[51] See Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington, 1978), esp. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War," pp. 8–40.
[52] V. Pletnev, "O kul'turnoi revoliutsii," Rabochii klub , no. 53/54 (1928), pp. 3–13.
[53] Katerina Clark, "Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five Year Plan," in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 , ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bloomington, 1978), p. 196; and Mironova, TRAM , p. 6.
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existing organizations increased, the percentage of workers rose, and the national network grew to include new circles in areas like Stalingrad and parts of Siberia.[54]
Topical themes dominated the Proletkult's creative work. New circles in Siberia sent out agitational troupes to perform at construction sites and collective farms.[55] Proletkult theaters performed contemporary plays, for example, Aleksandr Bezymenskii's The Shot (Vystrel ), which had been made famous by the Meyerhold Theater. In the play young workers expose party corruption and unmask a group of Trotsky's supporters. Another play, Without Regard to Individuals (Nevziraia na litsa ), featured a Komsomol member who valiantly resists the management of a large department store and reveals its unethical practices.[56]
Although the Proletkult showed signs of rejuvenation during the years of the "Stalin revolution," it could not reclaim its old position. It had neither the funding nor the staff to inspire the same broad following that it had had in the Civil War years. Moreover, its artistic direction was at odds with the aesthetic approaches favored by the regime. The Proletkult embraced a theater inspired by Meyerhold, a visual arts based on constructivism, and literary methods that tended toward documentation and a literature of fact. All these techniques came under attack as "formalistic" methods during the First Five-Year Plan. The Communist Party Central Committee even singled out the Siberian Proletkult for censure because it took a critical stand toward the work of Maxim Gorky.[57]
[54] Minutes of the July 3, 1931, meeting of the central Proletkult presidium, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 23, ll. 1, 8; and T. A. Khavina, "Bor'ba Kommunisticheskoi partii za Proletkul't i rukovodstvo ego deiatel'nost'iu, 1917–1932 gg." (Candidate diss., Leningrad State University, 1978), p. 152.
[55] Pinegina, Sovetskii rabochii klass , p. 95; and Kunst in die Produktion: Sowjetische Kunst während der Phase der Kollektivierung und Industrialisierung, 1927–1933 (Berlin, 1977), p. 22.
[56] Pechat' i revoliutsiia , no. 5/6 (1930), p. 95; ibid., no. 3 (1930), p. 87.
[57] "O vystupleniiakh sibirskikh literatorov i literaturnykh organizatsii protiv Maksima Gor'kogo," in KPSS o kul'ture, prosveshchenii i nauke: Sbornik dokumentov , ed. V. S. Viktorov (Moscow, 1963), pp. 201–2.
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But the Proletkult's most significant handicap remained its poor political reputation. RAPP, the most powerful cultural organization, attacked Proletkult theory and practice in a manner that harkened back to Lenin's original accusations. In their journal On Literary Guard , RAPP members denounced the Proletkult as a carcass of the revolution and accused it of being inspired by the false "Menshevik" ideas of Aleksandr Bogdanov. It had never produced much good work because its members totally rejected Russia's cultural heritage and held a romantic view of the revolution. The contemporary Proletkult was beneath their notice; its adherents were nothing more than the executors of a deceased movement who were circling around the sarcophagus.[58]
The ascendancy of proletarian cultural groups ended almost as quickly as it began. Their domination of cultural life depended on a state-sponsored shift in the social climate that openly favored the working class. By 1931 the government began a hasty retreat from the anti-intellectual positions it had sanctioned at the beginning of the plan. It instituted a series of laws designed to bolster the position of "bourgeois" experts and the technical intelligentsia, who had been severely ostracized both by state organs and by workers' cultural groups. Wage differentials favoring the better educated were introduced and the massive affirmative action programs, a central feature of the First Five-Year Plan's educational policy, were drastically curtailed.[59]
These dramatic reversals quickly affected the organiza-
[58] See V. Sytyrin, "O blagorodnykh predkakh, neblagodarnykh potomkakh, o legomyslennom povedenii poslednikh," Na literaturnom postu , no. 2 (1930), pp. 26–30; and idem, "Blagodarnost'," ibid., no. 8 (1930), pp. 20–23. See also Iu. Libedinskii, "O proletarskom teatre," Rabochii i teatr , no. 2 (1932), pp. 4–5.
[59] Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War"; idem, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), pp. 209–33; and Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin (Princeton, 1978), pp. 159–87.
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tions advocating proletarian culture. As at the start of the New Economic Policy, these groups' messages of proletarian hegemony were no longer welcome. RAPP, which had demanded a privileged position, became a special target of party criticism. It was charged with hounding sympathetic noncommunist writers, producing vulgar and inconsistent criticism, and promoting poor artistic products.[60] Although RAPP and its allies had been exposed to such attacks before, this time it was the prelude to their dissolution.
In April 1932 the Communist Party issued a directive that disbanded all literary and cultural circles. The document had a neutral title, "On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations," but it was aimed specifically at the proletarian circles that had dominated cultural life during the First Five-Year Plan.[61] The party acknowledged the service of these groups, which had helped to foster a new generation of artists from the fields and factories. However, the directive charged that their activities had now become too narrow and sectarian, thus hindering the further development of socialist art. They would be replaced by professional unions open to artists of all classes.
This resolution marked the end of the many cultural circles that had evolved from 1917 to 1932, among them the Proletkult. These circles liquidated their operations, dividing up their staff and resources. Most affiliates of TRAM, the active youth theater, were absorbed into the Komsomol. Members of the Russian Association for Proletarian Musicians, RAPM, offered their services to the new musicians' union.[62] The Proletkult, the oldest and at one time the most inclusive of all these
[60] Brown, The Proletarian Episode , pp. 188–89; Herman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934 (Berkeley, 1963), pp. 106–18; and S. Sheshukov, Neistovye revniteli: Iz istorii literaturnoi bor'by 20-kh godov (Moscow, 1970), pp. 302–13.
[61] "O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii: Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) ot 23 aprelia 1932 g.," in Gronskii and Perel'man, AKhRR—Assotsiatsiia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii , pp. 329–30.
[62] Mironova, TRAM , pp. 92–104; and Schwarz, Music and Musical Life , p. 112.
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groups, quietly handed over its assets to the trade union cultural bureaucracy; in August 1932 it ceased to exist.[63]
After dissolving the many contentious groups that had dominated Soviet cultural life, the regime began to formulate an official Soviet aesthetic, "socialist realism." This elusive genre bore some similarities to Proletkult cultural theories. Like Bogdanov, the shapers of socialist realism believed that art served an active social role. They also insisted that cultural creation be simple, clear, and easily accessible to the masses, characteristics that echoed at least part of the Proletkult's artistic platform during the Civil War. But at this point similarities ended. Proletkultists believed that culture in the broadest sense was a means to awaken creative independence and to express proletarian class consciousness. By contrast, the advocates of socialist realism saw art as a didactic medium through which to educate the toiling masses in the spirit of socialism.[64] Either implicitly or explicitly, they rejected the premise of a unique class culture that spoke to and for the proletariat.
Instead, socialist realism was intended to convey the values of all groups in Soviet society. Its purpose was to give "poetic shape to the spiritual experience of the socialist man who is now coming into being," to quote Bukharin's effusive phrase.[65] Proletkultists had always maintained that their ultimate goal was to create the foundation for a human culture transcending class boundaries; proletarian class culture was necessary as the penultimate step before that final end. Now socialist realism claimed to have achieved this classless ideal.
[63] Khavina, "Bor'ba Kommunisticheskoi partii za Proletkul't," pp. 156–57; and Pinegina, Sovetskii rabochii klass , p. 118.
[64] See the resolutions passed at the 1934 Writers' Congress, Soviet Writers' Congress, 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London, 1977), p. 275. For an innovative study of socialist realism that stresses its didactic nature see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1985).
[65] Soviet Writers' Congress , p. 255.
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The new aesthetic was presented as the expression of a new and more advanced stage of historical development, a move toward a classless society.[66] The state's adoption of this new direction turned proletarian culture, supposedly the harbinger of the future, into the culture of the past.
[66] On the links between socialist realism and a new classless interpretation of Soviet society see Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories , pp. 140–43; and Hans Günther, Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur: Entstehung und Funktionsweise des sozialistischen-realistischen Kanons der sowjetischen Literatur der 30er Jahren (Stuttgart, 1984), p. 12.
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Conclusion
"Culture is not a luxury," wrote one Moscow Proletkult participant in 1920.[1] No words could better serve as the motto for the movement as a whole. Bogdanov first used them in his writings on art and culture before the revolution.[2] Lunacharskii repeated them when he moved to start the first Proletkult circle in 1917. No matter what the political condition of the country, he insisted, culture was too vital an arena to be ignored.[3] When defending the organization against political attacks, Valerian Pletnev employed the same phrase, pleading that the Proletkult not be viewed as a luxury that could be cast aside.[4]
Of course, on a fundamental level the Proletkult's opponents did not believe that culture was a luxury either. Instead, they questioned how best to turn what Pletnev called "this wild, uncultured, semiliterate, and impoverished country"[5] into a cultured society. The state chose a pragmatic approach, using its elaborate bureaucratic networks to transmit basic
[1] O. Radanskii, "Zadachi proletarskoi kul'tury," Gorn , no. 2/3 (1920), p. 39.
[2] See, for example, A. A. Bogdanov, "Vozmozhno li proletarskoe iskusstvo?" 1914, in O proletarskoi kul'ture, 1904–1924 , by A. A. Bogdanov (Moscow, 1924), pp. 104–16.
[3] P. N. Amosov et al., eds., Oktiabr' skaia revoliutsiia i fabzavkomy (Moscow, 1927), vol. 1, pp. 235–37.
[4] V. Pletnev, "Na ideologicheskom fronte," Pravda , September 27, 1922.
[5] Ibid.
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education, labor discipline, and respect for the Russian classical tradition. In its varied programs the Proletkult contributed to this process as well by opening literacy classes and introductory courses in the sciences and humanities. In its workshops, theaters, and choirs it helped to familiarize the population with the prerevolutionary classics.
And yet, at least in the opinion of its most passionate advocates, the Proletkult was never meant to serve as a mere "culture bearer." Instead, its task was to found a new cultural order, an order dominated by a proletarian class spirit. Although no one could articulate just what shape this new culture would take, Proletkultists set incredibly ambitious goals. They wanted an art that would inspire society to productive labor and break down the boundaries between refined culture and daily life. They sought a new science that would integrate all knowledge into a harmonious whole and yet still be accessible to the population at large. They hoped to create a new proletarian intelligentsia that could completely subsume the old intelligentsia but not lose its ties to the working class. It was this utopian agenda that so offended pragmatists like Lenin, who saw such proposals as "harebrained" extravagances that the state could ill afford.
During its long tenure the Proletkult's expansive cultural goals narrowed markedly. Already during the Civil War, local circles abandoned many of their basic educational functions in order to conserve resources and attract a more advanced and gifted membership. The rich and eclectic artistic offerings, from folk music choirs to tonal-plastic studios, were gradually limited as the organization embraced a more unified cultural direction. Grandiose plans to transform science, the family, and daily life were scaled down to projects with much more modest ambitions. Instead of changing proletarian mores Proletkultists tried to restructure club workshops. Instead of addressing inequities inside the proletarian home they reached out to female participants with the promise of sewing circles.
This contraction of the movement's cultural mission was
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partly the result of internal politics. Most central leaders had never wanted to provide hygiene lectures or literacy classes and were more than happy to leave these tasks to state institutions. Nor did they aspire to serve all of the laboring masses. In their view the Proletkult's real constituency was the proletariat's cultural vanguard, not the diverse social mix of the Civil War years. As the national organization gained more influence, it intervened in local operations to enforce its own vision of the Proletkult's goals. At the same time, many participants began to lose faith in their ability to transform longstanding habits and institutions, at least in the sweeping manner that they had first predicted. As Kirillov lamented in 1921, "The severe, cruel facts of life have shown us that those things we hoped and dreamed about in our work are very, very far away."[6]
External opposition also forced the organization to narrow its sights. The Proletkult never was a laboratory, isolated from the rest of Soviet society. It flourished with the aid and support of many allies, including unions, soviets, and parts of the Narkompros bureaucracy. When the Communist Party turned against it, the Proletkult's coalition of support dissolved. With the advent of the New Economic Policy there were fewer funds available for all cultural projects, but money was particularly scarce for an organization with controversial cultural and political goals. The Proletkult's dwindling programs reflected its dwindling resources. It had neither the funds nor the staff to support the wide network that had prospered during the early years.
As the Proletkult's cultural offerings declined, so too did its political ambitions. Once the organization was subordinated to the state, its controversial claim to be the equal of trade unions and the Communist Party was hardly tenable. Indeed, Proletkult autonomy was always a fragile construct, one that proved very easy to undermine. Although it gained the movement many followers, it also earned the Proletkult the party's