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Culture and Politics Under Stalin: A Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Sheila Fitzpatrick
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Extract

Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , June 1976 , pp. 211 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1976

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References

1. The categories of scholarly and memoir literature overlap in a number of works which have influenced Western thinking about Soviet culture under Stalin, for example Eastman, Max, Artists in Uniform (New York, 1934)Google Scholar; Olkhovsky, Andrey V., Music under the Soviet: The Agony of an Art (New York: Praeger, 1955 Google Scholar; Elagin, Iu. [Jelagin, J.], Ukroshchenie iskusstv (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1952 Google Scholar; Shteppa, Konstantin F., Russian Historians and the Soviet State (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

2. The “two image” analysis of the totalitarian model is made by Jerry F. Hough in “Cultural Revolution in Historical Perspective, ” to be published in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931.

3. Various aspects of the cultural revolution are discussed in Brown, E. J., The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953 Google Scholar; Joravsky, David, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961 Google Scholar; and Graham, Loren R., The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927-1932 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967 Google Scholar. On the phenomenon as a whole, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-32,” Journal of Contemporary History, 9, no. 1 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the forthcoming volume of essays edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928- 1931.

4. See Bukharin's speech to a meeting called by the press department of the Central Committee in May 1924, in K voprosu o politike RKP(b) v khudoshestvennoi literature (Moscow, 1924).

5. For quantitative growth in the period 1928-33, see Sotsialisticheskoe stroitel'stvo: Statistichcskii eshegodnik (Moscow: TsUNKhU Gosplana SSSR, 1934), p. 406; for changes in social composition of the student body, together with a breakdown by sex and party membership, see ibid., p. 410.

6. Speech of June 23, 1931 in Stalin, I. V., Sochineniia , vol. 13 (Moscow, 1951), pp. 69–73.Google Scholar

7. Resolution of TsIK and SNK SSSR of September 15, 1933, and “Statute on the Ail-Union Committee on Technical Education under TsIK SSSR, ” Presidium of TsIK, October 17, 1933, in Vsesoiuznyi komitet po vysshemu tekhnicheskomu obrazovaniiu pri TsIK SSSR, Biulletcri, 1933, no. 9-10, p. 7. It is clear from the Biulleten’ that the committee began work considerably before its formal establishment, probably some time in 1932.

8. See, for example, Front nauki i tekhniki, 1932, no. 7-8, p. 121; ibid., 1932, no. 10, p. 94; ibid., 1932, no. 11-12, p. 111.

9. See, for example, articles by Professor A. M. Berkengeim, Professor la. N. Shpilrein and S. V. Volynskii in Vysshaia tekhnichcskaia shkola, 1934, no. 1 (September).

10. For the first resolution of the Central Committee, “On the elementary and middle school, ” September 5, 1931, see KPSS v resoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s “ezdov, konferentsii i plemimov TsK, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1970), p. 569 ff. (in this edition, the date of the resolution is wrongly given as August 25, 1931). For subsequent resolutions of the Central Committee—” On teaching programs and regimes in the elementary and middle school” (August 25, 1932), “On textbooks for the elementary and middle school” (February 12, 1933), “On the structure of the elementary and middle school in the USSR” (May 1934), “On publication and sale of textbooks for the elementary, incomplete middle, and middle school” (August 7, 1935), and “On the organization of teaching work and internal discipline in the elementary, incomplete middle, and middle school” (September 3, 1935)—see Direktivy VKP(b) i postanovleniia sovetskogo pravitel'stva o narodnom obracovanii, vol. 1 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1947), p. 159 ff.

11. Timasheff, Nicholas S., The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946).Google Scholar

12. Discrimination on grounds of social origin in university admission was formally dropped at the end of 1935. See Direktivy VKP(b) i postanovleniia sovetskogo pravitcl'stva o narodnom obrasovanii, vol. 2, p. 89.

13. Stalin, , Sochineniia , ed. McNeal, Robert H., vol. 1 (14) (Stanford, 1967), pp. 364–66Google Scholar.

14. See Stalin's letter to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, “On some questions of the history of Bolshevism, ” in Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1931, no. 6; and Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 13, pp. 84-102.

15. See the attack on Shulgin's theory of “the withering away of the school” in the Central Committee resolution “On the elementary and middle school, ” cited in footnote 10, above.

16. Many examples of Averbakh's ambition and insubordination are given in a valuable Soviet monograph by Sheshukov, S., Neistovye revniteli: Is istorii literaturnoi bor'by 20-kh godov (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1970 Google Scholar. On the “left-right” bloc, see resolution of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of December 1, 1930, “On the fractional work of Syrtsov, Lominadze and others, ” Pravda, December 2, 1930; and Literatura i iskusstvo, 1930, no. 2, p. 3 (editorial on involvement of Communist Academy members).

17. For accusations against RAPPists Averbakh and Kirshon, see Literatumaia goseta, April 20, 1937. It should be noted that Averbakh actually had been a Trotskyite in 1923-24 and the playwright Kirshon, his close friend, was related by marriage to Iagoda.

18. See Central Committee resolution “On the reconstruction of the literary-artistic organizations” of April 23, 1932, translated in E. J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature.

19. See Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927-1932.

20. On the privileges, see Lewin, Moshe, “Society and the Stalinist State in the Period of the Five-Year Plans,” Social History, no. 2 (May 1976), pp. 171–72Google Scholar; and Elagin, Ukroshchcnie iskusstv, pp. 286-90.

21. See Moskovskii universitet sa 50 let sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1967), pp. 68-69.

22. Swayze, Harold, Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard. University. Press, 1962, p. 45–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Elagin, Ukroshchenie iskusstv, p. 303.

24. Kuibysheva, G. V., Lezhava, O. A., Nelidov, N. V., and Khavin, A. F., Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev (Moscow, 1966), p. 352.Google Scholar

25. These examples belong to the folk history of the Moscow intelligentsia and are by their nature difficult to document. The Mandelstam case is reported in Mandelstam, Nadezhda, Hope against Hope (New York: Atheneum, 1970 Google Scholar; the Bulgakov, case in , Proffer, E., ed., The Early Plays of Mikhail Bulgakov (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, [1972]), pp. xviii–xxGoogle Scholar.

26. Swayze, Political Control, p. 40.

27. Elagin, Ukroshchenie iskusstv, p. 143.

28. A partial list—unreliable, because it is based on information obtained in interviews and from various memoir sources—of the education and professions of children of the political elite would include Stalin's younger son and daughter—air force and literature; Molotov's daughter—Gnesin Musical Institute; Litvinov's son and daughter—science and literature; Zhdanov's son—science and scientific administrative work in Central Committee apparat; a Kamenev son—air force cadet; Lunacharskii's son and daughter —both journalism, after higher education respectively in literature and science; Khrushchev's daughter—science journalism; Kosygin's daughter—foreign languages.

29. For illustration, see Lena and family in the Stalin Prize-winning novel by Trifonov, Iurii, Studenty (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1951 Google Scholar. On mcshchanskaia kul'turnost', see Dunham, Vera S., “The Uses of Stalinist Literary Debris,” Slavic Review, 32, no. 1 (March 1973): 115–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Between July 1937 and December 1938, Gorky was the subject of 333 scholarly articles listed under literaturovcdenie in the Letopis', or 15 percent of the total. Pushkin, with 220 articles, was in second place. Four articles were published on Marx, Engels, or Marxist literary criticism; 18 on Lenin; 7 on Stalin. The Stalin articles and many of the Lenin ones were on the image of Stalin (Lenin) in folklore, the other Lenin articles being of the “Lenin on Gorky, ” “Lenin on Belinsky” type. (The first half of 1937 has been omitted from the calculation above because of distortion attributable to the Pushkin centenary: of 840 articles published January-June 1937 on literature, 429 were on Push kin, 68 on Gorky, 2 on Marx and Engels, 4 each on Lenin and Stalin.) In the category of khtidoshestvennaia literatura (poems, plays, novels, short stories) published in the journals 1937-38, Stalin was the subject of 121 works (mainly poems by Central Asian and other non-Russian writers and folk balladists), Pushkin the subject of 65 works, Lenin of 62, and Gorky of 8. An analysis for comparative purposes of the Lctopis’ for 1948 (minus two of the weekly issues) shows Gorky still in first place as the subject of 45 articles, or 9 percent of the total, as against 8 on Pushkin, 1 on Marx-Engels, 3 on Lenin, and none on Stalin. In the khudoshcstvcnnaia literatura category for that year, Stalin was the subject of 25 works, Lenin of 10, Gorky of 4, Pushkin of 4, and Marx-Engels of 2.

31. There is a massive Soviet literature on Gorky. Of particular interest for the purposes of this article are Bykovtseva, L., Gor'kii v Moskvc, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1966)Google Scholar, and Valentina Khodasevich, “Gorky as I knew him, ” Novyi mir, 1968, no. 3. No adequate study of Gorky's role in the 1930s has been written in the West, though there is a useful short chapter in Thomson, Boris, The Premature Revolution (London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), pp. 186–205.Google Scholar

32. Moskovskii khudoshestvennyi teatr v sovctskuiu epoklnr. Matcrialy i dokumenty (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962).

33. The stenographic report (excluding Meyerhold's famous outburst against repression in cultural life) was published in Reshisser v sovctskom teatre: Materialy pcrvoi vscsoiucnoi konferentsii (Moscow-Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1940). See especially the report by S. M. Mikhoels and subsequent discussion, p. 73 ff.

34. The English-language studies of Makarenko as educational theorist shed little light on his literary career or on his emergence as a public figure. A useful Russian source, in addition to the seven-volume Sochineniia published in the 1950s, is Morozova, N. A., A. S. Makarenko: Seminarii (Leningrad: Uchpedgiz, 1961 Google Scholar. On the controversy surrounding Makarenko in the late 1930s, I have benefited from the research of a Columbia University graduate student, Gary Davis.

35. Peter Juviler, “Revolutionary Law and Order: Crime, Politics and Social Change in the USSR” (unpublished manuscript, chapter 7, pp. 20-21).

36. This characterization of Makarenko's support is based on analysis of articles listed in Letopis1 slmrnal'nykh statei for 1938-40 and on interviews in Moscow. It should be pointed out that among Communists of the cultural-revolution generation, Makarenko had critics as well as supporters—notably the group of former Communist Academy personnel associated with the journal Literatumyi kritik.

37. The pedologists’ fall came with the Central Committee resolution of July 4, 1936, “On pedological distortions in the system of the education commissariats, ” in Direktivy VKP(b) i postanovleniia sovetskogo pravitcl'stva o narodnom obrasovanii, vol. 1, p. 190 ff. The educational bureaucracy was found to contain a “counterrevolutionary Narkompros center” headed by the commissar of education of the RSFSR, A. S. Bubnov, and his deputy, M. S. Epshtein. On Bubnov's arrest, see Binevich, A. and Serebrianskii, Z., Andrei Bubnov (Moscow, 1964), p. 78–79.Google Scholar

38. Pravda, August 27, 1940, cited in Morozova, A. S. Makarenko, p. 29.

39. See Morozova, A. S. Makarenko, p. 45.

40. Nicolaevsky, Boris, Pozver and the Soviet Elite (New York, 1965), p. 14–15.Google Scholar

41. Graham, Loren R., Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 375.Google Scholar

42. On Lysenko, see Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Medvedev, Zhores A., The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. Lerner, I. Michael (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.Google Scholar

43. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 83.

44. Lepeshinskaia was an old Bolshevik member of the prerevolutionary emigration and one of the first Communists to be appointed (against bitter faculty and student protest) to the medical school of Moscow University at the beginning of the 1920s. On her work as a cytologist in the 1940s, see Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, p. 276.

45. Extensive quotations from the decrees and official statements on culture in this period are given in Counts, George S. and Lodge, Nucia, The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949 Google Scholar. For a stenographic report of Zhdanov's meeting with composers in 1948, see Werth, A., Musical Uproar in Moscoiv (London: Turnpike Press, [1949]).Google Scholar

46. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 107.

47. “Marxism and the Question of Linguistics” (first published in Pravda, June 20, 1950) in Stalin, Sochincniia, ed. Robert H. McNeal, vol. 3 (16), pp. 114-48.

48. See Vera Dunham, In Stalin's Time, to be published by Cambridge University Press.