A more immediate need in the years of revolution was to mobilise popular support, by means of agitation, propaganda and education. The classic distinction of agitation and propaganda belongs to Lenin. According to him, agitation was a short-term activity that informed the masses of tasks for the immediate future and enlisted them on the side of progress. Propaganda was instructive and enlightening, aimed at establishing deeper understanding of the goals of the revolution.[15] Agitation was essential during the revolution, for it allowed the Bolsheviks to recruit the worker masses into the Red Guard and Red Army, and to defeat better-situated opponents. Many Bolshevik leaders had been underground journalists and were masterful communicators.
When the newsprint shortage and a transport crisis made communication difficult, they devised ingenious new methods. ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency), the first Soviet press agency, hired artists in a number of large cities to produce posters on current events in a popular cartoon style presenting the Bolshevik point of view. The army and Narkompros organised so-called agit-trains. Staffed by journalists, actors, orators and leading members of the government, agit-trains would typically arrive in a town or village, interview local Bolsheviks (if there were any) and residents, write up their findings into a newspaper that was printed aboard the train and then show a movie in the evening. A visible presence could be decisive in bringing locals over to the Bolshevik cause.
Though instrumental in the civil war effort, agitation could not serve the Bolsheviks' long-term needs. Strapped for funds upon conclusion of the war and with an economy in ruins, the government undertook to create a new Soviet consciousness. Schools were rebuilt in villages and towns, and new teachers hired to teach children who, in many cases, had not seen school for five years. The Commissariat of Enlightenment issued new curricula based on the progressive education theories of John Dewey, embodied by the elementary school curriculum borrowed from Dalton, Massachusetts. A reality of under-educated and overworked teachers with poor facilities meant that many reforms were never realised. In higher education, curricular reform was complicated by ambitious programmes to recruit working-class students, who never before had access to higher learning. Rabfaks (worker faculties) were created to prepare these students for the rigours of study, laying the ground for years of conflict between students and their professors, most of whom still hailed from the privileged classes. Tensions grew throughout the 1920s until finally a new generation of younger 'Red' professors replaced older faculty
members. [16]
The belief that Soviet Russia would breed new forms of culture based on new forms of social life was borne out only partially. The cultural life of most Russians was vastly different by the mid-i920s from what it had been in the final years of the Romanov dynasty. The face of art had changed as well. Artists spoke with a voice unimaginable before the revolution, and in the voices of people - above all the urban working class - silent under the Old Regime. New, revolutionary art forms represented the fragmented consciousness of modern urban life and its hostility to traditional ruling norms. The need to respond to new realities, to find new purposes for art, to appeal to a new audience and even to find a new language or mode of expression caused an unrivalled outburst of creative activity.
Writers discovered that the revolution had remade the very stuff of their work, the Russian language. The coherent social structures that had been the foundation of the Russian novel had disappeared, and prose writers retreated to shorter fragmentary forms. Although writers produced very little of lasting value during the revolution, they responded with a burst of innovative prose in the early 1920s. Readers who preferred a traditional narrative found the civil war experience related in Chapaev (1923), a novel by Dmitrii Furmanov, who had himself served the real Chapaev as commissar. In Cement (1925), Fedor Gladkov gave readers a working-class hero who fought in the civil war and returned to civilian life to reconstruct a local cement factory. These two novels, whose heroes and narratives conformed in many ways to the classic literary canon, were later declared forerunners of the official Soviet literary style, socialist realism.[17] Aleksei Tolstoy published the first two volumes of his trilogy Road to Calvary (Khozhdeniepo mukam), which chronicled the tortured path of a well-born intellectual through the revolution.
The realistic narratives of these and other writers were challenged by a strong element ofmodernism in Soviet literature. Fragmented narrative styles were well suited for a time when prevailing social structures had broken down. Isaak Babel' 's compact tales of the civil war, published under the title of Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), provided classic heroes of bravery and natural grace, but disconcerted readers by describing unjustifiable acts of brutality. Boris Pil'niak's Naked Year (Golyi god) (1921) reflected the era through a town seemingly unaware of the revolution, whose residents slowly succumb to its dislocations. His prose seems plotless and fragmentary, and his language heterogeneous, as if overwhelmed by new words and ideas. A more comic approach to social change was found in the feuilletons of Mikhail Zoshchenko, an enormously popular writer of the NEP era. Set loose in booming urban centres, his narrators and characters absorbed the new language of Soviet Russia without fully understanding it, producing comic malapropisms that cut to the heart of the new Soviet consciousness.
The poetic heirs of Aleksandr Blok and the Symbolists were many and diverse, and they met the revolution with responses ranging from hostility to welcome. Though he had sought to uncover ineffable truths with his verse, Blok's legacy lay equally in changes he brought to Russian poetic language and form. Blok was able to weave ideal beauty and the coarseness of modern urban life into a single poetic form. He perceived and responded to the storm gathering over Russian society in such poems as The Field ofKulikovo (Na pole Kulikovom) (1908) and Retribution (Vozmezdie) (1910-21). Poets responded to his challenge either by seeking a new balance for modern verse, as classical verse had once possessed, or by created a fragmented, unbalanced poetic form appropriate to modern life. The poetic ideal once created by Pushkin featured a harmonic expressive control; modern poets no longer had such a world to describe. Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky sought inspiration in a non-standard sources, including popular urban ditties called chastushki, and introduced new and sometimes vulgar words into the poetic lexicon, to yield a new range of expressive abilities. They grabbed readers' attention with public scandals and manifestos that included A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu), published by David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov in 1913.[18] The Futurist taste for urban modernism contrasted with the classical balance sought by Acmeists, a group organised by Nikolai Gumilev, whose most elegant voices would be Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel'shtam.
The October Revolution saw young poets respond in a number of ways. Mayakovsky declared the revolution to be his own and dedicated his work to its cause. The younger Boris Pasternak was far more ambivalent towards the revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva rejected the revolution and wrote from the Paris emigration. Each found in modernism a fragmentation of metre, rhyme and the poetic line that corresponded to their emotional needs and social experience. Each developed an intensely personal style and lyrical voice. Mayakovsky's claim that poetry was obliged to participate in social change proved fertile in his case, but did not hold true for all. The revolution demanded that literature change with the times. Yet time has proven the value of poetry that cultivated its own values, arranging words in musical patterns and bringing out the distinct and fundamental meaning of language. Poets who gathered under the banner of Acmeism, most prominently Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam, answered to these tasks. Refusing to march with the times, never ignoring the world around them, both Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam wrote verse of tremendous gravity and integrity.[19]
15
For an earlier distinction, see Allan K. Wildman,
16
Larry E. Holmes,
17
Edward Brown,
18
Vladimir Markov,
19
Clare Cavanagh,