Just as the Soviet Revolution occurred through several political developments, and just as Stalin made several Five Year Plans to modernize the economy and industry of the Soviet Union, the culture of the Soviet Union underwent many transformations from the days of the October Revolution to the days of the Party cultural commissars. All the various areas of culture developed and changed under Soviet rule, including all kinds of art and performances. Culture in the Soviet Union changed transformed first from the liberatory energy of the Revolution, as the energy and the ideology of the Revolution spread throughout Russian culture. It also developed in response to the demands of establishing a new national identity, with the birth of the new Soviet Union. Likewise, as the political leadership of the party underwent transformations, culture, like all other aspects of Russian life, transformed to keep up to date with the current party line, or the current interpretation of Marxism. In addition, cultural production in the Soviet Union responded to external pressures as well, as it joined in to lead the “Popular Front” throughout the world. In the same way, Russian culture adapted to become another weapon in the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. These changes can be found in the cultural fields of literature, fine arts, and film.
The first effect of the Soviet Revolution occurred in the years surrounding the revolution, right before it and right after it. As noted in the essay “Death of a Poet” the poets and writers already in Russia responded to the Revolution in a positive or a negative way, depending on their politics. Some, like Aleksandr Blok, saw the revolution as an outpouring of the will and energy of the people, and something that any true poet would be required to write about. In 1918 Block wrote two poems, Scythians and The Twelve which celebrated the energy and goals of the Revolution, while at the same time justifying the violence of the Revolution as necessary.
Blok’s experience was generally uncommon. Many older poets left the scene of the revolution, frightened of the violence, or the change, or the politics. However, they were replaced by a younger core of poets who supported, believed in, and wrote about the Revolution. some who were native Russians, and some who emigrated to Russia to support the Revolution. The literary scene was thrown into chaos not only by the events of the Revolution, but by the inter-party fighting, which was reflected in the fighting of the various writer’s groups and communities. In October 1920 the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was formed, which would lead the Cultural Revolution. Other groups formed and others were shut down, and in 1921-1922 various Soviet state and political police began t0 intervene in literary life establishing a pattern for what was to come.
The energy and memory of the Revolutionary moment continued to produce a rich and varied literary scene throughout the 1920’s. However, by 1929, the party sought to bring a degree of control and regimentation to the various artistic and cultural realms. In 1929, the Party granted the Russian Association of Proletarian writers complete control over the literary world inside Soviet Russia. One the one hand there was a sort of equality to this movement, as control of the journals and the publishing firms was given to ‘worker-writers, many of whom had little experience writing or running literary institutions. This could have been an idealist moment when men and women were freed from the alienation Marx had talked about. However, what it really amounted to was direct party control over the realm of literature, with the intention of making literature serve the party and the party’s goals for communism. Editorial demands were handled and implemented like the economic five year plans; people agreed and produced as they were told, or they went away. For, “Literature no longer had autonomous value; its utilitarian tasks were to reflect the “unvarnished” reality of the working class and optimistically describe its new world. Literature was not to create, but to respond to social demand”. Leopold Averbakh was put in charge of the Russian Association of Proletarian Workers, who was a loyal member of Stalin’s inner circle. Stalin, Averbakh, and the Party Central Committee felt it was time to bring all of the cultural world under Party control and to make it follow the Party line, which is another way of saying Party doctrine. On the one hand, they felt that culture could not be allowed to return to an elitist form, with only a few people able to afford to see or experience museums, operas, or understand literature. Communist culture was meant to be enjoyed by the workers, not an elite. However, on the other hand, Stalin and the Central Committee also felt that following the Party line was the primary job of all artists, and came before any aesthetic concerns.
The Party had two main goals in taking over the literary (and other cultural) realms. They desired to “root out class-alien culture, and to create new art forms in its place.” The first goal was another way of saying that elitism and the values of the old ruling class and the values of capitalism had to be eliminated from culture, and that Russian writers and artists could not be aristocrats, capitalists, elitists, or supporters of the old systems. Writers who were thought to be a part of those old classes, or to sympathize with them, could not find a place to publish or perform their work. However, this also had a result of eliminating many of the forms of popular culture and popular literary genres like detective stories and science fiction because they seemed to reproduce the values of the capitalist west instead of the values of the workers of the Soviet Union. In general, the historical effects of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was to eliminate the autonomous realm of culture. Culture was mas produced and made to seem very similar, and sent out only through party organs and channels. Thus, nearly everyone experienced the exact same programs or books. Popular and folk culture disappeared, and the arts now existed to replicate the party line. On April 23, 1932, the Central Committee issued a new decree, “On Reconstructing Literary-Artistic Organizations”. RAPP was dissolved, and new writer’s unions were formed, but Russian literature was not separated from the Party. It still existed to serve and promote the Party line; all that had happened was that the Party line had changed, so the way in which literature was managed was changed too.
Film had an interesting existence in Soviet Russia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, film became much more than simply another form of entertainment; to the Soviets, it was a form of mass media. Even before the Party began to establish control over the other artistic fields and genres in the mind-1920’s, film was already seen as a vehicle for the proletarian revolution and proletarian culture. Russian cinema of the 1920’s was lucky to have three of the most well regarded film makers in the history of all the world, not just in Russian history. Sergi Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko were all masters of the film genre, and they attempted to blend their talent and political conviction.
As avant-garde artists, Anna Lawton writes in her study of the Soviet Film industry, the three great directors “developed the aesthetics of cinema in daring experimental styles; as Soviet artists they conveyed the substance of their revolutionary philosophy; as democratic artists they wanted to reach and educate the masses.” It is interesting that while the three directors succeeded in making their films masterpieces of Soviet ideology, and truly captured the party positions and party doctrine without sacrificing the artistic content; they never developed a very popular following in Russia. It is not implied that this lack of a popular following was because of the Soviet ideology, but rather that the films they made were of such high artistic quality, and pushed the boundaries of film as an art form so much, that the general population and the proletarian audiences either did not get the films, or did not find them enjoyable, in the way that the films of less talented, and less famous, Soviet directors and film makers were.
Sergei Eisenstein made two films, famous both inside and outside the Soviet Union, which are considered masterpieces of both film and propaganda. In 1925 he released Strikeand Battleship Potemkin, both of which were films which captured moments in the long process of the stages of revolution in Russia. However, Soviet films were able to merge popularity, portrayal of the party line, and the presentation of the artistic values of cinema in the films made after World War II (The Great Patriotic War). At first after the war, the Soviet film industry was like the American film industry: it attempted to give audiences something else to think about besides the war, now that the war was finally over. But in 1950, two well-known films documenting the history of World War II were released: The Battle of Stalingrad, and The Fall of Berlin.
What is truly interesting about the films is the way they present the history of the war. It is not that they twist or revise the history of the war, but the fact that they presented the war from the point of view of the leaders. The soldiers were not shown fighting; the common Russian soldier was not celebrated. Rather, these films showed the highest levels of Soviet command, Stalin and the Central Committee directing and planning out the war. The Fall of Berlin for example is almost completely shot in Stalin’s various command centers. To me, this truly reveals how much the Soviet Revolution had changed from the days of 1917 after dozens and dozens of years of control by Stalin. The proletarians, the workers, the Russians, are gone. All that is left is Stalin, who so came to personify both Russia and the Communist Revolution (or at least his version of it) that there was no need to represent anything else besides Stalin.
The same pattern can be seen in Russian and Soviet fine arts, although through the work of contemporary artists like Bansky and Shepard Fairly of Obey, Soviet Fine art is the most influential cultural product to come out of Russia during its Soviet years. In August of 1934, the First All-Union Confers of Soviet Writers declared that Socialist Realism was the official method of Soviet writing. However, Socialist Realism became the official for not just for literature, but for fine art as well. Soviet painting of the era presents the world as it is, but as it is scene through the eyes of a member of the Party. Thus, Socialist Realism is really a blending of traditional realist methods with subjective perspective of the Communist or Proletarian artist. Thus a city is not painted as realistically as possible, but the objective city is combined with the subjective understanding of the class conscious artist. Soviet Iconography, the various posters used to promote Party policy, or to increase patriotism during the war, presented the images which were the most iconic of communist thought and life in Russia.
Works Cited
Gelden, James von. “Death of a Poet.” Soviet History Web 17 May 2016
Gelden, James von. “Proletarian Writers.” Soviet History Web 17 May 2016
Gelden, James von. “Socialist Realism” Soviet Realism. Web 17 May 2016.
Gelden, James von. “War Films”. Soviet History. Web 17 May 2016.
Lawton, Anna. The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. Edited by Anna Lawton.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Structure of Soviet History New York: Oxford, 2003.
