The Proletkult's Social Program
During the 1920s the two cardinal principles of Proletkult organization, autonomy and independent action (samostoiatel'nost ' and samodeiatel'nost '), were finally separated as the organization abandoned any pretense of institutional autonomy. Despite this momentous shift in its founding principles, national leaders still believed that the organization was the main defender of workers' creative independence. Within the Proletkult's small studios and theaters members conducted innovative artistic experiments. At the same time they also tried to reach out to the laboring population at large by offer-
[7] See, for example, G. Lelevich, "O marksizme, bogdanovshchine, proletarskoi literature i t. Rumii," Na postu , no. 6 (1925), columns 171–88.
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ing their services as researchers and instructors to working-class clubs.
Eager to end its suspect political status, the Proletkult struggled to establish its trustworthiness as a loyal, proparty organization. When a small circle of workers, inspired in part by Bogdanov's thought, formed an underground circle called "Workers' Truth" (Rabochaia pravda ) in 1922–1923, prominent party members pointed to this as yet more evidence of the Proletkult's fundamentally flawed theories.[8] Proletkult leaders publicly took the party's side, announcing that Workers' Truth was alienated from real life, had no understanding of Marxist theory, and could not grasp the dialectical development of proletarian culture. The Communist Party was neither hierarchical nor authoritarian, as the Workers' Truth group charged. Instead the party ensured workers' collective interaction and self-government.[9]
But these attempts at political conformity did nothing to halt the organization's rapid decline. There were only eleven Proletkult circles left in the Soviet Union in 1924, and early in the following year the Proletkult in Tver, one of the oldest, shut its doors, liquidated by the local party division.[10] This dramatic reduction did not leave a distilled proletarian essence. Only 20 percent of the 412 workshop participants in 1924 came directly from the factory, although 33 percent more came from a proletarian background.[11] These figures
[8] See I. Vardin's comments at a party press section meeting in May 1924 in Voprosy kul'tury pri diktature proletariata: Sbornik (Moscow and Leningrad, 1925), pp. 127–28. On Workers' Truth see Frits Kool and Erwin Oberländer, eds., Arbeiterdemokratie oder Parteidiktatur (Freiburg, 1967), pp. 264–73; Robert V. Daniels, Conscience of the Revolution (New York, 1960), p. 204; and N. I. Demidov, Iz istorii bor'by Kornmunisticheskoi partii za chistotu sotsialisticheskoi ideologii v period NEPa (Moscow, 1960), pp. 9–10.