IN DECEMBER 1934, Sergey Kirov, a prominent early Bolshevik leader and loyal supporter of Joseph Stalin, was assassinated in The Smolny Institute in St Petersburg, where he worked.
Stalin had ordered the execution. The Russian dictator was determined to wipe out all remaining Old Bolsheviks from the USSR government and anyone else he considered an enemy - whether they were a friend or not.
This assassination is the starting point for an intriguing new play entitled Troika which looks at the infamous Great Purge orchestrated by Stalin from 1937 to 1938. It will be performed in the Town Hall Studio from Monday January 19 to Thursday 22 at 8.30pm.
Troika will be the debut play of new Galway based theatre company The Company Productions. It is written and directed by Jack Kavanagh, a 20-year-old student of history at NUI, Galway.
Jack is originally from the United States, but during his teens he lived in Sligo and became involved in theatre there. Upon entering NUIG, Jack began working on a dissertation about the Great Purge and this inspired him to write Troika - his fifth play.
The play is timely as we are fast approaching the 20th anniversary of the collapse of Communism and the BBC recently ran a major series on Stalin and WWII - Behind Closed Doors - which examined such atrocities as the Soviet’s mass murder of Polish military officers in 1941 and the expulsion of the Tartars from the Crimea. So why did Jack want to write about this dark era in Russian history?
“I had read Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror which deals with the Great Purge,” Jack tells me as we sit for the interview on a Thursday afternoon. “Conquest’s book is very opinionated and has a very Western bias. That’s understandable given it was written during the Cold War but many other documents have been released since then by the Russians, so I wanted to try and take a fairer, more balanced look at this time.”
The play begins with the assassination of Kirov and the subsequent investigation. The second half deals more with the actual purges themselves.
“You will see officials going through files and photos and lists of names and dealing with people in quick succession,” says Jack. “The play quotes from actual documents. Sometimes it would only take four minutes to deal with a trial. It would be that quick because that might be all the time they would be given to deal with it. Stalin himself is not in the play, but he is the shadow behind the characters.”
The Great Purge saw Stalin root out - through assassinations, intimidation, persecution, imprisonment, and exile - anyone he considered an enemy within the USSR’s Communist Party. The purge also involved the repression of peasants, deportations of ethnic minorities, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons. Estimates of the number of deaths associated with the Great Purge run from 681,692 to c2 million.
The purge was started under NKVD (forerunner of the KGB ) chief Genrikh Yagoda and reached its height under his successor Nikolai Yezhov, but at all times the campaigns were carried out under orders from Stalin.
During his research for the play, how shocked was Jack by the kind of actions that Stalin took against close confidants, enemies, and whole populations?
“I was not shocked at all,” he replies. “In studying or writing on history I find that as a rule you are not supposed to have emotions or display bias. You have to look at the facts and draw your conclusions from there. If you bring in opinion it will just be propaganda.
“I’ve tried to go that middle course between the USSR and the West. There are characters that are cold, characters that are moral, and others who just don’t care. In the Cold War both the US and the USSR did things that were wrong. I’m hoping that after seeing this the audience will come out with some questions.”
Appearing in Troika will be Gavin Sharkey, Kori Kilduff, Cluadia O’Sullivan, Ben Simmons, Richard Seery, Donal McGrail, and Muireann Bird. The producer is Rummy McCullagh and lights are by Eoin Gallagher.
For tickets contact the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
