1. How did socialist realism become a state doctrine?

Hi, everyone. My name is doctor Simon Huxtable.

I'm an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of

London.

I specialize in the history of Eastern Europe and,

in particular, media and culture.

So in today's lecture,

I'm gonna be talking about the evolution of Stalinist culture.

It's a subject that probably gets overlooked when we think

about the history of this period.

But actually, for the Soviet authorities,

culture was something that they took very seriously.

Stalin read manuscripts of novels and made comments on them.

He liked to critique new films,

and he watched them in his dacha with his colleagues.

So, you know,

this is a subject that the party took extremely seriously.

And in today's lecture,

I want to show how the arts and culture were vital tools for

the Soviet government.

Because in a state where propaganda was everywhere,

culture becomes part of a wider campaign,

not just to mobilize the con the population,

to build communism,

but also to create individuals imbued with communist ideals.

So I'm gonna start off with a discussion of one of the

keywords of today's lecture,

which is socialist realism and how social realism becomes a state doctrine.

In the second part of the lecture,

I'm gonna think about what mass culture is in a society that's

dominated by socialist realism.

In the third part of the lecture,

I'm gonna think about what culture means outside Russia,

so in the other Soviet republics.

And then in the final part of the talk,

I'm gonna talk about Stalinist violence and how that makes its

way into culture.

Okay.

So in the first part of today's lecture,

I want to think about the transition from the early post

revolutionary period,

which you may know as the period of the avant garde,

and this is the period where the meanings of culture are

really up for grabs,

to the period of what some historians have called cultural

revolution that led to the proclaiming of socialist

realism in the early nineteen thirties.

Okay.

So after the revolution,

Russia and the parts of the Russian empire that would

become the Soviet Union entered a civil war.

So some Bolshevik artists, writers,

and filmmakers traveled across the country on agit trains,

which toured the country,

bringing Bolshevik propaganda to the masses.

Others produced propaganda posters,

like this famous civil war poster by Elle Lissitzky,

which is called beat the whites with the red wedge.

After the Bolshevik victory came a period of consolidation.

You probably have heard of the new economic policy,

which is a period of state capitalism that was a response

to this crisis in the post civil war period.

So this is a time of eclecticism in the Soviet arts

where multiple trends coexist,

from vulgar commercial culture and imported films to orthodox

pro Bolshevik culture.

And while the state remains intolerant of certain forms of

cultural expression and criticism of the Bolsheviks

was, of course, off limits,

This period sees a kind of pluralism as artists

sympathetic to the revolution grapple with the questions,

what should Soviet culture look like,

and what should be its aims?

So for some artists,

Soviet culture needed to get closer to the worker and to the peasant.

So the proletarian culture movement or prolet cult was a

group of writers and intellectuals who thought that

communist art would only come about if workers and peasants

were empowered to make their own art.

At the same time,

there were constructionist artists who thought that art

should be useful.

Some of them, like Lyubov Popova and Veres de Parma,

designed clothes and textiles,

which were both attractive and could be mass produced.

Vladimir Taplin was an artist,

but he also designed a new wood burning stove that could be mass produced.

But for other artists,

the Soviet arts needed to change the audience's reaction to art.

Artists needed needed to use abstraction or fragmentation to

shape them from their slumber and make viewers see the world

in a new way and make them ready to build communism.

But after the Bolsheviks strengthened their control of

of power after the civil war,

none of these avant garde pro approaches actually seemed satisfactory.

So for example, the Proletcourt movement was led by one of Lenin's

opponents, Alexander Bogdanov,

which made it seem dangerous to the Bolsheviks.

Constructivist artists,

by shrinking the gap between art and life,

seemed to negate the very need for art.

And the modernists wrote and painted in such a way that

their artworks were inaccessible to the masses.

Nontraditional art seemed to alienate traditional viewers

and peasants and workers who wanted clear moral messages.

One peasant, at a meeting in the nineteen twenties,

complained of one story that, quote,

the author kept throwing us around here to there,

here to there, and didn't ever let us know where we were going.

All this writing is left in some kind of fog.

There's no connectedness in this reading.

End quote.

So interpretations like this seem to demand a more

accessible kind of art for the newly literate.

So this chaotic mix of movements and philosophies came

to an end at the start of the nineteen thirties when we see a

transition from the eclecticism of the net period to the

rigidity of a period that some historians call the great break.

What set it in motion was Stalin's decision to build

communism at a faster tempo,

first by collectivizing agriculture and then by

industrializing the country at breakneck speed.

So culture might seem peripheral to the tasks of the

first five year plan, but it was, in fact, central.

The party wanted culture to become a means of propaganda and persuasion.

It wanted the arts to make people want to build the

future, to show them how to do it,

and to make them thankful for the Bolsheviks in setting these priorities.

So in other words, like the avant garde before them,

writers, painters,

and filmmakers were charged with the task of turning art into life.

But if the party rejected avant garde ideas,

what would revolutionary art look like?

The answer was realism, socialist realism.

Realism was a product of the nineteenth century.

So you've probably read the novels of Russian realists like

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev.

And in those writers,

you can see in action one version of realism that says

that writers can describe the human psyche,

capture social reality,

and critique contemporary morals all at the same time.

But in fact, there was an alternative,

more radical version displayed in the novels of writers like

Maxim Gorky.

His nineteen o six novel, mother,

depicted the difficult lives of factory workers and showed how

the mother of the book's title has her life transformed by

subscribing to revolutionary ideals.

And it's this idea of Soviet art as revolutionary, optimistic,

and comprehensible to the masses that guides literary

practice and, in fact, all artistic practice under Stalin.

So in nineteen thirty two,

all literary movements were dissolved and reformed into a

single union of Soviet writers.

Two years later, a Soviet writers'

congress was held in the Kremlin to discuss literary matters.

It soon became clear that this meeting was designed to impose

a new form of literature by Diktat,

which was known as socialist realism.

At the meeting, the notorious Soviet ideologue, Andrei Shtyanov,

argued that the aim of socialist realism was to,

quote, depict reality in its revolutionary development.

And what this meant in reality was that novels should be

written in accessible language.

They should depict the fight to build socialism.

They should make use of exciting plots and heroes,

and they should show, really,

the lives of people who try to battle battle against the

elements, their enemies,

and their own physical limits to build factories or power plants.

In other words, to build communism.

But socialist realism didn't just affect literature.

Its tentacles stretched into the visual arts and even into music.

And in these less word centric media,

socialist realism tended to mean traditional.

In music, it meant tonal music, generally optimistic sounding,

which incorporated folk motifs.

For the visual arts, meanwhile,

socialist realism meant cutting out any form of abstraction or

formal experimentation in favor of traditional forms

and the depiction of laborers and peasants at work.

Or, of course, it meant depicting comrade Stalin.

And the Stalin cult was to become one of defining trades

of the arts and media from the nineteen thirties onwards.

Even though Stalin was a peripheral figure in the early

Bolshevik underground,

authoritative textbooks now wrote rewrote history to make

him one of the central figures,

while newspapers began to depict him with ever greater

regularity on their front pages.

In the arts, the Stalin cult manifested itself in paintings where

Stalin was depicted as the director of the country's

movement towards communism.

There's also a notable uptick in interest in strong leaders

from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great.

In the nineteen fifty film, The Fall of Berlin,

which depicts the capturing of the Reichstag in nineteen forty five,

The lead character even engages in a chaste kiss with the

Soviet leader.

And while such depictions were obviously excessive and seem

ridiculous today, they were also effective.

They helped imbue Stalin with this kind of religious aura,

which made him seem human and also otherworldly.

So we can say overall that socialist realism was an

attempt to simplify Soviet art and put an end to age old

arguments about what revolution culture should look like.

It was a form of culture oriented towards the widest

possible audience.

And for that reason, it was accessible,

but also lacking in complexity.

It also had the effect of squeezing out alternative ways

of writing, painting, or making music.

Great works like Mikhail Bulgakov's Master of Margarita

or Andrei Plautona's Foundation Pit were rejected by publishers

or consigned to the desk drawer,

or composers like Dmitri Shostakovich were forced to

renounce their avant garde experimentalism in favor of a

more accessible form of music.

And in the next part of my talk,

I want to ask what Soviet culture looked like once Soviet

realism had triumphed.