declared the doctrine of “socialist realism,” formulated two years earlier, as the official (and sole) successor to the Russian literary tradition as we have presented it so far in this book. In his opening speech, the recently repatriated Maksim Gorky, president of the Writers’ Union, surveyed that tradition and found it seriously flawed, especially in two widespread nineteenth-century movements he proceeded to classify as unac-ceptably bourgeois: “the old romanticism” and “critical realism.” To help us grasp Gorky’s plea for a clean literary slate for Russia, and to better orient us in the resulting ideological terrain, we must first clear away two enduring Western misconceptions – two bad binary oppositions – about artistic creativity in the Stalinist period.
First is the familiar opposition of “collaborator” versus “martyr.” This convenient yet dysfunctional Cold War binary divides up the residents of a totalitarian society into two camps: conformists or dissidents, the triumphantly self-righteous or the suffering victim – which was itself a Romantic cliche? that Gorky deplored. Most people, including artists, are neither. They simply survive, balancing daily the benefits and costs of being useful, “normal” citizens in their society. This means taking a stand at some points, lying low at others, and constantly devising compromises to protect one’s comfort, dignity, work, and family. Moreover, during these years the collaborator often
The second bad or inadequate binary pits “free” against “unfree” art. Liberal or open societies usually insist on the right of creative artists to be political or apolitical as it suits them. In this regard, Stalinism grotesquely narrowed the sphere of the private: every personal act was potentially political. This politicized dimension was not necessarily punitive or imposed. Recent work on
Stalin-era diaries suggests that “forging an identity,” for a young Soviet citizen, was not the individualizing process familiar in the West (or in Tolstoy), with its goal of a unique voice free from societal constraint. More likely it was the reverse, a striving for the transcendence of the personal: “a Communist should make himself permanently at home in a heroic universe by means of uninterrupted, sustained ideological thinking and acting” and should understand failure as a matter of one’s “personal deviations from a mandated norm.”1 This model recalls the saint’s life, which a human subject internalizes and “grows into” as into an ideal prototype. Such self-fashioning complemented a more general shift toward active monitoring of creative acts. To the negative censorship familiar from tsarist Russia (deleting what could
The Soviet state had another carrot, however, which in the minds of many creative artists worked to offset the constant intimidation, control of culture by thugs and hacks, and silencing of the disobedient. This was the fact that the state and Party were committed to sponsoring serious art - and, at the same time, to ensuring that a large spectrum of artistic media and genres were considered “serious.” As part of the Leninist cultural revolution of the early 1920s, lavishly financed outreach programs in the popular arts reached mass audiences. Factory workers were organized into brigades and bussed to theatre performances; crews of writers and musicians were dispatched to factories to explain operatic plots and teach workers how to write poetry. Such aggressively proletarian programs were discontinued in the 1930s. By that time artists no longer explained their craft; their craft was explained to them by censorship and repertory boards. But traces of this cultural populism remained. Musical theatre and film were valued as moral education, not only as entertainment, and the nation’s most gifted artists produced magnificent scenarios, propaganda canvases, and musical scores on commission.
As state violence became more capricious and widespread in the upper ruling circles, public campaigns intensified for “culturedness”
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for dealing with the functional necessity of intercourse. A brisk public debate developed over the best ways to avoid sexual arousal (“Never drink alcohol . . . Upon waking, stand up at once . . . Urinate before going to bed . . . Flirtation, courtship and coquetry should not enter into sexual relations . . . There should be no jealousy”).2 In 1927–28, as part of this high-profile debate, Vsevolod Meyerhold defended to Party skeptics his staging of Sergei Tretyakov’s play
With this agenda in the moral and physiological sphere, conflicts of state interest were inevitable. Some high-ranking Bolsheviks, who promoted a healthy and harmonious body for the New Soviet Man, advocated the prohibition of all alcohol – but in 1927 Stalin (following his tsarist predecessors) instituted a state monopoly on vodka, justifying it as an indispensable revenue source for Russia’s industrialization.3 These clean-living campaigns might strike us now as na??vely high-minded, but such priorities appealed powerfully to many artists, as much for Tolstoyan reasons (subduing our “animal” side) as for political ones. Many took pride in the fact that in communist Russia, “healthy art for the people” was not obliged to cater to a Hollywood market mentality aimed at pleasing the crowd at any price, nor (at the other extreme) to an arrogantly isolated, incomprehensible avant-garde. Indeed if need be the tastes of both elite and mass audiences could be ignored, since the official success or failure of a work was judged “scientifically,” before its publication or performance, by Party committees. Serious art in Russia meant serious social engagement toward a positive goal, determined in a collectively “conscious” – not an independently “spontaneous” – manner. Consciousness, once achieved, was always unified, goal-directed, and stable: a second- order simplicity.
Collaborator versus dissident, free versus unfree: such categories are too rigid to be useful. From the perspective of Russia’s most gifted creators, it is possible that the maximally criminal aspect of Stalinist cultural policy might turn out to be not its cruelty, wastefulness, utopian or dictated aspects – although those qualities certainly applied – but the fact that it was so arbitrary and discontinuous. Party-line shifts were abrupt, unpredictable, justified by coded or meaningless phrases. Even those who wanted to cooperate (a far more compassionate verb than the sinister “collaborate”) could never be sure how to go about it. This arbitrariness – defined here as a demand that does not need to justify itself – is called in Russian
