[24] Smirnov, "K istorii Proletkul'ta," pp. 120, 124.
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ian Culture, which had been created by Lunacharskii in 1917.[25] Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, chair of the organizing bureau for the national Proletkult, was also on hand to defend the organization.[26] They both contended that the government had no right to tell them what to do. Because the Proletkult and Narkompros had different purposes, they should be allowed to maintain separate institutional identities. If no one demanded that unions become part of the Commissariat of Labor, or that the Communist Party itself cease to exist because there was now a Soviet government, Lebedev-Polianskii argued, then no one should question the separate identity of the Proletkult from that of Narkompros.[27] Their forceful arguments, combined with disagreements among Narkompros representatives, won the advocates of autonomy an initial victory.
Yet despite their abrasive tone, Kalinin and Lebedev-Polianskii took government fears of parallelism seriously. Working together with other Proletkultists associated with the new journal Proletarian Culture , they sought to define a separate sphere of cultural activity that would not duplicate Narkompros work. Already in the first issue of the journal in March 1918, Lebedev-Polianskii wrote that purely educational programs could be left to other groups. The proletariat obviously had to assimilate the accomplishments of past culture, but that was not the Proletkult's task. Its role was to awaken independent creative activity (samodeiatel'nost' ) within the working class.[28]
Proletarian Cuhure 's editorial board, which included Alek-
[25] "Dekret ob uchrezhdenii gosudarstvennoi komissii po prosveshcheniiu," November 22, 1917, Dekrety sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow, 1957), vol. 1, pp. 60–62.
[26] On the organizational bureau see Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 2 (1918), p. 25.
[27] Smirnov, "K istorii Proletkul'ta," p. 121; see also Lebedev-Polianskii's speech at the first national conference, "Revoliutsiia i kul'turnye zadachi proletariata," Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , pp. 27–29.