"Praising Stalin is unacceptable" - Sovlab demands play be cancelled

A play about Stalin at a Batumi theater

The Laboratory for the Study of the Soviet Past (Sovlab), in Tbilisi, has called on the Batumi State Drama Theater to “change its decision on staging a play that praises Stalin.”

Nukri Kantaria, a former MP from the ruling Georgian Dream party and the new artistic director of the Batumi Drama Theatre, is about to stage a play by Mikhail Bulgakov. Sovlab says that this play was written in 1939 on the orders of Stalin himself, then canceled and never staged again.

Information about the staging of the performance about Stalin was initially distributed by the newspaper “Batumelebi”.

“The choice of this play is yet another manifestation of the disturbing trend of promoting Stalin as a piece of Russian propaganda,” Sovlab associates maintain.

In recent years, eleven new monuments to Stalin, who was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, have been erected in Georgia.

“According to various credible polls, positive attitudes towards Stalin in Georgia are on the rise. And this creates fertile ground for accepting mass disinformation from Russia on various topics.

The task of the Russian disinformation machine and its agents of influence is to cultivate Stalin as a false patriotic symbol as a counterbalance to the historically established pro-Western choice of Georgian society,” Sovlab writes in its address.

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“It is not known what approach the director will take in interpreting the play. But his repeated references to Stalin in a positive context in the past are known, and this is a legitimate cause for concern.

“It is especially dangerous to put on a pro-Stalinist play today, when one of the main drivers of Russia’s full-scale military aggression against Ukraine is the Kremlin’s deliberate misrepresentation of life in the Soviet Union.

“The situation is aggravated by the fact that it was Joseph Stalin who initiated the attack in the early 1920s by Soviet Russia on the democratic and internationally recognized Republic of Georgia. It was Stalin who played the leading role in the repressions that followed and, as a result, the removal of Georgia from its European path,” Sovlab maintained.

A play about Stalin at a Batumi theater