Discredited Old Bolshevik Portrayed as Double-Agent : Trotsky Revived as Villain in Soviet Play

MOSCOW —  Leon Trotsky, a key figure of the Bolshevik Revolution who was purged and assassinated during the Stalin era, has emerged from the obscurity of official banishment that made him a non-person.

Trotsky and two other Bolsheviks who suffered a similar fate are major characters in a new play that appears to challenge the Kremlin practice of rarely mentioning their names. However, their sudden reappearance does not mean they have been rehabilitated.

Trotsky is portrayed as a villain, a sort of double-agent who pretends to favor the Bolshevik uprising in October, 1917, but is really trying to disrupt the Bolsheviks’ plans for a takeover.

The authors depict the two other revolutionaries, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, as “defeatists” and “capitulationists.” Both were convicted of high treason and executed in 1936.

So far, the play has appeared only in written form, published in the current issue of the magazine Theater. It was written by Sergei Bondarchuk, one of the best-known Soviet film directors, and a collaborator, Alexei Pryashnikov. Bondarchuk’s prominence suggests that the play will eventually be performed on stage.

Western observers of cultural trends say that publication of the play may reflect increased official willingness to be more realistic about Soviet history.

Josef Stalin, the late dictator, is pictured in a favorable light as a comrade of V.I. Lenin, who is revered in the Soviet Union as the founder of its Communist Party and architect of the revolution. Officially, Stalin is regarded as a great wartime leader who made serious mistakes, but he is hardly glorified by the Soviet leadership.

Trotsky, who was expelled from the Communist Party and deprived of his citizenship after quarreling with Stalin, was assassinated in 1940, in Mexico City. His friends said that the killer, who escaped, was acting on Stalin’s orders.

Trotsky’s key role in the revolution, as well as his leadership of the Red Army in the civil war that followed, has been expunged from Soviet history books.

The latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia contains no listing for Trotsky, but under the heading “Trotskyism” it describes him as the leader of a small opposition movement that was purged in 1927 and ceased to exist in 1928. An earlier edition depicted him as an “irreconcilable enemy of Leninism.”

Plays and films about Lenin have been common since his death in 1924, but it is rare for officially approved productions to refer to his discredited allies.

Trotsky, however, was characterized on the stage in Moscow two years ago, in a very minor role in a play about Lenin’s last days. President Leonid I. Brezhnev attended the premiere performance shortly before his death.