Perhaps this concrete sociological investigation reveals the essence of ‘socialist realism’ better than any theoretical criticism. Every system of art has its ‘model viewer’, and this model tells us more about the given system than any statements made by its supporters and opponents. Social changes bring about the death of old aesthetic dogmas, because the actually existing ‘model viewer’ begins to change, and then no declarations, threats or bans can save what has outlived itself. Here, however, we are anticipating somewhat.
In concluding our discussion of the Stalinist conception of artistic creativity we must describe one more of its characteristic features. According to this theory, art must be free from conflict (this was said openly), or else the conflicts or real life must be replaced by invented, illusory or secondary ones. Typical of the classical ‘socialist realism’ of the 1940s was a conscious utopianism, the creation of a ‘second reality’, of what André Malraux called ‘a fictitious world’.129 Art’s task here was not the cognition of reality by artistic means but the fashioning of an anti-reality while trying in every way to present this fictitious world as the only real one. For this reason ‘socialist realism’ was frequently and correctly described as ‘utopia in lifelike forms’.
What is true is not what actually exists but what ought to exist, what is ‘correct’ from the standpoint of official ideology. Lunacharsky spoke frankly on this point:
Imagine that a house is being built, and when it has been built it will be a splendid palace. But the building of it has not been finished yet, and you depict it in this unfinished state and say: ‘There’s your socialism for you — it’s got no roof on it!’ You will, of course, be a realist in saying that, you will be telling the truth: but it is immediately obvious that this truth is actually a lie.[!] Socialist truth can be spoken only by one who understands what sort of house is being built and how it is being built, and who knows that it will have a roof. A person who does not understand the course of development will never perceive the truth, because truth is not like its actual self [!!], it does not sit still, truth takes wing, truth is progress, truth is conflict, truth is struggle, truth is tomorrow, and it has to be seen like that. Whoever does not see it in that way is a bourgeois realist and therefore a pessimist, a moaner, and frequently a scoundrel and a falsifier — in any case, willingly or unwillingly, a counter-revolutionary and wrecker.130
Such an attitude as this fully justifies the persecution of Mikhail Bulgakov, the hushing-up of actual facts, the practice of censorship, and so on. There is really nothing else to be said on this matter. The division of truth into ‘harmful’ and ‘useful’, ‘needed’ and ‘not needed’, ‘big’ and ‘little’ is false in itself. Moreover, we have to bear in mind that it is the ruling class that has appropriated for itself the monopoly right to decide which truth is ‘needed’ and which is not. This approach to the ‘reflection’ of reality illustrates better than anything else the radical break with Marxism at which the Stalinist bureaucracy arrived. For comparison one can only quote Lenin, when he wrote: ‘We need full and truthful information. And the truth should not depend on whom it has to serve.’131
Socialist realism was therefore not realism at all but, so to speak, promises in the form of art. This art performed very important functions in the Soviet society of the 1930s and 1940s. The Stalinist ideology was not without solid foundations: it was based upon a particular type of psychology, social and individual, which had been formed by a totalitarian regime over two and a half decades. L.S. Vygodsky was quite right when he said that ‘no sociological investigation which is not supplemented by a psychological investigation will ever be able to reveal the most important cause of ideology, namely, the state of mind of social man.’132 In the last analysis, as Plekhanov observed, ‘All ideologies have a common root in the psychology of the epoch to which they belong.’133
Stalinist art served a well-defined purpose — to create the ‘optimum’ moral and psychological climate for subjecting the masses to barracks-communism’. It had to embellish people’s lives in a society suffering from poverty, repression and war, to create a utopian counterpoise to reality, and thereby to help people find the peace of mind that was desired.134 This was an art of promises in a period of great promises. In a country which was moving further and further away from socialism it had, along with propaganda, to create the illusion of ‘socialist construction’. ‘Socialist realism’ was, in the strictest sense, opium for the people, sedating and stupefying them. Finally, this same art had to educate people for totalitarian collectivism. Architecture had a special role to play here. At a time when many families were huddled together in ‘communal’ flats, the state was building enormous edifices which were then thought beautiful. The function of this architecture was to make the citizens’ collective life more attractive than their individual lives. More than that: the poorer, harder, more squalid their individual lives were, the more attractive would their official, collective life become. This second life was no less real than the first, perhaps even more so. In Moscow they built a magnificent Metro, with stations like the halls of palaces, although their décor was excessively luxuriant in accordance with the taste of the nomenklatura. Soviet skyscrapers were built in the ‘Stalinist baroque’ style. The same purpose was served by organizing demonstrations on public holidays, bringing everyone together in a mood of celebration. The same sentiments had to be fostered by the theatre, films, painting and literature. It was an idea that spread from one work to another.
The utopian world of pseudo-art had its own laws and its own heroes. Characteristic of it was, as V. Kardin wrote later in the journal Teatr, ‘a cold pomposity’. One was shown ‘a significant conflict between a beardless worker-innovator and a grey-bearded conservative professor’. There appeared on the stage ‘intellectuals poisoned by the venom of grovelling [before Western achievements? — Trans.] and restored to new life through a talk with a wise housewife or a shrewd Party organizer. ’135
Constant lying and toadying corrupts people. Stalinist ‘socialist realism’ did not create a single significant work of art, nor did Stalinism create anything valuable in any other branch of culture. Bureaucratic totalitarianism and spiritual creativity proved incompatible. Stalinism, as one of the critics grouped around Novy Mir wrote later,
dried up the scholar as well as the writer. The system of literary prizes, the pre-determined analysis and evaluation of works, the impossibility of disputing the aesthetic standards laid down from ‘on high’, the dogmatism, the ostentation, the verbosity, all gradually destroyed the scholar’s personal, subjective approach to literature. And without this there can be neither love for art — one can love only in one’s own way and not otherwise — nor creative thinking about it: one can reveal only what is ‘one’s own’, it is impossible to ‘reveal’ another person’s ideas.136