Autonomy and Identity: Proletkult, Narkompros, and the Communist Party
Although the workers and intellectuals who met in Petrograd in October 1917 to lay the foundations for the Proletkult were preparing for revolution, they did not envision the consequences the impending upheaval would have on the structure they were creating. The Petrograd Proletkult had been shaped in opposition to the Kerensky regime's perceived cultural inadequacies. Now, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the Proletkult refused to give up its autonomy, much to the surprise of many advocates of the Soviet state. Its partisans insisted that an independent Proletkult would enhance the proletariat's position in the new political order.
Lunacharskii had already provided a justification for this
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position when he insisted that there were four organizational forms of the workers' movement—political parties, trade unions, cooperatives, and cultural circles—and that the last was no less important than the others. In the same spirit Proletkultists—combining unions and cooperatives under the rubric of "economic organizations"—began to write about the three paths to workers' power through economics, politics, and culture.[8] In institutional terms this meant that unions, the Communist Party, and the Proletkult should pursue their own agendas, free from state intervention. Implicitly, it also denied the party any special power over Proletkult or union affairs.
The Proletkult's claims to autonomy (samostoiatel'nost' ) and its slogan of "three paths to workers' power" quickly became controversial. When the Proletkult lost favor with the Communist Party at the end of the Civil War, critics chose to interpret its initial demand for independence as an anti-Soviet, anticommunist posture. This negative or oppositional explanation has colored subsequent scholarship to such an extent that it is difficult to recapture what autonomy meant to Proletkult members. Because the organization's best known leader, Aleksandr Bogdanov, never rejoined the party after his ouster before the revolution, many commentators have assumed that the Proletkult's claim to independence was an implicit critique of the Communist Party's role.[9]
However, if we examine the Proletkult's demands for autonomy more closely, it becomes apparent that they were directed much more against the state than against the party. Proletkult theorists did not equate state and party power. For
[8] In "Ot redaktsii," Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 1 (1918), pp. 1–3, Bogdanov discusses the importance of cultural, political, union, and cooperative organizational forms and then combines the latter two. On the authorship of this unsigned article see A. A. Bogdanov, O proletarskoi kul'ture, 1904–1924 (Moscow, 1924), p. 100.
[9] This is a common theme in Soviet scholarship. See, for example, V. V. Gorbunov, V. I. Lenin i Proletkul't (Moscow, 1974), esp. pp. 5–7. For a Western assessment that makes a similar point see Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 140–42.
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them the Communist Party, like their own organization and trade unions, was an expression of proletarian class interests. The government, by contrast, had to take the needs of non-proletarian classes into account, and this necessity made it a suspect partner for workers' groups. In the minds of Proletkult theorists only pure working-class institutions could usher in the dictatorship of the proletariat. "In questions of culture we are immediate socialists ," proclaimed the editorial board of the central Proletkult journal Proletarian Culture (Proletarskaia kul'tura ). "We demand that the proletariat start right now, immediately, to create its own socialist forms of thought, feeling, and daily life , independent of alliances or combinations of political forces. And in this creation, political allies—the rural and urban poor—cannot and must not control [the proletariat's] work."[10]
Proletkultists were not the only ones to draw a sharp distinction between state and party authority as the new system took shape. The function of the Communist Party within the state was not predetermined in 1917.[11] As party members gained dominant positions in the central government, some revolutionaries, including Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, suggested that the party be disbanded altogether because it duplicated the structure of the state.[12] These ideas also found favor at the local level, where many activists initially assumed that the soviets would take precedence over the party bureaucracy.[13]
[10] "Ot redaktsii," Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 3 (1918), p. 36. Emphasis in the original.
[11] See Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (New York, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 214–32; and T. H. Rigby, Lenin's Government: Sovnarkom, 1917–1922 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), esp. pp. 160–89.