To what degree did this mixture of repression and education produce the desired result? On the one hand, Church and state sources of the period both reported a sharp decline of religiosity in the cities, especially among the young. There was also no shortage of testimony from the countryside that prerevolutionary peasant anticlericalism had grown into religious indifference during NEP, among village males in particular. Frequently, the mock processions staged by the Komsomol to parody Easter and Christmas worship bitterly split villages along generational lines. On the other hand, the Church and state regarded peasant women as consistently devout. And in the realm of religion-as-social-ritual, some who ceased observing (including party members) nevertheless hedged their bets by baptizing their children or undergoing a second, church wedding. Soviet attempts to raise labour productivity by eliminating the numerous rural religious holidays were unqualified failures, while at the same time traditional apocalyptic formulas—including the coming of the Antichrist—entered the world of peasant rumour when the threat of collectivization grew. In the end, it is not possible to quantify the level of religious belief in the 1920s since the 1926 census contained no query about it, but in 1937 57 per cent of the population still identified themselves as believers (45 per cent of those in their twenties, but 78 per cent of those in their fifties). In sum, formal religion loosened its hold on Soviet society during NEP, especially among the younger and urban segments. Since this drop was both incomplete and not accompanied by the eradication of Russian belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs, however, the official state position by 1929 was that the most important anti-religious work still lay ahead.
All dimensions of the new world view converged in high and popular art. As NEP opened, the revolutionary society was already embroiled in controversy over how best to reconstruct culture. Could a proletarian culture evolve organically, or must the new society first master bourgeois elements and build further? Opinions differed. Revolutionary intellectuals in an aggressive institution called ‘Proletkult’ (Proletarian Cultural-Educational Institutions) wanted to create an entirely new culture to operate independently of government institutions (especially Narkompros), and to receive extensive state support. In addition, artists working both inside and outside the Proletkult championed a number of movements—Futurism, Constructivism, Objectivism, Acmeism, Cubism, and others—rooted in pre-revolutionary radical expression that was now liberated. And among the intelligentsia that comprised much of the party leadership, many agreed with Lenin and Trotsky that Soviet society must make bourgeois aesthetics the basis of proletarian culture. In 1921–9, all these views reached the public.
It was no coincidence that in a country battling against illiteracy, the Bolsheviks placed special emphasis on the visual arts. The party had been an innovator in the political applications of poster art in its rise to power, and it continued to rely on this powerful means for influencing mass attitudes. The revolutionaries placed strong faith in other visual media as well. The cinematic and thematic innovations of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevelod Pudovkin put the Soviets in the front rank of world film in the 1920s. They and others combined the art of political persuasion with imagery and techniques unprecedented in the medium. Frequently they succeeded too well, however, and their sophisticated presentations baffled their intended audience, who in the 1920s continued to prefer escapist American and German adventure films to those designed for their edification.
Painting and sculpture entered the process in a related way. Simply put, pre-revolutionary experimental artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Vasilii Kandinskii viewed art as an essentially spiritual activity free of ideological or other restraints, and they and like-minded others continued to produce prolifically during the 1920s. But their view collided with the conception of art advanced by the likes of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko—that the artist was essentially an engineer in the service of proletarian society, that his art must not only be beautiful, but useful. Acting on slogans like ‘art into life’ and ‘art is as dangerous as religion as an escapist activity’, these Constructivists produced works that not only celebrated the mechanistic, materialist world-view, but demonstrated how to implement it. Such thinking inspired art, not all of it strictly Constructivist, that ranged from the idealization of ordinary objects to a more noble representation of labourers.
The artistic currents also influenced architecture. One did not have to be a communist to envision a future world of skyscrapers and rationally designed, utilitarian working and living spaces. In the first half of the 1920s, economic scarcity largely limited innovation to the realm of conceptualization, but the ideas were imaginative and diverse—garden cities, symmetrical urban utopias, and high-rise apartment dwellings. After 1925, however, it became possible actually to carry out designs that fostered additional creativity. Everything from the redesign of household furniture to workers’ clubs and massive public buildings became the object of architectural scrutiny, and the Soviet pavilion was by far the most radical at the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts.
NEP influenced the non-visual arts as well. In music, important emigrations weakened the ranks of classical composers, despite the emergence of Dmitrii Shostakovich in the mid-1920s. In popular culture, while Nepmen supported pre-revolutionary forms, jazz made its first inroads, but met with a mixed review from the party. In literature, the situation was different. A variety of poets and satirists—Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Zoshchenko—evoked every emotion, from shocking society out of its bourgeois complacency to scoring the foibles of the new regime. Fedor Gladkov’s Cement was the first proletarian novel, but many others soon delved into the revolutionary experience. New works recounted heroic events and employed the genre of science fiction to put forward utopian and dystopian visions.
By the late 1920s, however, eclecticism in the arts came under as much fire as did gradualism in other spheres. Militants in the Komsomol, Institute of Red Professors, and a number of organizations such as RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) grew impatient and pressed for a more rapid adoption of proletarian values. Youthful exuberance, idealism, and the results of protracted exposure to state propaganda inspired confrontations over a correct social politics and led to the removal of gradualists and the former bourgeoisie from positions of influence. In short, the pre-conditions of Stalinism that had emerged in politics and economics converged with a predisposition towards cultural revolution. At the end of the decade, the strategy of creating a new world-view shifted from inculcation to imposition.
Conclusion