religion . . . rushed every evening to assault the 125 seats of the minute and improvised Habima amphitheater. . . . Subjugated, gasping for breath in this suburb-cemetery of the vanities of a condemned nobility-men who had just lived through the most modern, the most implacably mechanical of revolutions crowded around words that they did not understand. . . . The theater was returning to its origins and they were submitting to its religious spell. The mysticism, the ancient chaos, the animal divinity of the crowd-all that makes up the secret and powerful depth of revolutions was expressed by the Dybbuk and imposed on Moscow.3
It may seem surprising that a Hebrew troupe was able to provide such a vital leaven for Russian culture, particularly at a time when the native stage was itself in full flower. But
In certain liturgical hymns each verse is preceded with a word in Hebrew. The faithful do not understand it; but by modulating it strangely and mysteriously, the clear Christian hymn is impregnated, the unknown word strikes against the faithful and confers an unsuspected profundity. Thus did the Hebraic soul of the Habima act upon the Russian soul.4
At the same time, the futurists provided a more secular form of cultural stimulus, continuing to clamor for public attention on the pages of Lef ('Left Front in Literature'), which began to appear in 1923 with the collaboration of Maiakovsky and Meierhold. Older traditions of satirizing contemporary life were revived by promising new writers, such as the Odessa team of Ilf and Petrov and Michael Zoshchenko. The latter, the son of a Russian actress and a Ukrainian painter, became probably the most widely read contemporary Soviet writer in the twenties, with more than a million copies of his works sold from 1922 to 1927.5 In the field of history, non-Marxist and pre-Revolutionary figures like Tarle and Platonov continued to work inside Russia, though some of their works (and many in the literary world) were published in Berlin. Serge Prokof'ev, one of the greatest Russian composers, returned to take up permanent residence in the USSR in 1927, and was followed within a year by Maxim Gorky, its most renowned prose writer.
Even religion seemed to be receiving a new lease on life in the USSR of the mid-twenties. In 1926 the newly chosen Patriarch of the Russian Church was released from prison. In the following year, both he and the
patriarchal church were grudgingly recognized by the regime and the puppet 'Living Church' allowed to die. The various sects-and particularly the locally organized and administered communities of the newly consolidated Protestant community (the 'Evangelical Christians-Baptists')-grew rapidly in strength. Lenin's secretary, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, was an historian of Russian sectarianism who argued with some success that the indus-triousness, productivity, and communal methods of the sects might have something to contribute to the construction of a socialist society.'
The relatively permissive cultural atmosphere of the twenties was, in part, the result of Bolshevik preoccupation with political consolidation and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of seven years of international and internal war. In part also it was the result of the relatively optimistic and humanistic reading of Marx's theories of culture that were advanced by the reigning ideologists of the early Soviet period: Deborin in philosophy and Voronsky in literature.7 These men insisted that a new culture must follow rather than precede a new proletarian society. Following Marx and his most brilliant interpreter among the Bolsheviks, Nicholas Bukharin, they considered literature and art part of the superstructure rather than the base of human culture. Art could, thus, be transformed only in the wake of profound social and economic change. In the meantime, the arts had a duty to absorb the best from past culture and provide an independent reflection of reality in a complex era of transition. The practical consequences of this position were to discredit the earlier hopes for 'immediate socialism.' One could no longer speak seriously of replacing the traditional university with a new 'fraternity ef teachers, students and janitors'; nor of replacing the family system with 'the new family of the working collective.'8 Gradually, however, it became apparent that this relaxation of control and return to old ways was only temporary. Whereas about two fifths of all publishing was outside of government hands at the time of Lenin's death early in 1924, only one tenth had survived three years later.9 The beginnings of tightening ideological control can be traced to the founding of the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, Bolshevik, in 1924,10 and to a series of party discussions on the role of literature in the new society held in 1924 and 1925. Although the party resolutions rejected the demand of the extremist 'on guard' faction for detailed party regulation of literature, they did assert the right of party control over 'literature as a whole' and call for a centralized 'All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers' (VAPP): the first in an apostolic succession of increasingly powerful organs for tight regulation. In the same 1925 a comparable group was formed on what was soon to be called 'the musical front,' 'The
Association of Young Professional Composers'; and a new shock army was constituted in the 'struggle for scientific atheism,' the notorious 'League of the Militant Godless.' The suicide of Esenin and the collapse of Maia- kovsky's LEF movement within a few months of each other in 1925 provided testimony to the growing gulf between the new regime and some of the very intellectuals who had initially supported the Revolution.
The destruction of a living Russian culture was made complete in 1930 with the suicide of Maiakovsky, the formal abolition of all private printing, and Stalin's sweeping demand at the Sixteenth Party Congress that the first five-year plan be expanded into a massive 'socialist offensive along the entire front.'11 Not a single delegate abstained, let alone dissented, as Stalin began to introduce his techniques of therapeutic purges and prescriptive uncertainty. The classical Leninist opposition to relying on 'spontaneity' istikhiinost') rather than strict party guidance in preparing a political revolution was expanded into a new Stalinist opposition to tolerating 'drift' (samotek) on the 'cultural front' while preparing a social and economic revolution.
Moderate planners who argued that there were unavoidable limitations on the productive possibilities of the Soviet economy were denounced as 'mechanists' and 'geneticists,' devoid of Revolutionary spirit and 'dialectical' understanding. The purge of Bukharin, the apostle of relative freedom in the agricultural sphere and of balanced development of heavy and light industry, was accompanied by the purge of advocates of relative freedom and balance in the cultural sphere. Thus, Voronsky in literary theory and Deborin in philosophy were denounced for 'Menshevizing idealism' and forced to recant publicly. Marxist philosophical ideas were not to be permitted to interfere with the development of the new authoritarian state; and Deborin and his followers were swept from the direction of Under the Banner of Marxism in 1930. The dominant idea in the twenties, that state law was a 'fetish' of the bourgeoisie and 'the juridical world view … the last refuge of the remnants and traditions of the old world,' was replaced by the new concept of 'socialist legality.'12 The dictatorship of the proletariat would not wither away in the foreseeable future, and the authority of the Soviet state and Soviet law would have to be strengthened, Stalin told the Party Congress in 1930. This contradiction of one of Lenin's fondest beliefs was pronounced 'a living, vital contradiction' which 'completely reflects Marxist dialectics.'13 Freud, whose doctrines of psychic determinism had been hailed in the twenties as 'the best antidote to the entire doctrine of free will,'14 was denounced at the first All-Union Congress of Human Behavior in 1930 for denying the possibility of 'a socially 'open'
man, who is easily collectivized, and quickly and profoundly transformed
in his behaviour.'15
A collective shock treatment paralleling that being given to the reluctant peasantry was being administered to the intellectual elite. Figures like Averbach in literary theory and Pokrovsky in history were used in this first 'proletarian' phase of Stalinist terror to discredit others before being rejected themselves. Stalin emerged from it all as the benign father, the voice of moderation and protector of the little man from the 'dizziness from success' of his less humane lieutenants.16 This 'proletarian episode' in Russian culture, which lasted roughly from the first party decree on literature in December, 1928, to the abolition of the distinctively proletarian organs of culture in April, 1932, was coterminous with the period of the first Five-Year Plan; part of the unprecedented effort to transform Russian society by forced-draft industrialization and agricultural collectivization. The cultural transformations of the
