realism.
This short-lived easing of control over artistic production ended with a further tightening of the
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
parameters that defined socialist realism. While these parameters never approached the strictness of the early years of Soviet power, they persisted nonetheless. Ironically during this ensuing period-called Stagnation (1964-1985)-a number of interesting, original films, works of literature, art, and music appeared either through official channels or through the burgeoning artistic underground. This underground phenomenon permitted a host of officially censored or unacceptable works to be circulated among appreciative audiences through samizdat (self- publication) or tamizdat (publication abroad). Consequently, with each passing year, the hold that the socialist realist aesthetic exerted on Soviet culture gradually lessened until it dissolved into the period of glasnost in the mid-1980s. Nonetheless, the village and urban prose movements of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that socialist realism’s elasticity was greater than one might have imagined. Indeed, the traditional view that the artistic value of any work of socialist realism was compromised by virtue of the fact that it was Party-mandated, has lost some of its urgency. While not all works of socialist realism deserve attention and appreciation, many do. When coupled with the non-socialist realist works of this period, most notably Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, we are left with a rich, variegated artistic legacy.
Moreover, the fundamental fact that socialist realism changed with the ideological and political demands of a particular time period argues for an inherent organicity that infused the system since its inception. Our understanding and, perhaps, even appreciation of socialist realism has grown thanks not only to the post-glasnost flood of archival texts and documents, but also thanks to the broader vision that hindsight provides. See also: BULGAKOV, MIKHAIL AFANASIEVICH; GORKY, MAXIM; MOTION PICTURES; RUSSIAN ASSOCIATION OF PROLETARIAN WRITERS; SAMIZDAT; SILVER AGE; SOLOVIEV, VLADIMIR SERGEYEVICH; THAW, THE; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH tural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Sheila Fitz-patrick. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, Katerina. (1985). The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (1997). The Making of the Soviet Reader. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dobrenko, Evgeny. (2001). The Making of the Soviet Writer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ermolaev, Herman. (1963). Soviet Literary Theories, 1917-1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, no. 69. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golomshtock, Igor. (1990). Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China, tr. Robert Chandler. London: Collins Harvill. Groys, Boris. (1992). The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gunther, Hans, ed. (1990). The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gutkin, Irina. (1999). The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890-1934. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. James, C. Vaughan. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lahusen, Thomas. (1997). How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lahusen, Thomas, and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds. (1997). Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Reid, Susan E. (2001). “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935-1941.” Russian Review 60:153-184. Robin, Regine. (1992). Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, tr. Catherine Porter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tertz, Abram [Andrei Sinyavsky]. (1982). The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, tr. Max Hayward and George Dennis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
CYNTHIA A. RUDER
Brooks, Jeffrey. (1994). “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It.” Slavic Review 53(4):973-991. Carleton, Greg. (1994). “Genre in Socialist Realism.” Slavic Review 53(4):992-1009. Clark, Katerina. (1978). “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan.” In CulSOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES The Russian Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party arose between 1900 and 1902. Industrial growth, peasant unrest, and the rise of the Marxist Social Democratic movement spurred an array of leaders
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from the earlier populist movement, as well as new figures, to create a party that adapted the older movement’s traditions to the new realities. Socialist Revolutionary ideology, organizational base, and personnel therefore reflected, but was not identical to nineteenth-century, Russian populism. The prime mover was Victor Chernov, the educated grandson of a serf. Chernov hailed from the Volga region, the new party’s first bastion. Chernov’s neo-populist theory maintained that industrialization had created a sizable proletariat and that the peasants had become a revolutionary class. In the SR view, a coalition of the radical intelligentsia, the industrial proletariat, and the peasants would make the coming revolution, whereas Russia’s middle class would remain quiescent. Consequently, the revolution would be socialist, hence the party’s title. This complex of views gave birth to a program aimed at propagandizing and recruiting workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. In addition, the SRs utilized terrorism to destabilize, rather then overthrow, the existing regime. The actual revolution, they insisted, would result from hard organizational work and a popular uprising.
During the early 1900s, the party laid down a network of peasant-oriented organizations and in the cities challenged the Social Democrats among the proletariat. The SR Party won over some of the Social Democrats’ following through its popular terror program and appeal to both peasants and urban workers and as a result of splits within Social Democracy. By the 1905-1907 Revolution, the latter party still had an edge among the proletariat, but the SRs operated virtually unchallenged among the peasants. The SRs’ special attention to arming workers and peasants allowed them to play a lively role in armed struggles in Moscow, Saratov, and elsewhere during 1905. However, as Chernov later admitted, none of the socialists proved capable of uniting the opposition to overthrow the regime. Beginning in 1908, the Stolypin repression damaged all socialist organizations and destroyed SR- oriented national peasant, railroad, and teachers’ unions. Debates and splits characterized party life, as the party put the terror program into abeyance. Furthermore, the revelation that party leader Evno Azev was a police spy further demoralized party cadres. Yet the party survived and plunged into the nascent labor movement. This tactic brought the SRs to virtual parity with the Social Democrats in many industrial areas and provided them with the means to become fully involved in the post-1912 revival of the revolutionary movement.
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The outbreak of the war in 1914 gave the regime its last opportunity to suppress the radical movement. Like the Social Democrats, the SRs split over the war issue. Leftists, known variously as Left SRs or SR-Internationalists, opposed the war, whereas Right SRs supported the government’s war effort. By 1916 the government’s ability to control the revolutionary movement waned. SR organizations opposed the war and propagandized revolution, often in coordination with Social Democrats. The February 1917 Revolution reflected protracted, sustained revolutionary activity, not least by SRs, who were also the revolution’s prime early beneficiaries. After tsarism’s fall, the SRs strove to reunite the party’s left, right, and center in order to dominate the new revolution. Moderate SRs and Mensheviks, in alliance with the liberals, soon led the Provisional Government, which the SR Alexander Kerensky headed after July. Still, the dedication of the moderate socialist-liberal coalition to pursuing the war gave ammunition to the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who began to call for soviet, socialist power. Leftist SRs gradually moved away from the moderate leadership, which by then included Chernov and other former radicals. By the fall of 1917, the SR-Mensheviks’ cooperation with the liberals discredited those parties in the eyes of many workers and soldiers, who supported the Bolsheviks and other leftists. During the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks removed the Provisional Government from power in the name of the soviets. Deprived of the reins of government, the SRs’ residual support from the peasantry held them in good stead in the November 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, a success that proved untranslatable into political power. After the Soviet government dismissed the Constituent Assembly in early January 1918, many SR delegates, including Chernov, formed a government in Samara that sought legitimacy in association with the Constitutional Assembly. This government, like other SR-oriented governments in Arkhangelsk and Siberia, failed to stand up to Red and White military forces, in part owing to the
