7 The Proletkult in Crisis
In October 1920, just as the worst of the Civil War was past, Proletkult delegates gathered in Moscow to discuss what seemed to be the bright future of their cause. The organization's mass base promised to grow as the new era of peace saw the return of workers to the factories. The national leaders were convinced that Proletkult work would improve in quality now that the agitational tasks of the war were over. They even foresaw international expansion and support. But these optimistic projections were quickly undermined. By the conclusion of the conference the Communist Party Central Committee forced the Proletkult to give up its independence and become part of the state's cultural bureaucracy, thereby initiating a period of precipitous decline for the organization.
The Communist Party's assault on the Proletkult is often presented as the logical result of Lenin's longstanding animus against Bogdanov.[1] Although certainly a factor, this animus alone cannot explain the timing or the vehemence of the party's actions. Bogdanov, after all, had taken part in the Proletkult from the very beginning, and he retained a leading
[1] See, for example, Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks (Bloomington, 1985), pp. 185–87.
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position a full year after its subordination. Proletkult autonomy, not Bogdanov, was the prime target of the central committee's attacks in the fall of 1920, when the imminent end to the war marked yet another crisis for the new regime. Despite the hardships, the Civil War had worked as a cohesive force for the Soviet state. Many potential critics feared the Whites more than the Bolsheviks and thus put aside their doubts until the outcome was certain. But as the war drew to a close, debates about the future of the country began anew. Emergency solutions to military problems lost their primary justification. Union activists began to clamor for a more central role in economic planning. Critical factions within the Communist Party called for reorganization and decentralization. In response the party leadership moved quickly to undercut potentially troublesome groups, among them the Proletkult.
A central issue in the heated political discussions that began in 1920 was the future role of proletarian institutions. The state had mobilized (and eventually militarized) Russian labor during the war while restricting labor unions mainly to disciplinary tasks. Although labor leaders accepted these conditions in the context of the military crisis, once a Red victory seemed certain some began to chafe against them. Trade unionists were particularly opposed to plans to continue labor militarization into the postwar period to meet the new emergency of economic reconstruction. These proposals aimed to fuse the unions with the state bureaucracy.[2]
This course was most vehemently rejected by the leftist trade union activists known as the Workers' Opposition. With a following in the Metalworkers' Union, in Moscow, Samara, the Urals, and the Ukraine, the Workers' Opposition de-
[2] On the trade union debates see Edward Hallett Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (New York, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 198–227; Robert V. Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution (New York, 1960), pp. 119–36; Jay B. Sorenson, The Life and Death of Soviet Trade Unionism, 1917–1928 (New York, 1969), pp. 106–28; and Thomas Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia (Pittsburgh, 1984), pp. 92–101.
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manded that the trade unions be granted real independence and the power to control the economy. Their insistence on autonomy sounded very similar to Proletkult demands. Indeed, the major theoretical statement of the Workers' Opposition, written by Aleksandra Kollontai, coincided with the Proletkult's vision of the Soviet order on many levels. The Workers' Opposition attacked the prevalence of nonworkers, particularly specialists, within the Soviet system; its solution to the growing bureaucratization in the party and the state was to allow more room for workers' independent action (samodeiatel'nost '), a key word in the Proletkult vocabulary.[3] The members of the Workers' Opposition also criticized internal party organization, insisting that the Bolshevik leadership pay more attention to the rank and file and introduce wider discussion and debate.[4] Another critical faction, the Democratic Centralists, shared some of these complaints, arguing that the party was overcentralized.[5] Although the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Opposition did not unite around their common grievances, the appearance of such vocal critics worried the party leadership and eventually led to the ban on factions at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921.
In addition to this dissent among their allies, the Bolsheviks also had to ponder the daunting problem of the Russian peasantry. During the Civil War peasant sympathy for the regime's land programs had been worn thin by grain requisitions at gunpoint. In the summer of 1920 the peasantry in Tambov province erupted in a partisan war against Soviet power that helped to convince the government that forced requisitions could not long continue. It was painfully clear
[3] A. Kollontai, Rabochaia oppozitsiia (Moscow, 1921), pp. 37–45.
[4] Indeed, Kollontai insisted on more glasnost ', a demand with a very contemporary sound, ibid., p. 44.
[5] On the Democratic Centralists see Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917–1923 (London, 1979), pp. 51–53, 144–46; and Ekkehard Klug, "Die Gruppe des Demokratischen Zentralismus und der 10. Parteitag der KPR(b) im März 1921," Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas , vol. 35 (1987), pp. 36–58.
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that the state had to shift to noncoercive economic measures if it were to forge a modicum of support for the regime.
As they pondered new economic approaches, government leaders also began to give even greater consideration to propaganda and education as a way to imbue the population with a unified, pro-Soviet spirit. In August 1920 the Communist Party created a special division of agitation and propaganda, usually known as Agitprop, to oversee all Soviet institutions involved in political education.[6] At the same time, Narkompros created its own section for political enlightenment, Glavpolitprosvet, out of its former Adult Education Division.[7] Because the exact duties of these two new groups were not clearly defined, they were potentially in conflict. Nonetheless, their almost simultaneous creation illustrated the appearance of a new emphasis on political education as a way to cement the social order.
Although the Proletkult had mainly worked as a loyal propagandist for the Red cause during the Civil War, it nonetheless embodied potentially threatening principles. Its insistence on autonomy had an ominous ring at a time when other groups were making their own case for independence and authority. Its claims to a large following among rank-and-file workers made it a possible candidate for opposition. Finally, it oversaw a broad network of cultural and political education programs theoretically free from party and state control. Thus, with or without Bogdanov's provocative presence, Lenin had ample motivation to turn against the movement as the country made its rocky transition from war to peace.