THE PEACE OF BREST-LITOVSK
I didn’t trust the word “compelling”–not in the same sentence as “Central Committee” and “negotiations,” anyway–and I’d never heard of Brest-Litovsk. I was leery of the heroic imagery, too. I pictured a long, pious, deadly authentic recapitulation of debates remembered today only by Russian grammar school students, who probably get tested on them every year in civics class.
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Well, it turns out that Brest-Litovsk is a city on the Bug River, at the border between the USSR and Poland, where the newly ensconced Bolshevik regime worked out what for them were the humiliating terms of a separate peace with Germany, ending Russian involvement in World War I.
Of course, if The Peace of Brest-Litovsk had been written by an American, it would have been entirely about Lenin and Armand. But Soviet playwright Mikhail Shatrov has more serious intentions than merely showing us Lenin the lover. He’s out to show us Lenin as a man in the world; a political combatant, deeply and passionately involved in a struggle that he’s by no means assured of winning. When Shatrov’s Lenin meets with Armand, they exchange caresses but talk strategy.
More profoundly, from an American point of view, Shatrov never questions the ethics, much less the legitimacy of the coup that brought Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power in the first place. To ignore this essential–this literally fundamental–fact of history seems a little like Sophocles forgetting to mention that Oedipus had a run-in with Laius on the road to Thebes.
