Boris Godunov and the Evil Tsars

Stalin never missed a Bolshoi premiere. He then commented. This Boris Godunov, with such an abundance of ghosts of slaughtered and bloodied children, he would not have liked it. In 1936 he had summoned the conductor Samuil Samosud, newly appointed head of the Bolshoi, to tell him that both Pushkin and, after him, Musorgsky, had perverted the image of Boris Godunov. “He is represented as a crybaby, a softie, someone who has pangs of conscience just for having killed a little boy.” It would be silly. It would contradict the evidence, namely the fact that, as a statesman, Boris must have known very well that “all this was necessary to lead Russia towards progress and towards authentic humanism”.