music. The avant-garde, which had emerged around 1908, was impelled by the belief that the revolutionization of artistic practice was part of a larger project of transforming the role of art within society, art having the power to transform life*. Though divided over aesthetic matters, the avant-garde was loosely leftist in politics and iconoclastic in spirit, though by no means all endorsed the Futurist call to 'Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy overboard from the ship of modernity.* Many of its representatives, such as Ivlalevich, A. M. Rodchenko, Tatlin, and Kandinsky in the visual arts, gained positions of influence within new soviet institutions.
19. Altman's design for Palace Square
Theatre was supreme among the arts during the civil war. However, Meyerhold's efforts to unleash a 'Theatrical October* were blocked by the Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, who insisted on the importance of preserving the classical repertoire. Lunacharsky defended the principle of artistic pluralism but supported the avant-ga rd e, wh ereas Len in was fa г less tolera nt, con demnin g it a s 'absurd an d perverted*. With the onset of NEP, architecture, film and the novel came into their own. Constructivism was the one movement in the visual arts born directly out of October 1917. In seeking to fuse the artistic and technological aspects of production, it aspired to create an environment in which the 'new soviet person' could flourish. Constructivist interest in the properties of materials and in industrial design had a huge impact on modern architecture, on photography, print graphics, fabrics, furniture, and film. In cinema leading directors such as S. Eisenstein, D. Vertov, V. Pudovkin, and A. Dovzhenko, some of whom had cut their teeth making propaganda 'shorts' during the civil war, produced dassics of world cinema. Most experimented with montage - the juxtaposition of unexpected images - as a way of
expanding the visual awareness of the audience. As in all other artistic fields, there was vigorous debate - over the virtues of documentary as opposed to feature film, of propaganda as opposed to entertainment. However, even Eisenstein's politically impeccable films had a lukewarm reception from officialdom, not to speak of the public, because of their experimental editing, shooting, and mise-en-scene. The revival of commercial mass culture that came about with NEP, moreover, left no doubt that the public preferred escapist fiction, light music, comedy, and variety acts to avant-garde art. Official concern that art should become more accessible was one reason why in the second half of the 1920s the regime came to look with increasing favour on those artists who had continued to work within broadly realist and figurative genres.
Literature experienced an efflorescence in the 1920s, partly because of the revival of private publishing houses. Some of the first responses to revolution, from poets such as A. A. Blok, S. A. Esenin and A. Belyi, had had an apocalyptic character, identifying with its 'spiritual maximalism'. В. Pi Г nia k's Л/afced Year (19 22), considered by many to be the first 'soviet' novel, depicted the revolution as a vengeful, Asiatic force stripping off the civilized veneer of 'mechanical Europe'. K. Fedin, M. Zoshchenko, and V. Ivanov, by contrast, hailed the revolution as a liberation of the fantastic imagination. They came under attack for being 'ideologically empty' from the Smithy group, which lauded collectivism, labour, and the cult of the machine. As the memory of the civil war faded, writing began to become less partisan and more reflective of the uncertainties of NEP. Noteworthy was the tragicomic satire of M. Zoshchenko, whose subject-matter was the absurdity of daily life. A humanistic, apolitical aesthetic also gained ground in the poetry of Mandelstam and Akhmatova, who aspired to cultivate lyricism and a language of precision, clarity, and restraint. It was in reaction to such pluralism that in 1928 the Association of Proletarian Writers demanded that literature obey a 'social command'. This aesthetic, which saw fiction as having little value except as sociological document, chimed with the tastes of newly literate readers who craved positive, unambiguous characters, a
20. Constructivist poster design for Dziga Vertov's film,
secure narrative, and moral certainties. Yet if the 1920s saw genuine pluralism in literature, it also saw the steady rise of censorship. In 1922 the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press was
set up, charged with censoring domestic and imported printed works, manuscripts, and photos. By July 1924,216 foreign films had been banned because of the threat to the ideological education of workers and peasants in our country*. This was stricter censorship than had pertained after 1905.
During the 1920s the position of the intelligentsia remained ambivalent. Having reduced it to political impotence, the regime encouraged it to put its expertise to the service of socialism since it needed teachers, scientists, planners, managers, doctors, and engineers. From the mid-1920s, salaries began to rise and material privileges to accrue. The regime, however, continued to distrust the intelligentsia as a competing
elite with pretensions to moral leadership, one likely to impede its efforts to establish hegemony. Whilst a degree of pluralism was tolerated in education, the arts, and the sciences, the trend was clearly towards increased official control. In 1922 universities lost their autonomy - in spite of a strike by academics in Moscow and elsewhere -and the State Academic Council began rather tentatively to weed out 'theologians, mystics, and representatives of extreme idealism'. Uniquely, the Academy of Sciences preserved its autonomy until 1929, although a Red Academy was created to compete with it. Associations as seemingly innocuous as the Vegetarian Society were regularly refused authorization by OCPU 'for political considerations'. Nevertheless the extraordinary fact is that in spite of all its travails, the intelligentsia maintained a distinct social identity through its informal networks, personalties and institutional loyalties.
The 1920s was thus an era of unbounded artistic and intellectual diversity yet one that saw the regime steadily intensify its control of cultural life through censorship, control of funding, and brusque intervention. Since it believed in the power of art to transform human consciousness, it was not going to allow its direction to be determined by the spontaneous whims of the individual artist or by the imperatives of the marketplace. Moreover, the gap between the avant-garde and popular taste troubled a leadership that recognized the tremendous propaganda potential of such new media as film. Stalin, an aficionado of the cinema, described it as 'the most important means of mass agitation'. Finally, the tendency of the party to take a less tolerant attitude to the avant- garde was an indirect reflection of the party's own increasing concern with stability and its repudiation of anything that smacked of permanent revolution. That said, the exercise of party control was never secure or efficient in this period and debate about what constituted an appropriate art for a socialist society remained relatively free. A qualitative difference exists between the diversity of the 1920s - however compromised - and the stifling conformism of the 1930s.
By highlighting the disparity between ideal and reality, NEP may be seen as reining in the utopianism of the civil war, but one should not conclude that utopianism died. The hopes placed in electrification, Taylorism, and cultural revolution were Utopian and evinced the ongoing dynamism of the regime. However, Russian realities were beginning to make themselves felt. Paradoxically, as the regime stabilized so the deeper structuring forces of Russian development reasserted themselves: forces of geography (huge distances, scattered populations,
