[90] For a discussion of the issue of the Proletkult and young children see Chapter 6.
[91] See, for example, the records for the Novotorsk Proletkult in Tver province, Proletkul't (Tver), no. 1/2 (1919), p. 53.
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gree "classless." At the founding national conference in 1918 the central leader E. P. Khersonskaia insisted that the Proletkult had to take dramatic steps to include adolescents; she went so far as to extend an invitation to the children of intellectuals, shopkeepers, and artisans.[92] This solicitous concern won the Proletkult youthful support. At the same time, however, it further diluted the organization's industrial proletarian identity.
Who wasn't drawn to our little light—children, young girls, youth from the barricades, graybeards in homespun coats and bast shoes from the countryside, poets no one had ever heard of who previously had scratched out their verses in a scrawl in cellars, under the eves of stone houses, at their workbench, or behind a plow. Until then I had never seen such characters and costumes in my life as those that appeared in the Proletkult.[93]
These loving memoirs by Aleksandr Mgebrov, a theater instructor in the Petrograd Proletkult, are a testament to the movement's broad social appeal. Mgebrov obviously relished this mixed following, but for those who perceived the Proletkult as a purely proletarian movement, such diversity posed a real threat to the organization's identity.
The Proletkult's popularity reveals the flexibility—and inaccuracy—of class categories in this period of rapid social change. The label "proletarian" was not a neutral class description: it conveyed political power and revolutionary sentiment. This was not the only allegedly proletarian institution faced with a crisis of class identity. In the Communist Party, supposedly the vanguard of the working class, workers were
[92] E. P. Khersonskaia, "O rabote s iunoshestvom," Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , pp. 66–67, 72.
[93] A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), vol. 2, pp. 314–15.
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no longer in the majority by the end of the Civil War.[94] But the party, in contrast to the Proletkult, never professed to appeal to the proletariat alone.
One result of the Proletkult's diversity was certainly positive. Its large size helped it to win national attention and gain the backing of local cultural groups. Proletkultists' attempts to stand equal to trade unions and the party in proletarian affairs would have had no resonance at all if the organization had really limited itself to a small vanguard of industrial workers. And despite the national leaders' distress about the organization's mixed following, they were certainly in part responsible for making it into the mass organization it became.
However, the Proletkult's large and varied membership also posed real threats to the organization's continued survival. Proletkultists had initially won the support of Narkompros precisely because they were supposed to be doing something different than state educational institutions. The more socially diverse the Proletkult was, the weaker this argument became. By the end of the Civil War Narkompros educational workers asked with ever greater urgency why an organization that duplicated state programs so closely needed to maintain its autonomy. In addition, party leaders came to doubt the wisdom of sustaining a mass institution that defended its independence so fiercely.
The Proletkult's heterogeneity also complicated the internal workings of the movement. Bogdanov and his allies envisioned an experienced, literate, sophisticated following able to work on its own or with minimum aid from the intelligentsia. With such a membership they believed that they would have the human resources necessary to question prevailing scientific propositions and to create unique artistic forms.
[94] Official party figures show the working-class contingent declining from 60 percent to 41 percent in the years 1917 to 1921, T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R . (Princeton, 1968), pp. 52, 85.
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However, the organization drew in a much broader constituency, thus altering the scope of all its work. Local groups offered literary circles for the uneducated, French classes for those who sought "refinement," and dance evenings for young people's entertainment. Rather than investigating the nature of working-class creativity, Proletkult circles tried to satisfy the wide-ranging cultural demands of the lower classes. This skewed the very definition of proletarian culture and undermined the national leadership's conception of the movement. The central Proletkult could not shape its constituency. It was very much the other way around; the constituency shaped the Proletkult.
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