After 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with more pressing matters, cultural policy was left to these former Vperedists in the party. Lunacharsky became the Commissar of Enlightenment — a title that reflected the inspiration of the cultural revolution which it set as its goal — and was responsible for both education and the arts. Bogdanov headed the Proletkult organization, set up in 1917 to develop proletarian culture. Through its factory clubs and studios, which by 1919 had 80,000 members, it organized amateur theatres, choirs, bands, art classes, creative writing workshops and sporting events for the workers. There was a Proletarian University in Moscow and a Socialist Encyclopedia, whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot’s Encyclopédie had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.19
As with the Capri and Bologna schools, the Proletkult intelligentsia displayed at times a patronising attitude towards the workers they sought to cultivate. Proletkult’s basic premise was that the working class should spontaneously develop its own culture; yet here were the intelligentsia doing it for them. Moreover, the ‘proletarian culture’ which they fostered had much less to do with the workers’ actual tastes — vaudeville and vodka for the most — which these intellectuals usually scorned as vulgar, than it had to do with their own idealized vision of what the workers were supposed to be: uncorrupted by bourgeois individualism; collectivist in their ways of life and thought; sober, serious and self-improving; interested in science and sport; in short the pioneers of the intelligentsia’s own imagined socialist culture.
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The revolution of 1917 came in the middle of Russia’s so-called Silver Age, the first three decades of this century when the avant-garde flourished in all the arts. Many of the country’s finest writers and artists took part in Proletkult and other Soviet cultural ventures during and after the civil war: Belyi, Gumilev, Mayakovsky and Khodasevich taught poetry classes; Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Eisenstein carried out an ‘October Revolution’ in the theatre; Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky and Malevich pioneered the visual arts; while Chagall even became Commissar for Arts in his native town of Vitebsk and later taught painting at a colony for orphans near Moscow. This coalition of commissars and artists was partly born of common principles: the idea that art had a social agenda and a mission to communicate with the masses; and a modernist rejection of the old bourgeois art. But it was also a marriage of convenience. For despite their initial reservations, mostly about losing their autonomy, these cultural figures soon saw the advantages of Bolshevik patronage for the avant-garde, not to speak of the extra rations and work materials they so badly needed in these barren years. Gorky was a central figure here — acting as a Soviet patron to the artists and as an artists’ leader to the Soviets. In September 1918 he agreed to collaborate with Lunacharsky’s commissariat in its dealings with the artistic and scientific worlds. Lunacharsky, for his part, did his best to support Gorky’s various ventures to ‘save Russian culture’, despite Lenin’s impatience about such ‘trivial matters’, from the publishing house World Literature, where so many destitute intellectuals were employed, to the Commission for the Preservation of Historical Buildings and Monuments. Lunacharsky complained that Gorky had ‘turned out completely in the camp of the intelligentsia, siding with it in its grumbling, lack of faith and terror at the prospect of the destruction of valuable things under the blows of the revolution’.
The nihilistic wing of the avant-garde was especially attracted to Bolshevism. It revelled in its destruction of the old world. The Futurist poets, for example, such as Mayakovsky, practically threw themselves at the feet of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as an ally of their own struggle against ‘bourgeois art’. (The Italian Futurists supported the Fascists for much the same reason.) The Futurists pursued an extreme iconoclastic line within the Proletkult movement which enraged Lenin (a conservative in cultural matters) and embarrassed Bogdanov and Lunacharsky. ‘It’s time for bullets to pepper museums,’ Mayakovsky wrote. He dismissed the classics as ‘old aesthetic junk’ and punned that Rastrelli should be put against the wall (rasstreliat in Russian means to execute). Kirillov, the Proletkult poet, wrote:
In the name of our tomorrow we shall burn Raphael
Destroy the Museums, crush the flowers of Art.20
This was by and large intellectual swagger, the vandalistic pose of second-rate writers whose readiness to shock far outstripped their own talents.
Stalin once described the writer as the ‘engineer of human souls’. The artists of the avant-garde were supposed to become the great transformers of human nature during the first years of the Bolshevik regime. Many of them shared the socialist ideal of making the human spirit more collectivist. They rejected the individualistic preoccupations of nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ art, and believed that they could train the human mind to see the world in a different way through modernist forms of artistic expression. Montage, for example, with its collage effect of fragmented but connected images, was thought to have a subliminal didactic effect on the viewer. Eisenstein, who used the technique in his three great propaganda films of the 1920s, Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October, based his whole theory of film on it. A great deal of fuss was made of the ‘psychic revolution’ which was supposed to be brought about by the cinema, the modernist art form par excellence, which, like the psychology of modern man, was based on ‘straight lines and sharp corners’ and the ‘power of the machine’.21
As the pioneers of this ‘psychic revolution’, the avant-garde artists pursued diverse experimental forms. There was no censorship of art at this time — the Bolsheviks had more pressing concerns — and it was an area of relative freedom. Hence there was the paradox of an artistic explosion in a police state. Much of this early Soviet art was of real and lasting value. The Constructivists, in particular artists such as Rodchenko, Malevich and Tatlin, have had a huge impact on the modernist style. This could not be said of Nazi art, or of what passed for art in Stalin’s day, the grim monumental kitsch of Socialist Realism. And yet, almost inevitably, given the youthful exuberance with which the avant-garde embraced this spirit of experimentalism, many of their contributions may seem rather comical today.
In music, for example, there were orchestras without conductors (both in rehearsal and performance) who claimed to be pioneering the socialist way of life based on equality and human fulfilment through free collective work. There was a movement of ‘concerts in the factory’ using the sirens, turbines and hooters as instruments, or creating new sounds by electronic means, which some people seemed to think would lead to a new musical aesthetic closer to the psyche of the workers. Shostakovich, no doubt as always with tongue in cheek, joined in the fun by adding the sound of factory whistles to the climax of his Second Symphony (‘To October’). Equally eccentric was the renaming of well-known operas and their refashioning with new librettos to make them ‘socialist’: so Tosca became The Battle for the Commune, with the action shifted to the Paris of 1871; Les Huguenots became The Decembrists and was set in Russia; while Glinka’s Life for the Tsar was rewritten as The Hammer and the Sickle.
There was a similar attempt to bring theatre closer to the masses by taking it out of its usual ‘bourgeois’ setting and putting it on in the streets, the factories and the barracks. Theatre thus became a form of Agitprop. Its aim was to break down the barriers between actors and spectators, to dissolve the proscenium line dividing theatre from reality. All this was taken from the techniques of the German experimental theatre pioneered by Max Reinhardt, which were later perfected by Brecht. By encouraging the audience to voice its reactions to the drama, Meyerhold and other Soviet directors sought to engage its emotions in didactic allegories of the revolution. The new dramas highlighted the revolutionary struggle both on the national scale and on the scale of private human lives. The characters were crude cardboard symbols — greedy capitalists in bowler hats, devilish priests with Rasputin-type beards and honest simple workers. The main purpose of these plays was to stir up mass hatred against the ‘enemies’ of the revolution and thus to rally people behind the regime. One such drama, Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Eisenstein in 1924, aroused such emotions that in the final act, when the German workers were shown storming the stronghold of the Fascists, the audience itself tried to join in. Every murdered Fascist was met with wild cheers. One spectator even drew his gun to shoot an actress playing the part of a Fascist cocotte; but his neighbours brought him to his senses.