Defining the Proletkult's Constituency
In a rudimentary sense the Proletkult's intended membership was already apparent in its name—it was to be a cultural organization for the proletariat. But the issue was not resolved with the Proletkult's title because "proletariat" was a term open to many interpretations. Did it mean everyone who labored for a living without owning the means of production? Did it include artisanal workers who themselves might hire and supervise other employees? Did it encompass the entire breadth of Russia's half-urbanized, half-ruralized labor force? These definitional problems were particularly complex for the Russian proletariat because the lines between the working class and the peasantry had always been very hard to draw.[1] Processes set in motion by the revolution and Civil War
[1] There is a vast literature on the problems of defining the Russian proletariat, particularly in relationship to the peasantry. See Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion (Berkeley, 1983); Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford, 1982); L. M. Ivanov, ed., Istoriia rabochego klassa Rossii, 1861–1900 gg . (Moscow, 1972); Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917," in The Structure of Russian History , ed. Michael Cherniavsky (New York, 1970); Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979); and Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, 1971).
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made it even more difficult to set clear limits.[2] This was a time of rapid social change, as workers left factories for the countryside, the army, or the state bureaucracy, and new groups took up industrial jobs.
Before the revolution Russian Marxists, and Bolsheviks in particular, addressed the complexities of the Russian working class by stressing hierarchies within it. Although the Bolsheviks realized that it was very hard to separate the industrial proletariat from the peasantry, for them the workers who really mattered, those who were most inclined to develop a revolutionary consciousness, were the ones who had completely severed their rural ties.[3] The Bolsheviks not only defined the proletariat narrowly, reducing it to the industrial working class alone, but also insisted that only an elite within this group would develop a keen political awareness. This proletarian vanguard would be led by the political vanguard of the Bolshevik Party.
Proletkult national leaders, who were themselves Bolsheviks (or in Bogdanov's case a former Bolshevik), shared many of these assumptions.[4] If anything, the workers they cared about formed an even smaller vanguard. They searched for a political and cultural elite within the industrial proletariat. Those positive values that were to form the foundation for the culture of the future were nurtured by the industrial labor process. The factory taught workers the need for cooperation, group action, and collective solutions to shared problems. Working-class neighborhoods and families could also help to mold a proletarian worldview, but those who had not studied long and hard at the school of factory labor could not hope to
[2] See Leopold H. Haimson, "The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia," Slavic Review , vol. 47, no. 1 (1988), pp. 1–28.
[3] These ideas are generally accepted in Soviet scholarship, but they have been disputed by many Western researchers. See Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability," for the classic rebuttal of these views.
[4] See Chapter 4 for an analysis of the national leadership.
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develop the values necessary to shape a proletarian culture.[5]
After October the Bolshevik Party began to stress the need for cross-class alliances, particularly with poor peasants and those intellectuals who were willing to cooperate with the new regime. Although Proletkult leaders understood the reasons for these conciliatory programs, most still insisted on class purity within their organization. Proletarian culture could not be created by representatives from the peasantry, the army, the Cossacks, or the narrow-minded urban poor proclaimed the editorial staff of Proletarian Culture in 1918.[6]
For Proletkult leaders the most serious threat to proletarian consciousness lay within the laboring masses themselves because workers could easily be led astray by petty-bourgeois influences. Lebedev-Polianskii, the Proletkult's first president, was particularly sensitive to these dangers. He felt the organization had to be free of all unskilled and unemployed workers, as well as artisanal laborers and the urban poor. Proletarians who had not broken their ties to the countryside were also questionable allies because they might be too sympathetic to the peasantry.[7] Those who had no factory experience at all had no business in the Proletkult. LebedevPolianskii lumped professionals, shop workers, and salaried employees together with the petty bourgeoisie and categorically denied them all the right to participate in the movement.[8]
The peasantry posed a particular danger to proletarian consciousness. In the opinion of Aleksandr Bogdanov, the
[5] See A. A. Bogdanov, "O tendentsiakh proletarskoi kul'tury: Otvet A. Gastevu," Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 9/10 (1919), pp. 46–52, esp. p. 46.