[79] January 1919 meetings of the Tula Proletkult, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1537, ll.1, 6.
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the local Adult Education Division simultaneously, a suggestion that was categorically rejected by the national organization.[80]
In other cases Narkompros workers were guilty of violating Proletkult autonomy. In Izhevsk the Proletkult was started by the head of the local Adult Education Division, who ran it as the artistic subsection of her own department. She formed a choir and a small theater group, both of which were open to the population at large. Participants included workers, teachers, and white-collar employees.[81] Dissatisfied with this arrangement, several local workers sent a representative to Moscow to gather information about how the organization should be structured. When the representative returned, armed with issues of Proletarian Culture , the dissatisfied workers decided to establish the Proletkult on an independent footing. They held a local conference and elected the metalworker and party member Andrei Kozochkin, one of the critics of the first organization, as their president.[82]
When local Proletkults started work before Narkompros divisions were formed, they were tempted to take charge of comprehensive educational programs far exceeding the limitations set by the central leaders. In Vladikavkaz, a major battle zone of the Civil War, a Proletkult opened in 1918 before Soviet power was firmly established in the area. The new organization was composed of representatives from the local soviet, Socialist Revolutionary and Communist parties, the teachers' union, the theater workers' union, and the central bureau of labor unions. It operated an art school and a workers' club, but the most lively sections were those for agitation and preschool education. The Proletkult sent organizers out into the surrounding mountains to gather support for Soviet power. It opened literacy classes for the local population and
[80] Discussed at the July 4, 1919, meeting of the Proletkult central committee, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 3, 1.49 ob.
[81] "Doklad o deiatel'nosti Izhevskogo Proletkul'ta s 15-ogo avgusta 1919 g. do 1920 g.," TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1221, l. 1.
[82] Ibid.
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sponsored very successful courses for children.[83] In this instance the Proletkult functioned as the local pro-Soviet educational institution.
In distant Vladivostok the Proletkult also served a very broad educational function. It was founded in 1920 by the proletarian writer Aleksandr Alekseevich Bogdanov (no relation to the central leader), who had gone to Siberia as a Proletkult organizer.[84] Bogdanov was driven further east by Kolchak's forces and ended up in Vladivostok in early 1920. With the help of unions, the Communist Party, and the leftist intelligentsia, he quickly organized a Proletkult. The zemstvo government in power gave its qualified support, and the new organization assumed a similar role to the one the Petrograd Proletkult had claimed in 1917, serving as an educational and cultural base for the city's working-class population. It sponsored lecture series, classes, festivals, and artistic workshops. Local teachers gave their services, as did two well-known futurist poets residing in the city, David Burliuk and Nikolai Chuzhak. Because Vladivostok was entirely cut off from Moscow by the war, this circle existed without the aid or even the knowledge of the central organization.[85]
The pyramidlike structure envisioned by central planners—where factory Proletkults banded together to form citywide groups, and these combined into provincial Proletkults—never materialized. Many factory organizations operated independently, without any ties to city or provincial bodies; city-level Proletkults were formed in areas with no factories; and there were even some provincial organizations with no infrastructure at all. This chaotic situation enormously complicated the center's efforts to transmit funding
[83] Proletkul't (Vladikavkaz), no. 1 (1919), esp. pp. 10–17.
[84] See his personnel file in TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 715, ll.19–23.
[85] V. G. Puzyrev, " 'Proletkul't' na Dal'nem Vostoke," in Iz istorii russkoi i zarubezhnoi literatury , ed. V. N. Kasatkina, T. T. Napolona, and P. A. Shchekotov (Saratov, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 90–93, 115; on the zemstvo government's aid see Canfield F. Smith, Vladivostok under Red and White Rule (Seattle, 1975), p. 20.
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and information and of course to establish control over the rapidly growing enterprise. Indeed, much of the central committee's time was spent trying to discover just what was going on in the provinces. Although the Proletkult's expansion was an impressive accomplishment, it was not clear just what was being created—a loose cultural alliance or a self-conscious and purposeful force in the new state.
In the first years of the Soviet regime Proletkult advocates struggled to define a coherent identity and a secure national structure. Most of their problems were not unique. All early Soviet institutions confronted the confusion of parallelism, learning to defend their constituencies from rival groups. Similarly, all new central bureaucracies found it hard to shape a smoothly working national network, and the dislocations of revolution and war greatly complicated the task. We can add to this list the familiar complaints of poor staffing, funding, and communication, grievances that fill the protocols of all institutions from village soviets to national commissariats.
In some respects the Proletkult was in a very fortunate position. Because of Lunacharskii's intervention, its independence, however limited, was protected by its closest competitor, Narkompros. Thus national leaders could quickly lay claims to a distinct place within the confusing array of cultural institutions. The deals they struck with Narkompros were intelligent ones. The Proletkult would not be just another cultural organization; instead it would be a creative "laboratory," with all the exclusivity that this implied. It would cater to a specialized proletarian audience involved in cultural creation and leave standard educational duties to groups that served the general population. And yet the potential for confusion, misunderstanding, and resentment in these arrangements was enormous. Although the Proletkult was formally autonomous, at the local level it depended on the good-
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will and support of potential rivals to secure a stable base. Many of the conflicts supposedly resolved at the national level were played out again and again in the provinces.
The Proletkult also faced peculiar difficulties raised by its ambitious cultural agenda. Demands for autonomy and independent action (samostoiatel'nost ' and samodeiatel'nost ') evoked a sympathetic local response. But such beliefs necessarily fed centrifugal forces, taking power away from national organs. These principles not only legitimated the national Proletkult's challenges to the state's cultural bureaucracy; they also encouraged participants to shape their own institutions to serve local needs.
New Proletkults were formed for many reasons—to continue educational projects conceived long before the revolution or to agitate for a Soviet victory in the Civil War. In the process participants devised an impressive array of cultural programs, from traveling theatrical studios to literacy classes, and they also opened their doors to a very broad audience. Proletkult theorists' commitment to creative independence unwittingly sanctioned this diversity and undercut all efforts to create a cohesive national movement.
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