The moderate policies nurtured by Lunacharskii ensured that Soviet culture under NEP was rich and layered, offering something to many tastes.[26]Adherents could point with pride to advances in the cinema, to the verses of Mayakovsky or plays of Meyerhold, to the vigorous worker club movement. Perhaps their greatest triumph was unprecedented access ofthe proletariat to culture. Critics who rejected the revolution or felt that art must follow its own path could find solace in the splendid outburst of poetry, in the riches of the art world, in the splendid new theatre productions by directors such as Tairov and Evgenii Vakhtangov, by the reinvigorated opera and ballet companies of the former imperial theatres.[27] They could even read the rich flow of novels and poetry being produced by Russian emigres in Paris and Berlin.[28] Social ferment ensured a lively and sometime ferocious debate on cultural issues.
Moderate policies ensured that many modes of cultural expression received state support. In practice the Bolsheviks accepted the same cultural hierarchies that radical Leftists would make the primary target of revolution. Despite the obvious disloyalty of their staffs during the revolution, the former imperial theatres received lavish funding. The theatres responded by bringing their work to working-class audiences and creating a new repertory that tried to respond to revolutionary thematics. Still, much in the ballet and opera harked back to an aesthetic identified with imperial society.[29] Other innately conservative organisations, such as the musical conservatories and arts academies, continued to receive generous support, undergoing periodic outbursts of internal reform in which the state was as likely as not to support the forces of continuity. Institutions of higher education were still dominated by faculties trained long before the revolution, a situation that grew tense as the worker faculties brought more and more students radicalised by the revolution into universities. Younger people who felt that the revolution had been accomplished in their name found themselves marginalised within many Soviet institutions. Many devoted their energies to building secondary cultural organisations that seemed insignificant within the diversity of the 1920s, but would later mount a powerful assault against prevailing orthodoxies. Institutions that provided refuge for cultural radicals included local branches of the Komsomol, worker clubs and newspapers that gave space to worker correspondents (rabkors), who reported on local working-class affairs and whose exposes of local corruption were so trenchant that several were murdered.
The fate of two independent proletarian organisations that came to dominate cultural life in the late 1920s illustrates the dynamics of the 'Cultural Revolution', the radicalisation and subordination of culture to the party that was initiated in the late 1920s.[30] Artists and critics claimingto speakforthe working class created the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). They insisted on pursuing a narrowly proletarian agenda in the arts, and succeeded for several years during the First Five-Year Plan when the state gave members control of institutions of training, publication and production. The proletarians demanded that art present party agendas and proclaim the slogans of the day. They insisted that only workers could create a proletarian art (this despite the non-proletarian background of many RAPP and RAPM members). Above all they worked to excise certain forms of culture that betrayed bourgeois or aristocratic origins. Noble-born literary classics such as Pushkin and Tolstoy were declared out of date. Lyric poetry and the realist novel were to be replaced by so-called 'production' novels, which describe the industrial process as experienced by the working class.[31] Folk music, popular urban songs, jazz and most forms of classical music were no longer supported, and some were actively attacked. The tumult that accompanied the rise to power of RAPP and RAPM was replicated in theatres, editorial offices and educational institutions across the country. There was a dismal fall-off of artistic production in all branches of culture, and a wrenching turnover of personnel. Experienced creators and administrators were silenced or removed from office, and classics disappeared from stages and library shelves. Much of this activity took place in the years 1928-33, which coincided with radicalisation of Soviet social life. These were the years of the First Five-Year Plan, and of the collectivisation of agriculture.[32]
Just as it grew wary of policies that alienated common citizens from Soviet power, the party cooled towards proletarian arts organisations. Soviet leaders sought to stabilise cultural life in ways that would allow them to work productively with the 'creative intelligentsia' (as the artistic world came to be known in Soviet parlance) and to win back audiences alienated by radical art forms. Two new policies became the foundation of the state arts administration. The first was the creation of trade unions for creative artists, initially in literature, then in music and the visual arts. The unions allowed party and non-party artists to normalise their professional lives, including the commission and payment for their work. The second was the enunciation of an official Soviet aesthetic, called socialist realism, which rapidly became obligatory for all artistic expression.[33]
Socialist realism was declared the reigning method of Soviet literature at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Defined by Maxim Gorky as a continuation ofthe Russian realist tradition, the doctrine was infused with the ideology and optimism of socialism. Socialist realism was best characterised by the watchwords accessibility (dostupnost'), the spirit ofthe people (narodnost'), and the spirit of the party (partiinost'). Joseph Stalin provided an authoritative if vague formulation when he stated that socialist realism was 'socialist in content, national in form'. Writers were wise not to use fancy language, artists and composers not to be too refined in their techniques. The subjects and heroes of these works were usually uncomplicated, reliable and their politics predictable (if not always the core of the tale). Such works could be entertaining, as was Iurii Krymov's Tanker Derbent (1938), an adventure tale that hinged on an undisciplined crew brought together by their Communist captain. Socialist realism was unique only in that it was the sole method endorsed by the state. Soviet critics would have denied that this was new. Other ruling classes - the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie - had enforced establishment aesthetics through sponsorship and taste. Of course the proletariat would do the same.
26
Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'The "Soft" Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy 1922-1927',
27
Nick Worrall,
28
Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr. (eds.),
29
See Katerina Clark,
30
The term 'cultural revolution' was defined for Russia by Sheila Fitzpatrick in 'Cultural Revolution as Class War', in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),
31
Harriet Borland,
33
Boris Groys,