art, sculpture, and architecture massive, grandiloquent, and neoclassical exemplars managed to concretize the physical manifestations of socialist realism.
Indeed, in one respect socialist realism’s lineage harkened back to the nineteenth century since its foundation rested on the aesthetic principles of realism and its purported ability to truthfully depict life as it was happening. Moreover, the populist movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, which greatly appealed to Bolshevik ideologists, including Vladimir Lenin, provided the prototypes not only for the appropriate psychological makeup of a character. In addition, these populist models served to situate socialist realist aesthetics in a revolutionary context that applauded the development of socialism.
In addition, some critics have traced socialist realism’s genealogy through early twentieth-century Russian symbolism, a development that thereby enabled the Russian artistic and political avant-garde movements to share the notion of a perfect future life. The artistic avant-garde drew on the work of the Russian symbolist philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the basis of its doctrine, while the political avant-garde followed Marxist ideology on its path to create a new Soviet society. Both avant-garde projects shared many of the same ideas, metaphors, and terminology in describing the “new world” they hoped to create. For example, while Soloviev espoused the idea that art was an instrument for creating the future, Marxists maintained that art was an instrument for transforming life, a process that, by its very nature, would create new men and women. Indeed, the Left Front Futurist theorist Nikolai Chuzhak links Solovievian symbolist principles with Marxist ideology, thereby creating a Marxist aesthetic that blended the theur-gic impulse of Solovievian thinking with Marxist dialectics. Chuzhak labels this end product “ultra-realism,” a construct that “would express the dialectical collision between ‘what is’ and ‘what will be’” (Gutkin, 1999, p. 46). According to this interpretation, the artistic and political avant-garde movements already had sown the seeds of socialist realism long before its actual adoption.
Similarly, the critic Boris Groys has argued, among other notions, that socialist realism was more avant-garde than the avant-garde itself. Whereas the avant-garde provided numerous theoretical models, mandates, and pronouncements for how the future world should be, they were neither willing nor able to completely replace or even destroy the traditions that preceded and produced them. In fact this futuristic vision could never fully be realized, precisely because the avant-garde sought to construct it on the existing cultural structure. Conversely, socialist realism was, according to Groys, able to achieve that which the avant-garde never could-to reject traditional cultural structures and in their place to construct a new system of artistic production that reflected the new society that was supposedly being created in the Soviet Union.
Critics such as Herman Ermolaev and C. Vaughan James have argued that the basis for socialist realism rests firmly on Communist Party ideology and its desire to control cultural production to serve its ideological and propagandistic needs. Finally, the writer and literary critic Andrei Sinyavsky has proposed that the aesthetic system after which socialist realism was modeled harkened back not to nineteenth-century realism, but rather to the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century. As Sinyavsky notes, the necessity to produce state-mandated art; the directive to applaud the glory, power, and vision of the State, especially vis-?-vis its own citizens and other cultures; the proclivity to build, write, paint, or compose works of art that were massive in structure, grandiose in their praise, and fraught with visions of how life should be, not as it actually was-these elements paralleled the demands put to socialist realism.
Clearly the development and historical precedents in Russian cultural history for socialist realism are richer and more complicated than originally thought. In fact, even the proposed elements that had to be included in an artistic production to make it truly socialist realist were reconfigured and reemphasized as this aesthetic system continued through successive eras in the development of the Soviet Union.
Initially a number of characteristics were required of a work of socialist realism. First, it had to depict Soviet life not as it was, but as it should be. Hence, any work of socialist realist art would
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exemplify for its reader or viewer a behavior, event, or image that captured an “ideal” rather than reality. As stated in Literaturnaya gazeta (September 3, 1934), “Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism, demands from the artist the truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the task of ideologically remolding and educating the working people in the spirit of socialism.” While this statement specifically refers to literature, the parameters it sets forth were applicable to any artistic production.
In essence, any work of socialist realism should depict the bright future that Soviet public rhetoric continually promised its citizens, provided that they followed the socialist realist model. The epitome of this model was the “new Soviet man/woman” who through his or her Party-mindedness, intensive labor, class identity, and singlemindedness achieved great feats that resulted in a happy ending and that glorified the Soviet Union, thereby demonstrating the correctness of its ideology. In literature these new Soviet men and women were created by Soviet writers, the “engineers of human souls,” as Josef Stalin called them. Hence, almost from its inception Socialist realism was redolent with industrial metaphors and images. Writers, indeed all artists, were engineers charged with “reforging” or reconstructing characters, images, words, and deeds into manifestations of Party policy and Soviet power.
Originally a work of socialist realism should contain four key elements. The first was ideinost- the work must be anchored in and resonate with Soviet ideology, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Second, the work must convey klassovost-class-consciousness. The socialist realist heroes and heroines must personify their class heritage. Preferably they were to be members of the working class or, more rarely, enlightened peasants or intellectuals, who embraced the new ideology and demonstrated through their lives and work their allegiance to their class, and, ultimately, to the Soviet Union. Third, a socialist realist work must contain partynost-Party-mindedness. This meant that the firm, guiding hand of the Communist Party of the USSR constantly exerted its presence in a work of socialist realism, either in the character of an ideal Party member in a work of literature, or through the visual or aural presentation of a theme or motif that exuded strength, decisiveness, and grandiosity. Finally, works of socialist realism should have
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narodnost-the content of a work of art should represent the interests and viewpoint of the people (narod) rendered in an intelligible, approachable manner.
Throughout the 1930s the aforementioned guidelines were strictly applied to artistic production. Whereas in the early 1930s collective heroism and collective labor (consonant with the goals of the first two five-year plans) were glorified and promoted, in the latter half of the 1930s up to the advent of World War II, individual heroes, from Stalin to polar explorers, from collective farm workers to Stakhanovites, were extolled. As the war years unfolded, the official enforcement of socialist realist imperatives lessened but definitely did not disappear. The slight flexibility, afforded writers in particular, to depict the brutality of battle during World War II (but not any mistakes of Stalin or his military commanders) was counterbalanced by the heroic music, art work, and films that understandably lauded the honest heroism displayed by common Soviet citizens in the face of the war.
Nonetheless, when the war concluded, a redoubling of efforts to enforce strict principles of socialist realism emerged. Primary responsibility for this enforcement fell, once again, to Andrei Zhdanov, then chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Zhdanov’s most virulent wrath fell on poet Anna Akhmatova and writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose work Zhdanov aggressively attacked in the press. Consequently, the canonical elements of socialist realism reemerged and prevailed until the so-called Thaw in the late 1950s.
This period (1953-1963) witnessed another lessening of the paradigmatic strictures that defined socialist realism. During this period relatively greater flexibility marked artistic endeavors. In particular, literary works were permitted to explore previously untouchable topics-the Soviet concentration camps, the difficulties of life in the countryside, the trauma of the post-war years- in a more humanely artistic, less formulaic way. This did not mean that Party supervision of artistic production diminished completely, nor were all works of literature written at this time permitted to be published (e.g., Lidia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna, Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle). Rather, a slight lessening of the controls enabled some artists to produce works that stretched the boundaries of socialist
