The First Five-Year Plan: Expansion and Demise
The end of the New Economic Policy and the advent of rapid industrialization and collectivization in the late 1920s marked a profound change in Soviet social life. Groups favored during the New Economic Policy, especially the peasantry and parts of the educated elite, found their status abruptly and radically altered. The regime now shunned its former allies and turned to the working class, in rhetoric if not always in policy, as the main buttress for the industrialization drive. The language of class conflict, severely limited during the 1920s, revived in the lexicons of political activists.
The First Five-Year Plan had profound cultural ramifications. During the 1920s the Soviet government had endorsed a policy of relative cultural pluralism, thereby gaining the support of many artists and intellectuals who were at best lukewarm supporters of the new regime. Their knowledge and expertise were considered essential to realizing Lenin's vision of a cultural revolution, that is, the gradual dissemination of literacy and education to the broadest possible public. However, this incremental approach was abruptly altered in the late 1920s. The state's change in direction put cultural experts on the defensive and disrupted established educational programs. Cultural revolution, in its new aggressive transmogrification, became a medium for class conflict, a way for the
[50] V. Polonskii, "Literaturnoe dvizhenie Oktiabr'skogo desiatiletiia," Pechat' i revoliutsiia , no. 7 (1927), pp. 15–80, quotation p. 38; see also P. Markov, "Teatr," in ibid., pp. 149–50.
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regime to motivate and justify its assaults on the intelligentsia and the peasantry.[51]
The many cultural circles advocating proletarian artistic forms not only welcomed these new policies but also helped to give them teeth. The Proletarian Writers' Union, especially its radical Russian division, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), stepped up attacks against bourgeois culture, this time with some effectiveness. Voronskii, Lunacharskii, and others who defended "fellow travelers" and independent intellectuals quickly fell from grace. In language similar to that of the Civil War RAPP and its allies now demanded proletarian hegemony in the cultural sphere.
Proletkultists also embraced the new direction. In a substantial article on the meaning of cultural revolution, Valerian Pletnev argued that without a radical shift in cultural values, industrialization would not succeed. He insisted that it was essential for the country to rationalize industry, revise its educational system, and rid itself of the corrupt influence of bureaucrats, kulaks, and capitalists. The masses had to be excited and drawn into industrialization through cultural creation; they needed a new literature, film, and theater as well as new forms of propaganda to involve them in the great push for economic change.[52]
During the First Five-Year Plan all proletarian cultural circles were on the upsurge. RAPP increased its membership by 80 percent from 1930 to 1931; the number of TRAM affiliates expanded fivefold from 1929 to 1932.[53] The Proletkult also experienced some positive change: the membership in