With the timely Patriots, Peter Morgan is still playing fast and loose with the facts.
Vladimir Putin’s rise to power is the stuff of Shakespearean drama, so it’s no surprise that the tale is now the subject of a play, which ran on London’s West End last summer and opened on Broadway this week. It doesn’t necessarily follow that such a play would be a commercial success, but it was a hit in England, and it’s a hot ticket in New York, though for reasons quite apart from mass interest in the subject matter.
Of course, Putin on his own is a figure of great public interest, especially since his invasion of Ukraine, which transformed global politics and heightened fears of a wider war. Butwas written before the invasion. It focuses on the struggle between Putin and Boris Berezovsky, the most flamboyant of a group of Moscow billionaires known as “the oligarchs.” Berezovsky was the most powerful private Russian citizen at the time, and his struggle with Putin was truly titanic.
But these events took place 30 years ago. Few in the West remember Berezovsky or the other oligarchs, much less their clash with the man who still occupies the Kremlin. Still, this is a story worth recalling: It sheds light not only on Russia’s recent past but its possible future—and thus the lives and fortunes of us all.
In a climactic scene , Putin, the new president, calmly tells Berezovsky that the state must take back its vital assets, which the tycoon and his friends have been exploiting for their own wealth. Berezovsky screams that Russia needs the oligarchs; that they had turned the assets, which had been lying fallow under Soviet rule, into profitable enterprises; that their ventures were essential if Russia were to become a rich and powerful country.
First, Putin wasn’t quite a nobody when he met his patron. Berezovsky refers to him in the play as a “provincial deputy mayor,” but St. Petersburg was, and still is, Russia’s second-largest city. Mayor Sobchak was a leading figure in Russia’s reform movement, and Putin was seen as a like-minded aide and thus a natural recruit for Yeltsin’s apparatus.
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