"They have arrived on Russia's shores just as the history of Russian thought is up for grabs, when a fight is raging for the country's identity and for its past. Everything Herzen detested is being resurrected: censorship, the autocracy of the Russian state, a macabre union of Orthodoxy, nationalism and authoritarianism. After almost 15 years of a democratic experiment following the collapse of Communism, Russia's middle class is voluntarily surrendering personal liberties for a notional stability just as the French did in 1848. As one of the audience declared, "I feel that this production is so up to date that it could be shut down."
"Russian state ideologists are hard at work trying to persuade themselves and the country that democracy and respect for individual rights and liberty are of no use to its people, that Russia always prospered when it was ruled by despotic tsars and that there is nothing in Russian history to be embarrassed about. The characters have returned to a country where their dreams about justice and freedom evoke mostly sneers, whereas Nicholas I, one of Russia's most senseless autocrats, evokes sympathy and respect. "I'd love to read an article by Herzen, with his lacerating wit, about contemporary Russia," Stoppard says.
"Russian history has never been kind to Herzen and his circle. Isaiah Berlin, who inspired Stoppard's interest in Herzen, wrote that "the singular irony of history was that Herzen—who wanted individual liberty more than happiness, or efficiency or justice, and denounced organised planning, economic centralisation and governmental authority—was canonised by the Soviet government, whose genesis he understood better and feared more than Dostoyevsky did."
"But the Soviet system did not just distort these men's ideas. It did its best to wipe out the type of people who looked to their ideas for guidance. During the Soviet period, Russia still produced intellectual giants and great writers. It had its Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but it squeezed out the close reader of Belinsky's pulsating articles and Herzen's unhurried memoirs, the person who shared their sentiments and their rejection of enslavement (whichever form it takes): an educated middle class.
"The Soviet and post-Soviet eras also deformed the language that expressed those sentiments. Words such as "honour" and "duty" were first extolled and abused by the Communists then turned into a joke by their successors. Stoppard's trilogy has not only taken off layers of bronze paint from Herzen or Belinsky and brought them back to life, it has rehabilitated their language...."
