[11] "Plan organizatsii Proletkul'ta," Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 6 (1919), pp. 26–29.
[12] This term is from Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, Eng., 1983). See especially pp. 7–8.
[13] Pervaia Tverskaia gubernskaia konferentsiia kul'turno-prosvetitel'nykh organizatsii: Protokoly zasedanii (Tver, 1919), p. 56.
[14] From a speech by the organization's leader at a general meeting, October 27, 1920, Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva [henceforth cited as TsGALI] f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1240, l.18.
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what the proletariat was. Local groups that welcomed toilers defined the working class broadly, including all the laboring masses in its ranks. They did not share the strict Marxist understanding of the industrial proletariat as a class distinct from and more conscious than other laborers. In fact, many used the word "proletariat" as a synonym for "the people" (narod ), something particularly common in provincial Proletkult poetry.[15] According to this conception of the working class, laborers were united against their common enemies above them. Intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, and the supporters of the old regime might be the villains, but certainly not "petty-bourgeois influences" within the laboring classes themselves. Local groups simply ignored strictures against artisans, office workers, unskilled workers, and the urban poor. Some openly contradicted official statements about the peasantry.
Such divergent perceptions of class insured the Proletkult a large and diverse following. Lebedev-Polianskii was fond of comparing his organization to the Communist Party, but in fact it was a very poor analogy.[16] It implied that the Proletkult was much more cohesive and better organized than was in fact the case. Although the party had methods of supervising who its members were (even though these methods were often ineffective), the central Proletkult had very little authority over its affiliates. There were no centrally approved "Proletkult cards,"[17] no candidate membership periods, nor any secure methods to eliminate undesirable elements. The national
[15] See, for example, Il'ia Il'in, "Proch byloe," Molot , no. 1 (1920), p. 10.
[16] This comparison is also made by contemporary Western scholars. See Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 128–29.
[17] Some local organizations had cards that they administered themselves. See the records of the Lenin State Sugar Factory organization in Kursk province, July 7, 1920, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1280, l. 12.
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leadership had to depend on local groups to understand and implement its wishes.
In fact, the central Proletkult was not a very competent collector of data about its rapidly expanding network. It is even difficult to make definitive statements about the organization's size. In the fall of 1920 the center claimed between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand members, eighty thousand of those in elite artistic studios.[18] These figures, the only aggregate totals available, are very problematic. On the one hand, they are necessarily incomplete because there were many registered organizations that did not provide information about their participants.[19] On the other hand, the central leadership never gave any sources for these estimates, nor did it clarify exactly what it meant by membership, allowing ample room for exaggeration. To take one example, the Petrograd Proletkult asserted that it controlled over one hundred and twenty clubs with approximately five hundred participants in each in 1919.[20] Of these estimated sixty thousand "members," how many were casual auditors of plays or lectures, and how many actively identified with the organization's goals?
Whether they were accurate or not, these substantial membership figures were readily exploited by the movement. They gave the Proletkult visibility and power and also lent some credence to its claim to be the organizational equal of trade
[18] Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 17/19 (1920), pp. 2, 5, 74. There is no source given for these figures, but presumably they were generated from the periodic questionnaires sent out to local affiliates. However, these questionnaires were most reliable in determining the number of participants in studio workshops, not the various other activities the Proletkult sponsored. See, for example, those from the Viatka province and Pudemskii factory organizations, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 117, l. 32; d. 430, l. 20 ob.
[19] In 1919 the center compiled a list of nineteen organizations it would no longer support because they had not answered requests for membership figures, "Spisok ne subsidirovannykh Proletkul'tov," TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 117, ll.7–8.
[20] "Deiatel'nost' Petrogradskogo Proletkul'ta," Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie (Petrograd), no. 4/5 (1920), p. 70.
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unions and the Communist Party. Some Proletkult advocates went so far as to argue that the membership was drawn entirely from the working class, which would have assured the movement a hold over a significant percentage of Soviet Russia's small proletariat.[21] But such boasts can be easily disproved by the records of local affiliates, which show sizable numbers of nonworkers within the ranks. They were also contradicted by the more candid comments of the central leaders themselves, who frequently bemoaned the organization's social diversity.
Despite their angry rhetoric directed at nonworkers, national leaders were at times quite willing to stretch their stiff guidelines in order to secure a broad following. Although there were strong ideological justifications for class purity, there were equally strong organizational reasons for large membership figures. The Proletkult's size and breadth made its cultural agenda very difficult to ignore. Thus both the actions of local circles and the partial complicity of national leaders ensured that many different social groups found a place under the banner of the Proletkult.
The Worker Contingent
The Proletkult expanded as the proletariat declined. It gained popularity as mobilizations, food shortages, and factory closures drastically diminished the ranks of Russian workers. Not only did the number of workers drop, but the lines between the industrial proletariat and other laboring classes—never very clear in the best of times—became more fluid as a result of wartime upheavals. This process could not help but affect an organization aimed at the working class.
[21] When Lenin asked for specific information about Proletkult members in 1920, the central leaders Vladimir Faidysh and Vasilii Ignatov sent word that it united four hundred thousand proletarians. See V. I. Lenin o literature i iskusstve , 7th ed., ed. N. Krutikov (Moscow, 1986), p. 542.
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In numerical terms the early Soviet years were a disaster for the industrial proletariat; many scholars have noted that the most immediate consequence of the workers' revolution was the decimation of the working class.[22] The process of what Lenin called the "declassing" (deklassirovanie ) of the proletariat had already begun during the First World War.[23] Experienced workers were mobilized into the army and their places taken by the unskilled, either members of workers' families or fresh recruits to factory life from the cities and the countryside. With the outbreak of the October Revolution, which brought demobilization, the situation improved somewhat as seasoned workers reclaimed their jobs. However, the beginning of the Civil War was a renewed blow to the size and quality of the labor force. Hunger, disease, the decline of industry, and renewed mobilizations all combined to deplete workers' ranks.[24] In the first three years of Soviet power the industrial labor force was more than halved.[25]
Factory workers left the cities in search of food and were absorbed into the peasantry. They also either voluntarily joined or were drafted into the Red Army. As a result, many of those who held industrial jobs were new, inexperienced recruits. Nonproletarian city dwellers who, unlike workers, often did not have relatives in the countryside, entered urban factories. In rural areas industrial plants found new laborers among the local peasantry. Not only did the size of the working class decline, its social makeup changed as well.
[22] See D. A. Baevskii, Rabochii klass v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti, 1917–1921 gg . (Moscow, 1974); Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (New York, 1952), vol. 2; E. G. Gimpel'son, Sovetskii rabochii klass, 1918–1920 gg . (Moscow, 1974); Diane Koenker, "Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War," Journal of Modern History , vol. 57, no. 3 (1985), pp. 424–50; V. M. Selunskaia, ed., Izmeneniia sotsiarnoi struktury sovetskogo obshchestva, Oktiabr' 1917–1929 (Moscow, 1976); and William G. Rosenberg, "Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October," Slavic Review , vol. 44, no. 2 (1985), pp. 213–38.