could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that people lived. Lenin was deeply influenced by the ideas of the physiologist Ivan Sechenov, who maintained that the brain was an electromechanical device responding to external
stimuli. Sechenov’s materialism was the starting point for I. P. Pavlov’s research on the conditioned reflexes of the brain (dogs’ brains in particular), which was heavily supported by the Soviet government despite Pavlov’s well-known anti-Soviet views. This was where science and socialism met. Lenin spoke of Pavlov’s work as ‘hugely significant for our revolution’.28 Trotsky waxed lyrical on the ‘real scientific possibility’ of reconstructing man:
What is man? He is by no means a finished or harmonious being. No, he is still a highly awkward creature. Man, as an animal, has not evolved by plan but spontaneously, and has accumulated many contradictions. The question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and spiritual construction of man, is a colossal problem which can only be understood on the basis of socialism. We can construct a railway across the Sahara, we can build the Eiffel Tower and talk directly with New York, but surely we cannot improve on man. Yes we can! To produce a new, ‘improved version’ of man - that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology. Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: ‘At last, my dear
The artist also had a central role to play in the construction of Soviet man. It was Stalin who first used the famous phrase, in 1932, about the artist as the ‘engineer of the human soul’. But the concept of the artist as engineer was central to the whole of the Soviet avant-garde (not just those artists who toed the Party line), and it applied to many of the left-wing and experimental groups which dedicated their art to the building of a New World after 1917: the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, or the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema all broadly shared the communist ideal. All these artists were involved in their own revolutions against ‘bourgeois’ art, and they were convinced that they could train the human mind to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms. They viewed the brain as a complex piece of machinery which they could recondition through reflexes provoked by their mechanistic art (cinematic montage, biomechanics
in the theatre, industrial art, etc.). Since they believed that consciousness was shaped by the environment, they focused on forms of art, like architecture and documentary film, photomontage and poster art, designs for clothes and fabrics, household objects and furniture, which had a direct impact on people’s daily lives.
The Constructivists were in the forefront of this movement to bring art into union with life. In their founding manifestos, written during 1921, they detached themselves from the history of art, rejecting easel painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the new society; as ‘constructors’ and ‘technicians’, they declared their commitment, by contrast, to the design and production of practical objects which they believed could transform social life.30 To this end, Varvara Stepanova and Vladimir Tatlin designed workers’ clothes and uniforms. Stepanova’s designs, which were strongly geometric and impersonal, broke down the divisions between male and female clothes. Tatlin’s designs subordinated the artistic element to functionality. A man’s spring coat, for example, was designed to be light yet retain heat, but it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design.31 Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis used photomontage to smuggle agitation into commercial advertisements and even packaging. El Lissitzky (a late convert to the production art of the Constructivists) designed simple, lightweight furniture capable of being mass produced for standard use. It was versatile and movable, as necessitated by the ever-changing circumstances of the communal house. His folding bed was a good example of the Constructivist philosophy. It was highly practical, a real space-saver in the cramped Soviet apartments, and at the same time, insofar as it enabled the single person to change his sleeping place and sleeping partner, it was designed to be instrumental in the communistic movement to break down the conjugal relations of the bourgeois family.32
The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. ‘A new science, art, literature, and morality’, wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918, ‘is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs.’33 The roots of the movement went back to the 1900s when the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky)
had set up schools in Italy for workers smuggled out of Russia. The object was to educate a tier of ‘conscious proletarian socialists’, a sort of working-class intelligentsia, who would then spread their knowledge to other workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. In the Vperedists’ view the organic development of a working-class culture was an essential prerequisite for the success of a socialist and democratic revolution, because knowledge was the key to power and, until the masses controlled it, they would be dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin, who was dismissive of the workers’ potential as an independent cultural force, but after 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the civil war, cultural policy was left largely in their hands. Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the Proletkult movement. At its peak, in 1920, Proletkult claimed over 400,000 members in its factory clubs and theatres, artists’ workshops and creative writing groups, brass bands and choirs, organized into some 300 branches spread across the Soviet territory. There was even a Proletarian University in Moscow and a
In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, Destroy the museum, and trample over Art.35
Yet there was also the Utopian faith that a new culture would be built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was entirely purged of historical and national elements. This ‘Soviet culture’ would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian. There would be a proletarian philosophy, proletarian science and proletarian arts. Under the influence of such ideas, experimental forms of art appeared. There were films without professional actors (using ‘types’ selected from the streets), orchestras without conductors and ‘concerts in the factory’, with sirens, whistles, hooters, spoons and washboards as the instruments. Shostakovich (perhaps with tongue in cheek) introduced the sound of factory whistles in the climax of his Second Symphony (‘To October’) in 1927.
But was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? How could one have a ‘proletarian culture’, or a ‘proletarian intelligentsia’, unless the proletariat was first educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? And if they were so educated, would they, or their culture, still be proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not expect to build their new culture entirely from scratch and that, however Utopian their plans, much of their work would consist of educating workers in the old culture. After 1921, once the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was assured, official policy encouraged something of a rapprochement with the ‘petty-bourgeois’ (that is, peasant and small-trading) sector and what remained of the intelligentsia, through the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters, had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. He once confessed to Klara Zetkin, the German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics were firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution’s task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. As he put it to Zetkin, ‘We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it
as a starting point, even if it is “old”. Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is “old”? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is “new”?’36
But pressure
