The extended discussion here on Russian culture under Stalin is due to the importance that the culture-war between the USSR and the USA took, having repercussions that were not only world-wide but lasting.
II
Stalinism and the Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism’
The contending outlooks of Stalinist Russia and the USA on the arts during the ‘cold war’ era have been referred to as the ‘Cultural Cold War’. The arts were◦– and remain◦– an important part of US subversion against the traditional cultures of the world in the US bid for a ‘new world order’. ‘Cultural imperialism’ is a primary means of imposing the ‘American dream’ over the world by breaking down the unique cultures of peoples and nations, to be replaced by the ‘American’ concepts of the ‘Global Shopping Mall’ and the ‘Global Factory’, with a uniform ‘world culture’, and world consumer market.
Stalinist Russia recognised the importance of the cultural question in maintaining its own cultural integrity and resisting American globalism. Stalinist Russia realised that nihilistic trends in the Left, including those within the USSR, were a corrupting influence, and worked in conjunction with America’s ‘Cultural Cold War’. As previously seen, Zhdanov had already launched an attack on corrupting trends in the arts, and sought to define a ‘Soviet culture’ that was rooted more in the folk-soul of Russia and of Europe, than in Marxist doctrine.
In 1949, the same year that America launched a decade’s long world offensive in the arts, Chernov returned to and developed Zhdanov’s theme, and termed cultural degeneracy ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. The term is precise in describing the character of artistic nihilism. Rootless cosmopolitans produce their art as narcissists detached◦– rootless◦– from any cultural heritage. Here, as in foreign policy, anti-Stalinist Leftists, anarchists and Trotskyites converged with the American ‘Establishment’ against a common enemy: the USSR. Ironically, the USSR served as a bulwark of classical Russo-European culture, purged of Leftist doctrines, while the USA promoted cultural-Bolshevism and patronised sundry extreme Left artists and art theorists, and continues to promote ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the arts as a strategy.
Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called ‘American’ art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure in Abstract Expressionism, was sponsored by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project, 1938-42, along with other Leftist artists painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime. Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the socialist realism sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts that had been experimental and as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional. On the other hand, American Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.
Many of the theorists, patrons and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyists or other types of anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA foreign policy. In 1947 the US State Department organised a modernist exhibition called ‘Advancing American Art’ which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.[73]
The Trotskyites had formed an alliance with the anarchists of the modernist movement on the basis of Trotskyite condemnation of Stalinist art policy. It was a cultural offensive that was to be taken on board by the CIA, the Rockefellers and other globalists and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, to use the Stalinist phrase. In 1938 André Breton[74], Mexican communist muralist Diego Rivera[75] and Leon Trotsky issued a manifesto entitled: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art[76]. The manifesto was published in the Autumn 1938 issue of The Partisan Review, a Marxist magazine that was of significance in the Cold War. Trotsky, according to Bretton, had written the Manifesto, which states:
Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity… Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws that govern intellectual creation.
In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible… The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the status of domestic servants of the regime… If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union… True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time◦– true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society… We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy…[77]
The criterion for art given here by Trotsky seems more in the nature of Breton’s anarchism and of the future New Left than of the collectivist nature of Marxism. However, Trotsky, like the CIA and the wealthy American patrons of modernism, recognised the value of modernism as a method of subversion. F Chernov, whose important statement on the arts from a Stalinist viewpoint will be considered below, was to refer to such art as ‘nihilism’. Given that the manifesto was published in The Partisan Review, which was later to receive subsidies from the CIA, Trotsky’s theories provided the basis for the CIA’s ‘cultural cold war’, and for the modernist art movement that developed as an assault upon tradition with the eager patronage of ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ plutocrats such as the Rockefellers and Saatchis.[78]
As Trotsky exhorted in his manifesto, this art is divorced from any cultural legacy or tradition, individualised and uprooted. There is no room for a national or ethnic culture, nor even the ‘proletarian◦– folk◦– culture’ that ‘socialist realism’ represented in Stalinist Russia, but only for cosmopolitan, nihilistic, hyper-individualised art-forms; what American conservative theorist Wilmot Roberston called ‘the atomisation of art’.[79] It is from this milieu that the CIA and the globalists recruited their agents and dupes to create their world cultural revolution.
Trotsky wrote Towards a Free Revolutionary Art as a call for mobilisation by artists throughout the world, an ‘Artists of the World Unite!’ Manifesto, to oppose on the cultural front Fascism and Stalinism, which to many Leftists and Communists are synonymous. Trotsky wrote:
73
Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters (New York: The New Press, 1999), 256.
74
Breton was the founding father of Surrealism. Joining the Communist Party in 1927 he was expelled in 1933 because of his association with Trotsky. Breton wrote of Surrealism in 1952: ‘It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognised itself’.
75
In Mexico Trotsky lived with Diego Rivera and then with Diego’s wife the artist Frida Kahlo, having reached Mexico in 1937, where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940.
It is of interest that Rivera was commissioned personally by John D Rockefeller Jr to paint the mural for the RCA lobby of the prestigious Rockefeller Center, which was being constructed in 1931 as a showplace for Rockefeller power. Abby, John D Rockefeller Jr’s wife, had bought Rivera’s paintings for her personal collection, had Rivera’s art exhibited at the Rockefeller controlled Museum of Modern Art, and had socialised with Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Nelson Rockefeller negotiated the commission with Rivera. The theme was to be: ‘Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future’. With such a theme it should be obvious as to how it would be interpreted by an enthusiastic communist, whose sketch depicted a falling capitalism with the bright future of fluttering red flags and a saintly visage of Lenin. Because of press ridicule over a capitalist subsiding a piece of revolutionary art, the mural was reluctantly dismantled. Ron Chernow, Titan: the Life of John D Rockefeller Sr (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1998), 669-670.
76
Leon Trotsky, André Breton, Diego Rivera, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 25 July 1938.