One must not forget, however, that Soviet culture was founded on coercion. The state and party controlled all the institutions of arts education, creation, production and distribution. Artists had no choice but to conform to artistic controls, and audiences knew little but what the state provided them. The audience's apparent enjoyment of Soviet cultural products in pre-war years, and the deep response during the war, took place in the absence of competition. No less a legacy of Soviet culture is the wretched treatment of gifted artists, writers, composers. Those who died, and those who were hounded into silence, were also beloved by Soviet readers, and their legacy lives on.
The politics of culture, 1945-2000
JOSEPHINE WOLL
During the more than half a century covered in this chapter, the Soviet Union experienced a bewildering array of changes, up to and including its own demise. The final years of Stalin's life and rule, when the country had to regenerate itself after the devastation of the Second World War, involved major cultural repressions amid a climate of isolationism and xenophobia. Between Stalin's death in 1953 and the mid-1960s, Soviet officialdom shed its most tyrannical aspects, and despite frequent reimposition of cultural controls, artistic creativity flourished. Brezhnev's reign curtailed much of the dynamism characteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged during Gorbachev's five years of perestroika and glasnost'. Finally, after the upheavals that ended Gorbachev's rule, Russia now vies for attention and profit in a world market. In slightly more than half a century, then, the society has gone from absolute political centralisation to substantial if jagged decentralisation, from state-planned mega-economic structures to market-dependent enterprises, from power- and prestige-based hierarchies to money-based class structures. Its creative artists, once tacit partners with the state in a contract based on mutual support, must fend for themselves in a difficult and competitive environment.
Paralysis, 1945-53
Although Soviet culture was never entirely monolithic and univocal, it probably came closest to that condition between Victory Day (8 May 1945) and Stalin's death nearly eight years later. Broadly speaking, the arts in those years had nothing whatever to do with an artist's unique and untrammelled creative energies, and little to do with the art prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, born
My thanks to Caryl Emerson, Julian Graffy, Joan Neuberger, Robert Sharlet and Ron Suny for their extremely helpful comments and corrections on earlier drafts of this essay
of the marriage between state ideology and individual imagination. Rather, artistic products served 'to make conscious that which was made known in the language of decrees'.[42]
Within a year of the war's end, the nation's wartime unanimity of patriotic purpose disappeared, replaced by a reshuffled deck of social sectors with new allocations of privileges, rewards and penalties, and a welter of new domestic enemies. A miasma of belligerent isolation and xenophobia stifled wartime exposure to the outside world, and controls over culture tightened with dramatic harshness. Party leaders, often Stalin himself, 'selected the main themes and topics of literature and carefully supervised its ideological content', placing particular emphasis on both Russian and Soviet chauvinism, hatred of everything foreign and glorification of the Communist Party and of the country's ruler,[43] and favouring the epic genres - long novels, marathon narrative poems, historical films, operas - that most readily accommodated themselves to expressing these themes. During the Zhdanovsh.ch.ina, the crudest expression of the regime's general approach to the arts in the post-war years, every newspaper and journal joined the offensive against individual works and artists, excoriating the least suspicion of veracity, artistic independence ('formalism') and apoliticism ('ideological emptiness') and demanding militant, ideologically pure and edifying art. If artists wanted to address the real moral and social dilemmas of their world, they could do so only in the most oblique fashion; lakirovka, or make-believe, reigned supreme.
Andrei Zhdanov and his epigones vilified great artists, such as poet Anna Akhmatova, satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, film director Sergei Eisenstein, composers Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. But they scrutinised with equal vigilance individuals of considerably less talent and reputation: Ukrainian Petro Panch, for the brazen notion that the writer had the 'right' to make mistakes; playwright Aleksandr Gladkov, for his 'complete ignorance of Soviet man and an irresponsible attitude toward his own literature'; scriptwriter Pavel Nilin, whose play provided the basis for Leonid Lukov's film A Great Life (Bol'shaia zhizn'): 'In the imaginary people portrayed by Nilin there is no power of enthusiasm, no knowledge, no culture, which the Soviet man in the ranks, who matured during the years of the mighty growth of our state, bears within himself.'[44] The film itself, an attempt to portray with some degree of verisimilitude the life of miners in the Donbass, elicited a Central Committee ban (4 September 1946) as an 'ideologically and politically vicious' film, and artistically weak to boot.[45]
The rhetoric of assault, the shortcomings singled out for attack and the sanctions imposed recurred throughout the years 1945-53, with different segments of the creative intelligentsia targeted at different times. Music, for instance, tookits turn on the choppingblockin 1948, when the Central Committee made an example of composer Vano Muradeli and his 'vicious and inartistic' opera The Great Friendship (Velikaia druzhba). The State Museum of Modern Western Art was closed down in 1948, the same year that libraries were instructed to 'process' their holdings of foreign literature captured abroad during the war, and to eliminate once-acceptable domestic works that had slipped into disfavour through political vicissitudes, such as a novel expressing 'friendly feelings' for Communist Yugoslavia, now turned enemy under renegade Tito.
Chauvinist xenophobia rehabilitated the Russian past and hailed all aspects of Soviet life while denigrating everything Western. Seductively attractive foreign art masked a 'putrid, baneful bourgeois culture'. Soviet productions of foreign plays disseminated 'the propaganda of reactionary bourgeois ideology and morals'. Revised editions of books excised favourable references to foreign nations and negative details about Russia. A 1948 edition of Stepan Razin, a historical novel set in the seventeenth century, for instance, eliminated obscenities, gory descriptions of torture and details about body odour, bedbugs, flatulence and sex that suggested an 'uncivilized' Russia. New editions ofVsevolod Ivanov's 1922 novel and play, Armoured Train No. 14-69 (Bronepoezd No. 14-69), inserted tributes to the Russian people and interpolations about America's hostile role in the Far East during the civil war, including American plans 'to annex Siberia and China'.[46]
42
Evgeny Dobrenko, 'The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon', in Thomas J. Lahusen with Gene Kuperman (eds.),
43
Deming Brown,
44
George S. Counts and Nucia Lodge,
46
Herman Ermolaev,