The virtuoso historian

Some weren’t keen on novels by Walter Scott, Alexandr Dumas and Thomas Mayne Reid. Even the classical detective story writer Conan Doyle did them justice. By the way, the latter was very surprised that his historical novels such as The White Company and Sir Nigel Loring about the Hundred Years’ War were much less popular than his series about Sherlock Holmes.

The history, just like any other science, is an affair of experts. Not everyone has the possibility, time and desire to read articles and academic chronicles. Not so long ago our history had only one line, approved by the party leaders, and it was scholastic, boring and pointless.

This is how folk history appeared. It’s interesting that in English this expression means “folk narrations and tales.” In our society during the perestroika, when official history was debunked, it acquired another meaning. In the West where the same process is in progress it’s called non-academic history. Probably, the reason for this is that the academic science rejects the attempts to change its basis and not without reason — mainly because it is the domain of amateurs. Yet the professor of the Russian State University High School of Economics Igor Orlov wrote: “I think that Gumilev, Fomenko and Bushkov woke Russian history… We have to thank them all for having prodded Russian historian thought… Let’s recall the Slavophils, most of which also were literary men and philosophers. We don’t criticize them for being amateurs. They galvanized public thought and the Western movement.” The member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Dmitry Volodikhin remarked: “The high history for intellectuals has always been accompanied by its little sister… next to the tragic heroine. Amateurs, thirsty for court passions, knights’ marches, patriotic battles and various mysteries have always been attracted by popular fiction history. There’s nothing wrong with this: popular history has its educative function. Dumas and Pikul are fun and didactic.”

If this genre is presented by a professional historian, writer and dramatist it becomes especially attractive.

Edvard Radzinsky is a popular writer. The young dramatist became widely known in 1964 when director Anatoly Efros staged his play 104 Pages about Love in the Moscow Theater of Lenkom. This drama became the scenario for the film Once Again about Love by Georgi Natanson with Tatyana Doronina and Sergei Lazarev playing the leading parts. The plays Talks with Socrates and The Theater in the Times of Nero and Seneca made a big stir at that time. They have been staged in many countries, and by such leading figures as Tovstonogov and Goncharov. Lyudmila Gurchenko, Oleg Basilashvili, Armen Dzhigarkhanian and Tatyana Dogileva played in them.

His books, translated into more than 12 languages and published in many countries, caused a sensation, too. The former US president George Bush was the first to read the biography of Aleksandr II in English.

History is an interesting science in itself, but when some historical events are retold by a real orator the audience feels the depth of these events. Radzinsky is a speaker able to excite passion toward the most boring historical facts. This is probably why Rambler users picked Radzinsky as person of the decade.

Recently Radzinsky has visited Kyiv and attracted history buffs with his speech.

The topic of tyrants and dictators has always been interesting for Radzinsky. Unfortunately, there are those who still have a kind word to say about Stalin, and are ready to erect monuments to him and go into streets carrying red flags on communist holidays. In the first part of his speech Radzinsky spoke about the surprising similarity of two dictatorships, those of Hitler and Stalin: from common destiny and career, the same problems in childhood and an inferiority complex to the irrepressible need for power, the defiance toward humans, their dignity and even their lives.

The 20th century started very happily, it seemed that humankind entered a golden age of technical progress that would dramatically change their lives and make work easier and more descent. There won’t be any wars as during the international disarmament conference large and small countries agreed to settle disputes peacefully and honestly. Of course, the leading European countries and Japan rapaciously pilfered China and the US was fighting a transient war with Spain. However, it was far from Europe. They tried not to think about it at all. Even when the drama of two military campaigns unfolded in the Balkans a lot of people naively thought that nothing threatened the peace.

And then that inexplicable outburst of hate. The World War I. Europe in the death dance. “They didn’t study Goethe in Germany, no, they learned the anthem of hate for England. They learned it at schools and soldiers repeated it before the attacks. High society was banned to speak French. They wrote on their masks: ‘God, punish England and France.’ In France they didn’t play Beethoven and declared him a Belgian to be able to play his music. They didn’t play Mozart in England. And what was happening in our country. They renamed the capital, eliminated German surnames and the horses from the German embassy were thrown into the Moyka. It wasn’t done by the dregs of society, no, the aristocrats were proving their patriotic feelings. In Austria they repeated the phrase: ‘The one unable to hate won’t learn how to love.’ The war showed that the coating of civilization on the people was thin and pitiful… The orgy didn’t finish with this; it entered its new stage called ‘the revolution.’”

It wasn’t a lecture, but the actor’s narration kept the audience under a spell. The audience became the participant of this immersion into history. The historical was combined with the literary. He made the audience think, stretch their memory and recall things they knew before. When quoting the poets to prove his ideas Radzinsky doesn’t name them, making one think over what he said, come home, find the quoted words and read the whole work. It isn’t light history, but education in the finest sense of this word.

The short kingdom of liberty in Russia finished with a terrible defeat of the intellectuals; the bearers of culture were murdered or exiled. A lot of people actively participated in this, in both the USSR and Hitler’s Germany. “Goethe said: ‘The German nation isn’t one of liberty but one of order.’ A poet with an alert eye warned us back in 1919:

…They will pass,
the melted years
Of the popular storms
                 and revolts:
The former slave, tired
                    of liberty,
Will grumble asking
             for his chains.
He will build barracks
                     and jails,
He will raise the broken throne,
And he will silently go back
                       to his lairs
To work in the fields like
                      a horse.
He will sober from the blood
                     and fumes
He will rejoice the tsar’s whip,
And he will light the bright
                      candle
From the coals
of the extinguished fire.
So, pray, bear and accept…

Maximilian Voloshin saw from the remote Crimea what was going to happen.

To stress the importance of the quoted verses, Radzinsky makes pauses, giving the audience the time to feel the depth of what he said and then he skillfully passes from pianissimo to fortissimo charming the audience and making it feel the events that happened many years ago.

The dramatic tension rose in the second part, when he spoke about the mystery of Stalin’s death. Radzinsky had a unique opportunity to record the memories of one of Stalin’s guards Lozgachov. Those details are not crucial, though they are very interesting; the point is that all dictators finish their days in a similar way. They are either murdered or betrayed by those who are closest. The latter happens much more often. The leader felt it and prepared for a new bloody purge. Not without reason did he call Georgy Zhukov from Sverdlovsk (he had been previously sent to the remote military district). The executioners in Lubyanka were digging dirt up on the Great Mingrelian, Lavrentiy Beria. Molotov, Mikoyan and Kaganovich were going to be arrested. But the dictator ran out of time. His henchmen were faster. On The Day of Stalin’s funeral Beria boasted on the mausoleum tribune: ‘I killed him.’ It was the logical end of he who conquered half of Europe.

However, Stalin’s shadow is still wandering in Russia and not only there. It also visits our country. This is what Radzinsky is worried about. “The famed public opinion poll ‘Your name Russia.’” If they published the real results Stalin would have taken the first place. He liked Ivan the Terrible a lot. In 1942 the play Ivan the Terrible was published and the copy that belonged to Stalin survived. There’s one and the same word written on it several times: “Teacher, teacher, teacher.”

At the end of his speech explaining this phenomenon the writer quoted the words about Stalin’s teacher written by the great historian Karamzin: “Ivan died. The moans of his victims stopped… and the new generations could see only the evidence of his state power and military victories. Gradually the name of the Tormentor, the one his contemporaries called him, was replaced by the Terrible, a name that is honored in Asia. However, history has a better memory than people do, history remembers: ‘the Tormentor.’”

Do the people remember? They have to. The poet Semen Lipkin wrote:

Don’t harden in your silence
Despite the bitterest experience;
We listen to you, the historian,
To find out what is awaiting us.

This is what Radzinsky tells about. We have to be attentive not to repeat the history.