ABSTRACT
The first night of Sir Laurence Olivier's Othello in Moscow on 7 September 1965, could easily have been mistaken for an historic occasion. It was the (National Theatre) NT's first visit abroad, the first by any foreign company to the Kremlin Theatre, built by Stalin inside the walls of the palace to avoid the risks of the open streets; and the first public manifestation of a cultural exchange agreement signed by two new governments, each wanting for their own reasons to show their willingness to bring the Cold War to an end. In general, the collective leadership preferred to adopt post-Stalinist methods of censorship, which the Hungarian writer, Miklosz Haraszti, has described in his book, The Velvet Prison. The velvet prisoners were under considerable pressure to conform or to moderate their lack of conformity. Thus, post-Stalinist censorship penetrated deeply intellectual orthodoxies, unlike Stalinism which buried dissent without poisoning it first.
