Experimental Blog #84

Comments on "Batum" - A Play by Mikhail Bulgakov

This play, "Batum", begins in 1898 in the Georgian city of Tiflis, or Tbilisi. A nineteen year old Joseph Vesarionovich Dzhugashvili is being expelled, because of his revolutionary propagandizing, from a seminary; where, it seems, he had been a student for almost 6 years. Young Joseph was not known as Stalin in those years, and among his comrades he was usually called "Soso". Sometimes he was called "Pastir" because he had been a seminary student.

The play continues through 1902 when "Soso", or "Pastir", is arrested and imprisoned, for leading strikes and demonstrations in Batum; and, eventually, he is exiled in 1904 to Siberia for a 3 year term. However, in only about 2 months, a 25 year old "Soso", or Pastir", is unexpectedly back in Batum; and the play ends.

Completed in July of 1939, "Batum" is the last literary work of Mikhail Bulgakov. He died the next year. Bulgakov thoroughly researched "Batum", and, inspite of not being believable in a few places, it is considered to be historically accurate. The author of the notes to "Batum" in this volume, A A Neenov, has also been very thorough. A 59 year old Joseph Stalin read the play and said, "it was very good, but could never be put on stage".

The big question is, "How did young Joseph return so quickly and easily from Siberia where he was supposed to stay for 3 years?" The official soviet version has been that "Soso" had "somehow escaped and had obtained forged documents". In the following years "Soso, Pastir, or Koba" would have repeated successful escapes from prison or exile. Besides that, the underground communist party organizations with which "Koba" was connected had a history of "large scale failures and downfalls.

Eventually an official document was discovered in Soviet archives that revealed a connection between "Koba" and the Tsar's secret police, or "Okrana", that showed that in 1912 "Koba" had given information about communist party activity to an "Okrana" agent. A A Neenov maintains that young Joseph's relationship with the Tsar's secret police goes back to 1904, and that is how he was released from Siberian exile; and that his papers were not forged, but were in fact genuine. So things worked well for "Soso" or "Koba" or "Stalin".

However, these views only confirm what is already well known; that is, Stalin was a dedicated and dogmatic Marxist-Leninist in the extreme. A A Neenov writes that people in the communist party, working at the same time with the secret police, were not at all uncommon.

Perhaps Mikhail Bulgakov wrote this play, "Batum", to remind Joseph Stalin of the years of his youth, and he hoped it would have some affect or influence on Stalin's tyrannical leadership. An early, but not completely corrected, version of "Batum" was published in 1977 in America. However, the most corrected version was not published until 1988, and it was published in the Soviet Union. The play still seems to be something of an embarrassment to many people.