Programme extract for Burnt by the Sun
Extract from Robert Service's article 'Life Under Stalin':
Burnt By The Sun is an outstanding attempt to make sense of the carnage that occurred in the USSR. Communism fell in Moscow at the end of 1991. Subsequent rulers have tried in their own ways to heal the wounds of the past. President Boris Yeltsin described the seven decades of the communist party dictatorship as “a totalitarian nightmare”. Boisterous and unpredictable, he consolidated a rough-and-ready system based on electoral politics and market economics. His successors Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have been more circumspect. Putin in particular has urged the need to celebrate the positive side of communism’s past; he points to the achievements in education, industrial development and the military victory over Nazism. But it is the artists – the dramatists, novelists, poets, painters and film-makers – who have deeply touched the minds of fellow citizens by depicting the complexities of life in the pre-war years. Avoiding generalities, they have looked at how people coped with the terrifying pressure of the 1930s.
Copyright Robert Service 2009
The rest of Robert Service's article 'Life Under Stalin' is available to read in the programme for Burnt by the Sun, for sale from the NT Bookshop, and the Olivier Bookstall and ushers at performance times, priced at £3.
Contents also include:
A TIMELINE of Russian history (1905–1938) and the events leading up to Stalin’s rise to power; PLUS images from the time; WHO’S WHO in the company, and photographs of them at work by CATHERINE ASHMORE.
Programme sales help support the work of the National Theatre
