Back in the 1930s, after Stalin had finished starving the Ukrainians into submission, was in the midst of slaughtering the kulaks, and was getting ready to murder his own party members, the biggest hit on the Moscow stage was Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Days of the Turbins.” It was their “Cats” or, as the head of the Moscow Arts Theatre said at the time, “another ‘Seagull’ for a new generation.” Its appeal to sophisticated Russian theatergoers might have been that it had no tractors, no Stakhanovite workers, no heroic Red Army, none of the tawdry claptrap of typical Soviet propaganda. Instead, its deeply sympathetic heroes were bourgeois intellectuals fighting to restore czarist rule, honest to goodness enemies of the revolution.

Today the play, under its original title, “The White Guard”—a name too politically charged under the Soviet regime—is enjoying a revival at London’s Royal National Theatre. I have long wondered how an enemy of the proletariat could have written Stalin’s favorite play, so when I heard that it was to be performed for the first time in London since the 1970s, I rushed to get a ticket. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but assumed that Bulgakov would have had to suppress his anti-communist convictions in order to get the play produced. I was wrong.

When first performed in 1926, the Communist press denounced the play as counterrevolutionary and suggested that the Soviet government take Bulgakov out and “bash him over the head with a basin.” Normally this would have been enough to shut the production down and imprison its author, but “The Days of the Turbins” found an unlikely patron in Joseph Stalin. When he first attended a performance, as the curtain fell, he rose from his box and gave a standing ovation. He would return to see the play some 15 times, insist that it be revived when the authorities closed it, and in a legendary moment in the history of Soviet dissident literature, he telephoned Bulgakov from the Kremlin when the writer was broke and got him a job.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), best known for his magic realist novel The Master and Margarita, despised the Soviet regime. His 1924 novel, The Heart of the Dog, tells the story of a kindly professor who transplants the pituitary gland of a human into a common street dog, transforming the cur into a crass Bolshevik. It is a hysterically funny critique of the Soviet concept of the New Man, telling us that a dog remains a dog, even as he dresses in human clothes and parrots Marxist slogans.

Bulgakov was a snob. For him, the workers and their party were lowlifes. His ideal was the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia—that was the world into which he was born. His father, a professor at Kiev Theological Seminary, raised Mikhail and his six siblings in a profoundly cultured atmosphere.

The play, based on Bulgakov’s own family history, opens in the Turbins’ large and comfortable apartment in Kiev. Alexei, a colonel in the White Guard, is typing orders, Nicolai is singing, their sister Lena is preparing dinner. It is November 1918. For the moment, their city is still controlled by the White Guard, their German allies, and the Hetman, a German puppet. But Kiev is surrounded by an armed mob. In the Kremlin, the Bolsheviks rule and starving Muscovites are reduced to eating house cats. Outside, you hear gunfire, but inside their flat, the old order remains. Friends stream in from the cold to laugh at each other’s jokes, sing songs, flirt, drink vodka, and eat. For all of them, soldiers, scholars, and poets, the Turbins’ home is a sanctuary in a world that is falling apart. “These Turbins are. A castle in themselves to protect us from the. Horrors,” a drunken poet declaims, shortly before he collapses into his soup.

The next day, battle. The second act opens with slapstick comedy set in the Hetman’s palace as the self-important toady engineers his escape upon learning that his German allies are abandoning the city. Then a scene with the peasant army, their brutality and venality exposed, contrasting with the nobility (and naïvety) of Alexei’s White Guard soldiers as they realize they are doomed. The play ends back in the Turbins’ apartment as the Bolsheviks are about to enter the city. They recognize their old world is finished. They can do nothing but accept their fate while striving to remain true to their values. The world has changed, but they will remain the same. They can do no less.

Alexei’s long speech at the end of Act I summarizes Bulgakov’s views. Their real enemy, he tells his friends, is not just the Bolsheviks but “this modern world.”

This world hates us for our past, our tradition, our strength. This world of every man for himself and damn the rest of you; this gaping grasping, endless stream of envy and hatred we’ve unleashed. Those are the real enemies we face, deep in the shadows. This modern man with no name, no past, no love. This desperate hate-filled man born of loneliness and frustration. This man with nothing to be proud of, nothing he is a part of. There is a tide rising against us, and all we know and all that we define ourselves with will be eradicated. Bigger than Petlyura, bigger than Bolshevism. It is the future, and I hate it. Either we will bury it or it will bury us. That is the battle we are fighting, gentlemen.

Bulgakov is deeply conservative, of a sort we don’t meet very often anymore. It is hard to imagine Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin or even Milton Friedman railing against “the modern world.” Bulgakov’s ideology, however, is reminiscent of the great-granddaddy of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. Burke, of course, wrote his masterpiece in opposition to the rationalist ideology of the French Revolution. The Jacobins did more than just chop off Louis XVI’s head. They argued that all existing traditions should be eliminated, that the old world could be swept away. Ardent enthusiasts of the decimal system, they even abolished the seven-day week. Burke argued against them that logic was overrated, that organic traditions served profound purpose that mere reason could not fathom. The Bolsheviks, with their faith in “scientific” Marxism, were the heirs of the French Revolution, Jacobins on crystal meth.

When the Turbins and their friends sing “God Save the Czar” (while fretting that the downstairs neighbors will report them), it is not because they believe in the divine right of kings or even that Nicholas II was a wise ruler, but rather because they always have. The czar was an accustomed part of their world and precious for that reason alone.

More than just a traditionalist, Bulgakov was also deeply elitist. He knew without question that opera was better than folk songs, that Pushkin was greater than Gorky, that he and his intellectual friends were superior to the workers and peasants about to overthrow their world.

For him, the Bolsheviks were hateful because they scorned tradition and sought to raise the great unwashed above their betters. Burke similarly railed against the French Revolution because for the Jacobins “a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order.” For both of these writers, hierarchy and tradition had value that the falsely rationalist Bolsheviks and Jacobins were fools to ignore. This is a truth that the modern world, and even much of the conservative movement, has lost.

The Turbins and their friends represent the highest flowering of Russian civilization. They are cultured, literate, decent, caring, honorable, and very, very funny. They enjoy each other’s company, wit, and laughter. For them, opera and literature are not affectations but basic pleasures. Conversation is both sport and delight. One cannot watch this play and not mourn the destruction of the most civilized class in Russian history.

It’s understandable that audiences in Moscow and Leningrad flocked to the play, which surely reminded them of the cultured lives they had lost, but why did Stalin? A scholar of Russian literature tells us it “delighted the leader, apparently because in showing the Whites as a noble group, it demonstrated that the Bolsheviks had defeated a worthy opponent.”

I don’t buy that explanation. The Turbins are everything you and I hope to be on our best days, but a worthy opponent they are not. They are doomed, ineffectual, easily tossed by the currents of history. I prefer to think Stalin liked the play because it reminded him of the world he aspired to in his youth. Yes, young Stalin was a revolutionary, a bank robber, a bandit, but in pre-revolutionary days, the sophisticated life of the intelligentsia was all around him. A young man from Georgia must have yearned to be a part of it. Locked in the Kremlin, surrounded by his brutish bootlickers, Stalin might have missed the world of civilized conversation and deep friendship that he and his comrades destroyed. In some part of his black heart, perhaps he wished it wasn’t gone. 
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Tom Streithorst writes from London..

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