Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan

5. Soviet Theater in Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 98 Theater provided a powerful arena in which Kyrgyz revolutionaries of the 1930s sought to introduce Soviet ideology to wide populations. All types of Houses of Culture became the stages for the first plays in Kyrgyzstan. Regional institutions of cultural activity, including the clubs, served as convenient locations for urbanized and ail populations to appropriate state discourses in order to craft new cultural expressions. By applying the state’s requirements and guidelines to their own understanding of culture, theater amateurs and professionals fashioned a new, essentially Kyrgyz brand of theater. In 1919, the first Kyrgyz People’s Theater opened its doors in Karakol and presented its first stage production, Maxim Gorky’s 1903 play Na dne (known in translated versions as Underground or The Lower Depths).1 Soviet theater in Kyrgyzstan, beginning with modest performances that debuted in Soviet clubs in the 1920s, exposed Kyrgyz youth to Soviet dramatic forms and prepared them to undertake professional careers in the theater of the 1930s. Soviet scholars list A Profitable Position, by Russian playwright Aleksander Ostrovsky, as one of the earliest Russian-language plays performed in Kyrgyzstan ; it was staged in 1918.2 According to the same sources, a limited number of plays appeared on stage between 1918 and 1920 due to the efforts of an amateur group in Pishpek called Svoboda (Freedom). Consequently, a small CHAPTER 5 Soviet Theater in Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s SOVIET THEATER IN KYRGYZSTAN IN THE 1930s 9 99 but significant number of theater professionals managed to introduce Kyrgyzness into Soviet theater performances of the 1930s in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz theater professionals of that decade, who received their first dramatics education in clubs, participated in the process of conveying the Soviet state’s ideological messages. These revolutionary figures in the cultural arena helped to add a traditional exterior to the Soviet ideological message by using stage sets depicting jailoo (the summer pasture of nomadic populations in the high mountains) scenes and stage costumes representing nomadic traditions. Consequently, Kyrgyz revolutionaries and the first generation of Kyrgyz theater professionals managed to shape the Kyrgyz State National Theater so as to project a national image but also incorporate Soviet ideology. The state theater and its creative crew could not have existed without the clubs. There was a dark side to the emergence of Kyrgyz theater, however. Financial challenges of the late 1930s handicapped most of the cultural projects, but these endeavors were not the only government ventures to suffer. The economic climate of the Soviet Union between 1937 and World War II was drastically different from that of the first part of the decade. Stalin’s purges stripped many institutions of their experienced leaders, and related labor and wage problems loomed large in Kyrgyzstan. The purges targeted many intellectuals in the Soviet Union, and even remote, rural Kyrgyzstan was not spared. In November 1938, Ivan Petrovich Lotsmanov, the head of the Kyrgyz People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), ordered the execution of 137 “enemies of the people.” On November 5, 1938, these people were shot and their bodies thrown into the furnace of a brick factory near Chong Tash, not far from Frunze.3 Among the 137 were many intellectuals, including Kasym Tynystanov, Törökul Aitmatov (Chingiz Aitmatov’s father), and Jusup Abdrakhmanov .4 Tynystanov was one of the founders of the Communist Party in Kyrgyzstan. Ironically, these native sons of Kyrgyzstan were accused of being “enemies of the people” by a Belorussian colonel who had just arrived in Kyrgyzstan.5 Stalin’s purges managed to eliminate these 137 academics, writers, politicians, and other progressive individuals in Kyrgyzstan. Once favorite sons of the revolution, they were nonetheless murdered for alleged anti-Soviet activity. In the brutal era from 1933 to the end of World War II, Stalin and his commissars purged those members of the Kyrgyz Soviet elite who believed that valuing their Kyrgyz community was not necessarily an impediment to their Soviet citizenship.6 The primary focus here is the background of those few Kyrgyz theater professionals who survived and kept their positions through the purges. The official reports on Kyrgyz theater events, occasionally called Theater Olympiads, help explain how these few theater professionals managed to insert Kyrgyz flavor into Soviet theater of the 1930s in Kyrgyzstan. 100 9 SOVIET THEATER IN KYRGYZSTAN IN THE 1930s When the party carved the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic...