In its exclusivity The World History of CommunismThierry Walton repeatedly repeats the idea that nowhere, not even in former Tsarist Russia, was Communism established as a result of a popular revolution. When Lenin arrived from Zurich to his homeland in the legendary armored car, the tsarist regime was already hopelessly attacking the duke, but his replacement was by no means called for, because the Russians wanted the establishment of communism.

After 1944 or 1945, that is, after the famous one Tolstoy’s conference where demarcations took place, Communism was established by the threat of Soviet tanks, accomplices of all kinds, including fatigue, real or conscious impotence, fears of the West, and slogans, among which above all struggle for peace. It’s just that between 1945 and 1989 there was no question of peace, because during that period all humanity was threatened or even became a victim of a significant number of wars. The great, vast Soviet Union is often among the triggers. The great war for the defense of the Motherland, a place of memory that turns into a dispute of a frantic and destructive struggle for dominance.

The impressive propaganda apparatus of the Kremlin, very often combined with the apparatus of the satellite countries, invented explanations and words like the salvation of communism, which was declared a threat in the GDR, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland, normalization, as it happened. in August 1968 in Prague, a humanitarian operation, a phrase used in the winter of 1979, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan or special operationwas the cynically named phrase that started the war against Ukraine in February 2022.

In June-July 2022, that is, a few months after the start of the mentioned special operation, Theater Bulandra he invited his audience to the first performances of the said play Zinc boys. Which began with the staging of the book Zinc soldiers laureate of the award named after Nobelskaya from literature Svitlana Aleksievich. In fact, the playwright of the text and the director of the play, one and the same Yuriy Kordonskyi, realized sooner than others that aggression, the so-called special operation against Ukraine, originates not only in the Russian image of Ukraine, in the categorical rejection of pro-Europeanism on the part of Kyiv, which Mossova does not like at all, but also in the entire communist past of Russia and in various formulas for the survival of the KGB. A fact demonstrated in lavish detail in the recently appeared Putin’s Black Book coordinated by Galia Akerman and Stéphane Courtois (publisher Humanitas¸ Bucharest, 2023).

I think it will not be superfluous to recall the detail that Kordonskyi’s personal biography is connected with Ukraine by thousands of threads. Who among the artists who were born, grew up, artistically trained in the former Soviet space and who told him NO to Putin I am convinced that this new war, like the war against Afghanistan documented in Svitlana Aleksievich’s book, is a war in which a person no longer identifies as a person. That the one who started them, be it Brezhnev or Putin, cares very little about his people, because he sent to certain death many, thousands, tens of thousands of soldiers, young men, a large number of whom returned home in zinc coffins. This after they behaved very often like Nazis on the battlefields. The aforementioned zinc coffins were used so that the mothers of the fallen soldiers of the Order of the Infidels would not see that there those to whom they had given life had turned into something indistinct, or even a bucket of flesh. Or being programmed to kill and hate their victim even after death.

All these ideas are presented in Svitlana Aleksievich’s book, which provoked a violent reaction from the authorities. These cruel details became the reason for sending the author to court. Because her book sharply, categorically, irrevocably calls into question, dismantles, deconstructs the entire heroic mythology. The mythology behind the hideous religion of death.

Show with Bulandra he himself accepts the court formula. In which Svetlana calls six witnesses not to defend herself, but to argue, recalling the personal tragedies described in the book. First of all, it is about five mothers from different intellectual formations and social conditions, some of whom at a certain period of their lives were marked by communist propaganda and its vile mythology, who lost their boys. Four of them died in Afghanistan, returned home in sealed zinc coffins, and the fifth returned tarred. Four of them died, but it couldn’t be more obvious that they also committed crimes at the behest of high command, all too often the victims of which were innocent Afghan citizens. For this, they received awards, worthless banks… The fifth, a sick person, the perpetrator of a qualified murder, which, however, did not correspond to the heroic vision desired by the propaganda, received instead hard years of imprisonment.

The sixth witness appears – a nurse who went to Afghanistan of her own free will. And who, although he could, did not have the means to save life at hand. Either because there were no drugs or tools, or because doctors drowned their minds in alcohol. Mind and consciousness are the same.

The six testimonies begin relatively calmly. With black-clad witnesses sitting at a table (scenography: Nina Brumusila), so only later do accusations, rebellion, anger intervene.

The great merit of Yuriy Kordosky’s play is that each witness has not only his own story, but also his own personality. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro