Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of
Women and Revolution, Winter 1976-77, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of
Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Markin comment on this article:
Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal
Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.
A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
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Art and Revolution-Before "Socialist Realism" in the Soviet Union
by Janis Gerrard
Soviet art is linked in the minds of many with an endless and repetitive panorama of heroic factory workers and healthy-looking peasants, basking in the reflected glory of Stalin's fatherland. But the sterile,servile, cynical and unimaginative "art" associated with Stainist totalitarianism is the product of the suppression of a virtual creative explosion which accompanied the revolutionary struggle. During the brief period of democratic proletarian dictatorship between the overthrow of tsarism and its reactionary censorship policies and the institutionalization of "socialist realism" under Stalin, the optimism and unlimited expectations unleashed by the Russian Revolution supported a heady atmosphere of artistic experimentation.
Under capitalism the arts rely for survival on the monied patronage of the leisure class. But although the Soviet state was born in conditions of desperate poverty, its commitment to making art accessible to the masses intersected a profound cultural upheaval which had begun in the 1890's, to produce a surge of creative activity that swept through every area of artistic endeavor.
As the Soviet government was bringing new sources of light and energy to the population through a campaign to spread the use of electricity—leading to a popular definition of communism as "soviet power plus electrification"—it was taken for granted that the revolution would bring light and energy to the intellect as well.
A look at the effects on the arts of the October Revolution illustrates the commitment of the young Bolshevik regime, despite immense material obstacles, to culture. The complex and shifting relationship between artists and the regime also illuminates the high ideals of the best elements of this idiosyncratic petty-bourgeois layer, which sought to associate its creativity with the great liberating revolution.
The Winds of Change
Although there is no direct relationship between political struggle and aesthetic innovation, historically periods of great artistic and cultural ferment have often preceded violent political struggle, as the changing class relations are mirrored in artistic expression. In Russia, dramatic transformations were evident in the arts several decades before the revolution.
At the beginning of the 20th century, after 300 years of existence, the ballet was still regarded as
frivolous entertainment for young aristocrats. The audience regarded the performance as a form of burlesque—where else could one see women so scantily clad? When the young Mikhail Fokin, who was later to introduce innovations which would save ballet from oblivion, questioned a leading dancer on the possibility of artistic renewal of the dance, he was told, "Ballet is pornography, plain and simple."
Young noblemen would sit in the smoking room playing cards and exchanging stories of romantic conquests until an usher announced that one or another "favorite" was due to appear, at which they would rush into the nearly empty theater to cheer loudly for an encore. One went to the theater to hear the soliloquy of a famous actor, to see the (our de force of a renowned ballerina, to hear the high C of a visiting soprano.
The novel concept of ballet as art can be credited to a handful of theatrical geniuses who qualitatively trans¬formed the dance in the first years of the 20th century. They included: C. Stanislavsky of the Moscow Ar; Mikhail Fokin, choreographer of the Imperial Ballet; S. Diaghilev, grand impresario of the Ballets Russes; A. Benois, artist, designer of scenery and costumes and close collaborator of Diaghilev; George Balanchine, choreographer for Diaghilev and pioneer of modern ballet in the West; and Isadora Duncan.
Stanislavsky's role in ending the isolation of the Imperial Ballet cannot be underestimated. He strove to cast away all the artificial and unnatural theatrical conventions which served only to advance the career of individual performers while stifling the art of dance and theater. His ideas focused on the desire to create in art the concept of "truth of life." His costumes and sets were defined to reflect the period of the play and to contribute to the artistic whole. He allowed no interruptions in the mood of the drama and fostered collaboration between different branches of the performing arts to achieve an artistic whole.
Isadora Duncan's first Russian tour in 1905 occurred just as these leaders of the "left" reform current were formulating their criticisms of the ballet and searching for new artistic models. For Fokin, who had dreamed of staging a ballet in the Greek style, Duncan's powerful yet simple performance, in which she was clad simply in a Greek tunic and danced on a green, grass-like rug with simple, graceful movements to the music of Chopin and Schumann, had an overwhelming impact. Her dancing, unfettered by the confines of classical ballet technique, challenged all serious ballet dancers to examine their own concepts of art and aesthetic movement.
Duncan's influence was profound but, as Stanislavsky discovered when he met her in 1908, she was incapable of articulating her methods. She could speak only in mystical and idealistic terms of her concept of the interpenetration of art and life. Moreover, out of a false standard of artistic purity she refused to allow her dancing to be filmed.
The 1905 Revolution, which shook Russian society to its foundations, also jarred the complacency of the Russian ballet. Both Fokin and Anna Pavlova, the world-renowned prima ballerina, were involved in organizing a strike by dancers under the slogan "Freedom of Art," with a program of relatively minor economic and organizational reforms.
Other fields of art demonstrated an equally accelerated rate and heightened exuberance of creative expression. In poetry, new currents sprang up faster than they could be labeled. Symbolism gave way
to futurism, then to acmeism, imagism and a multitude of unclassifiable styles. On the stage, the ensemble work of Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater and the expressionism in Meierhold's theater wrought pro¬found changes in dramatic production.
But of all the art media, music seemed to be the central and determining one. Aleksandr Bloc, one of the greatest poets of the period, spoke of escaping from calendar time to "musical time." The pioneering abstract painter, Vasily Kandinsky, said he considered music the most comprehensive of the arts and the model for all others, while his colleague Chiurlionis called his paintings "sonatas" and his exhibitions "auditions."
In writing, too, a new musical style evolved, and a new form of lyrical narrative called "the symphony" was developed by Andrei Bely. In the theater, Meierhold's emphasis on gesture underscored his belief that "the body, its lines, its harmonic movements, sings as much as do sounds themselves."
Even Lenin, removed as he was from the world of art, confessed to a strong and disturbing attraction to music during this period. In his Days With Lenin, author Maxim Gorky quoted him as saying:
"I know nothing more beautiful than the Appassionata I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people's heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal—it is a hellishly hard task...."
Particularly after the Revolution of 1905, when man artists fled to the West, Russian art developed in a direction that was both more international and more interdisciplinary. One artistic medium seemed to flow into another. Thus futurism, the most radical of the new artistic currents, began in painting and then moved into poetry. The painter M. Vrubel drew much of his inspiration from poetry, while his use of color inspired poetry. The Ballets Russes epitomized this harmonious fusion of the arts, combining the scenic designs of Benois, L. Bakst and N. Roerich, the music of Igor Stravinsky, the dancing of the great Nizhinsky, the choreography of Fokin and the guiding genius of Diaghilev.
This development was sharply checked by the outbreak of war in 1914, which forced Russian art into isolation. During the war even the most avant-garde artists became superpatriots. The futurists, including Maiakovsky, led a patriotic-nationalist movement which elevated Russian primitivism and religious icons to the basis of a great Russian art of the future. Diaghilev and his group, cut off from Russia, toured Europe and the United States with a continually degenerating Ballets Russes. Isadora Duncan became a French patriot on the grounds that France was the preserver of what was best in modern European culture, although she said:
"France is the only country that really understands But I have great hopes for Russia. At this moment she is passing through the growing pains of childhood, but I believe that she is the future for Artists and the Spirit "
The Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution sent shock waves of wild hope and exhilaration through the artistic intelligent¬sia. In his famous poem, "Twelve," written just after the October uprising, Aleksandr Bloc introduces a popular revolutionary song traditionally sung to the accompa¬niment of balalaikas:
"No sound is heard from the city, There is silence in the Nevsky tower. And on the bayonet of the sentry Glistens the midnight moon."
—A. Bloc, quoted in James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe
Only Bloc changes the last two lines to an exultant: "And there are no more policemen— Rejoice, lads, without need of wine!"
For Fokin and Stanislavsky, the opening of the theaters to audiences composed of factory workers who had last year been peasants and to soldiers who had only yesterday been peasants was the realization o a lifelong aspiration. Batches of tickets were distribute free to the heretofore artistically disfranchised plebe an classes through the Soviets and other worker, organizations.
The new audiences were difficult—to say the least— composed as they were of people unfamiliar with ur¬ban culture in general, not to mention the subtleties of literary and dramatic tradi¬tions. As commissar of war, Trotsky had to teach many of these former peasants to use soap and to clean their weapons. Similarly, Stanis¬lavsky viewed his task as educating them in the conventions of the theater: "... to sit quietly, not to talk, to come to the theater on time, not to smoke, not to eat nuts in public, not to bring food into the theater and eat it there, to dress in [their] best so as to fit more into the atmosphere of beauty that was worshipped in the theater."
In 1921, Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Soviet minister for education, telegraphed Isa¬dora Duncan: "Come to Moscow, we will give you your school and 1,000 children. You may carry out your ideas on a grand scale." The offer was irresistible, despite the warnings of her friends that cannibalism was rampant and that "four year old children hung by their heels in the butcher shops."
Duncan entered the Soviet Union at a time when many artists were leaving, both for political reasons and to escape the misery and privations of a country ripped apart by civil war. She and her protege Irma Duncan were the first foreign artists to enter the Soviet Union and the last for some time.
Bolshevik Ideals and Harsh Realities
The Bolshevik Ministry of Education and Art— Narkompros—faced enormous difficulties. Lunacharsky was caught in the middle of warring artistic tendencies, all clamoring for official approval. Further¬more, he was crippled, as were all government administrators, by the gap between the ideals and program of the Bolshevik party and the material inability to realize this program under conditions of war, extreme scarcity and national isolation.
The Bolshevik program called for artistic freedom, no state intervention into artistic affairs and no preferential state support for any particular artistic tendency, on the grounds that this would inhibit the development of other tendencies.
Lunacharsky was well aware of the need for political support and material aid from the artistic intelligentsia, realizing how few active artistic sympathizers there were. He was forced again and again to prove his artistic
neutrality both to the artists themselves and to the party.
Despite the extremely difficult conditions under which it was forced to function, Narkompros did manage to keep open the universities and to preserve the public libraries, art collections and museums. It also instituted a network of kindergartens, children's colonies and experimental schools and administered state subsidies to support the arts.
Nevertheless, it seemed that Narkompros could satisfy no one. To give precious resources to the ballet while workers were starving was highly controversial. The exigencies of war communism left little extra for the fundamental restructuring necessary to lift the Russian masses out of centuries of backwardness and cultural poverty.
Narkompros vs. Proletkult
Freed from tsarist persecution, a multitude of artistic tendencies—futurists, confuturists, constructivists, supremacists, primitivists, imagists—surfaced; each with its own manifestoes, journals and organizational animosities. While hailing their new freedom from autocracy, many of these tendencies were suspicious of the Bolsheviks. The Artists' Union, formed in May 1917, held up the banner of artistic freedom like a cross to fend off the suspected Bolshevik threat.
The "left" wing of this Union was dominated by the futurists—self-proclaimed architects of the future "proletarian culture," who argued for a complete break with the past, insisted on a fundamental link between art and technology, introduced technical-industrial terms into their poetry and identified themselves with Bolshevism and internationalism. But futurist leader Maiakovsky, despite his sympathies for the revolutionary proletariat, stood in principle against joining any state body dealing with art. The Artists' Union refused to cooperate with Narkompros even in its campaign to save art treasures from war damage.
Lenin, whose aesthetic tastes were relatively conser¬vative, personally disliked the flamboyant public spectacles, bright yellow shirts and painted faces in which the futurists delighted and was infuriated when they painted the trees in front of the Kremlin bright colors for a May Day celebration.
Lunacharsky and Trotsky were more sympathetic to avant-garde and experimental trends but also felt a commitment to the preservation of artistic tradition. It was disgraceful, said Trotsky, to approach the "cultural heritage" of the past with nihilistic contempt. The working class had to take possession of that heritage and guard it. Above all, they strove to maintain an even-handed policy of official toleration and even encour¬agement with regard to all artistic tendencies. None¬theless, the government was always suspected by the traditionalists of favoritism toward the futurists, espe¬cially when the futurists, after splitting from the Artists' Union, had obtained a position within the graphic arts department of Narkpmpros by offering their services for the production of propaganda posters.
The most organized expression of radicalism in the arts was the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) organiza¬tion, whose founder was Aleksandr Malinovsky,known as Bogdanov. Bogdanov means "god-gifted" and accurately reflects the image which this individual had of his own importance.
Although Bogdanov had been a member of the Bolshevik party until his expulsion in 1909, he believed that the key to the future lay not in the tranformation of economic relationships through class struggle and socialist revolution but in the technology and ideology which was already being created by the proletariat. He also argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without the creation of anew, socially oriented religion, which he called "empirio-monism." Bogdanov's idealism was attacked by Lenin in Materialism and Empiric-Criticism.
The theoretical basis of Bogdanov's Proletkult was the belief (originally supported by Lunacharsky) that
artists, under the direction of an organization similar to a trade union, which was to protect the interests of the proletariat in the cultural sphere, should create a "proletarian culture" which would substitute for the decadent, class-biased and therefore dangerous bour¬geois culture. "Proletarian culture" would become a weapon of the oppressed in the class struggle. Proletkult saw nothing of value in the old bourgeois culture, which, its adherents argued, must be immedi¬ately destroyed. The refutation of this idea of "proletarian culture" was succinctly summarized by Trotsky in the preface of Literature and Revolution:
"It is fundamentally wrong to oppose proletarian to bourgeois culture and art. Proletarian culture and art will never exist. The proletarian regime is temporary and transitory. Our revolution derives its historic significance and moral greatness from the fact that it lays the foundations for a classless society and for the first truly universal culture."
What is more, argued Trotsky, the historic destiny of the proletariat does not leave it enough time to develop a new culture. Whereas the bourgeois way of life developed organically over several centuries, the proletarian dictatorship will be measured in years or decades, and its duration will be filled with savage class struggles. "We are still soldiers on the march," he said. "Our epoch is not the epoch of a new culture. We can only force open the gate to it."
Although Lenin believed the concepts of Proletkult to be un-Marxist and unmaterialist, he refrained initially from intervening against it on the grounds that it was not the role of the party to take positions on questions of art and culture. But Proletkcult's attempts to create a new culture under the conditions of war communism proved dangerous. The discovery that Narkompros' budget for the arts was larger than its budget for education and that the special rations which had been granted technical specialists had been extended to artists prompted Lenin late in 1920 to support Lunacharsky's demand that the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult be subordinated to Narkompros.
The immediate cultural necessity, he argued, was to raise the level of the Russian masses—to help them acquire the level of competency that the petty-bourgeoisie had taken for granted: literacy, simple arithmetic, hygiene. But the avant-garde artists of Proletkult disdained such mundane tasks. Lenin characterized them as "parasites...escapees from the bourgeois intelligentsia" who were looking for a playground in the institutions desperately needed by the workers.
Lenin was supported in his struggle against Proletkult by both Lunacharsky, who believed that proletarian culture was possible but not imminent, and Trotsky. Trotsky agreed with Lenin on the philosophical aspects of proletarian culture as well as the immediate priorities of raising the level of culture for the masses but disagreed with Lenin's evaluation of avant-garde experimentation and was particularly sympathetic to the futurists.
The real strength of Proletkult is demonstrated by the fact that after deciding in 1919 that the organization represented a danger, it took the Bolsheviks two years to achieve its subordination to Narkompros. Proletkult was also censured for its claim to have brought about "immediate socialism" in the cultural sphere, a "proletarian culture" totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. It is instructive that throughout this fight Lenin never resorted to censorship. Freedom of expression for all except active counterrevolutionaries was a fiercely guarded principle during Lenin's lifetime.
Degeneration, Defection, Death.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) initiated in 1921 meant a loosening up in most areas, but coinciding asit did with the end of the Proletkult fight and the reorganization and trimming down of Narkompros, it hit the arts like an austerity program. It was all Lunacharsky could do to salvage subsidies for the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Ballets, the Academic Theater and the Moscow Art Theater. He almost lost on the ballet, which Lenin ordered closed because of its "negligible artistic value" and high cost of mainte¬nance; He managed to keep the Bolshoi open, after the Council of Trade Unions ordered it closed, only by arguing that the theater was needed for congresses and state functions. Other theaters maintained themselves by selling tickets to those who could afford them and distributing a small number to trade unions and schools at half price. The Proletkult Theater and the Isadora Duncan School maintained their premises but were told to support themselves through performances. Duncan, with 40 students and a staff to support, went on a pan-Soviet tour, which was artistically successful, but after the expenses of the orchestra and transportation were settled, she had little left with which to maintain her school. Her next tour to Central Asia was so financially disastrous that she decided that if she must go back to dancing for money she should go to a country that had some—the United States. But al¬though her concerts in the U.S. were sold out, she was banned in Boston and other cities for "inflammatory Communist dancing" and oratory.
The degeneration of the revolution after 1924 and the insidious entrenchment of the Stalinist bureaucracy was reflected in the arts. In the ballet, experimentation with themes of class struggle began to be booed off the stage. George Balanchine was publicly criticized for his experiments with pantomime, which were character¬ized as a break with "artistic tradition." In 1924 he and his whole company defected and joined Diaghilev in Paris—the first in a long line of Soviet ballet dancers to defect.
In 1925 the poet Esenin, Isadora Duncan's estranged husband, committed suicide. Although ostensibly an apolitical act, this suicide, like Balanchine's defection, started a trend among artists. In fact, the self-destruction of poets associated with "drunkenness and bohemian influences" created a new Russian word— "Esenism." These suicides represented the inability of a certain layer of artists either to submit to the growing bureaucracy or to fight it.
In 1929 Lunacharsky resigned his post as commissar of education. In the same year, Maiakovsky wrote "The Bedbug" and "The Washhouse," skillful, satirical plays exposing the bureaucracy. The public criticism of these works was brutal. He was allowed no reply and was hounded until he finally recanted. But although in a poem of capitulation he promised to write one hundred party books and publish them in the official party press, he was never to write anything again. In 1930 he shot himself.
In 1935 Maiakovsky was proclaimed a national hero by Stalin. Russian school children were compelled to memorize his poems; posthumous awards were bestowed; a subway station was named in his honor.
One understands that when a subway station is dedicated to a martyred poet by his persecutors the time for debating questions of aesthetics, style and freedom is past." (Boldface by Markin)
