A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

In the name of our tomorrow we shall burn Raphael Destroy the Museums, crush the flowers of Art.²⁰

This was by and large intellectual swagger, the vandalistic pose of second-rate writers whose readiness to shock far outstripped their own talents.

Stalin once described the writer as the 'engineer of human souls'. The artists of the avant-garde were supposed to become the great transformers of human nature during the first years of the Bolshevik regime. Many of them shared the socialist ideal of making the human spirit more collectivist. They rejected the individualistic preoccupations of nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' art, and believed that they could train the human mind to see the world in a different way through modernist forms of artistic expression. Montage, for example, with its collage effect of fragmented but connected images, was thought to have a subliminal didactic effect on the viewer. Eisenstein, who used the technique in his three great propaganda films of the 1920s, Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October, based his whole theory of film on it. A great deal of fuss was made of the 'psychic revolution' which was supposed to be brought about by the cinema, the modernist art form par excellence, which, like the psychology of modern man, was based on 'straight lines and sharp corners' and the 'power of the machine'.²¹

As the pioneers of this 'psychic revolution', the avant-garde artists pursued diverse experimental forms. There was no censorship of art at this time — the Bolsheviks had more pressing concerns — and it was an area of relative freedom. Hence there was the paradox of an artistic explosion in a police state. Much of this early Soviet art was of real and lasting value. The Constructi-vists, in particular artists such as Rodchenko, Malevich and Tatlin, have had a huge impact on the modernist style. This could not be said of Nazi art, or of what passed for art in Stalin's day, the grim monumental kitsch of Socialist Realism. And yet, almost inevitably, given the youthful exuberance with which the avant-garde embraced this spirit of experimentalism, many of their contributions may seem rather comical today.

In music, for example, there were orchestras without conductors (both in rehearsal and performance) who claimed to be pioneering the socialist way of life based on equality and human fulfilment through free collective work. There was a movement of 'concerts in the factory' using the sirens, turbines and hooters as instruments, or creating new sounds by electronic means, which some people seemed to think would lead to a new musical aesthetic closer to the psyche of the workers. Shostakovich, no doubt as always with tongue in cheek, joined in the fun by adding the sound of factory whistles to the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October'). Equally eccentric was the renaming of well-known operas and their refashioning with new librettos to make them 'socialist': so Tosca became The Battle for the Commune, with the action shifted to the Paris of 1871; Les Huguenots became The Decembrists and was set in Russia; while Glinka's Life for the Tsar was rewritten as The Hammer and the Sickle.

There was a similar attempt to bring theatre closer to the masses by taking it out of its usual 'bourgeois' setting and putting it on in the streets, the factories and the barracks. Theatre thus became a form of Agitprop. Its aim was to break down the barriers between actors and spectators, to dissolve the proscenium line dividing theatre from reality. All this was taken from the techniques of the German experimental theatre pioneered by Max Reinhardt, which were later perfected by Brecht. By encouraging the audience to voice its reactions to the drama, Meyerhold and other Soviet directors sought to engage its emotions in didactic allegories of the revolution. The new dramas highlighted the revolutionary struggle both on the national scale and on the scale of private human lives. The characters were crude cardboard symbols — greedy capitalists in bowler hats, devilish priests with Rasputin- type beards and honest simple workers. The main purpose of these plays was to stir up mass hatred against the 'enemies' of the revolution and thus to rally people behind the regime. One such drama, Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Eisenstein in 1924, aroused such emotions that in the final act, when the German workers were shown storming the stronghold of the Fascists, the audience itself tried to join in. Every murdered

Fascist was met with wild cheers. One spectator even drew his gun to shoot an actress playing the part of a Fascist cocotte; but his neighbours brought him to his senses.

The most spectacular example of revolutionary street theatre was The Storming of the Winter Palace, staged in 1920 to celebrate the third anniversary of the October insurrection. This mass spectacle ended the distinction — which in any case had always been confused — between theatre and revolution: the streets of Petrograd, where the revolutionary drama of 1917 had been enacted, were now turned into a theatre. The key scenes were re-enacted on three huge stages on Palace Square. The Winter Palace was part of the set with various windows lit up in turn to reveal different scenes inside. The Aurora played a star role, firing its heavy guns from the Neva to signal the start of the assault on the palace, just as it had done on that historic night. There was a cast of 10,000 actors, probably more than had taken part in the actual insurrection, who, like the chorus in the theatre of the Ancient Greeks, appeared to embody the monumental idea of the revolution as an act of the people. An estimated 100,000 spectators watched the action unfold from Palace Square. They laughed at the buffoonish figure of Kerensky and cheered wildly during the assault on the palace. This was the start of the myth of Great October — a myth which Eisenstein turned into pseudo-fact with his 'docudrama' film October (1927). Stills from this film are still reproduced in books, both in Russia and the West, as authentic photographs of the revolution.²²

Art too was taken on to the streets. The Constructivists talked of bringing art out of the museums and into everyday life. Many of them, such as Rodchenko and Malevich, concentrated their efforts on designing clothes, furniture, offices and factories with the stress on what they called the 'industrial style' — simple designs and primary colours, geometric shapes and straight lines, all of which they thought would both liberate the people and make them more rational. They said their aim was 'to reconstruct not only objects, but also the whole domestic way of life'. Several leading avant-garde painters and sculptors, such as Chagall and Tatlin, put their hands to 'agitation art' — decorating buildings and streetcars or designing posters for the numerous revolutionary celebrations and festivals, such as I May or Revolution Day, when the whole of the people was supposed to be united in an open exhibition of collective joy and emotion. The town was literally painted red (sometimes even the trees). Through statues and monuments they sought to turn the streets into a Museum of the Revolution, into a living icon of the power and the grandeur of the new regime which would impress even the illiterate. There was nothing new in such acts of self-consecration by the state: the tsarist regime had done just the same. Indeed it was nicely ironic that the obelisk outside the Kremlin erected by the Romanovs to celebrate their tercentenary in 1913 was retained on Lenin's orders.

Its tsarist inscription was replaced by the names of a 'socialist' ancestry stretching back to the sixteenth century. It included Thomas More, Campanella and Winstanley.²³

As far as one can tell, none of these avant-garde artistic experiments was ever really effective in transforming hearts and minds. Left-wing artists might have believed that they were creating a new aesthetic for the masses, but they were merely creating a modernist aesthetic for themselves, albeit one in which 'the masses' were objectified as a symbol of their own ideals. The artistic tastes of the workers and peasants were essentially conservative. Indeed it is hard to overestimate the conservatism of the peasants in artistic matters: when the Bolshoi Ballet toured the provinces during 1920 the peasants were said to have been 'profoundly shocked by the display of the bare arms and legs of the coryphees, and walked out of the performance in disgust'. The unlife-like images of modernist art were alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with art was based on the icon.* Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October insurrection, Chagall was asked by Communist officials: 'Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What's the connection with Marx and Engels?' Surveys of popular reading habits during the 1920s showed that workers and peasants continued to prefer the detective and romantic stories of the sort they had read before the revolution to the literature of the avant-garde. Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one 'concert in the