Socialist realism became the criterion by which all art and culture was to be measured. The doctrine of socialist realism came, in fact, from Stalin, refined by the writer Maxim Gorky, as a way to describe life in direct, understandable ways, but in ways that would uplift the subject towards the goals of fulfilling socialism. Socialist realism was a dogma of art that was unapologetically didactic. It was not necessarily a recipe for saccharine sweet or escapist depictions of socialist plenty and happiness, even though much of socialist realist art degenerated to that level. The doctrine, as applied by censors, and even by Stalin himself, allowed for, and even demanded, the portrayal of conflict and sacrifice, even tragedy, but always with a moral message. That message was that the cause of building socialism was greater than the individual, that the individual found self-realisation only by denying selfish interests, by dissolving individual will into the will of the collective, and by giving the self completely to the cause of socialism and in the striving for socialism.
In practice, socialist realism found expression in representational and clearly programmatic forms, whether in literature, music, painting, film or other artistic genres. And while the dogma dictated the form in general, it did not entirely stifle creativity or breed simplicity. Socialist realist art did not always take the form of 'boy meets tractor'. In music, for example, the composers Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev abandoned the high formalist experimentation of their earlier careers after serious political censure and public humiliation. Both composers turned back to classical melodic and symphonic forms, but they continued to produce great works of music. The writer Valentin Katayev's novel Time Forward! (Vremia vpered) - about the heroic struggles by a young couple to overcome adversity and even sabotage on an industrial construction site - became a much and often poorly copied model of socialist realism in action. The movie Chapaev (1934) provided film history as well as Soviet audiences with grand action and heroes on a larger-than-life scale. Sergei Eisenstein's film epics Aleksandr Nevskii and Ivan Groznyi (Ivan the Terrible) are regarded as movie classics, just as Shostakovich's music score for Aleksandr Nevskii ranks as a musical and choral classic.
If socialist realism did not entirely stifle creativity, neither did it preclude truly popular forms of entertainment. American jazz music found an enthusiastic audience in the USSR during the 1930s, as did Charlie Chaplin movies. The country had no lack of its own schmaltzy radio ballroom crooners. P. Mikhailov was one of the best known, though by no means the only, of the radio singers of the late 1930s. His song 'The Setting Sun' was one of the most popular of the period - a syrupy ballad about palm trees and moonlight on an exotic Black Sea shore. Escapist musicals, Hollywood style, were also popular, but with a revolutionary Soviet twist. The film A Wealthy Bride (Bogataia nevesta) (1:937) portrayed the life of joy and plenty on a collective farm. It showed often on the wide screen, replete with copious amounts of food and drink, boisterous pranks, light romance and big choral numbers involving happy singing peasants in fecund marketplaces and in fields redolent of grain.
The Stalinist regime enforced aesthetic norms by extending monopoly control over the organisation of all cultural production. Intrusion of the state into the country's cultural life went hand in glove with the extension of state power into the economy. Culture became a front, in the militarised language of the day, just as did the economy, in the campaign to mobilise the country to build socialism. Thus, any artist or writer who worked professionally had to belong to a corresponding union, which was closely regulated by the party and subject to state censorship review. Decisions about what constituted acceptable socialist realist art could be arbitrary and depended greatly on the political and even personal politics of the union organisations, censorship boards and the artists themselves. Shostakovich, for example, regularly introduced modernist elements into his music. He covered himself and his music with a politically acceptable title or dedication, but while the lack of exactitude in aesthetic definitions allowed some leeway in artistic endeavour, that vagueness could also be dangerous. Shostakovich found himself more than once fearing for his life as well as his artistic career under the scrutiny of Stalin's personal displeasure. Many artists wrote or composed 'for the desk drawer', realising that their work would very likely not pass censors, or deciding simply not to take the risk of being public cultural figures. Others abandoned creative production and retreated into safer but related activities. The writer Boris Pasternak spent much of the 1930s and 1940s producing his now famous series of translations of Shakespeare into Russian.
The middle 1930s witnessed a conservative turn in Stalin's social as well as cultural policies. The new Soviet morality rebuffed the liberalising trends of the 1920s and the cultural revolution of the early 1930s and heralded a return to traditionally gendered roles. 'Communist virtue' for men extolled patriarchal values ofmanliness and patriotism, duty and discipline, and family. The heroine welder in Ostrovskii's How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalialas' stal') - who could smoke, curse and shimmy down ropes from high altitudes just as well as any man - no longer provided a role model for women. Soviet advertising in the relative abundance of the mid- and late 1930s appealed to women as domestic and feminine consumers, not as revolutionary equals with men.[16] In the new morality, women were encouraged to provide the moral and emotional support for their worker husbands in the building of socialism. Official propaganda stressed child-bearing as the highest duty for women under socialism. Family and education were touted as the foundation of socialist society.[17]
Stringent laws reinforced these values. The series of family laws passed in 1936 were the most comprehensive of these and reversed many of the progressive statutes of the 1926 set of family laws. The new laws affirmed the nuclear family and made divorce more difficult to obtain. Abortion became a criminal offence once again, with severe jail penalties for both women and abortionists, although women continued to have abortions, and doctors continued to give them in large numbers. Child-support laws were strengthened, as were criminal statutes for men, primarily, failing to provide court-ordered family support. For a brief period, police even considered the idea of placing a special stamp in the internal passports of men who owed child support so that they could be traced.
Nationality under Stalin
Stalinist leaders sought to reconstruct Soviet nationalities on the same broad scale that they did society, culture and moral values. The peoples of the Soviet Union were to be mapped, schematised and rationalised - engineered, in a word - just as was the land, the economy and the human soul. Constructing nationality was not unique to Stalinism or to the Soviet Union. Most European states engaged in some form of nation-building, based on criteria of inclusion and exclusion, but the Soviet experiment differed fundamentally from the nation-building projects of other states. The Soviet state was not a nation- state, such as France or Germany, but a state of nations, a conglomeration of national political governments under a central controlling state system. The only other state resembling this model had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had been torn asunder by the strains of the Great War. Stalin understood - or at least he thought he understood - the explosive potential of national identity and, while he did not openly repudiate the conciliatory policies of the 1920s, he gave nationality issues a new politicised importance that they had not had.
16
Amy Randall, 'The Campaign for Soviet Trade: Creating Socialist Retail Trade in the 1930s', Ph. D. diss., Princeton University, 2000.
17
DavidHoffmann,