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The De-Stalinization of Soviet Culture After 1953
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Russia – Soviet Art and Culture, 1953-1991
In this course, Dr Simon Huxtable (Birkbeck, University of London) discusses art and culture from the death of Stalin until the collapse of the Soviet Union, 1953-1991. In the first lecture, we explore the de-Stalinization of art and culture orchestrated by Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. In the second lecture, we investigate the evolution of Soviet youth culture as greater freedom allowed for a growth of alternative style and music. Third, we look at art and culture in the years of Leonid Brezhnev and the increasing repression of culture leading to a growth in popularity of underground cultures. Finally, in the fourth lecture, look at art and culture under Mikhail Gorbachev and understand how Soviet culture in these years contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The De-Stalinization of Soviet Culture After 1953
In this lecture we think about de-Stalinization of Soviet Culture after 1953, focussing on: (i) the impact of Joseph Stalin’s death, creating an atmosphere in which Soviet art and literature saw a brief period of greater freedom, allowing artists to experiment and criticize Stalinism, exemplified by works like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962); (ii) Nikita Khrushchev's conservative tastes ultimately led to a return of state control, limiting artistic freedom, however not to the extent seen under Stalin; (iii) although some works challenging Soviet ideals were published, the limits on creativity remained tight, with repressive censorship still in place.
Hi, everyone. My name is Doctor Simon Huxtall.
00:00:06I'm an honorary research fellow in the Department of Historical
00:00:08Studies at Birkbeck University of London,
00:00:11and I specialize in the history of Eastern Europe, particular,
00:00:13media and culture.
00:00:16So this is the second of two lectures on Soviet culture.
00:00:18In the previous lecture,
00:00:21we saw how Soviet culture was transformed under Stalin.
00:00:22Socialist realism came to dominate Soviet art and literature,
00:00:25squeezing out alternative ideas of what Soviet art could be.
00:00:28We also saw how the inclusive cultural politics of the
00:00:32nineteen twenties,
00:00:35which encouraged artists outside Russia to create art in
00:00:36their native language, gave way to suspicion and repression.
00:00:40We also learned how violence was written through Stalinist
00:00:44culture like a stick of rock.
00:00:47So the audiences were encouraged not just to be on
00:00:48their guard against enemies,
00:00:50but to hate and maybe even destroy them.
00:00:52So today, we'll show how Stalin's death created new freedoms for artists.
00:00:55But as we'll see,
00:00:59the loosening of restrictions created problems for the Soviet authorities,
00:01:00which they could only resolve by turning to older methods of repression.
00:01:04So in part one of today's talk,
00:01:08I'll focus on the process of de Stalinizing Soviet art after
00:01:09nineteen fifty three.
00:01:13Then in part two, I'll look at Soviet youth culture,
00:01:14which was increasingly central in this postwar period.
00:01:17Then in the third and fourth parts,
00:01:20I'll look at the repressions of the Brezhnev era,
00:01:22then examine the collapse of cultural restrictions under
00:01:24Gorbachev.
00:01:27So moving into part one now.
00:01:30For most of the period we're discussing today,
00:01:32the period from nineteen fifty three to nineteen ninety one,
00:01:34socialist realism remained the officially mandated state doctrine.
00:01:37But what socialist realist meant was now up for grabs.
00:01:42So one important attempt to think about what socialist
00:01:45realism meant was by the literary critic Vladimir
00:01:49Pomerantsev.
00:01:53So nine months after Stalin's death,
00:01:54he published an influential essay with the title On
00:01:57Sincerity.
00:02:00And in it, he argued that to serve the revolution,
00:02:01a writer needed to identify problems and to write about
00:02:04them truthfully so that they could be resolved.
00:02:07And he argued that Stalinist art,
00:02:10with its images of happiness and abundance,
00:02:12had failed to do that.
00:02:14So he used the term varnishing to argue that Stalinist art had
00:02:16put a positive gloss on everyday problems.
00:02:19But he argued that true art needed to be sincere.
00:02:22It couldn't shy away from the country's problems,
00:02:25and it had to focus on people, not machines.
00:02:27So this word sincere becomes an important term after Stalin's death.
00:02:31One of the first examples of this sincere art was in Oberma
00:02:36by the journalist and critic, Ilya Ehrenberg.
00:02:40So Ehrenberg told the story of an authoritarian factory
00:02:43manager and his relationship with his long suffering wife.
00:02:46At some point, as winter turns to spring,
00:02:49the wife decides to leave her husband and begin a new life.
00:02:52And Ehrenberg called this novel the Thor.
00:02:55And this metaphor of the thaw,
00:02:58obviously has a resonance in the Soviet Union,
00:03:00where spring is accompanied by a melting of ice and snow.
00:03:03So for Ehrenberg,
00:03:06the thaw represented a change in the characters'
00:03:08lives and a change in emotional mood,
00:03:10and maybe even a change in political mood.
00:03:12And even though Khrushchev hated the term Thor,
00:03:15this idea of the Khrushchev era as the Thor has stuck because
00:03:18the country itself seems to undergo this similar process of
00:03:22warming up from the icy atmosphere of Stalinism.
00:03:25Now as you'll probably know,
00:03:29the key symbol of the thaw is Khrushchev's secret speech at
00:03:30the twentieth party congress.
00:03:34At a secret sent,
00:03:36session of the congress in February nineteen fifty six,
00:03:38Khrushchev told his audience that Stalin had repressed party
00:03:41members and national minorities,
00:03:44was unprepared for the German invasion,
00:03:46and had become paranoid in the years before his death.
00:03:48Once news of the speech leaked out,
00:03:52the result was shock and anger,
00:03:54but also a sense of possibility.
00:03:56Now that Khrushchev was effectively renouncing terror,
00:03:58artists could experiment with less fear.
00:04:01And if Stalin's personality and his actions could be
00:04:05criticized, then maybe other things could be too.
00:04:07So nineteen fifty six really becomes a year of criticism in
00:04:10workplaces, on the streets, in the press,
00:04:14and also in literature.
00:04:17So one of the key symbols was a novel by Vladimir Dudintsev
00:04:19called Not Buy Bread Alone.
00:04:22And this book tells the story of a physicist,
00:04:24Dmitriy Lipatkin,
00:04:26whose new invention is blocked by bureaucrats who dislike his
00:04:28criticisms and have him arrested on false charges.
00:04:31By the end of the book, Lipatkin is freed,
00:04:35and his invention goes into production.
00:04:37But this ending is not entirely happy.
00:04:39The bureaucrats who obstructed his invention and sent him to
00:04:41prison are still in position at the end of the novel.
00:04:45So this novel was published in August nineteen fifty six in
00:04:48the New World Literary Journal,
00:04:51and it immediately becomes a hit.
00:04:53The Soviet reading public recognizes this novel as a
00:04:55really important critique of Stalinism.
00:04:58So interests couldn't keep up with demand.
00:05:01So issues of the journal were passed from person to person to
00:05:04allow everybody who needed to, who wanted to,
00:05:07to read this novel.
00:05:10Students in particular were inspired by Not by Bread alone.
00:05:12They used Udindsev's book to critique the rote learning, rigidity,
00:05:16and lack of questioning that were rife in Stalinist schools
00:05:20and universities.
00:05:23So we could say that in nineteen fifty six,
00:05:25to some extent, the arts spun out of the party's control.
00:05:27Although the censorship system is still in place,
00:05:31even though censors were confused about what was allowed
00:05:33and what wasn't allowed, effectively,
00:05:36between March and October,
00:05:38artists ran the show with the party's grip on literature
00:05:40looser than any time since NEP.
00:05:43The problem for the party was that too much questioning was
00:05:45dangerous for communist rule, both within the Soviet Union,
00:05:49but especially outside it.
00:05:52In nineteen fifty six,
00:05:54protesters took to the streets in Poland,
00:05:56followed by an attempted revolution in Hungary,
00:05:58which was put down by the Soviet army.
00:06:00By December, the party feared for its survival and penned a secret closed letter,
00:06:03which criticized Dudintsev's novel and pressed pause on destalinization.
00:06:07And we can see this from an article of August nineteen fifty seven,
00:06:12where Khrushchev writes that the party's opinions
00:06:15were more important than those of artists because only the
00:06:18party understood the course of history and what was best for the country.
00:06:21He suggested that art's purpose was to, quote,
00:06:25rouse the people to struggle for new victories in the
00:06:27building of communism and criticize writers in these terms.
00:06:30They try to present matters as if the duty of literature and
00:06:34the arts were only to find the faults,
00:06:36to speak primarily of life's negative aspects of lack of
00:06:39harmony, and keep silent about all that is positive.
00:06:42Yet it is the positive, the new and progressive in life,
00:06:46that is most important in the turbulent developing reality of
00:06:49a Soviet society.
00:06:53So in other words,
00:06:55Khrushchev is saying that writers should write about
00:06:56positive things.
00:06:59They should once again talk about heroes and great deeds
00:07:00that might inspire people to build communism.
00:07:03So socialist realism, in essence, is back.
00:07:06But, of course, because of Khrushchev's secret speech,
00:07:09it was impossible to go fully back to the past.
00:07:12Censorship is still there.
00:07:15Mediocre Stalinist writers start to have their work published again.
00:07:17But Soviet culture never went back to Stalinism.
00:07:21Instead, it became a dynamic space where dull socialist realists
00:07:24competing with more innovative artists.
00:07:28But when those innovative artists pushed too far,
00:07:30the repressive force of the regime still reigned down on them.
00:07:33We can understand these paradoxes much better if we
00:07:37look at Soviet literature.
00:07:39One landmark was a book by a former Gulag prisoner.
00:07:41Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as a Red Army commander during World War two,
00:07:44but was sent to the camps for a derogatory comment about
00:07:47Stalin.
00:07:50After his release in nineteen fifty three,
00:07:51he began writing a manuscript about the life of a Soviet
00:07:53prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.
00:07:56Solzhenitsyn imagined a day in Ivan's life,
00:07:59getting punished for waking up late,
00:08:03his work building a wall in treacherous conditions,
00:08:04his meager daily rations,
00:08:07and the relationships between the prisoners.
00:08:09Now what happened next after Solzhenitsyn had written the
00:08:12manuscript tells us something about the the massive climate of the thaw.
00:08:15Solzhenitsyn took his manuscript to the New World
00:08:20Journal, but his editor, Alexander Twardovsky,
00:08:22knew that it would require approval from the party.
00:08:25And quite remarkably, given the subject matter,
00:08:28especially how taboo the counts were up to that point in Soviet literature,
00:08:31Khrushchev himself liked the book and agreed to his publication.
00:08:36So in nineteen sixty one,
00:08:40a day in the life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in print,
00:08:41and it became a phenomenon in the Soviet Union and, in fact, worldwide.
00:08:44But all although the publication of this book is
00:08:49testament to the Thor's cultural atmosphere,
00:08:51it's also important to think of the literature that doesn't get released.
00:08:54Khrushchev liked Ivan Denisovich because he believed
00:08:59that it showed how Ivan had kept his humanity and even
00:09:01taken pride in his work despite the degradations of the camp system.
00:09:05But Solzhenitsyn had actually held back and didn't depict all
00:09:09the horrors of the gulag.
00:09:12Another writer, Varlam Shalomov,
00:09:14spent two decades in some of the country's harshest labor camps.
00:09:16Columnar Tales depicts in gruesome detail the way minds,
00:09:20bodies, and morality were destroyed by hunger and overwork.
00:09:23In one of his most famous stories,
00:09:27Shalomov imagines the thoughts of one of Stalin's victims,
00:09:29the poet Ozick Mandelstam,
00:09:32as he slips in and out of consciousness.
00:09:33But there is a brutal ending to the story.
00:09:36His fellow inmates conceal his death for two days so they can
00:09:38claim his bread ration for themselves.
00:09:42There's no heroic heroism.
00:09:44There's no optimism in this story,
00:09:46and there's therefore no possibility of publishing it officially.
00:09:48So although work that challenged socialist realist
00:09:51ideals could be published during the thaw,
00:09:54the limits remained highly restrictive.
00:09:56What went for literature also went for visual art.
00:09:59So after the death of Stalin,
00:10:02Soviet visual artists began to experiment with different forms
00:10:03of making art.
00:10:06Some, although relatively few, tried abstraction.
00:10:08Others went for a more rugged form of representational
00:10:11painting that its protagonist called severe style.
00:10:14But this kind of art was bitterly opposed by those with
00:10:18more conservative tastes.
00:10:20At an exhibition at the Manetje in Moscow in December nineteen sixty two,
00:10:23Khrushchev was confronted with abstract and expressionist art
00:10:27that he didn't understand, and he began to insult the artists.
00:10:29He described modern painting as looking like dog dirt,
00:10:33except he didn't use the word dirt,
00:10:36insulted the artist in homophobic terms,
00:10:38and threatened to take away their state funding.
00:10:40Of one painting by a Sevier style artist, he said this,
00:10:42we're going to take these blotches with us into
00:10:46communism, are we?
00:10:48Pictures should arouse us to perform great deeds.
00:10:49They should inspire a person.
00:10:52But what kind of picture is this?
00:10:53One jackass is riding on another.
00:10:55If pictures like these appear,
00:10:57it means that we are not doing our work properly.
00:10:58So this is the paradox of the arts under Khrushchev.
00:11:02It could be inventive and save things unthinkable under
00:11:05Stalin, but in a dictatorship,
00:11:07a lot still rested on the whims of a man with very conservative tastes.
00:11:09
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Huxtable, S. (2024, November 15). Russia – Soviet Art and Culture, 1953-1991 - The De-Stalinization of Soviet Culture After 1953 [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/russia-soviet-art-and-culture-1953-1991
MLA style
Huxtable, S. "Russia – Soviet Art and Culture, 1953-1991 – The De-Stalinization of Soviet Culture After 1953." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Nov 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/russia-soviet-art-and-culture-1953-1991