| Raining on Turandot, or, Why Krushchev's Thaw Wasn't Lenin's NEP |
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Stephen Bittner Raining on Turandot, or, Why Krushchev's Thaw Wasn't Lenin's NEP February 14th, 2007 Abstract This paper examines nostalgia for the NEP period through the 1963 revival of Carlo Gozzi's comedic masterpiece, "Princess Turandot," at the Vakhtangov Theater in Moscow. The original "Turandot," which premiered in 1922, was the crowning achievement of Evgenii Vakhtangov, one of the most influential figures in early-Soviet theater. It was widely seen as proof of the dynamism of Soviet culture in the years before Stalin came to power. Its revival in 1963 spoke to the possibilities of the thaw; according to one of its proponents, "Turandot" would transform an "underlying atmosphere" that had been stultified by Stalinism. Yet this atmosphere proved more intractable than anyone realized. Soon after the revival of "Turandot," the Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, ordered the theater to begin production of the anti-Stalinist play "Rainstorm." Furtseva's meddling struck many at the theater as a vestige of the very politics "Rainstorm" criticized. It was one thing to restage a play; it was quite another to recreate an era. |
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National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) is a non-profit organization created in 1978 to develop and sustain long-term, high-quality programs for post-doctoral research on the social, political, economic, environmental, and historical development of Eurasia and Central and Eastern Europe. More
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This working paper focuses on the plans to construct a skyscraper in St Petersburg, Russia, known originally as Gazprom-City and recently renamed into Okhta Center, and on the controversy that developed around these plans. The paper uses the skyscraper debates as a lens to discuss a particular "aesthetic politics" of St Petersburg, the meaning of "world cities" and "global architecture" in Russian and international contexts, post-Soviet forms of political and corporate governance, the mobilization of civic opposition to such projects and the ability of such urban protests to translate into a more unified and politically oriented opposition than has been possible in other contexts in Russia.
