The Magical Chorus

What is socialist realism? Ask five specialists and you will get five different answers. Should it interest us in the least? I believe so: socialist realism reigned in Soviet culture from the early 1930s for an entire half century, and after World War II it was declared to be the dominant force in culture for all countries of the Soviet bloc, that is, on the territory of over a dozen countries in Europe and Asia with a total population of almost a billion people.

For Russia, the significance of socialist realism cannot be overestimated. It is an inalienable and important part of its cultural heritage. Russian culture of the twentieth century was created in large part before our eyes, yet its history contains many mysterious “black holes,” as if it were a long-vanished civilization. The doctrine of socialist realism is one of those mysteries.

Soviet people of a certain age still remember the time when the words “socialist realism” were used as frequently as “Soviet rule” or “Communist Party,” that is, constantly. But unlike the other two terms, which stood for something concrete and had more or less clearly defined features, the true meaning of socialist realism, despite the thousands of articles and books attempting to explain it, remained quite elusive.

This vagueness was built into the original definition of socialist realism from 1934, of which Stalin was a coauthor, as “the basic method of Soviet literature and art,” which “demands of the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.”¹

Like Lenin before him, Stalin preferred slogans that were simple and clear and easily understood by the masses. According to Stalin’s confidant Ivan Gronsky, the ruler chose the label “socialist realism” because of “its brevity (just two words), second, perspicuity, and third, its connection with tradition.”² (Stalin was referring to the label’s link with the great literature of “critical realism,” that is, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Chekhov.)

The sought-after clarity was illusory, however. An animated discussion of the meaning of socialist realism continues to this day. Is it a method or only a style, or both? Can only works with a strongly expressed Communist ideology be considered socialist realist? Mayakovsky’s narrative poems Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Good! come to mind, but their style is rather more expressionist than realist. But if we accept that these works are examples of socialist realism, in accordance with Soviet doctrine, then why not use the same criteria for the poems of Pablo Neruda and Paul Eluard? (This was done in 1972 in the Moscow Short Literary Encyclopedia, which also made Romain Rolland and Bertolt Brecht socialist realist writers, an absurd proposition.)

But if you consider German and Chilean Expressionists and a French Surrealist as socialist realists, then why deny the appellation to Boris Pasternak’s revolutionary narrative poems Nineteen Hundred Five and Lieutenant Schmidt? Contemporary Russian literary criticism tends to leave Pasternak and Andrei Platonov, who also wrote quasi-Communist works, outside the limits of socialist realism: they, you see, are “good” writers, and today only “bad” ones are considered socialist realists. (In the Soviet Union, in their time Pasternak and Platonov were also not regarded as socialist realists, but precisely because they were viewed as “bad” writers.)

One way to deal with this confusion would be an attempt to place the problem in a historical context. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of the man who was personally responsible for the appearance and later wide usage of the term “socialist realism,” Joseph Stalin. We can understand better what he himself considered real socialist art and literature, worthy of state support, if we open Pravda for March 16, 1941. This issue of the country’s main newspaper was full of materials on the first winners of the Stalin Prize, instituted in 1939, when he was celebrating his sixtieth birthday.

Stalin’s idea was to recognize the most outstanding works of Soviet art and literature. A special multilevel bureaucratic system was set up for the selection process, which was topped by the Stalin Prize Committee chaired by the artistic lion Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had founded the Moscow Art Theater with Stanislavsky. But the last word always belonged to Stalin, who personally wrote in or crossed out names and who was impressively enthusiastic and informed. At the beginning, the prize was awarded in the first and second degrees (respectively 100,000 and 50,000 rubles), but a third degree (25,000 rubles) was added in 1948.

Stalin was particularly attentive and demanding when it came to the very first winners of the prize named for him. Subsequent awards were given for works that appeared the previous year, but the first ones were given, as the Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of March 15, 1941, stated, “for outstanding works in art and literature for the period of the last 6–7 years,” that is, since 1935.

The editorial of the “laureate” issue of Pravda formulated the current cultural priorities: “Soviet art must inspire the masses in their struggle for a full and final victory of socialism, it must help them in this struggle. In the great competition of two systems—the system of capitalism and the system of socialism—Soviet art must also serve as a weapon in this struggle, glorifying socialism. The era of the struggle for Communism must become the era of Socialist Renaissance in art, for only socialism creates the conditions for a complete flourishing of all national talents.”³

The characteristically catechistic style of this lecture, with its tautology and fixation on the words “socialism” and “struggle,” suggests that the author is Stalin. I’ve argued (in my book Shostakovich and Stalin) that the ruler was not only an attentive reader of Pravda but one of its main authors, and often the texts that he wrote or dictated appeared without his signature. No one but Stalin could have dared propose the unexpected parallel with the Italian Renaissance, for that would inevitably lead to a rather ambivalent comparison of him as a patron of the arts with the violent Medici family and the willful Roman popes of that period.

Without a doubt it was Stalin’s decision to publish the photos of the six winners on page one. The “magnificent six” appeared in an order that surely was meaningful for Stalin: Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Gerasimov, Vera Mukhina, Valeria Barsova, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Sholokhov. Four men, two women (Stalin was apparently not a misogynist), some of whom are geniuses known to the entire world, and others who today are known even in Russia only to specialists. But Stalin saw them as the most representative examples of his cultural renaissance.

Valeria Barsova (1892–1967), a lyric coloratura soprano and soloist of the Bolshoi Theater, is rarely remembered today, but in the 1930s and 1940s she was one of the most popular and beloved Soviet singers. She was called the “Soviet nightingale” and shone in the Verdi roles of Gilda and Violetta, but Stalin liked her best in her nuanced performance (she consulted with Stanislavsky) as Antonida, daughter of the Russian peasant patriot Ivan Susanin in Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, the first mature Russian opera. Stalin loved Glinka’s work, which had been banned after the revolution for its monarchism; he returned it to the repertoire in 1939, with a new title, Ivan Susanin, purged of pro-tsarist sentiments (the revisions were quite skillful).

As always with Stalin’s cultural gestures, politics mattered. A fan of Russian classical opera (he would interrupt a meeting of the Politburo to get to the Bolshoi in time for his favorite aria in Susanin), Stalin also used Glinka’s majestic work to legitimize, on the eve of the war with Hitler, the nationalistic emotions that had been downplayed by the internationalist Lenin.

It’s quite possible that Stalin chose Barsova not only for her talent and high professionalism (on the plump side, she tortured herself with exercises to stay trim enough even after fifty to leap around the stage as Rosina in The Barber of Seville; on vacation, she swam far out into the sea and sang voice exercises out there), but also for her civic activities—Barsova was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and