when Mosfilm asked if I was interested and I read the screenplay, it was like the Tunguska meteorite," he said, referring to the comet that thundered into central Siberia in June 1908, laying waste vast areas in an explosion that was felt as far away as London.

"The story is like that, for the main character it is beyond understanding. For everyone of that time, the 1930s, the events were like that meteorite, bursting into the sky, ruining everything around, leaving nothing standing."

Rybakov's trilogy -- the second and third novels are entitled "Fear" and "Dust and Ashes" -- recounts the trials and tribulations of Sasha, an engineering student who is exiled to Siberia for writing a mildly satirical poem.

The action begins early in 1934, the year in which the murder of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov triggered the cycle of arbitrary arrests and show trials with which Stalin purged Communist party ranks of possible rivals, and progresses through to the early years of World War II.

Sasha's prank in effect saves his life. Removed from Moscow at an early stage, he is able to sit out the darkness-at-noon years when the merest slip of the tongue, a banal error at work, was sufficient to condemn party and non-party workers alike to the long years of forced labour that often ended in death.

Portraying the idealism and revolutionary fervour of Soviet youth in the 1930s, the novels are also notable for their attempt to present Stalin's inner monologue as the increasingly paranoid dictator picks off his victims, one by one and group by group.

Based on Rybakov's personal experiences, "Children of the Arbat" was written in the 1960s.

An attempt by Alexander Tvardovsky, who had already brought out Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in his review Novy Mir, to publish it foundered when the Khrushchev thaw was reversed by the neo-Stalinist Leonid Brezhnev.

It finally appeared in 1988 as censors loosened their grip in the Soviet Union's dying years, with its sequels appearing in 1990 and 1996.

The deep crisis in Russian cinema and television throughout the 1990s meant that a screen adaptation was until recently out of the question.

Rybakov, who became founding president of the Russian PEN Club, died in 1998, aged 87, but his widow Tatyana, now resident in the United States, was in Moscow this week to help with the film's preparation.

Co-scripted by Valentin Chernykh, writer of the Oscar-winning "Moscow does not Believe in Tears" (1979) and Iulia Damsker, the television series will be the first to take a cold, hard look at the dark face of Stalinism.

As President Vladimir Putin restores Soviet-era hymns and insignia to Russia's public life while the millions of Stalin's victims remain officially unremembered, Rybakov's story -- its makers hope -- may yet provoke the confrontation with the past that the Russian state has so far been determined to avoid.