Communism was based on lies and mass murder. But what really doomed it was boredom. That is the message of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock’n’Roll, which premiered in 2006 and is now enjoying an acclaimed revival at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Its message illuminates the past, present, and future.
The first strand of Stoppard’s plot is ideological. Max Morrow, a Cambridge University philosophy professor, is an unrepentant Marxist hardliner. Bearded, stout, self-important, and cantankerous, he regards the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as a justified reaction to egotistical behavior by the reformists. Discipline in the face of the Western imperialists is much more important. His views make him an object of fascination to the regime in Prague: he actually believes in an ideology that they merely serve.
His counterpart is his pupil, Jan, a brainy, idealistic supporter of Alexander Dubček’s reform communism. Instructed to stay in Cambridge by the secret police, Jan instead heads back home after the invasion in the hope of salvaging something of the “socialism with a human face” that Brezhnev’s tanks have crushed.
Interrogation, censorship, protest, dissident activity, and then jail remove his illusions, while Max’s faith shrivels to weary contrarianism. The play also highlights another sharper contrast, between the monochrome arguments about ideology and the vivid excitements of popular culture. In the frozen landscape of post-invasion Czechoslovakia, these camps initially dislike each other. The musicians find the dissidents irrelevant. The dissidents despise the musicians as childish. Only in 1977 do the disparate elements of the proto-opposition — anti-communists, Christians, 1968-era reformists, and the hairy rebels of the music scene — find common cause as signatories of a mildly phrased but potent declaration called Charter 77. It takes another 12 years for that coalition to remove the regime.
A third element of the play is the tension between collaboration and resistance. Many under communist rule sought a grey zone — often in universities or the cultural sphere — between the outright resistance that leads to jail, penury, and perhaps exile and the moral abnegation of full-scale collusion. As the play shows, those compromises may prove costlier than they seem at the time.
A deeper understanding of the dynamics of the old Cold War may help win the new one. The West’s growing economic and military superiority indeed accentuated the failures of the Soviet planned economy. But it was not NATO, or the US military-industrial complex that fostered rock’n’roll — indeed, the besuited types who ran the Western military alliance were rather suspicious of the popular culture of the 1960s, to put it mildly. Military resistance to communism in Indochina, Central America, and elsewhere proved hugely costly and mostly futile, while rock’n’roll, along with much else, exemplified the cultural freedom to innovate that is taken for granted in an open society, and which so profoundly threatens a closed one. The more that Soviet regimes tried to suppress these manifestations of decadence, the more their captives yearned for them.
The Kremlin had no way out of that dilemma. And neither does Vladimir Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping’s China. Both countries are cultural superpowers — but not when it comes to innovation. The most important Chinese artist, Ai Wei Wei, is in exile. So, too, are top living Russian authors such as Boris Akunin and Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Cultural freedom necessarily means mistakes: dead ends, trivia, and abundant self-indulgence. But it also means people can question and, if necessary, ridicule orthodoxies of all kinds — and the people who uphold them.
To focus on fun might seem a distraction as rockets rain down on Ukraine. But this is what we are fighting for.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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