By Lucy Komisar
Good propaganda is subtle. You don’t know it’s propaganda. Erika Sheffer’s play “Vladimir” is as subtle as a sledgehammer. She and her family immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1975, 15 years before Glasnost. She hates the new state of Russia with a passion.
Her play “Vladimir,” presented by the Manhattan Theatre Club, is a pastiche of the attacks the West has launched against Russia since the American neocons led by Dick Cheney post-Glasnost decided (first quietly, now openly) to conquer and divide it into weak mini-states, as if she were throwing mud at the characters and hoping some of it would stick.
In this case it’s good to be a journalist as well as a theater critic. I have written about the subjects that are the backstories of her play. I explain the references and link to my evidence to prove how egregiously corrupt or ignorant the play is. Please ignore legacy media critics who have no information at all about the backstory and get everything wrong. Especially about the Browder Hoax.
The plot revolves around a reporter Raya (a tough Francesca Faridany) based on Anna Politkovskaya who is covering the war in Chechnaya, a breakaway Russian province controlled by radical Islamists financed by the U.S. to attack Russia. Raya is loud, often yells rather than speaks and reports whatever she finds hostile to Russia. At one point she is poisoned by tea from her own cupboard. She recovers. Who did it? We don’t know, so it has to be Putin. Because how could Russia defeat Islamic terrorists if a reporter was writing stories critical of the war?
Her editor Kostya (a likeable, realistic Norbert Leo Butz) has supported her but doesn’t want her going back to Chechnya. And he is visited by a top government communications official (Erik Jensen), an apparatchik who, unhappy with the Chechnya reporting, suggests he get another job. In fact, he arranges for Kostya to become a state TV director.
The Chechens would blow up a Russian school and kill hundreds of children. True. The play repeats claims that the government ignored intelligence about the attack. (Same has been said about 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.) Raya has a strange muse, Chovka (Erin Darke), a Chechen Islamist who wonders why the deaths of her people don’t matter. Unclear where the author’s sympathies lie.
From the BBC: Vladimir Putin accused US agents of directly aiding rebel fighters in the second Chechen war. …. Mr Putin accuses the West of trying to tear Russia apart by supporting terrorists. “Our security services recorded direct contact between North Caucasus fighters and representatives of US intelligence in Azerbaijan,” Mr Putin discloses ….. Once informed, he says, US President George W Bush promised to “kick ass”. But he claims US intelligence then wrote to their Russian counterparts instead, proclaiming a right to support all “opposition forces” in the country.
But the most important plot is Sheffer’s appropriation of the William Browder-Magnitsky hoax. For those who don’t know, who read only the legacy press, Browder is an American investor and conman who the U.S. Treasury labeled a tax expatriate because he traded his passport for that of the UK which doesn’t tax profits stashed in tax havens. Note his offshore company in the British Virgin Islands.
In Russia, he set up shell companies in the Buddhist region of Kalmykia which halved taxes for companies that hired workers with disabilities, then he cheated on taxes by claiming disabled workers, though his shells had no workers at all. His accountant Sergei Magnitsky got some laborers to provide their papers and say they worked at the firms, when they all did manual jobs elsewhere. Browder later lied in a U.S. court that everybody did it.
So Magnitsky, who handled the scam for Browder, was detained in the tax investigation, while Browder and other staff found safety in London. Browder would later claim Magnitsky was arrested for revealing the government culprits behind a “tax refund fraud,” which was also untrue.
In that operation, which Browder copied from another company, Renaissance Capital, he had shell companies set up to “sue” his companies for breaching an agreement. (I interviewed the Moscow lawyer who worked on both scams.) Then, the Browder companies “agreed” to pay $1 billion, which conveniently cancelled out that year’s $230mil tax payment. Browder says his companies were “stolen” before the “agreement.” But the crook jailed for handling the deal testified that Magnitsky was the collaborator who supplied the needed documents. And letters sent by the court to the mailbox Magnitsky oversaw proved he knew about the “scam” while Browder could still block it. There’s no evidence of where the money went. Just some charts with crossing lines which a New York judge derided as modern art.
In the play, Yevgeny (David Rosenberg), the accountant pretending to be Magnitsky of an American company executive (Jonathan Walker) pretending to be Browder finds his company was used to steal 20mil rubles from the Treasury in a (surprise) tax refund fraud. Yevgeny says, “My guy at the Tax Authority pulled files, found the shell companies, but I can’t figure out who’s behind them. There were refunds deposited in banks all over the country. Twenty million rubles.” He follows the trail to the top of the government and is arrested for revealing the culprits.
Of course, Magnitsky was arrested in the tax evasion scam, not the tax refund fraud, and he never revealed anything about anybody, as you can see from his published interrogations. Note he is identified as an auditor. Browder lied that he was a lawyer hired to investigate the tax refund fraud. When he actually helped organize it! And had done Browder’s accounting for years! (So many facts the legacy press has ignored!)
The play has him in prison beaten to death by thugs wielding truncheons: “they crack ribs.” The truncheons are a necessary part of the copy-cat story, as Browder lies to the world that Magnitsky “was murdered” with those weapons. But that is disputed by the Russian Public Oversight Commission for Human Rights Observance, an NGO charged with investigating prison conditions, that did a timeline of medical interventions that show the beating could not have happened – he was under in-person care during most of the time.
How Browder changed his stories about how Magnitsky died, graphic by Michael Thau.
The Browder-government inventions are easy to refute if you just take the time. This is 100Reporters, this is testimony to the Australian parliament. For more, go to the Browder Hoax. The Sheffer story is so fake fake fake!
At one point, perhaps to spice up a lull, Chovka, shrouded in black, appears to declare, “Well, I guess they can kill you any way they want. Polonium, Novichok, pushed from a window, bullet to the head. Polonium is named as the poison that in 2006 killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian FSB (security service), in London. The West roared “Putin”!
Novichok was claimed as the alleged weapons-grade chemical that in 2018 targeted the Skripals, he a former Russian military intelligence officer who was a double agent for the UK, freed on a prisoner exchange, and his daughter visiting him in the UK. The killer chemical must have been faulty: after a month, they were out of critical condition.
Same was alleged in the 2020 “poisoning” of anti-government activist Alexei Navalny at a Russian airport, though when he was flown to Germany with Moscow’s approval, initial medical exams did not detect novichok and the German military lab that later claimed to find it refuses to provide documentation. See the details. Sheffer was obviously serving this up to the Russophobic cognoscenti.
Navalny was a racist who called for killing Chechens in this video he made. No reason to kill him, but he was sure not the hero the U.S. calls him!
Connected to the Skripals case, an inquiry about the alleged 2018 novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess is starting in the UK. She allegedly found a perfume bottle filled with the substance, sprayed herself and died. But the inquiry won’t call the Skripals, who the UK has kept incommunicado for more than six years “to protect them from Putin.” Ever hear of zoom testimony? Or videographed depositions?
And finally, “pushed from a window” is the fake attempted murder of Nikolai Gorokhov, a lawyer paid by Browder to represent Magnitsky. He fell from a window while leaning out to assist in the crane delivery of a bathtub to his apartment. He was clumsy. Or was he pushed? As he had hired the delivery company, he could have given that information to authorities who could have located the workers. Instead, he first said he didn’t remember anything, then, after obvious instructions from boss Browder, declared he was targeted by an unnamed villain, because he found key evidence in a $230-million corruption scandal involving high-ranking state officials. The old tax refund fraud. So who pushed him out the window? U.S. media stenographers duly repeated his charges, bereft of questions. More junk journalism.
Whew, Sheffer hit all the bases on Russophobia! (Don’t know who the “bullet to the head” victim is. Whoever it is, Putin pulled the trigger, right?)
A minor fiction had me laugh. Raya says Putin is “Small. Not great intellectual, not insightful.” That to describe a man who has given hour-plus speeches, with no notes, that refer extensively to history and literature, while American leaders stumble over their teleprompters. He is an intellectual giant compared to Biden, Harris and Trump. (Russian-accented ungrammatical English kicks in when characters are addressing Americans. I found the device annoying.)
More about the characters. We begin with Boris Yeltsin in December 1999, about to resign his presidency. We know he was alcoholic, but Sheffer inflates the crudeness by having him pee into a flower vase because there’s no time to go to the “gents” before his televised announcement. Never heard that one.
Pretty much everyone drinks Scotch, heavily. (No vodka?) And curses, which must be a Russian affliction. Or, have you seen this quote from the new Bob Woodward book, “War.”
“Biden allegedly referred to Netanyahu as “that son of a bitch,” “a bad f**king guy,” and “a f**king liar” in a private conversation with a close associate, claiming that the prime minister “doesn’t give a s**t about Hamas [but] gives a s**t only about himself.”
Biden’s sharp tongue has also reportedly been directed at other leaders. Woodward writes that Biden uses swear words to describe this year’s Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, calling him “that f**king asshole.” He has also been equally candid when describing ex-President Barack Obama’s policy regarding Russia and Ukraine, telling a close friend that “Barack never took Putin seriously” and “that’s why we are here, we f**ked it up.”
Biden has not shied away from using swear words to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin in recent years. According to Woodward, he has referred to him as “that f**king Putin” and has said “Putin is the epitome of evil.” Biden’s public statements have often drawn criticism from Moscow as being “unbecoming” of a global leader.” One might agree.
And they are worried about surveillance. Kostya says doesn’t want his sister to tell things over the phone. You never know who’s listening. Yevgeny doesn’t want to talk to his boss on the phone. Have you heard about the U.S. National Security Agency that illegally listens to all Americans’ calls? Which forced Ed Snowden to flee the country and get safety in…Russia!
Kostya, by the way, wrote years before the time of the play that Glasnost would lead to the fall of the economy. No! It was the corrupt “loans for shares” organized by the “liberal” Anatoly Chubais, who worked with the USAID program managed by head of the Harvard Institute for International Development. It let the oligarchs (crooks) steal the Russian patrimony – oil, steel, all. They bid at corrupt auctions and paid massively below what the companies were worth. The cash went to Yeltsin’s campaign. Does Sheffer know all that?
Faradany is well cast as Raya, a committed Deep State apparatchik. I rather liked Butz as the newspaper editor. He seemed real, gruff, but caring about Raya though not about to commit professional suicide. Walker as Jim the CEO was too loud, Rosenberg as Yevgeny too nervous.
If there is an academic study of cultural propaganda, this play is easy to dissect!
Artistically, I quote the couple sitting in front of me, who said “dreadful,” without even knowing the fake politics. Still, this play is important as an example of crude 2024 Russophobic propaganda by a writer who appears utterly ignorant of Russian history of the past two decades. I invite Sheffer to disprove the accuracy of what I have written.
“Vladimir.” Written by Erika Sheffer, directed by Daniel Sullivan. MTC at City Center, 131 West 55th Street, NYC. Runtime 1hr25min. Opened Oct 10, 2024, closes Nov 10, 2024. Review on New York Theatre Wire.