Theater: Stalin on Broadway

The Passion of Josef D. Paddy Chayefsky has changed butchers; his Josef Stalin is a Marty with fangs. It is Chayefsky's notion in this play that Stalin can best be understood as a brute with an unquenchable thirst for the Absolute. Beginning as a divinity student in a Tiflis Orthodox seminary, Stalin lost his belief in God. According to Chayefsky, Stalin was further desolated and left with a desperate sense of meaninglessness when his first wife died agonizingly. As a Bolshevik revolutionary, he found new meaning in life; in Lenin he found a...

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