A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

22 Soviet Culture

With the end of NEP and well before the war, the Soviet Union entered a new period of its history, with profound cultural implications. The first phase of that new period, from about 1928 to 1932, saw major upheavals in every area of culture, science, art, literature, and the humanistic disciplines. It was a “cultural revolution” in the phrase of the time, though one neither so deep or thorough as the much later Chinese events that borrowed the name. For the people involved, it was certainly traumatic, for it was not merely a new ideological campaign. In those years the party authorities carried out a systematic attack on the leaders of virtually every field of culture, accusing them of failure to live up to the demands of “socialist construction” and of harboring old-regime views and hostility to the new order. These attacks came in the press and in meetings held in various institutions and workplaces, where mostly young and enthusiastic Communists were encouraged to attack their elders and teachers in the name of the revolution. In addition, the OGPU carried out systematic arrests of leading intellectuals – historians, engineers, writers, and some scientists. Most were accused of participation in various, presumably mythical, underground organizations aimed at undermining or overthrowing Soviet power. Compared to later times, the treatment was relatively mild: some were executed, more went to prison camps, but many were simply exiled to provincial towns to teach or work in local institutions. Some professions suffered more than others: the scientists were less commonly victims, but even for them there were consequences. At the same time as the old authorities were removed, all sorts of radical super-Marxist notions achieved brief fame and dominance, along with the ideas of various cranks who presented themselves as new proletarian voices.

For the writers this period meant the virtual monopoly of the Proletarians connected with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP in Russian) and their leader, the critic Leopold Averbakh. The Proletarians assailed nearly all of the major writers of the 1920s as counter-revolutionary, particularly those from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and the “fellow travelers.” Many major writers, including Evgenii Zamiatin and Mikhail Bulgakov, were the objects of furious attacks. Zamiatin was allowed to leave the country, but Bulgakov was not and for a while had almost no possibility to work. Other writers like the poets Akhmatova and Pasternak, escaped attacks because they published little or nothing during those years. The Proletarians were almost as savage with Communist writers who did not toe Averbakh’s line. What the Proletarians wanted was a literature that engaged itself in the struggle for the building of socialism, and in this sense some of their productions were quite critical of bureaucratism and passivity in the party and the state. Their ideal novel featured heroic workers overcoming tremendous obstacles to construct a new town or collectivize a village, changing themselves in the process. In reality, these stories were rarely successful, and the only readable works to come out of the movement were about the Civil War and were mostly written before 1929. The best by far was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don, and the RAPP leaders were uncomfortable with this volume.

Music as well had its proletarian radicals, who attacked the young Shostakovich and virtually every other composer, whatever the aesthetic. For the Russian Association of Proletarian Music, the only “proletarian” musical culture had to be “mass songs,” performed by semi-amateur choruses, preferably made up of workers. The proletarian musicians relied on the network of factory clubs and other amateur organizations to spread their work and doctrines, but most of their songs found little favor with the workers, who preferred a more traditional repertory. The Proletarians were allowed briefly to rule the conservatories, but in 1932 the party ended their monopoly as it did for the proletarian writers.

Even in the sciences meetings took place in research institutes, meetings that would have ominous consequences later on. In Nikolai Vavilov’s botanical institute radical graduate students criticized his leadership, political views, and scientific work. In the sciences these attacks were not yet primarily ideological, the chief charge being that the scientists were “cut off from life” and paid insufficient attention to the implications of their work for technology and thus “socialist construction.” It was at this time that Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian plant breeder, first came to the attention of the public and the authorities with his theories about breeding strains of wheat that were resistant to cold. Lacking the proper scientific training needed to develop his occasional practical insights, Lysenko was more of a crank at first, but he quickly learned to drape his claims in references to his plebeian origins and assertions that his was “proletarian” biology. The party authorities listened to him because his discoveries, real and imagined, seemed to promise much greater harvests very quickly, something the Soviet Union desperately needed.

After several years of chaos in many fields, the campaign came to a swift end in 1932. The exiled scientists and historians returned to their jobs, some returned from the camps, and generalized public attacks on the intelligentsia gradually ended. Thus began a new phase, one in which the party leadership, which increasingly meant Stalin alone, constructed the framework for what they considered a Soviet culture. In literature the Proletarians had alienated the party leaders, and in 1932 all literary groups were banned, a move mainly directed at Averbakh and his Proletarians. The pressure on non-party writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak eased. Bulgakov went to work for the Moscow Art Theater, writing original plays and adaptations that provided him with a livelihood even though they were often banned. He continued working on his masterpiece The Master and Margarita in private. Pasternak published prose and poetry in those years, becoming one of the country’s best-known poets, in spite of being out of step with Soviet ideology. In the new situation Stalin set up a single Writers’ Union, which met for the first time in a Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It was to include writers of all types, non-party member writers and Communists in one group, again a move in large part directed at taming the Proletarians. The Writers’ Union was the prototype for a series of unions of creative intellectuals, for composers, painters, architects, and others, that dominated the daily life of Soviet literary and artistic culture until the end, in many ways parallel to the structure for the natural and social sciences and the humanities found at the Academy of Sciences. The Writers’ Union had two functions. One was to provide ideological and artistic direction to the writers. At the head of the union was a committee whose membership was chosen by the Central Committee cultural apparatus and cleared with Stalin himself. These were the men who were to declare the party line in art and enforce it. The other function was to take care of the needs of writers in daily life. The Writers’ Union controlled apartments and dachas in the countryside, had a privileged distribution center for scarce consumer goods, and the best restaurant in Moscow. Its headquarters was a nineteenth century Moscow palace supposedly the prototype of the Rostov house in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Similar unions of artists and composers were formed and took on similar functions.

The party now intended to give literature and art firm direction. Stalin told the writers that they were the “engineers of human souls,” but he did not give them the blueprint. That was to come from the method of “socialist realism,” and at the first Writers’ Congress in 1934 A. A. Zhdanov and Maksim Gorkii, assisted by the former oppositionists Bukharin and Radek, tried to define what that was. The idea was to “reflect reality in its revolutionary development.” The implication was that the writer needed to show the great changes in Soviet life, but avoid concentrating on mistakes or shortcomings, and indicate how society was moving forward. The result was to demand a kind of official optimism that was very hard to provide in practice, as it would lead to flattened characters and unconvincing conflicts. The other side of socialist realism was that it was to become the art of the people and as such had to be accessible. This issue peaked in 1936, not over literature, but as a result of the staging of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The composer thought that he had made a good Soviet opera, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov that showed the dark, oppressive world of pre-revolutionary Russia. Instead he met savage criticism for his adoption of modernist musical language similar to that found in Western music of the time. In the minds of his critics, the opera was cacophonic and incomprehensible. It was “formalist,” a term that immediately became one of the most serious charges an artist could face. The writers as well understood the implications of the attack on Shostakovich, and realized that their styles would have to change. Many of them, even the most loyal supporters of the revolution, had employed style and narrative techniques that were innovative and modern in the 1920s, but now they were supposed to construct a novel much as Turgenev had done in the nineteenth century.

Besides mandating the correct direction in the arts, the party leadership in the later 1930s moved to expand and subsidize artistic institutions, and indeed the intelligentsia as a whole. The great theaters, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinskii (Kirov) in Leningrad, no longer scraped by on small budgets. The opera and ballet became central parts of Soviet culture, and although they were concentrated in the two main cities, they were not restricted to those places. Older cities such as Kiev and Tbilisi, now serving as republican capitals, also found their theaters with more solid budgets. In provincial cities and new republican capitals large theaters for musical performances and concerts sprang up. The great companies were encouraged to do provincial tours. Budgets for dramatic theaters also increased, as did the number of theaters in provincial and republican capitals. The theaters and orchestras supported a great many actors and musicians and in a style that became increasingly removed from that of the Soviet population. The Writers’ Union actually spent most of its effort in the 1930s not on ideological issues but on securing control of superior housing in the cities and the dacha districts, and even building them when it could. Pasternak was able to acquire a two-story house in Peredelkino – a dacha village for writers near Moscow – to use as his home for the rest of his life. Writers had access to the Union’s closed food and consumer goods distribution service. By the war, Shostakovich had a multi-room apartment, servants, and a car with driver. Thus the artistic elite came to match the scientists in standards of living, remaining only slightly less well off than the party elite itself.

Perhaps the central art form of the 1930s was film. During NEP, the necessary resources were simply unavailable for mass production and circulation of movies, and Hollywood productions filled the theaters. The cultural revolution tried to change this situation, but the works of that era were as shallow and short-lived as they were in other art forms and they came under heavy criticism, to boot. In the course of the 1930s the Soviet film industry changed radically. The state devoted increasing sums to the production of film stock and studio facilities, and bought expensive equipment abroad, including the entire technology for sound films acquired from the United States. Unlike all the other arts, cinema was a state industry under the state film committee, which answered directly to the central government, not a branch industrial unit. In keeping with its central status, it also received personal attention from Stalin himself. Most of the new films were shown in the Kremlin in the presence of the heads of the film industry, who received extensive comments from the leader. Stalin’s views of cinema were surprisingly sophisticated: he found most of the early films on revolutionary or other political subjects boring, and told the filmmakers that the country needed more comedies. That was a tall order, since the scriptwriters and directors were mostly afraid to satirize Soviet institutions, even mildly, though Stalin told them directly that they should do so. Ultimately the result was a series of authentically popular musical comedies, many of them starring Liubov’ Orlova, who became the leader’s favorite actress.

The expanded institutional base in film and theater came with much greater ideological demands on the arts. All forms of art were to be accessible as well as politically correct. The 1936 attack on formalism led to particular kinds of productions. In the ballet the many small experimental studios of the 1920s closed, and in their place came the large ballet companies that presented a basically classical choreography but with new sorts of ballets. There were attempts at “revolutionary” content, but very quickly Soviet dance moved toward story ballets, which were often based on literary classics and performed with undistinguished music – Boris Asaf’ev’s Fountain of Bakhchisarai (based on Pushkin) became the most popular of all. Shostakovich turned to more accessible musical styles, and Sergei Prokofiev, back in the Soviet Union since 1935, did the same. His music for Romeo and Juliet gave the repertory at least one ballet that fit the required esthetic but provided great music, as did his film music for Eisenstein’s two masterpieces, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. No one escaped criticism: Eisenstein had two movies banned in the 1930s and returned to favor only in 1938 with Alexander Nevsky.

In this situation the scientists were – most of them, at least – in a better position. Their institutes also received improved funding, which was even more generous than for the arts. The new situation came at a price, for starting in the early 1930s the scientific institutes were required to come up with five-year plans like those in the economy. In part, this move was to increase their usefulness to industry, but for that aim the ultimate means was the creation of a large network of specialized institutes for different branches of technology, while basic research remained in the hands of the older institutes. Gradually all basic research was centralized under the Academy of Sciences during the cultural revolution, was brought under party control, and then subordinated directly to the central government, bypassing the various People’s Commissariats. The Academy also had to leave its Leningrad headquarters for Moscow, which now acquired a new battery of scientific institutes to rival those of Leningrad. Thus in 1934 the Soviet government took advantage of the visit of the physicist Piotr Kapitsa from England to force him to remain in the country, and then set up the Moscow Institute of Problems of Physics under his leadership. The Soviet Union now had two world-class research institutes in physics. The scientists were also less often than writers and artists the object of ideological campaigns after the end of the cultural revolution. Abram Ioffe was the object of heavy criticism in 1935, but the charges were only that his Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute did not do enough to provide industry with new technology. The decade was in many ways the great age of Soviet physics. Some six Nobel prizes eventually went to Soviet physicists and chemists, all of them for discoveries made in the Leningrad and Moscow institutes during the 1930s. Biology was a different story. Throughout the decade Lysenko maintained a continuous assault on his opponents, spearheaded by his ideological spokesman, Isaak Prezent. The campaign culminated with Lysenko’s promotion to the leadership of the Agricultural Academy, but the party did not proclaim his doctrines to be the sole truth, and classical genetics survived, if under something of a cloud, until 1948.

The terror of 1937–38 hit the arts hard but not evenly. Musicians and composers seem to have suffered relatively little. Among the critics connected with the party, like Leopold Averbakh and his Proletarians, almost all perished. Surprisingly the writers from that group did much better, though many of them, even Sholokhov, lived those years in daily fear. Stalin did not carry out a mass purge of writers, but he and his agents did arrest and imprison many of them. For whatever reason, many of the most famous victims were arrested at the very end of the terror, Osip Mandelstam in 1938, followed by Isaac Babel, and later Meyerhold. Mandelstam died in prison, while Babel and Meyerhold were shot. At the same time, Pasternak spent the years of the terror working on translations from Shakespeare in his Peredelkino dacha, and Bulgakov continued at the Moscow Art Theater, dying of kidney failure in 1940. The sciences endured similar trials. On the whole the physicists escaped lightly: the few party members among them perished, and a few non-party scientists were arrested, Lev Landau among them. He spent months in prison only to be released without explanation. Kapitsa had interceded for him and Kapitsa’s institute survived intact. Biology was a different story. A denunciation from Lysenko’s spokesman Prezent led to the arrest of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet Union’s greatest biologist. He died in prison, as did several other important geneticists. The eve of the war was a dark time, both in the USSR and Europe. Stalin had decided by 1938 that the Soviet Union needed a fundamental ideological schooling, the beginning of a new and even more intrusive policy in culture. The basis of the new ideological campaign was to be the Short Course of the History the Communist Party, with its chapter on Marxism from the pen of Stalin himself. Yet the approaching war overshadowed even ideological efforts. The Soviet film industry’s annual plans stressed the “defense theme” and epics from the history of the revolution and Civil War. Movies on “socialist construction” and “friendship of peoples” were few in number and did not have big budgets.

When the war actually came, it created an entirely new situation, and Stalin had to quickly adjust. The preservation of cultural institutions was a priority. As the Germans advanced, orders came to evacuate cultural institutions as well as factories. Science research institutes, ballet companies, and writers were evacuated to the east. Eisenstein went to Alma-ata, and Shostakovich went to Kuibyshev on the Volga. The purpose was both to conserve the personnel of Soviet culture and to preserve some sense of normalcy during the war. Intellectuals joined the war effort with famous results such as the Leningrad symphony of Shostakovich, first performed in the besieged city. The physicists lobbied Stalin on behalf of an atomic bomb, as well as devoting their energies to more conventional weapons in factories and research institutes. For many engineers their war work took place as prisoners in NKVD laboratories, the most famous prisoners being the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the later rocket designer Sergei Korolev. The war also created ideological problems for the party leadership. To mobilize as many people as possible meant including sectors of the population whom the official ideology had not reached or had even repelled. The answer was nationalism. After Stalin’s early pronouncements about the virtues of the German working class ceased, the official line began to stress Russian heroes and Russian accomplishments. Historians dusted off manuscripts on Peter the Great or Kutuzov, hitherto unpublishable. Eisenstein made one of his classic films on the life of tsar Ivan the Terrible, a film designed to glorify the tsar’s conquests and portray him as fighting for the unity of the land. Even Marxism had to be rethought: in 1943 the leading party journals declared that formerly there had been far too much emphasis on Hegel as the background to Marxism and he needed to be deemphasized. The result was an inaccurate history of the thought of Marx, but it made Marxism seem less German. For much of the intelligentsia, the new line on culture meant more breathing space, and many of them hoped that it would continue after the war. They were to be disappointed. Even as the fighting raged there were incidents: Mikhail Zoshchenko, a popular satirical writer, found his introspective autobiographical novel Before Sunrise banned after the first chapters were published in a leading literary magazine.

The return to orthodoxy came swiftly after the war, and the years from the victory until Stalin’s death were the darkest and dreariest in the history of Soviet culture. The first signal was the attack mounted in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators, on Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Stalin himself regularly read the literary journals, and the judgments were ultimately his. Zoshchenko’s work was trite and lacking in ideas, Zhdanov said, and the novella written during the war was “disgusting” and had no relationship to the conflict with Hitler. Akhmatova’s poetry was pessimistic, oriented toward the past, and was a relic of a decadent aristocratic salon culture. Soviet literature was supposed to educate the reader and make the reader a fully conscious member of a socialist society who did not dwell on problems and shortcomings or on the details of individual psychology. It was also not to imitate Western literature, and indeed Stalin did not want too much Western literature translated: “Why do this?” he asked at one of the dressings-down for the writers. “It gives the impression that we Soviet people are second class, and the foreigners are the only first class people.” The result was a long series of dull chronicles of Soviet life, fantastic in their sanitized depiction of everyday life. Even Stalin realized that they were dull, but continued to blame the writers for their lack of talent and mastery of their art.

In 1948 it was the turn of the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich, attacked for supposedly dissonant music that was too far removed from folk music and inaccessible to the masses. In many ways a repeat of the 1936 attack on formalism, this new campaign had behind it both the rivals of the serious composers among the writers of popular songs and the party authorities. In the same year Lysenko was able to crown his long fight for power in biology by his appearance at a “discussion” on genetics, where he declared genetics to be a reactionary and “idealist” science and his own ideas progressive and “materialist.” Stalin took a direct hand in this affair as well. Lysenko sent him his speech for criticism, and the General Secretary read it carefully. Lysenko originally wanted to contrast his own “proletarian” biology to the “bourgeois” biology of the geneticists and make a general pronouncement that scientific thought reflected class interests. Stalin crossed out that passage, writing in the margins, “Ha ha! What about mathematics?” He required Lysenko to drop the class terminology and substitute “progressive” and “reactionary.” The result, however, was to destroy genetics for nearly twenty years and do enormous harm to Soviet biology. There were plans to hold a similar “discussion” to provide an ideological framework for physics, but for whatever reason, it never materialized.

In the last years of Stalin’s life the official Soviet ideology was a strange mixture of dogmatic Marxism and nationalism. There were campaigns to prove Russian priorities in science, the most famous being the claim that the Russian engineer Alexander Popov had invented the radio in 1900 (Popov was in fact one of several pioneers in this area.) Pre-revolutionary Russian writers, composers, and artists became the object of mini-cults, with endless statues, films, and publications made in their honor. The promotion of Russian culture was largely aimed at the West, to show Russia to be equal to Western culture, if not superior. At the same time the party leadership continued the promotion of culture heroes from the other Soviet nationalities. The Politburo ordered celebrations of the work of medieval Muslim poets claimed as ancestors of Soviet nationalities, Alisher Navoi in Uzbekistan and Nizami of Gandzha in Azerbaidzhan. Russian poets were paid to translate their works and they were the objects of fulsome official praise in the central press. In these years, Shevchenko or the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli loomed larger than Shakespeare or Goethe. In every Soviet republic the authorities assigned composers, usually Russians or Caucasians, to help local talent produce “national” ballets and operas to provide repertory and prestige for the newly opened theaters. At the same time as the activity on the periphery, in Moscow and Leningrad the ballet struggled with the restrictions of Soviet esthetics. The sheer genius of the dancers like Galina Ulanova kept it alive. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign directed against Jews in 1948 only further poisoned the cultural atmosphere since so many musicians, writers, and artists were Jewish. The main Yiddish writers were imprisoned or shot. The intelligentsia remembered the 1930s and the various ideological campaigns seemed to be leading to another mass terror. That never materialized, and the number of actual arrests among the intelligentsia in those years was small, but for Shostakovich or Akhmatova, the fear in those years was real.

The death of Stalin changed the whole atmosphere. Within a few months prisoners began to return from the camps, and the intelligentsia sensed the possibilities. Ilya Ehrenburg, mainly known as a war correspondent and author of mildly modernist novels of the 1920s set in Western Europe, quickly produced a short novel called The Thaw, which gave its name to the whole period. The villain of the story is a factory director, a classic Stalinist boss. Attacked at first, the story set the tone for a whole series of writings that tried to deal with the past, if within definite limits. Khrushchev’s secret speech gave another great impulse to this sort of literature, as well as relaxing the demands for orthodoxy in music and art. By the early 1960s a number of works had appeared describing the camp system that had just come to an end, the most famous being One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The novella appeared in the literary journal Novyi Mir, which gained huge popularity for its publication of many works in sympathy with the program of destalinization. Some writers, especially young poets like Evgenii Yevtushenko, acquired enormous popularity at this time, even reading his poetry in sports stadiums that filled to capacity. Shostakovich used Yevtushenko’s poem “Babii Yar,” about the wartime massacre of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis, in his Thirteenth Symphony. The ending of the post-war cultural policies and the rehabilitation of imprisoned and executed writers meant a sudden boom in the republication of the literature of the 1920s with its frequently modernist styles. Soviet publishers began to put out a wave of translations of Western authors: William Faulkner, John Updike, and many European writers. Soviet opera and ballet moved away from the Stalinist canon toward styles that were less narrative and more innovative, a compromise style that still required elaborate sets and more “acting” than was then popular in the West, then at the height of fascination with abstractionism in all the arts. The Khrushchev era was not all liberalism, however. The renewed campaign against religion affected many areas of culture indirectly, making impossible the republication of nineteenth century classics like certain works of Dostoyevsky or the expression of religious themes. The great event of the decade was the scandal around the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize to Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago, a clearly anti-Soviet account of the revolution and Civil War. A huge propaganda success for the West, the book was prohibited in the USSR and Pasternak became the object of press attacks and official condemnation. This was not Stalin’s time, however, and Pasternak continued to live quietly in his dacha in Peredelkino.

Perhaps the most striking relic of the Stalin era in Khrushchev’s time was his refusal to accept modern genetics. Lysenko remained king in biology, primarily because of Khrushchev’s support of him. At the same time science expanded enormously during these years. By the 1960s only the United States outranked the USSR in the number of publications in the natural sciences, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union had the largest number of natural scientists per capita in the world. The sciences had whole complexes at their disposal, like Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”) near Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. Started in 1958 at the inspiration of Academy scientists, this entirely new town came to have some fifty thousand scientists and their families, with new and comfortable (by Soviet standards) housing and privileged access to a whole range of consumer goods. For the party leadership, science was not only the basis of a “scientific” worldview but also the key to economic growth, the path to victory in the rivalry with the capitalist world. The ability to concentrate resources on crucial areas had brought spectacular successes in rocketry and the nuclear industry, both military and civilian, and the idea was to broaden the base so as to ensure a more thorough modernization of industry and agriculture.

With the removal of Khrushchev the new leadership quickly moved to end the anti-religious campaign and allowed the churches to continue a modest and heavily supervised existence that lasted until the 1980s. Lysenko finally lost his monopoly of power in biology, his work was repudiated and genetics reappeared as a recognized discipline. Until the end of the Soviet Union the relationship of the authorities to the science community was polite and collaborative, though not without tensions under the surface. For the writers, however, the new regime was less positive. The young poet Joseph Brodsky had been sent into northern exile for “parasitism” in the last months of Khrushchev’s leadership, and in 1972 the KGB threw him out of the country for publishing his work abroad. Brezhnev never repudiated the condemnation of Stalin, but he put an end to the toleration and encouragement of writing, historical or literary, that exposed the repressions of that era. Thus Solzhenitsyn’s work could no longer be published, and appeared only in the West, leading to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Cultural policy was essentially frozen in time, for the works of many writers repressed under Stalin continued to appear, but Bulgakov’s unpublished writings or Doctor Zhivago could not. Large numbers of translations of Western literature appeared in translation, but major writers like Marcel Proust (published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s) or James Joyce could not. Soviet writers began to write in a mildly modernist vein, and avoided the classic subjects of socialist realism. Some, Vasilii Belov and others, began to turn in different directions, influenced by Solzhenitsyn. They wrote romanticized accounts of village life with a strong nationalist undertone, the idea being that the peasantry had once had true Russian values, patriarchal and religious, which the Soviet order had destroyed. They were highly critical of the kolhoz, and their historical stories described a harmonic village destroyed by urban outsiders, often Jewish, in the 1930s. The critical edge and the nationalist tone gave them wide popularity among the intelligentsia in the later Brezhnev years. The village writers and their ideology shaded off into the dissident movement, which was heavily nationalistic in its outlook, though a minority of dissidents shared the more westernizing approach of Andrei Sakharov. Both tendencies were actually well known among the elite intelligentsia from underground manuscripts, but more than the dissidents it was some of the “bards,” the singers like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii, who performed their songs on the guitar and who most accurately reflected the mood among educated people. Vysotskii rarely gave public concerts, for no state agency could permit that, but his songs performed in small gatherings or Moscow apartments quickly spread all over the country in tape recordings and amateur performances, again behind closed doors. Not quite political enough to be overtly anti-Soviet, the songs and their lyrics reflected a kind of introspective alienation characteristic of the time. Above-ground recordings of Okudzhava’s songs appeared in the Soviet Union only in the later 1970s, and one recording of Vysotskii’s surfaced only shortly after his death in 1980.

Soviet filmmakers followed similar trends. The breakthrough of Christianity and Russian nationalism in film was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev of 1966. Rarely shown in the Soviet Union, the film depicted the fifteenth century icon painter Rublev as a man who survives the disasters of his time by faith and art. Tarkovsky later moved on to more psychologically introspective themes, usually with religious overtones, in his later works such as Stalker (1979), more or less science fiction. Though the film was seen in the Soviet Union, its showings were extremely limited. Tarkovsky had had enough and moved to the West, dying in Paris in 1986. Other film directors also divided their time between historical epics (Siberiade, also made in 1979 by director Andrei Konchalovsky) and mildly modernist films from the private life of the Soviet intelligentsia.

One of the most striking features of Soviet life from the 1960s onward was the emergence of popular culture. The beginnings lay in the Stalin era, and to a limited extent were there even before the revolution. In those years, however, the audience of popular culture was mainly the thin middle layer of urban society, with some extensions into the working classes. The main examples were the musical stages (estrada in Russian), which featured Soviet jazz bands and comedy routines, and film. The boundaries with the culture of the intelligentsia were fluid: Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote film music, and major writers produced scripts as well. Some writers produced science fiction and detective stories, though both were under a cloud after the middle 1930s. The more liberal atmosphere of the Khrushchev era brought about a revival of popular fiction, especially science fiction, and jazz came back onto the radio and into musical theaters. What really changed Soviet popular culture, however, were television and the availability of Western popular music, not just jazz but eventually some forms of rock and roll. Television took popular music out of the theaters and into everyone’s apartment. While Soviet television put on some culture programs, it was the popular entertainment that made a mass audience, like Iulian Semenov’s World War II spy story, Seventeen Minutes of Spring, the hit miniseries of 1973 that so impressed the young Vladimir Putin.

Popular music had a complex history. As elsewhere, the jazz audience was increasingly elite after the 1960s, and American rock took its place. Soviet youth heard rock music on foreign radio stations, but also massive amounts of tape recordings began to circulate, many homemade, as tape recorders and players became widely available. The Brezhnev regime did not prohibit rock music. It tried to restrict what it saw as the more erotic and wild versions, but much rock music circulated openly, and the state began to sponsor rock bands and popular singers with eclectic styles. Some of them, like Alla Pugacheva, became wildly popular. Parallel to these more official versions of popular music were underground bands like Aquarium in Leningrad that also relied for a long time on taped recordings but by 1980 had acquired some state recognition. All late Soviet popular music was derived from Western models, even if modified with a local twist, and it also imitated Western music in creating a series of rapidly changing generational subcultures. Each new moment, from jazz to the disco craze of the late 1970s, had its own audience that often did not extend to listeners even a few years younger. Soviet popular culture, at least the musical variants, now had very little to do with “Soviet reality.” It also had little to do with the culture of the intelligentsia, official, critical, or dissident culture, though it did share in the sense of alienation of much of the intelligentsia. It also shared a social background as many of the popular musicians, even rockers, came from privileged backgrounds in the intelligentsia or even the party elite.

By the 1980s most of the great writers and artists of the early Soviet days were gone: Pasternak died in 1960, Shostakovich in 1975, and Sholokhov in 1984. Almost all of the first wave of film directors and actors of the 1920s were gone. The newer generation of writers and artists was not in the league of their predecessors, no more than their counterparts in the West were in the league of Proust or Joyce. Soviet writers and artists had the additional burden of an ossified but obligatory cultural policy, one that no longer attracted the new generations among the intelligentsia. Even if the dissidents seemed to many educated people shrill and unconvincing, their own views of the Soviet system were scarcely enthusiastic. The official cultural line and its products became more and more a fantasy world that ignored what the public actually read or watched. For the intelligentsia, Gorbachev’s Perestroika was an earthquake – a welcome earthquake, as they were sure that political freedom and a market economy would produce a great flowering of culture. They were sure that the time for the intelligentsia had finally come. They would find out otherwise.