George Bernard Shaw Greets the Russian Socialist Utopia
On 9 February 2011, the first act of Andrei Platonov’s play, Fourteen Little Red Huts (1932), will be performed in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics. The play, which was banned under Stalin, satirizes the visit of George Bernard Shaw, who was guided round the USSR in 1931, enjoying an audience with Stalin and insisting that all talk of hunger in the workers’ paradise was a lie. Before this, a documentary film will be shown, Andrei Rogatchevskii will be talking about the great famine that Stalin unleashed on Ukraine in 1932-3, and I will be talking about the British intellectuals who visited Russia in the 1920s and 1930s and considering how they formed their often appallingly mistaken perceptions. Since George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb were dramatically wrong about the USSR, it is appropriate that the performance and discussion will take place in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics, an institution that counts all three of them among its founders, and with the present director, Howard Davies, playing a part. The event is free. It starts at 6.30, and details are available here»
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