The Civil War had a catastrophic effect on music and the theater, for the simple reason that there was no money to keep the theaters going at any but the most minimal level. The Imperial Ballet School closed, and the ballet and opera theaters closed for various periods until the early 1920s. Orchestras suffered similar fates. With NEP and the revival of the Soviet economy, the Soviet government gradually reestablished the old theaters and orchestras under different names, and at the same time the NEP economy and the absence of a defined party line on the arts meant that many smaller ballet companies and theaters of various types came into existence. Instrumental music did better, for the conservatories continued to function with many of the old staff, and produced a whole generation of new composers. By the end of the 1920s Dmitrii Shostakovich already had a name, both for his “serious” compositions and for film music. Perhaps the most innovative theater was established under the leadership of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in 1922. Meyerhold had begun under Stanislavskii in the Moscow Art Theater, but by 1917 had rejected the master’s ideas to develop his own theory and style of acting which he called “biomechanical.” The idea was that the actor should not strive for naturalism but use his body and his voice for the most expressive possible performance, making his point by an “unnatural” style that would strike the audience more powerfully. Meyerhold in turn had a powerful effect on another art form that was just coming into its own at the time, the cinema. Sergei Eisenstein was just starting on his career as a director in the 1920s with his historical masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin. The actors in the film reflected Meyerhold’s theories, while the overall structure was the product of Eisenstein’s technique of montage, using a series of discontinuous images to hammer home his esthetic and political points. This was a radical break with the normal technique of Hollywood and other films of the time, which stuck to visual continuity to tell the story. Eisenstein’s innovations seem to have bothered no one among the Soviet authorities, for whom film was in some ways the perfect art form: it spoke to the masses, was based on the latest technology, was easy to reproduce, and was cheaper and more portable than the stage. It was also much more adaptable for political messages, as Eisenstein and other directors proved. As Lenin had said, in a comment endlessly repeated, “of all the arts, cinema is the most important to us.” The Soviet authorities funded movies through their cultural offices, but resources were inadequate to produce films in large numbers. The great majority of the movies shown in the NEP era were actually imported Hollywood films.
With the end of the Civil War, publishing also revived, and in the NEP years a number of private publishers supplemented the products of the state publishers. The rich artistic world of the past could not be recreated. The NEP cafés lacked the elegance and panache of their pre-revolutionary prototypes, and the state publishers did not pay very well. The young Shostakovich survived by playing the piano in movie theaters to accompany silent films. The economy of artistic life was only one issue, as artists had to deal with the ambiguities of Soviet policy toward the intelligentsia, a policy based on an attitude of suspicion combined with an awareness of its value. The party also had very little to say about art. Certainly openly anti-Soviet works could not be published and the émigré writers gradually disappeared from the bookstores. Yet the party did not even publish a statement on literature until 1925, and that one contained little in the way of positive recommendations. The gist was that the party should help and promote “proletarian” writers as well as writers from the peasantry, but should also show tolerance of the “fellow travelers” (originally Trotsky’s phrase), writers from the intelligentsia to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic or at least neutral toward the new order. Party critics should not expect the “fellow travelers” to have and express a complete Bolshevik world-view. In a sense, the party’s position on the writers was similar to its position on engineers or government officials from the old intelligentsia. Until the end of the decade, the party relied on their skills and seemed to be willing to let them gradually move toward a friendlier attitude to the party and its aims.
The result of all these different elements was a great deal of varied writing, much of it innovative in language, style, and narrative technique. Even the “proletarian” writers wrote in a language that was full of slang, local dialects, and obscenities, a language that was later edited out of reprints of their work after the 1930s. While some of the proletarians wrote stories of Civil War sacrifice and heroism, pulling few punches to describe the horrors of the war, others tried to write about the working class in their factories, accounts of the rebuilding of Soviet industry and the new forms of life emerging around them. There were not very many of the actual proletarian writers, however, and most literature of the time presented a wide variety of daily life – often the semi-criminal margins of Soviet urban life, the complexities of the personal and private life of the intelligentsia and party officials. While many of the writers also spent much time in acrimonious debate among the various groupings, others managed to produce work of more enduring significance. In 1921 Boris Pasternak published a collection of poetry, “My Sister Life,” which instantly established him as a leading poet. In 1926 Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry with its brutal honesty placed it at the head of all descriptions of the Civil War. The stories of NEP-era marginal characters culminated in 1928 with Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, whose con man hero Ostap Bender passed into Soviet and Russian folklore. Other writers found it impossible to publish: Anna Akhmatova was not published from 1925 to 1940, and Mikhail Bulgakov began to have difficulties from the mid-twenties. Though his Civil War–era play “Day of the Turbins” was scarcely a flattering portrait of the White cause, it was also not crudely hostile, and the play was repeatedly banned and then allowed again until it finally disappeared from the repertory to return only in the 1960s. His other works were simply forbidden entirely. Some writers were allowed to emigrate, such as Yuri Zamiatin whose novel of an anti-utopian society We would come to influence Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
In literature and art, the 1920s were in many ways a continuation of the Silver Age under new conditions. Many of the most important voices of the twenties, Mayakovskii or Pasternak, Meyerhold or Prokofiev, were already accomplished artists by 1917, and the younger generation that came to maturity after 1920 was profoundly influenced by the culture of the pre-revolutionary decades. Even some of the young “proletarian” writers with their new themes wrote with Belyi or Blok in the back of their heads. The numerous literary or artistic platforms and groups maintained some of the organizational forms of artistic life of the Silver Age until the end of the NEP era.
THE NATURAL SCIENCES
For the natural sciences, in contrast, the revolution marked a more fundamental break, not so much intellectually but institutionally. The years before the revolution had been a period of change for Russian science. Perhaps the most important innovation had been the foundation of the new engineering schools under the Ministry of Finance. These technical schools not only produced sorely needed engineers but also were less conservative in their curricula than the universities under the Ministry of Education. Thus they were open to rapidly changing and growing disciplines like physics, while the universities tended to keep chemistry at the center of scientific education. The technical institutes were more open to society. They maintained ties with business, and were less restrictive about their admissions. Thus Jewish students like Abram Ioffe finished the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, studied in Germany, and received his first position in physics at the new St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, which was Witte’s creation. His years there from 1906 to the Revolution were to be the incubation period of the later Soviet physics, for Ioffe quickly revealed his talent for organization and intellectual leadership. Yet the conditions of science as a whole left much to be desired. Physics had suffered a major blow in 1911 when much of the science faculty of Moscow University and the Kiev Polytechnic Institute resigned over Minister of Education Kasso’s illegal repression of student meetings (a meeting in honor of Tolstoy’s death was at issue). There were few other institutions where the scientists could move, though some managed to find a home in the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Among the successful few among the protestors was the geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii, one of the founders of the science of ecology, who managed to find a place in the Academy.