[23] V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii , 5th ed. (Moscow, 1970), vol. 43, p. 42, cited in Baevskii, Rabochii klass , pp. 260–61.
[24] Baevskii, Rabochii klass , pp. 244–49.
[25] Gimpel'son, Sovetskii rabochii klass , p. 80.
― 71 ―
As the Proletkult spread throughout Soviet territory, it secured a following in the most industrially advanced areas of the country. During the Civil War it expanded from Petrograd, a stronghold of the metalworking industry, to the Central Industrial Region, the Urals, and even to parts of the White-controlled industrial South. Metalworkers, the traditional elite of the working class and a much sought after clientele, appeared to be very open to the organization's message.[26] Many defense-related engineering and metalworking factories had Proletkult organizations. Of the ten large private plants that were nationalized in 1918 and united to form a machine-building consortium called "GOMZ" (Tsentral'noe pravlenie gosudarstvennykh ob"edinennykh mashinostroitel'nykh zavodov ), at least half sponsored Proletkults.[27] Both metalworking plants in Tula opened Proletkuh organizations, as did many others: the Simbirsk cartridge factory, the Kovrov machine-gun factory, the Bezhetsk armament factory, metalworking plants in Izhevsk and Podolsk, the Putilov factory in Petrograd, and the Pudemskii factory in Viatka province.[28]
Several of the Proletkult's first organizers, Fedor Kalinin, Vladimir Kossior, and Aleksei Gastev, were active in the Metalworkers' Union.[29] Perhaps because of their influence,
[26] Lebedev-Polianskii singled out metalworkers as the best candidates for the Proletkult. See V. Polianskii [pseud.], "Nashi zadachi i puti," Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 7/8 (1919), p. 7.
[27] The Sormorskii, Brianskii, Tverskoi, Rybinskii, and Raditskii factories all had Proletkults. See Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 11/12 (1919), p. 65; Proletkul't (Tver), no. 1/2 (1919), p. 15; and local questionnaires in TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 121, l. 58 ob.; d. 117, ll. 5, 18.
[28] For the Simbirsk Proletkult see Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 7/8 (1919), p. 69. For the remaining groups see the local questionnaires in TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1540, 1.6 and d. 1538, l.14 (Tula); d. 121, l. 56 (Kovrov); d. 121, l. 57 (Bezhetsk); d. 117, l. 58 (Izhevsk); d. 117, l. 63 (Podolsk); d. 121, l. 41 (Putilov plant); d. 430, l. 27 ob. (Pudemskii plant).
[29] On Fedor Kalinin see Sbornik pamiati F. I. Kalinina (Rostov on Don, 1920), p. 14; on Kossior see Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , p. 103; on Gastev see Kendall E. Bailes, "Alexei Gastev and the Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924," Soviet Studies , vol. 29, no. 3 (1977), p. 374.
― 72 ―
some local trade union branches became strong Proletkult backers. The organizations in Izhevsk and Rybinsk were largely financed through the union.[30] The Moscow Metalworkers' Union even came to the aid of the Proletkult in a territorial dispute with the city's educational division.[31]
Railroad workers, another elite sector of the working class, were well represented in the Proletkult, too. There were special organizations for these workers in many parts of Russia, and railroad stations were frequent sites for local circles in the provinces.[32] As in the case of the metalworkers, the Railroad Workers' Union showed a lively interest in Proletkult ideas. In mid-1918 the cultural division of the union, named "Tsekult," organized classes in Moscow for provincial cultural workers. Among the many lecturers was Aleksandr Bogdanov, who addressed the topic "Culture and Life."[33]
However, even these leading proletarian groups had suffered severely from the combined effects of war and revolution. The quick expansion of the metal industry during the First World War meant that new and unskilled workers had entered the labor force. During the Civil War parts of the industry moved away from urban centers to areas where the working class had much closer ties to the peasantry.[34] Thus just because one was a metalworker did not in itself insure a proletarian pedigree, nor did it guarantee the possession of
[30] Letter from the Izhevsk leadership to P. I. Lebedev-Polianskii, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1222, l. 16; see also the 1919 questionnaire filed by the Rybinsk organization, d. 117, l. 5 ob.
[31] "Vypiska iz protokola zasedaniia komiteta Moskovskogo raionnogo otdela soiuza metallistov," October 15, 1920, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 3, 1. 108.
[32] See the list of six operating railroad Proletkults in the records for the 1921 national congress, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 122, ll. 1–2. Moscow province's local organizations were located on the railroad lines, Proletkul'tvorets , no. 1 (1920), p. 4.
[33] N.S. Zaichenko, ed., Organizatsionnye kursypo kul'turno-prosvetitel'nomu delu na zheleznykh dorogakh (Moscow, 1918), pp. 13–14, 20, 40.
[34] Selunskaia, Izmeneniia sotsial'noi struktury , p. 144; and Gimpel'son, Sovetskii rabochii klass , p. 122.
― 73 ―
any of those special traits—literacy, job experience, and a long separation from the countryside—that so appealed to Proletkult theorists.
Moreover, the Proletkult was not restricted to the most advanced segments of the working class. The movement also found a following in industries employing mainly unskilled labor. Textile workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk were some of the first to start local organizations. By 1920 the provincial Proletkult encompassed groups in twenty-six factories along with district branches in Shuia, Kineshma, Vichuga, Rodniki, Sereda, and Teplov. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk Textile Workers' Union was an active supporter of both the city and the provincial networks.[35] In Saratoy the cultural activities of the Tobacco Workers' Union were taken over by the Proletkult.[36] As in the textile industry, the labor force for tobacco factories was primarily composed of unskilled workers. The national Sugar Workers' Union tried to unite all its factory cultural circles with the Proletkult. According to the union, sugar workers had a special need for well-planned cultural activities because refineries were located in small villages far away from cultural centers.[37]
Rather than trying to isolate a cultural vanguard within the proletariat, many local groups made a special effort to reach out to the least advanced and least educated workers. The Kostroma Proletkult is an excellent case in point. In this town dominated by the textile trade a Proletkult took shape after many other attempts to organize educational projects for workers had failed. One commission, funded and organized by the local Narkompros division, determined through surveys and census data that there were over sixteen thousand illiterate or semiliterate workers in Kostroma, concen-
[35] 1922 report from the Ivanovo-Voznesensk organization, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1245, ll. 5–13.
[36] "Svedenie kasaiushchiesia deiatel'nosti Proletkul'ta," Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv RSFSR f. 2306, op. 17, d. 9, l. 8.
[37] Meeting of the central committee presidium, September 25, 1920, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 6, l. 82.
― 74 ―
trated especially among women. It also concluded that workers' willingness to make use of cultural offerings decreased as their educational level decreased. The commission's solution was to start active agitation among the least educated workers. It proposed to open literacy schools right at the workplace, aimed specifically at female workers.[38] As one commissioner noted, it was not possible to create a proletarian culture without sharing the rudiments of culture with the broadest possible working-class audience.[39]
When the Kostroma Proletkult began operation, it reflected the concerns of the educational circles that preceded it. A founding member, V. A. Nevskii, was also the head of the local Narkompros division. He believed that the new organization should not abandon the masses for the quiet of isolated studios. Rather, the creation of a proletarian culture had to be accomplished by the masses themselves.[40] To demonstrate its commitment to these goals, the Proletkult absorbed the factory workers' literacy commission into its organizational structure.
Together with unskilled laborers, many artisanal workers joined in local Proletkult activities, despite repeated warnings that they posed a threat to genuine proletarian values. As recent research on the Russian working class has shown, artisans were often well integrated into the factory proletariat, even constituting a significant percentage of those employed in large industrial complexes.[41] Indeed, one might argue that the most common symbol of Proletkult creation, the mighty blacksmith wielding his hammer over an anvil, was itself an artisanal image. It certainly did not portray a worker whose life was regulated by the pace of the machine. The records for