Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime

6

Culture as Propaganda

But then that was precisely the goal of the whole enterprise: to uproot the species spiritually to the point of no return; for how else can you build a genuinely new society? You start neither with the foundations, nor with the roof: you start by making new bricks.

Joseph Brodsky¹

For the Bolsheviks, the social revolution meant also a revolution in culture. The subject has attracted considerable scholarly attention because it is more congenial than the somber record of repression and suffering that fills so much of the history of the time. In their first decade, the Communists displayed a tolerance for independent creativity that was quite absent from their politics and economics. This tolerance becomes even more striking when set against the rigidity and vulgarity of the Stalinist era. Scrutinized more closely, however, the innovations in literature, art, and education of the regime’s early years appear as marginal aspects of a cultural policy that was from the beginning driven by political imperatives. The very concept of “cultural policy” is a contradiction in terms since true culture can only be unguided and spontaneous: it betrays the end to which the Communists intended to harness it.

That end was propaganda, that is, intellectual and emotional manipulation. Lenin as well as Anatolii Lunacharskii, his cultural commissar, defined the mission of all Soviet cultural and educational institutions as instilling Communist ideology for the purpose of raising a new and superior breed of human beings. The function of literature was to be propaganda; this was also the task of the visual and performing arts, and, above all, the educational system. No previous government had attempted to mold thought and feeling on such a comprehensive scale.

Propaganda was not a Bolshevik invention, of course. The concept originated in the early seventeenth century when the papacy established the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to spread Catholicism. In its secularized form, it was frequently employed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments: Catherine II of Russia made skillful use of it, as did the French revolutionaries and Napoleon. During World War I, the major belligerent powers carried out aggressive propaganda and set up special offices for this purpose. The novelty of what the Bolsheviks did lay in the centrality of propaganda in Soviet life: previously used to touch up or to distort reality, in Communist Russia it became a surrogate reality. Communist propaganda strove, and to a surprising extent succeeded, in creating a fictitious world side by side with that of everyday experience and in stark contradiction to it, which Soviet citizens were required to pretend to believe. This was made possible by the monopoly the Communist Party secured over sources of information and opinion. The effort was undertaken on so vast a scale, with such ingenuity and determination, that in time the imaginary world it projected eclipsed for many Soviet citizens the living reality.

Early Soviet cultural history reveals a striking dualism. On one level, bold experimentation and unrestrained creative freedom; on another, relentless harnessing of culture to serve the political interests of the new ruling class. While foreign contemporaries and historians focused on the whimsical creations of Bolshevik and “fellow-traveler” artists—the monochrome canvasses of Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin’s fantastic skyscraper that was never built and his man-propelled glider that never left the ground, the haute couture workclothes designed by Rodchenko and Liubov Popova for starving workers and peasants—the more significant phenomenon was the silent rise of a “cultural” bureaucracy for whom culture was only a form of propaganda, and propaganda the highest form of culture. Years before Stalin took over and put an end to experimentation, the shackles on creativity were being set in place.²

Since, according to Marxist doctrine, culture is a by-product of economic relations, the Bolshevik leadership took it for granted that the revolutionary changes they had carried out in property relations would result in equally revolutionary transformations in culture: Trotsky merely affirmed a Marxist axiom when he stated that “every ruling class creates its own culture.”³ The “proletariat” was to be no exception. This said, the Bolsheviks far from agreed on the nature of the new culture and on the best ways of bringing it about. One disagreement concerned the freedom of the writer and artist. Some Bolsheviks believed that “cultural workers” should be subject to the same discipline as the other members of Communist society. Others argued that since creativity could not be regimented, they required greater freedom. Lenin was ambivalent on this issue. In 1905 he spoke of literature as an activity least subject to “mechanical leveling.” To be sure, it had to be linked to the Party: in a socialist society, writers will have to be party members and publishing houses will have to come under party control. But since a socialist literature could not be created overnight, writers required freedom to be themselves.⁴ Yet, in the same breath, Lenin broadened the concept of partiinost—an untranslatable term meaning total commitment to the Party—to cover literature. After the Revolution, he said, “Literature must be partiinaia”: “Down with nonparty litterateurs!” “Down with litterateurs-supermen!”⁵ And although Lenin showed much more tolerance for literature and art than for any other field of activity, when forced to choose he usually sided with those who saw culture as the handmaiden of politics.

The other issue dividing the leadership concerned the content of the new, proletarian culture: whether it was to assimilate the heritage of “bourgeois” culture and build on it, or to reject it and build from scratch. The latter thesis was upheld by the “Proletarian Culture” or Proletkult movement. Enjoying the patronage of Lunacharskii and the Commissariat of Enlightenment which he headed, its members dominated cultural activity during the first two years of the new regime, when Lenin was preoccupied with more urgent matters. But it was only a matter of time before they would be demoted, because for Lenin “culture” meant something very different: not so much literary and artistic creativity, which he doubted the Russian masses were capable of in any event, but a way of life guided by science and technology:

Lenin’s conception of the “socialist cultural revolution” emphasized the rational-planificatory tasks of the new revolutionary state power as well as the instrumental quality of knowledge and the pressing tasks of elementary mass education. Only when the foundations had been solidly laid, could the higher culture become accessible to the peasant and proletarian masses, cultured social relations be established, and the people, schooled in technology, experience a transformation of mentality. In this conception, the “cultural revolution” meant not the creation of a new “proletarian culture” but the acquisition of scientific, technical, and organizational means with which to overcome the socioeconomic backwardness of the country and its population.⁶

Even though he adhered to a less utilitarian notion of culture, Trotsky also rejected the philosophy of Proletkult. Since the historic mission of the “proletariat” was to abolish all classes, its culture could not bear the stamp of a single class: the workers’ state would give birth to the first “truly human” culture.⁷ In the end, Proletkult lost out. For reasons that will be spelled below, its ideas were declared heretical and its organizations, which at their height competed with the Communist Party, were dissolved. The regime chose a more eclectic path.

In matters of organization Lenin believed in bigness: his preference was for superinstitutions modeled on capitalist cartels to manage every major sphere of public activity. Thus, the Supreme Council of the National Economy was to direct all industry, the Cheka all that concerned security, and the Revolutionary Military Council every aspect of the Civil War effort. He similarly consolidated and bureaucratized the management of culture by subordinating it to a single institution, the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi Kommissariat po Prosveshcheniiu, or Narkompros). Unlike the corresponding tsarist ministry, Narkompros assumed responsibility not only for education but for every facet of intellectual and aesthetic life, including entertainment: scholarship, literature, the press, painting, music, the theater, and the cinema. As defined in 1925, the function of the Narkompros of the Russian Republic was to “direct all scholarly, scientific, educational, and artistic activity of the Republic of a general as well as professional character.”⁸ Narkompros directed state publishing enterprises and enforced an increasingly rigorous censorship code. Because Lunacharskii was rather an indulgent person, as long as he was in charge (he was replaced in 1929) these functions were carried out in a relaxed manner, allowing to the Commissariat’s personnel and to the recipients of its subsidies a degree of independence that was unthinkable in the other branches of government. Inefficiently managed, Narkompros failed to attract good talent, turning into a favorite haven for the wives and relatives of the Bolshevik bosses.⁹

32. Lunacharskii.

But Lunacharskii’s personality was not the only and not even the main reason for the regime’s uncharacteristically benign treatment of the nation’s intellectual elite. The conspicuous fact was that virtually the entire intelligentsia, both professional and “creative,” rejected the Bolshevik dictatorship. The intelligentsia had been the first group in tsarist Russia to emancipate itself from the universal duty of service to the patrimonial state.¹⁰ Whatever its sins, it genuinely believed in freedom, and having enjoyed more than a century of independence, it was unwilling to be reharnessed in state service. Most of Russia’s writers, artists, and academics, individually and collectively, turned their backs on the new rulers, refusing to work for them, and either emigrated or withdrew into their private world. They did so not only for political reasons, but also from revulsion at the regime’s vulgarity and its interference with their private lives. The young Vladimir Nabokov spoke not only for himself when on the tenth anniversary of the October coup he wrote in an émigré newspaper:

I despise not the man, the worker Sidorov, an honest member of some Com-pom-pom, but the warped, stupid idea which transforms Russian simpletons into communist simplophiles, which turns people into ants of a new variety, formica marxi, var. lenini.… I despise the Communist faith as an idea of base equality, as a drab page in the festive history of mankind, as the rejection of terrestrial and nonterrestrial beauty, as something that stupidly encroaches on my unfettered I, as the encouragement of ignorance, obtuseness and smugness.¹¹

How repugnant the new regime was to the “creative intelligentsia” may be judged from the fact that when in November 1917, a few days after the coup, the Bolshevik Central Executive Committee invited Petrograd’s writers and artists to a meeting, only seven or eight turned up. The same fate befell Lunacharskii when in December 1917 he summoned 150 of its most prominent representatives: on this occasion, five came, among them two Communist sympathizers, the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii and the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and the temporarily disoriented Alexander Blok.¹² Lunacharskii virtually had to beg students and teachers to end their boycott of the new regime.¹³ Maxim Gorky was the only novelist with a national reputation who cooperated with the Bolsheviks, and even he subjected them to scathing criticisms that Lenin chose to ignore because he found his support so valuable. Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, written in 1924, poured scorn and hatred on Russia’s intellectuals for spurning the Bolshevik regime. Infuriated by their refusal to join what he saw as the wave of the future, Trotsky ridiculed the “reactionary stupidity of the professional intelligentsia” and declared that the October Revolution had marked its “unqualified defeat.”¹⁴ In time, many intellectuals made their peace (or, rather, truce) with the regime, often to escape death from starvation, but even they proved grudging collaborators at best. The “creative intelligentsia” whom the regime succeeded in winning over were mostly hacks and daubers unable to make it on their own, who, like similar mediocrities in Nazi Germany, flocked to the party in power in quest of patronage. The policy of relative cultural tolerance at least neutralized the rest. Lenin, who held the Russian intelligentsia in no less contempt than had Nicholas II, believed that he could buy it off with a bit of freedom and some material rewards.

Writers and artists willing to collaborate found the conditions of work during Lenin’s lifetime fairly decent. Even so, they produced little of lasting value because of the difficulty of working within the terms set by their Communist patrons. For the latter, human beings were not unique individuals with a free will and a personal conscience, but specimens of their class, that is, types who acted according to the dictates of their economic status. Communists intensely disliked individualism in all its manifestations: an influential theorist of Soviet culture of the 1920s, Aleksei Gastev, predicted the gradual disappearance of individual thinking and its replacement by “mechanized collectivism.”¹⁵ This outlook required writers to produce stock characters: it precluded a novel or play featuring a “good” businessman or a “bad” worker. As a result, the Soviet novel and drama presented two-dimensional, black-or-white personalities who talked in clichés and behaved like marionettes. They were permitted to lapse temporarily from the stereotype, to entertain doubts or commit mistakes, but in the end all had to work out as happily as in a Hollywood film. Since this made for predictable and therefore dull contents, the more imaginative Soviet writers and dramatists put their energy into experimenting with form. In the first decade of the Communist regime every traditional canon of literature, drama, and art was consciously violated: experimentation with form became an end in itself, pursued to conceal the poverty of the content.

The “Proletarian Culture” movement was founded in the early years of the century by Lunacharskii and his brother-in-law, Alexander Bogdanov (Malinovskii). Lenin appointed Lunacharskii, a dropout from the University of Zurich, Commissar of Enlightenment despite misgivings about this movement and suspicion of Bogdanov’s political ambitions. Lunacharskii said that he owed his appointment to the fact that he was “the intelligent among the Bolsheviks and the Bolshevik among the intelligentsia.”¹⁶ For all his disagreements with Lenin about the nature of the new culture, he shared Lenin’s conviction that the Soviet school had to be the “source of agitation and propaganda” and a weapon with which to destroy “all kinds of prejudices,” religious as well as political.¹⁷ He also defended censorship, which Lenin entrusted to his care.¹⁸

In the formative years of Bolshevism, Bogdanov was one of Lenin’s closest and most dependable associates. In 1905, Lenin appointed him to the newly formed clandestine three-man Center that directed secret Bolshevik activities and managed its finances. Even then he displayed a keen interest in the sociology of culture.¹⁹ His theory, not always clear or consistent, partly derived from Emile Durkheim and the neo-Kantians, can be summarized as follows: Culture is an aspect of labor, and since labor is a collective endeavor in man’s perpetual struggle with nature, the creation of culture, too, is a collective process:

All creativity—technological, socioeconomic, political, domestic, scientific, artistic—represents a variety of labor and is formed exactly the same way from the organizational (or disorganizational) efforts of man.… There is not and cannot be a strict delineation between creativity and ordinary labor; there not only exist transitional gradations, but often one cannot even say with certainty which of the two designations is more applicable. Human labor, always relying on collective experience and using means that have been collectively worked out, is in this sense always collective, no matter how, in individual cases, its objectives and its external, immediate form may be narrowly individualistic (that is, when such labor is performed by one person and only for himself). The same holds true of creativity. Creativity is the highest, most complex form of labor. For that reason, its methods derive from those of labor.²⁰

Primitive, classless societies had a single, common culture, whose outstanding product was language. But poetry, music, and dance also helped organize communal work and warfare.

At a certain stage in human evolution, according to Bogdanov, came the division of labor and its corollary, social classes. The breakdown of social homogeneity led to a bifurcation of culture as the propertied elite monopolized thought and imposed its ideas and values on the inert masses. The result was a cleavage between intellectual and physical labor, which the owners of the means of production exploited to keep the laboring classes in thrall. In societies based on class distinctions, art and literature became highly individualized, their creators claiming to respond to personal “inspiration.” But the individualism of feudal and capitalist cultures was more apparent than real. Adopting Durkheim’s concept of conscience collective, Bogdanov argued that the roots of even the most individualistic creativity lay imbedded in values the writers and artists absorbed from their class.²¹

From these premises it followed that once the proletariat took power, a new culture would emerge, one reflecting its experience in the workplace. Shaped in the factory, where men worked as teams, it would be collective rather than individualistic, and in this respect closer to the culture of primitive society. The “I” of bourgeois culture would yield to “we.” Under the new conditions, the heritage of the old, “bourgeois” culture would be of little if any value. Some of Bogdanov’s more radical followers wanted not only to discard but physically to destroy the legacy of the past—museums along with libraries and even science—as irrelevant or positively harmful. Bogdanov himself adopted a more moderate stand. The worker, he wrote, would approach the culture of the bourgeois epoch much as an atheist approaches religion, that is, with detached curiosity. But he would not adopt it, because its authoritarian and individualistic spirit is alien to him. The new culture will emerge from the inexhaustible creative powers latent in the masses of industrial workers once they are given the opportunity to write, paint, compose, and to pursue every other intellectual and aesthetic activity from which the bourgeoisie has barred them.

In 1909, with the financial help of Maxim Gorky and Fedor Shaliapin, Bogdanov opened an experimental Bolshevik school in Capri to train cadres of worker intellectuals. A dozen or so students smuggled out of Russia prepared, together with their Social-Democratic instructors, curricula in philosophy and the social sciences which, upon graduation and return home, they were to disseminate among fellow-workers. The instructional system was organized so that the teachers not only taught their pupils but also learned from them. The focus of instruction was on propaganda and agitation. The following year a school based on similar principles was opened in Bologna.²²

Lenin rejected the cultural philosophy of Bogdanov, for he believed that socialism, even as it destroyed capitalism, had to build on its foundations. He did not think that workers had the creative potential that Bogdanov ascribed to them. A technocrat, he viewed culture mainly in terms of science and engineering, of which the Russian masses were ignorant: he wanted to teach them, not to learn from them. Dismissing the theories of Proletkult as “utter nonsense,” he insisted that “proletarian culture must be the logical (zakonomernoe) development of the accumulation of the knowledge that mankind had produced under the yoke of capitalist society.… One can become a Communist only by enriching one’s memory with the knowledge of all the wealth that mankind has produced.”²³ But what especially irritated Lenin about Bogdanov’s theory was the notion that culture was an autonomous sphere of human endeavor, parallel to, and equal in importance to, politics and economics.²⁴ He suspected, not without reason, that the worker cadres trained at Capri and Bologna were intended to establish a separate Bolshevik apparatus, loyal to Bogdanov. Aware that some of his followers came to regard Bogdanov as his intellectual peer and a contender for leadership, Lenin had both him and Lunacharskii expelled from the Party (1909).

Bogdanov found a hospitable environment for his ideas after the Bolshevik coup owing to the friendship of Lunacharskii. In a decree issued shortly after assuming office as Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharskii (who had been readmitted to the Party in 1917) pledged to promote the “cultural-enlightenment organizations of workers, soldiers, [and] peasants” and their “full autonomy in relation to both the state center and the municipal centers.”²⁵ This provision, which slipped through the loose nets of early Bolshevik legislation, ensured Proletkult a unique status in Lenin’s dictatorship, exempting it from the supervision of party and party-directed state organs.

Drawing on generous subsidies from Lunacharskii’s Commissariat, Bogdanov proceeded to cover Soviet Russia with a network of Proletkult organizations. Studios were opened where professional artists taught drawing and sculpting. There were poetry circles, folk theaters, extension courses, libraries, and exhibitions. Professional writers and artists involved in these activities taught the techniques of their craft, but they also sought to stimulate original creativity. They wanted everything done by teams, without resort either to individual “inspiration” or to past examples: one theorist of the movement extolled the newspaper as the model of collective creativity.²⁶ At “poetry workshops” poems were created in cooperative fashion, participants contributing individual lines. Poetry was to reflect the mechanization of modern industrial life: its rhythms had to change accordingly, replacing Pushkin’s four-syllabic iamb that rendered “gentry leisure” with new, brisker rhythms. In the words of one Proletkult author, the world stood “on the eve of electrification of poetry in which the rhythm of the modern enterprise is provided by the central dynamo.”²⁷

Proletkult also attempted to reshape the culture of everyday life. The first Proletkult conference held in February 1918 earnestly debated a motion concerning “children’s rights,” which proposed to empower minors, regardless of age, to an education of their liking, and the right to leave their parents if dissatisfied with them.²⁸

One of the more eccentric members of Proletkult was Aleksei Gastev, a metalworker turned poet and theorist. An early follower of Bogdanov, in the first years of the Bolshevik regime he wrote verse and came to be known as the “singer of steel and machines.” After 1920 he concentrated on applying Frederick Taylor’s “time-motion” methods of industrial productivity to improving efficiency of everyday life. Members of his “Time League,” which had branches in every major city, were required to carry watches and to keep “chronocards,” on which they recorded the exact use they made of every minute of the day. Ideally, he would have had everyone go to sleep and rise at the same hour. To economize on time he proposed to “mechanize speech” by replacing the long expressions customary in Russian with shorter ones, and by resorting to acronyms, for the widespread use of which in Soviet Russia he bore much responsibility.

In moments of visionary exaltation, Gastev proposed to mechanize man and his activities in accord with the time-motion experiments carried out at his Central Institute of Labor (Tsentralnyi Institut Truda). He had visions of a future in which people would be reduced to automatons known by ciphers instead of names, devoid of personal ideas and feelings, whose individuality would dissolve tracelessly in collective work:

The psychology of the proletariat is strikingly standardized by the mechanization not only of motions, but also of everyday thinking.… This quality lends the proletarian psychology its striking anonymity, which makes it possible to designate the separate proletarian entity as A, B, C, or as 325, 075, and 0, et cetera.… This signifies that in the proletarian psychology, from one end of the world to the other, there flow powerful psychological currents, for which, as it were, there exists no longer a million heads but a single global head. In the future this tendency will, imperceptibly, render impossible individual thinking.²⁹

This nightmare, in which one Western historian perceives a “vision of hope,”³⁰ provided material for Evgenii Zamiatin’s anti-utopian novel, We, and Karel Capek’s R.U.R., a play that popularized the word “robot.”^* By a strange inversion, a flaw Communism attributed to capitalism, namely the dehumanization of the worker, became for some Communists an ideal.

Proletkult expanded rapidly: at its height in 1920, it had 80,000 active members and 400,000 sympathizers.³¹ In many factories it maintained cells, which functioned independently of regular Communist cells. Its leaders enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the Party granted no other group: they did not conceal that they regarded themselves as subject only to their own internal supervision. A Moscow conference of Proletkult organizations resolved that Proletkult “should become an independent class organization on an equal footing with other forms of the workers’ movement—the political and the economic.”³² In a programmatic statement published in the first issue of its organ, the chairman of Proletkult argued that the cultural tasks of the regime required a division of labor: to the Commissariat of Enlightenment belonged responsibility for education, while Proletkult was to direct the creative energies of the proletariat. To accomplish its task, it had to be exempt from the restrictions imposed on other state organs.³³ Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife, whom Lenin had asked to keep an eye on Narkompros, more than once objected to Proletkult’s “separatism,” but Lunacharskii, partly from sympathy for Bogdanov’s ideas, and partly from an un-Bolshevik dislike of harsh measures, did nothing to correct the situation.

It was this political self-aggrandizement that proved the movement’s undoing. Lenin turned his attention to Proletkult in August 1920, at which time he asked the historian M. M. Pokrovskii, one of its directors, for an explanation of the organization’s “juridical” status.³⁴ As soon as he realized how much independence this organization had acquired and what claims it made to institutional sovereignty, he ordered Proletkult organizations to be integrated into the Commissariat of Enlightenment (October 1920). In the course of the next two years, the central and regional offices of Proletkult were shut down and most of its cultural activities curtailed.^†

Proletkult managed to lead a desultory existence for a few more years but its philosophy was rejected. It was Lenin’s view that prevailed. Soviet culture was to benefit from the entire heritage of humanity: the new order would raise culture to unprecedented heights, Lenin proclaimed, but it would do so step by step, without abrupt leaps. It was a significant decision and perhaps the only liberal measure that Lenin bequeathed to his successors. For it meant that even under the harshest restrictions on creativity imposed by Stalin, citizens of the Soviet Union had access to the cultural heritage of mankind. It helped them to retain their sanity under the most trying conditions.

The Communist regime controlled cultural activities by two devices: censorship and monopoly on cultural organizations. Censorship was a tradition in Russia, first institutionalized in 1826 and enforced until 1906, long after it had been abandoned in the rest of Europe. Until 1864, it was practiced in its most onerous “preventive” form: before publication or performance, every manuscript had to be submitted to the censors to obtain their license. This form of censorship was unique to tsarist Russia in modern times. In 1864, a new censorship code replaced “preventive” with “punitive” censorship, under which authors and editors were liable to prosecution after the offending material had been made public. Censorship was abolished in 1906, although in 1914, Russia, like the other belligerent nations, introduced military censorship. On April 27, 1917, the Provisional Government lifted the remaining restrictions on the press and exempted it from administrative penalties, except for disclosure of military secrets.³⁵

It is indicative of the importance the Bolsheviks attached to controlling information and public opinion that the very first law they passed upon assuming power called for the suppression of newspapers that opposed their coup d’état. This was done by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of October 27, 1917, which ordered, as a “temporary and emergency measure,” the closing of all “counterrevolutionary” newspapers.³⁶ Such haste at a time when the Bolsheviks had more urgent things to occupy their minds is explainable by Lenin’s belief that “the press is the core and foundation of political organization”³⁷—in other words, that freedom of the press was tantamount to the freedom to form political parties. The decree met with such resistance from all quarters, including the printers’ union, which threatened to shut down all presses, Bolshevik ones included, that it had to be quietly dropped. It was replaced with another, milder censorship regulation in February 1918, according to which the right to publish was open to all citizens provided the names of the editors and addresses of the enterprise were made known to the authorities. Newspapers were required to publish government decrees and regulations on the front page.³⁸

Even without a comprehensive censorship apparatus, the new regime adopted a variety of measures to restrict press freedom over the next five years, the net effect of which was to choke off independent publishing.³⁹ To begin with, it set up in the major cities “Commissariats of the Press,” subordinated to the Sovnarkom, with discretionary powers to suspend hostile publications and impound their presses.⁴⁰ A decree of December 1917 entrusted similar authority to the soviets.⁴¹ On January 28, 1918, a new repressive institution came into being, a Revolutionary Tribunal of the Press, attached to the Revolutionary Tribunal, to try editors and authors guilty of publishing “false or distorted” information.⁴² In practice, most of the responsibility for censorship at this stage was assumed by the Cheka, which through its local branches collected information on hostile publications and turned over those responsible to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Papers that in its view worked for the overthrow of the Communist dictatorship the Cheka shut down. In the first seven months of Bolshevik rule (October–May) more than 130 “bourgeois” and socialist newspapers were closed in this manner.⁴³

During the first half of 1918, as popular support for the new regime eroded, editors and publishers were frequently hauled before tribunals. Troublesome newspapers were subjected to stiff fines; many appeared with blank spaces where censors had removed offending articles. Some were shut down temporarily or permanently; as had been the practice under tsarism, those that survived had to print formal repudiations of the information that had gotten them into trouble. Drawing on experience acquired under pre-1906 tsarist censorship, the publishers of the suppressed papers often came out the very next day under a new editor and with a changed but similar-sounding name.⁴⁴ One frequently penalized daily, the Menshevik Den’, or “Day,” managed to appear in the course of a single month (November 1917) under eight different names: after being forced to close, “Day” became “Midday” (Polden’), followed by “New Day” (Novyí den’), “Night” (Noch’), “Midnight” (Polnoch’), “The Coming Day” (Griaduiushchii den’), “New Day” (Novyi den’) (again), and “Dark Night” (V temnuiu noch’). Its last number was called “In the Dead of Night” (V glukhuiu noch’).⁴⁵

To further limit press freedom, the Bolsheviks resorted to economic measures. On November 7, 1917, Lenin decreed advertising a state monopoly which deprived the press of its principal source of income. The authorities also nationalized many printing establishments, turning them over to Bolshevik organizations. Even so, an independent press managed to carry on. Between October 1917 and June 1918, some 300 non-Bolshevik newspapers continued to appear in the provincial towns, that is, outside Moscow and Petrograd. In Moscow alone, there were 150 independent dailies.⁴⁶

The survival of independent dailies and periodicals, however, was only a temporary reprieve: Lenin made it no secret that he intended to liquidate them as soon as he was able to do so. When, in the course of an address to the Fourth Congress of Soviets in March 1918, he referred to newspapers and someone in the audience shouted “All are closed!” Lenin responded: “Unfortunately, not all, but we will close them all.”⁴⁷ The chief of the Petrograd police and Commissar of the Soviet Press, V. Volodarskii, said in May 1918: “We tolerate the bourgeois press only because we have not yet triumphed. But when we print in Krasnaia gazeta, ‘We have triumphed,’ from that moment on we shall not allow a single bourgeois paper.”⁴⁸ The rationale for such threats was provided by a contemporary Communist writer, who explained that in the summer of 1918 “it became conclusively clear that the entire periodical press, except for that published by the government, very consistently [supported] the struggle for power of the parties and groups which stood behind them. The government had only one option: to close all the periodical anti-Soviet press.”⁴⁹

The independent press was finally liquidated in the summer of 1918, two years before the anticipated Bolshevik triumph in the Civil War. The process began in Moscow with the closing of all non-Bolshevik dailies on Sunday, July 7, the day the Latvian troops suppressed the Left SR uprising.⁵⁰ An emergency measure, it was formalized two days later when the government revoked permits to publish newspapers, journals, brochures, bulletins, and broadsides issued in Moscow prior to July 6: henceforth, such publications, with the exception of those produced and distributed by government institutions and those of the Russian Communist Party, were proscribed.⁵¹ The ban initially applied only to the capital city and was to remain in force until the “final solidification and triumph of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federal Republic,”⁵² but before long it was extended to all areas under Bolshevik control, and it was never rescinded. On July 19, 1918, Izvestiia published the text of the Constitution of the RSFSR, Article 14 of which provided that to guarantee the toilers “true” freedom of opinion, the government abolished “the printed word’s [pechat] defense of capital” and entrusted publishing to workers and poor peasants.⁵³ This stipulation provided the legal grounds for the methodical suppression of what remained of the non-Bolshevik press. Before the end of the year, 150 Moscow dailies with a combined circulation of 2 million were shut down.⁵⁴ The provincial press met the same fate. By September 1918, when the Red Terror was launched, Soviet Russia had no independent press left to report on the atrocities.

Along with daily newspapers, Lenin liquidated independent monthlies, Russia’s celebrated “thick journals,” some of which had been in existence since the eighteenth century: Vestnik Evropy, Russkii vestnik, Russkaia mysl’, and dozens of others. In one fell swoop, Russia’s leading organs of opinion and the main vehicle for the dissemination of belles-lettres vanished: the country was thrown back to conditions which had prevailed in pre-Petrine Russia, when news and opinion had been the exclusive preserve of the state.⁵⁵

Like the tsarist regime, Lenin showed greater leniency toward books, since they reached a relatively small audience. But in this field, too, he restricted freedom of expression by nationalizing publishing houses and printing presses. The State Publishing House (Gosizdat), which he founded in December 1917 and placed under Narkompros, was to enjoy a monopoly on book publishing: in this capacity it later was entrusted with book censorship.^* The control of publishing was made effective by the introduction of a state monopoly on paper on May 27, 1919.⁵⁶ In 1920–21, the state monopolized the sale of books and other printed materials.⁵⁷ In 1919–23 some private publishing firms managed to carry on in Petrograd and Moscow, often by working on commission for Gosizdat. In the provinces, independent publishing ceased entirely: there, by 1919 virtually all books carried the imprint of the local branches of Gosizdat.⁵⁸

33. Krupskaia.

In October 1921, the Cheka was given the authority to enforce preventive military censorship.⁵⁹ “Military secrets” were undefined: the effect of the measure was to extend the censor’s power to publications that did not deal with military matters.

In 1920 an unusual attempt was made at retroactive censorship. Krupskaia, whom Lenin had appointed to a new propaganda bureau called Main Committee for Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet), decided that Soviet libraries should be “purged of obsolescent literature.” She had the Commissariat of Enlightenment instruct Soviet libraries to remove from their shelves all copies, save two to be preserved in a “Special Depository” (Spetskhran), of the works of 94 authors, among them Plato, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Mach, Vladimir Solovev, Nietzsche, William James, Leo Tolstoy, and Peter Kropotkin.^*

The hitherto piecemeal subjection of information, ideas, and images to state control was consolidated on June 6, 1922, with the establishment in the Commissariat of Enlightenment of a central censorship office called Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing (Glavnoe Upravlenie po delam Literatury i IzdatePstva), or as it came to be popularly known, Glavlit.⁶⁰ Glavlit’s charge was to carry out preliminary censorship of all publications and pictorial material and to make public lists of proscribed literature, in order to prevent the printing and distribution of works “containing agitation against Soviet authority.” Except for publications of the Communist Party and its affiliates, the Communist International, and the Academy of Sciences, which were exempt from censorship, all works intended for publication in Soviet Russia henceforth required an official license (viza) from Glavlit or one of its provincial branches. Glavlit was further charged with fighting “underground” publications. Secret circulars of the Politburo and Orgburo (the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee) forbade the importation of books of “an idealistic, religious, and antiscientific content,” as well as foreign newspapers and “Russian White Guard literature.”⁶¹ Exempt from this proscription were high government officials, including Lenin, who regularly received foreign books and periodicals, including “White Guard” publications. The implementation of Glavlit’s orders was entrusted to the GPU, the successor of the Cheka. In February 1923, Glavlit created a section called Glavrepertkom to make certain that the performing arts—the theater, cinema, musical and variety shows, and phonograph records—did not spread anti-Communist, religious, and similar material. In time, Glavlit and Glavrepertkom acquired a positive function: they not only prevented the publication or performance of works considered subversive, but released each year a “general orientation plan of publications,” which set quotas for diverse subjects that the authorities believed required particular attention. It also appointed the editorial boards of periodical publications.⁶² Glavlit was placed under the charge of an old Bolshevik, N. L. Meshcheriakov, an engineer by training, and his deputy, P. I. Lebedev-Polianskii, a leading figure in Proletkult.

The rules guiding the work of Glavlit’s censors were progressively tightened until every semblance of independent thought disappeared from public life.^* They had a devastating effect on creativity, inasmuch as authors and artists, ever mindful of the censor peering over their shoulders, learned to practice self-censorship. The writer Panteleimon Romanov deplored this habit in 1928, before the more onerous Stalinist censorship went into effect:

Russia happens to be such an unfortunate country it will never know real freedom. And how is it that they don’t understand that by sealing off with a dead mark the sources of creativity, they retard and kill culture? Just think of it, nowhere but in the U.S.S.R. is there preventive censorship! When a writer has no assurance what tomorrow will bring, how can one expect him to speak honestly, openly? Everyone looks at the matter as follows: Never mind, I shall write something, only so it passes.…

Once writers used to fight for their convictions, which they honored as sacred. Once, the writer viewed the government as something alien, something inimical to freedom. Now they make us treat it as our own. Now to shun the government is not liberalism, as before, but conservatism. And what are the convictions of today’s writer? If he is told that his thrust is unsuitable he blushes like a schoolboy caught in a mistake, and is ready on the spot to change everything, to replace white with black. And all this because they have frightened us.⁶³

Despite—perhaps because of—its unprecedented powers to control what was written or performed, information on Glavlit is exceedingly sparse: none of the three successive versions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, even has an entry on this subject. The 1934 edition blandly informs the reader that the “October Revolution put an end to both tsarist and bourgeois censorship.”^†

When they took power, the Bolsheviks had no literary policy other than to make good books available to the mass reader. On December 29, 1917, in the decree setting up Gosizdat, the classics of Russian literature whose copyright had expired were nationalized: one consequence of this action was to deprive private publishers of an important source of income. A supplementary decree of November 26, 1918, declared cultural works, published or not, by persons living as well as dead, liable to be declared property of the state. Their creators were to be paid honoraria fixed by the authorities. A decree of July 29, 1919, exempted the government from restrictions placed by their owners on personal archives of deceased Russian writers, composers, musicians, and scholars on deposit in libraries and museums.⁶⁴ In the course of 1918, numerous private libraries were confiscated.⁶⁵ In this manner, step by step, the entire heritage of Russian culture became the property of the state, that is, the Communist Party.

As noted previously, Russia’s literary establishment boycotted the new regime: the few willing to collaborate, such as Blok, Maiakovskii, and Valerli Briusov, found themselves ostracized by fellow writers. Many authors emigrated west, preferring to face the hardship and isolation of life abroad rather than the suffocating atmosphere at home—among them Ivan Bunin, Konstantin Balmont, Vladislav Khodasevich, Leonid Andreev, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ilia Ehrenburg, Zinaida Gippius, Maxim Gorky, Viacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Kuprin, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Aleksei Remizov, Alexis Tolstoy, and Boris Zaitsev.^* Zamiatin, who obtained permission to emigrate in the late 1920s by special dispensation of Stalin, expressed the feeling of many of Russia’s writers when he wrote in 1921 that if the country continued to treat its citizens like children, dreading every “heretical” word, “Russian literature [had] only one future: her past.”⁶⁶ In a world in which nothing seemed to make sense, this paradox became a much-quoted platitude. Blok, who did not emigrate and soon drifted away from the Bolsheviks, groped for an explanation of the creative impotence that afflicted him under the new regime: “The Bolsheviks do not hinder the writing of verses, but they prevent one from feeling master of himself.… He is master who feels the pivot of all his creativeness and holds the rhythm within himself.”⁶⁷

Of those who stayed but refused to collaborate, many perished from hunger and cold. Many more would have done so if not for the intervention of Maxim Gorky, who helped them by capitalizing on his friendship with Lenin: Gorky thought Russia a barbarous country in which intellectuals, regardless of their politics, were a priceless asset. In the expropriated residence of a wealthy merchant, located in Petrograd on the corner of Nevsky and Bolshaia Morskaia, he set up a refuge for writers and artists: among the inhabitants of what came to be known as the “Crazy Ship” (from its resemblance, when lit up at night, to a boat) were the poets Osip Mandelshtam, Nicholas Gumilev, and Vladimir Khodasevich, and the painter Ilia Repin. They lived far from luxuriously: one resident attempted to keep warm by writing about tropical Africa. But they did survive.

Prerevolutionary Russia had many literary circles grouped around programs and manifestos. Of these, the Futurists alone unreservedly collaborated with the Bolshevik regime. Futurism originated in Italy in 1909 and from there spread to Russia. As in postwar Italy, where the Futurists were the main literary allies of Fascism, and for much the same reason, the Russian Futurists made common cause with the Bolsheviks.⁶⁸ They despised as effete and ossified the existing cultures and yearned for a new culture attuned to modern technology and the rhythms of the machine age. The manifesto of Italian Futurism, written in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti, the movement’s founder—which served also its Russian followers—called for the destruction of museums and libraries. It extolled rebellion, “aggressiveness,” violence: racing cars were declared more beautiful than the statue of Victory of Samothrace.⁶⁹ The Futurists, who looked to “impulse” instead of reason as their guide, found Fascism and Communism attractive because of their hostility to the bourgeois life-style. They saw only the nihilism of these movements, not the constraints, which, once the old order was out of the way, would give way to totalitarianism.

The leading Russian Futurist, the poet and dramatist Vladimir Maiakovskii, joined the Bolsheviks the instant they took power and in mid-1918 went on Lunacharskii’s payroll. Long before 1917 he had hailed the coming revolution as the “holy washer-woman [who] will wash away all filth from the face of the earth with her soap.”⁷⁰ As poet laureate of the new regime, he placed his talents at the service of Communist agitation and propaganda. In his personal life, however, he was the very antithesis of the “collective man” favored by the new regime. A narcissistic self-promoter, from the beginning of his literary activity in 1913 he adopted himself as the hero: his first play he called Vladimir Maiakovskii, his first volume of verse 1!, and his autobiography, I Myself. His enchantment with the masses stemmed not so much from interest in the common man as from a craving for the common man’s adulation. He made certain always to be the center of attention, whether by staging scandalous plays, bellowing verse at public readings, painting propaganda posters, or carrying on an open affair with the wife of a colleague. Although no one claims that he was the greatest poet of his time, it has been said that no poet of the twentieth century has been accorded as much honor.⁷¹

This honor was lavished on him by the Communist establishment despite the fact that it was far from amused by the antics of Maiakovskii and his fellow Futurists. Lenin intensely disliked his poetry, calling his celebrated poem “150,000,000” “nonsense, stupid, arrant stupidity and pretentiousness.”^* He demanded that Futurist poetry be published at most twice a year in small editions, and called for “reliable anti-futurists.”⁷² As a result of Lenin’s disapproval, Maiakovskii and the Futurists became the object of harassment by the party establishment.⁷³ The movement survived thanks to the patronage of Lunacharskii and the willingness of its members to serve as propagandists. The Futurists were the only literary group on which the Bolsheviks could rely in the early years. In this position, they enjoyed access to state patronage, which they used to make life difficult for their literary rivals.⁷⁴ When Stalin took charge and bridled such displays of megalomania, Maiakovskii committed suicide (1930).

The favorite poet of the new regime, one of the few writers of peasant origin, was not Maiakovskii but Demian Bednyi (“Demian the Poor,” whose actual name was Efim Pridvorov). An old Bolshevik, he wrote agitational-propagandistic poetry made up of political slogans set to rhyme, exhorting workers to hate and kill. To White soldiers he appealed to massacre their officers:

Death to the vermin! Kill them all, to the last!

And having finished off the damned vermin,

Liberated from the yoke of the lordly horde,

One by one, by regiments, by squads,

Join our brotherly ranks!⁷⁵

Such verses the regime published in the daily press, posted on walls, and scattered from airplanes. Trotsky extolled Bednyi on the grounds that there is “nothing of the dilettante in his anger and in his hatred. He hates with the well-grounded hatred of the most revolutionary party in the world.” He thought it a virtue that Bednyi wrote not “only in those rare instances when Apollo calls,” but “day in and day out, as the events demand … and the Central Committee.”⁷⁶ During the siege of Petrograd in 1919, Red Army soldiers fleeing the battlefield are said to have been persuaded to turn around and face the enemy by the recitation of Bednyi’s “Communist Marseillaise.” Bednyi was ever ready to oblige with rhymed invective against the Communists’ enemy of the hour—the Constituent Assembly, the Mensheviks and SRs, Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson. He would perform similar services for Stalin during World War II. (Wits reported that after Petrograd had been renamed Leningrad, Bednyi demanded that the works of Pushkin be renamed after him.)⁷⁷

Great poetry, lasting poetry, was written by poets who insulated themselves from the turmoil and the politics of their time. Anna Akhmatova and her husband, Gumilev, as well as Mandelshtam, members of the Acmeist circle, the Imagist Sergei Esenin, and Boris Pasternak, led quiet, private, unsubsidized, and unadvertised lives. Later generations would recognize the poetry they wrote as among the noblest achievements of Russian literature—long after the shrill voices of the hate-mongers had been silenced and forgotten. For this they paid a price, however. Gumilev was shot in 1921 for membership in a “counterrevolutionary” organization: he is said to be the first Russian writer of note whose place of burial is unknown. (He believed that the Huns who in the fourth century had crossed southern Russia and under Attila ravaged Europe, had been reincarnated in the twentieth century as Bolsheviks.⁷⁸) Esenin killed himself in 1925. Mandelshtam perished in 1939 in a Stalinist camp where he had been sent for an anti-Stalin ditty.^* Akhmatova and Pasternak survived, but had to bear humiliations that less stalwart souls would not have endured.

A special case was Alexander Blok, a refined writer whose “Twelve” and “Scythians” are generally acknowledged to be the greatest poems of the Bolshevik October. In his youth, Blok, a leading Symbolist, was entirely absorbed in aesthetics and religion and oblivious of politics. On the eve of and during World War I (in which he served) he developed broader interests, in part under the stimulus of patriotic emotions. He welcomed 1917, excited by the surge of elemental peasant and worker violence, which promised to burn to ashes not only “old” Russia but “old” Europe. In October 1917 he impulsively sided with the Bolsheviks (although politically he had greater affinity for the Left SRs). He wrote his two famous revolutionary poems in January 1918 in a spell of poetic delirium. “Twelve” depicts armed Red Guards—murderous, pitiless—marching behind an invisible Christ bearing a “bloody standard” to smash the bourgeois world. “Scythians” extols Russia’s revolutionary masses as Asiatic hordes poised to ravage Europe: the Europeans are invited to become their brothers or die. The Bolsheviks never quite knew what to make of these poems, which depicted their leader as Christ and their followers as barbarian Mongols. Intellectuals ostracized Blok. His disenchantment set in almost at once, the instant he realized that the elemental forces whose praises he had sung were extinguished by the iron hand of the state. “What one cannot deny the Bolsheviks,” he wrote in 1919, “is their unique ability to exterminate life (byt) and to destroy individuals.”⁷⁹ He published no more poems after “Scythians,” fell into depression, and died in 1921, thoroughly disillusioned.

For all practical purposes, no novels were written in Russia during the first years of the new regime: not only were the material conditions unfavorable to creativity, but the situation was so violent and fluid that novelists, whatever their politics, had difficulty finding their bearings. The first major novels written under Communist rule—Zamiatin’s We (1920) and Boris Pilniak’s The Naked Year (1922)—had in common an unconventional, fragmented form of narrative previously confined to avant-garde literature. We, first published in Czech translation and then in English in the United States, is the original anti-utopian novel and the inspiration for Orwell’s 1984. It depicts a future world of totally dehumanized beings, such as envisioned by Gastev, known collectively as “we,” who bear numbers instead of names and whose every minute is regulated. Ruled by “the Benefactor,” they build a spaceship to carry their civilization to other planets. Confining his subjects to a city walled off from the rest of the world, the habitat of the “hairy” survivors of mankind, the “Benefactor” disposes by “atomization” of those who, like the novel’s hero, display such deviant behavior as falling in love. In The Naked Year, Pilniak describes, in a succession of scenes set during the Revolution and Civil War, the decline of an aristocratic family, sunk in alcoholism and disease, and the simultaneous rise of a coarse but robust new breed of “leather jackets.” The novel stresses the peasant character of the Bolshevik Revolution and the reemergence of traditional Muscovite culture that had lain dormant in the village since Peter the Great.

Pilniak and Zamiatin were members of the “Serapion Brotherhood,” a loose community of writers formed in 1920 under Gorky’s patronage. They were not hostile to Bolshevism and some of them even sympathized with it. But they uncompromisingly defended the autonomy of literature and the freedom of the writer. The group dedicated itself to developing “a strategy for dealing with an unprecedented situation in which a tyrannical regime, basing its power on the illiterate, has proclaimed itself the sponsor and advocate of cultural enterprise.”^* It is in regard to them that Trotsky revived and popularized the socialist term “fellow-travelers.” Writers associated with the Serapion Brotherhood (in addition to Zamiatin and Pilniak, they were Michael Zoshchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, Isaac Babel, and Iurii Olesha) produced some of the best literature published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

From 1922 until the end of the decade, when Stalin’s repressive measures eliminated virtually all creative freedom, Russian belles-lettres underwent something of a renascence. Efforts of the authorities to have writers abandon the central theme of the traditional novel—the struggle of the individual against passions, conscience, or social conventions—in favor of “collective” themes of class conflict, proved unenforceable. Even those writers most sympathetic to the new regime found that they had to focus on individuals because it was only by this device that they could inject into their narrative the element of drama. “Under all ideological regimentations, a writer, nonetheless, still worked alone. This means, at least hypothetically, that he remained susceptible to fits of extreme individualism known as ‘inspiration.’ He could be, and quite frequently was, a narcissist, nurturing his vain ‘ego.’ ”⁸⁰ A dominant theme of much Soviet belles-lettres of the 1920s was the difficulty persons brought up on the values of the old world had in adjusting to the new, revolutionary order. Novels were often set in the Civil War, in which many of the writers had taken part. Emphasis was placed on violence, much of it mindless, not only because the Civil War happened to have been very violent, but because exposing the reader to it was certain to shock his sensibilities and give the impression that a new literature was being born.

In a country a high proportion of whose population was illiterate, the printed word reached relatively few. Since they were primarily interested in influencing the masses, the Bolsheviks devoted great attention to the theater and cinema as instruments of propaganda. There was much experimentation in both of these art forms. Alongside the traditional theater, the Communists developed new varieties ranging from political cabarets and street shows to reenactments of historical events employing thousands of extras. A decree of August 26, 1919, nationalized theaters and circuses, entrusting their management to Tsentroteatr, a department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. The law authorized “autonomous” theaters (those not in receipt of state subsidies), but they had to submit annual reports of their activities and follow instructions of the central theater organization.⁸¹ Actors became state employees, and as such, liable to be drafted for theatrical duty.

The revolutionary theater was supposed to generate support for the regime and simultaneously to instill hatred for its opponents. To this end Soviet directors borrowed from Germany and other countries the techniques of the experimental theater. Emulating the German theatrical innovator Max Reinhardt, they strove to abolish the barrier between spectators and actors by eliminating the formal stage and by performing in the streets, in factories, and at the front. Audiences were encouraged to converse with the actors. None of these techniques was new, but in Soviet Russia they were applied on a scale not seen previously.⁸² The line separating reality from fantasy was all but obliterated, which also helped obliterate the distinction between reality and propaganda.

Agit-prop theater vulgarized drama by reducing the protagonists to cardboard symbols of perfect virtue and unalloyed evil, employing coarse ridicule and seeking to stir violent reactions in the audience. The leading innovator in the Russian revolutionary theater, Vsevolod Meyerhold, enjoyed in the early years of the new regime virtually dictatorial powers over the stage and cinema. An early convert to Communism, he was able to extract generous subsidies from Lunacharskii, with the help of which he sought to realize his ambition of carrying out an “October” in the theater.⁸³

Meyerhold personally directed the earliest play by a Communist author for the Soviet stage, Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe, which had its premiere on the first anniversary of the October coup. The leading characters were seven pairs each of “Clean” (rich) and “Unclean” (poor) who, having survived the Flood, find refuge at the North Pole. The Unclean manage to overthrow the Clean and leave them in hell. A Christ-like figure appears under the name “Simply Man” (the part was played by Maiakovskii) to bring a new gospel. “I do not preach the Christian paradise,” he says:

My paradise is for all

Save those poor in spirit.…

Come unto me

All who have calmly plunged a knife

And turned from the enemy’s corpse with a song!

Ye are the first to enter

My kingdom of heaven.

The Unclean visit the paradise promised by religion, which they find as boring and corrupt as the earth. In their wanderings they finally reach the terrestrial paradise of Communism, a city that, judging by Maiakovskii’s stage directions, is an idealized version of Henry Ford’s Detroit: “The exposed mass of transparent factories and apartment houses strains to the sky. Enveloped by rainbows stand trains, streetcars, and automobiles.…”⁸⁴

Despite complimentary tickets, workers and peasants stayed away from Maiakovskii’s play, while professional actors boycotted it. Much more popular with ordinary citizens were spectacles modeled on Punch and Judy shows. A favorite character was Petrushka, who would defend poor peasants and attack kulaks in improvised banter with the audience. There were also performances of “agitki,” brief productions on specific subjects, such as the vices of religion or the virtues of personal hygiene. These were performed with minimal decor in trains that traveled from town to town and from village to village, as well as from trucks and streetcars:

34. Agitational or agit-prop theater.

The one-time enemy is constantly ridiculed and combatted in symbolic form on the open street, with the masses being encouraged to join in. A beloved genre is contrasting the past and the present in the form of radical images. First come tsarist soldiers in blue uniforms with fixed bayonets, leading through the streets a group of political prisoners, followed by red gendarmes escorting white police officers in chains. Next is produced a colorful company of priests, generals, and speculators, who are exposed to public mockery because, although garbed in the most elegant clothes, they wear thick ropes around their necks. During a demonstration against England a gesticulating doll was erected in the middle of the square to depict an English diplomat in the process of delivering a note. An immense worker fist puts an end to this political action with a punch to the nose of the foreign statesman. On a similar occasion the Englishman was also represented by a gigantic effigy in tails and top hat carried on the roof of a car. Whenever the speaker referred to England, he directly apostrophized the effigy. Soon the crowd, too, turned against it with threatening gestures. The “Englishman,” in the meantime, walked up and down elegantly and arrogantly, a monocle casually inserted into his eye socket, until a Bolshevik worker swinging a hammer sprang onto the roof of the car. With one blow he forced the figure, which begged for pity, to its knees, at which point he turned to the crowd to ask whether the “Englishman” should be spared or not. As could be expected, the mob howled in unison: “Strike him down!” whereupon the worker raised his hammer and let it fall three times with full force on the effigy’s head. A man in the crowd picked up the soiled and crushed top hat, collected the fragments of the monocle, and, displaying both to the assembled, proclaimed in triumph, “That’s all that’s left of our enemy!”⁸⁵

The “worker” and “the man in the crowd,” were, of course, professional actors, and the purpose of the production was neither to entertain nor to enlighten but to instill hatred.

A sensational example of such hate drama was the play Do you hear, Moscow? (Slyshysh Moskva?) by S. Tretiakov, staged in Moscow in 1924 under the direction of Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein, who before turning to the cinema was a leading light of the Proletkult theater, wanted to do away with the theater as an institution separated from everyday life. He constantly experimented with techniques that would permit him to manipulate the audiences’ emotions to the highest degree of tension.⁸⁶ His greatest success in this was staging Tretiakov’s play. According to the director’s conception, the objective of the performance was “to collect into one strong-willed fist the diffuse emotions of the audience and to instill in the spectator’s psyche a purposeful directive, dictated by the current struggle of German workers for Communism.”

35. Street theater.

The second and third acts created in the audience sufficient tension which discharged itself in the fourth act in the scene showing [German] workers storming the Fascist platform. In the audience, spectators jumped from their seats. There were shouts: “Over there, over there! The count is escaping! Grab him!” A gigantic student from a worker’s university, jumping to his feet, shouted in the direction of the cocotte: “Why are you fussing? Grab her,” accompanying these words with a juicy curse. When the cocotte was killed on the stage and pushed down the stairs, he swore with satisfaction, adding, “She had it coming.” This was said so forcefully that a lady in furs sitting next to him could no longer stand it. She jumped up and blurted out in fright: “My Lord! What is going on? They will begin here, too,” and ran for the exit. Every killed Fascist was drowned with applause and shouts. It was reported that a military man, sitting in the rear, pulled out his revolver and aimed it at the cocotte, but his neighbors brought him to his senses. This enthusiasm affected even the stage. Members of the stage crowd, students … placed there for decoration, unable to hold back, joined in the assault on the installation. They had to be dragged back by their feet.⁸⁷

Satirical theater of a more sophisticated kind was born in 1919, following the publication of an article by Lunacharskii which said that the prevailing harsh conditions of life made humor a necessity. Fulfilling his directive, “Budem smeiatsia”—“Let us laugh”—a satirical theater opened in Vitebsk; from there it moved to Moscow. The “Theater of Revolutionary Satire,” or “Terevsat,” was modeled on prerevolutionary cabaret theaters. The Moscow Terevsat and its replicas in several cities enjoyed great popularity. The government began to cool toward the genre, however, when it became the target of its own satire. In 1922 the play Russia 2 depicted in a half-mocking, half-nostalgic way the life of Russian émigrés in the West. Upset by the sympathy the audience expressed for the White émigrés and their anti-Communist sentiments, it ordered the satirical theater closed.⁸⁸

A type of spectacle much favored in 1920 was instsenirovki, or “stagings,” mass performances under the open sky, with innumerable extras, to reenact historic events in a manner favorable to the Communists.⁸⁹ Lavishly staged, such “docudramas” blended truth and fantasy, theater and circus. This genre, too, was not original, having been experimented with in Western Europe and the United States before World War I. But techniques that in the West served to entertain, in Soviet Russia were employed to persuade. Events were reduced to the starkest conflicts and the characters to symbols: mimicry and movement replaced words, burlesque concealed the complexity of human relations.

The most celebrated of these spectacles was staged on the third anniversary of the October coup in the heart of Petrograd under the title The Capture of the Winter Palace. The producers disclaimed any intention of “re-creating exactly the picture of events,” and they were true to their word. The performers, of whom there were six thousand, were to be as “a single collective actor.” A spectator left the following account:

36. Scene from Tretiakov’s Do you hear, Moscow?

The discharge of an artillery gun announces the beginning of the show. The square is darkened. A few minutes pass in tense expectation, all eyes are focused on the stage, which is silent.… Music resounds.… The crowd of many thousands watches with bated breath as the action unfolds. Laughter and barbed quips greet the appearance of Kerensky, who pompously receives the homage of his admirers. “Now he got cut down to size pounding the doors of ministers and bankers abroad,” one can hear from a group of workers. “Yeah, it’s hard for him to make a buck,” responds a young Red Army soldier, without taking his eyes off the stage.

The rapid change of events on the stage attracts the strained attention of the viewers. The July attempt to overthrow the detested Provisional Government of Kerensky, which ends in the temporary defeat of the proletariat, elicits a deep sigh of disappointment.… But now the choir, heralding the power of the soviets, resounds louder and louder and with growing confidence. The supporters of the Provisional Government, seized by panic, flee in all directions. Kerensky and his ministers save themselves in automobiles; their hasty flight delights the audience. The proletariat has triumphed! “Hurrah,” shouts the choir from the stage. “Hurrah, hurrah!” respond the spectators.

There begins the impetuous assault on the Winter Palace. The viewers are electrified: an instant and it seems that the crowd will crush the barrier and together with the automobiles and mobs of soldiers and workers throw itself to storm the last bastion of despised Kerenskyism.

But now the cannonade stops. The Palace has been taken and above it unfurls the red flag. The orchestra strikes up the “Internationale,” which tens of thousands of voices pick up.

The spectacle is over, rocket after rocket rises to the sky. Cones of golden rain burst and silently expire. Thousands of silver flames descend straight on the crowd.… For an instant it becomes as bright as in daytime.

It is only now that one can behold the multitude of people. The square is packed. Without any exaggeration it can be said that on Uritskii Square that evening there were no fewer than one hundred thousand people.^*

Other such mass spectacles bore the titles The Mystery of Liberated Labor and The Blockade of Russia, the latter of which had a cast of 10,000. Such performances, also staged in provincial towns, had to be abandoned for reasons of cost. They were replaced by film productions.

Lenin is said to have been greatly impressed by the propagandistic possibilities of the cinema: he is quoted to the effect that for Bolsheviks it was the most important of the arts.⁹⁰ Its “main task,” according to Lunacharskii, was propaganda.⁹¹ During the Civil War, private as well as state-owned studios concentrated on the production of propagandistic shorts (agitki), usually less than 30 minutes long: of the 92 films turned out by Soviet studios in 1918–20, 63 were of this genre.⁹² They were shown in regular movie theaters and in agit-trains that crisscrossed the country. After a period of cooperation with private industry, the regime nationalized cinematic production and distribution, along with commercial photography.⁹³ Goskino, a state agency, came into being in December 1922 to manage cinema production.

37. Agitational train.

Moving pictures appealed to Communist propagandists not only because of cost considerations, but also because they were capable of a degree of realism no other art form could duplicate. The propagandists noted that Russian audiences displayed violent reactions to American movies, which were widely shown in those years. Analyzing the reasons for these reactions, one of the pioneers of Soviet cinema, Lev Kuleshov, concluded that they were due to the application of two techniques: close-ups and “montage,” a rapid succession of short scenes depicting an event or an image from different vantage points.⁹⁴ Since a major purpose of Communist propaganda was arousing violent political emotions against the regime’s enemies, the cinema seemed an ideal tool. The technical inspiration came from D. W. Griffith, whose Intolerance was smuggled into Moscow in 1919. It is said that Lenin was so impressed by it that he invited Griffith to take charge of the Soviet movie industry. Whether the story is true or not, it is indisputable that all Soviet movies produced in the first decade of the Communist regime bore the stamp of Griffith’s influence.^*

Artists, architects, and composers working for the Communists aspired to match the revolutionary changes in the country’s political, economic, and social life. This meant dramatic innovation. The early years of Soviet Russia saw frenzied experimentation in the visual arts and musical composition. Painters and sculptors, for all the creative freedom they enjoyed, were supervised by a bureaucratic organization, the Department of Visual Arts (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv, or IZO), formed in January 1918 as part of Narkompros and directed by the painter David Shterenberg. Musical activity was also supervised by Narkompros through a department known as Muzo. To break the hold on art of traditional institutions, the regime, on April 12, 1918, abolished the Academy of Arts.⁹⁵

As in the performing arts, a major effort went into breaking down the walls separating art from everyday life. Professionalism was disparaged: in the paradoxical style then in fashion, the device of young architects working under N. A. Ladovskii proclaimed, “The future belongs to those who are extraordinarily untalented for art.”⁹⁶ To bring “art into life,” leading creative artists banded together in 1920–21 into a community of “Constructivists,” who, following the example of the German Bauhaus, strove to eliminate the distinction between high and applied art. The Constructivists worked in all fields of aesthetic endeavor: painting and architecture, industrial design, couture, advertising, typography. Neither its adherents nor its historians have been able satisfactorily to define the aesthetic principles of Constructivism. Its programmatic declarations consisted of slogans, most of them negative. It is easier, therefore, to ascertain what the movement was against than what it was for. It was against “traditional art,” which term presumably embraced everything from Neolithic artifacts to post-Impressionist paintings. It often assailed art: “We declare irreconcilable war on art!” was the epigraph of one of its manifestos. “Death to art!” “Art is finished! It has no place in the human labor apparatus. Labor, technology, organization!” and so on.⁹⁷ The original statement of the group called on the artist to abandon the atelier for the factory, the true source of modern inspiration. Art embodied in concrete objects was pronounced dead.⁹⁸

Their declared intentions notwithstanding, artists of this school continued to turn out artistic objects—what else could they do?—and rather than mingle with factory workers, amused themselves, as artists have done since time immemorial, in studios and cafés in the company of fellow artists. Behind their creations it is difficult to discern any common principle except the desire to be different and to shock. In his determination to kill painting, the Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko turned out three “canvases” covered with nothing but the three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow. “I affirmed: it’s all over,” he explained.⁹⁹ In typographic design, nothing was ever symmetrical or linear. Constructivist furniture aimed to please the eye without considering the user’s comfort. Clothing designs imposed straight lines on the curves of the human body: futuristic costumes for an “illiterate population, shoeless and in rags.”¹⁰⁰

38. Alexander Rodchenko in a worker’s suit of his own design, 1921, with a drawing of the suit.

Museums were discouraged and stress was placed on street art. The government devoted much attention to the production of posters. During the Civil War, Soviet poster art was aimed at the Whites and their foreign backers. The enemy was represented as repulsive, bloated vermin while the Soviet hero had a clean-cut, trim, “Aryan” appearance. After the Civil War, posters were widely used for didactic purposes such as combatting religion, alcoholism, and illiteracy, and soliciting help for starving peasants. In 1918 and 1919, artists in Communist employ covered public buildings and residences, trains, and streetcars with graffiti bearing propagandistic slogans. In Moscow, the trees in front of the Bolshoi Theater were smeared with paint. In Petrograd, the Palace Square was given similar treatment. In Vitebsk, the cultural domain of Marc Chagall, the city center exploded in a riot of color and political slogans.¹⁰¹

Official architects and urban planners drew up fantastic schemes for the total reconstruction of Russian cities that called for wholesale demolition of existing structures to make room for monumental public and residential buildings. Little came of these projects, mainly for lack of money, but also from strong inhibitions against tearing down historic quarters. In the end, Petrograd was left virtually unaltered, a living historical museum. The center of Moscow was radically changed by the destruction of many old buildings, but this occurred later, under Stalin, and for reasons of security rather than aesthetics.

Avant-garde architects believed that Communist buildings had to be constructed of materials appropriate to the new civilization: declaring wood and stone “bourgeois,” they chose iron, glass, and concrete.¹⁰² The best-known example of early Communist architectural design was Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 projected monument to the Third International in Moscow. A leading Constructivist, Tatlin insisted that “proletarian” architecture had to be dynamic, its buildings as mobile as the modern industrial metropolis. The monument was designed on three levels. The lowest, in the shape of a cube that rotated around its axis once a year, was to provide facilities for the congresses of the Third International. Above it the second level, shaped like a pyramid, which turned once a month, was to house the Comintern’s administrative offices. The edifice was to be crowned with a cylindrical structure, revolving daily, where the information and propaganda offices would be located. The outer casing gave the structure the shape of a gigantic cannon. Had it been built, Tatlin’s monument, designed to rise 400 meters, would have been the tallest structure in the world. It was never erected. Tatlin also experimented with other forms of industrial design, such as a man-powered flying machine, called, in his honor, “Letatlin” (1929–31). Pleasing as it was aesthetically, it was useless for the purpose for which it had been designed, namely flying, which was rather odd coming from an artist who launched the slogan “Not the Old, Not the New, but the Necessary.”^*

39. Agitational streetcar.

Musical activity depended on Muzo, whose license was required for all concert performances. It demanded strict accounting from musicians.¹⁰³ Russia’s outstanding composers and performers, unwilling to submit to bureaucratic interference, left the country.¹⁰⁴ Those who remained split into two rival groups that competed fiercely for state subsidies: the “asmovites,” who advocated modernism, and the “rapmovites,” who championed musical primitivism. The gifted among them (such as Alexander Glazunov) ceased composing, while the hacks wrote “agit-music”: “Much Soviet music composed during the 1920s is strangely barren and synthetic.… The 1920s are filled with the names of Russian composers, now dimly remembered, who copied external devices, modernistic tricks, sociological gimmicks.”¹⁰⁵

Such tricks and gimmicks involved dispensing with the conductor and performing with nonmusical instruments, for music, too, was to reflect modern life and relate to production. As in architecture, efforts were made to depart from reliance on traditional media. “Musical orgies” were staged in which the instruments were motors, turbines, and sirens, and the conductor served as “Noisemaster.” “Symphonies of Factory Whistles” were performed in Moscow: the sounds are said to have been so confusing the audience was unable to recognize even the Internationale. The greatest triumph of the genre was the presentation in Baku in 1922, on the fifth anniversary of the October coup, of a “concert” performed by units of the Caspian Fleet, foghorns, factory sirens, two batteries of artillery, machine guns, and airplanes.¹⁰⁶

The creations of writers and artists subsidized by Lenin’s government had next to nothing in common with the tastes of the masses for whom they were intended. The culture of the masses was rooted in religion. Statistics on Russian reading habits indicate that both before and after the revolution, peasants and workers read mainly religious books; their tastes in secular reading ran to cheap escapist literature.¹⁰⁷ They were oblivious to the culture offered them by the Bolsheviks. The experiments in literature, painting, and music carried out in early Soviet Russia were manifestations of the European avant-garde, geared not to popular tastes but to those of the cultural elite. This was understood by Stalin, who on attaining absolute power put an end to experimentation and imposed literary and aesthetic Standards that in crude realism and didacticism exceeded the worst of Victorian culture.

Lenin, as a rule, did not interfere in cultural affairs, leaving the matter to Lunacharskii. His one venture into art was a rather comical attempt to cover Russian cities with statues of the forerunners and heroes of socialism. Lenin borrowed the idea from the utopia of the seventeenth-century Dominican Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun, which had the walls of the ideal city covered with edifying frescoes. Allowing for Russia’s harsh climate, Lenin proposed to erect busts and statues made of gypsum and concrete. In the spring of 1918 he told Lunacharskii of his idea of “monumental propaganda” and asked him to prepare a list of suitable candidates.¹⁰⁸ Lunacharskii and his staff, bewildered by this proposal and apparently hoping that Lenin would forget it, procrastinated. But Lenin did not forget, and after considerable delays, in July 1918 the pantheon was approved: it listed 63 persons, both Russian and foreign, among them some surprising names, the oddest being Dostoevsky, who hated socialism and socialists above all else in the world.¹⁰⁹ The monuments turned out to be either too futuristic to please the public or too traditional to satisfy the art critics. Some were rejected; the rest soon crumbled and had to be quietly removed. As with so much else of Communist legislation, the most enduring achievement of Lenin’s endeavor was destructive in nature, namely the demolition of monuments to the tsars.

The Russian language has two words for education: obrazovanie, meaning instruction; and vospitanie, meaning upbringing. The first refers to the conveyance of knowledge; the second, to the molding of personality. The entire Soviet regime was dedicated to vospitanie in the sense that all institutions of the state, from trade unions to the Red Army, had as one of their principal missions inculcating in the citizenry the spirit of Communism—so much so that in the 1920s some observers saw Soviet Russia as one gigantic school.¹¹⁰ This was education in the sense in which Helvétius had used the word: a total environment designed to turn out perfectly virtuous beings.¹¹¹ The Bolsheviks, of course, also attached importance to education in the narrower sense, in part because they wished through the classroom to condition the mind and psyche of children, and in part because they wanted to promote science and technology. As with everything else in Communist Russia, classroom activities were to be conducted in a politically correct manner: for Lenin there was no such thing as politically “neutral” education.¹¹² Accordingly, the Party program of 1919 defined schools as “an instrument for the Communist transformation of society.”¹¹³ This entailed “cleansing” pupils of “bourgeois” ideas, especially of religious notions: propagation of atheism occupied a central place in the curriculum of Soviet schools. It further meant imparting positive Communist values in order to raise constructive members of society. Education was to begin the instant the child came into the world. According to a Narkompros instruction of December 1917,

40. An example of “monumental sculpture”: the novelist Saltykov-Shchedrin by N. Zlatovratskii.

The public free-of-charge education of children should begin the day they are born. The incorporation of preschool education into the general system of public education has as its purpose laying down the foundation work for the social upbringing of the child at the earliest stages of formation. The further development by the school of attitudes to work and society laid down in preschool age will turn out a physically and spiritually fully developed member of society, willing and able to work.¹¹⁴

The notion that upbringing was the responsibility of parents, because children “belonged” to them, was rejected. Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, a leading economist and writer on ethical matters, put it bluntly:

From the socialist point of view it is utterly senseless for the individual member of society to treat his body as his inalienable personal property, because the individual is only one link in the transition of the species (rod) from the past to the present. But ten times more senseless is a similar view of “one’s” offspring.¹¹⁵

Soviet educational policies went through two phases. The first, spanning the era of War Communism (1918–20), was relatively liberal, concentrating on the free development of the child’s personality. It postulated that Communism was “natural” and that children liberated from traditional values and discipline would instinctively gravitate toward it. After the proclamation of the New Economic Policy in 1921, when the failure of progressive education became apparent and the authorities began to fear that the reintroduction of capitalist institutions would cool Communist ardor, emphasis was shifted to ideological indoctrination.

To realize its ambitious educational program, the regime nationalized educational institutions. A decree of May 30, 1918, placed all schools—elementary, secondary, and higher—whether belonging to the state, public institutions, or private bodies, under the authority of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. The declared purpose of this measure was to ensure that instruction was carried out in accord with “the principles of modern pedagogy and socialism.”¹¹⁶ The decree making education a state monopoly inadvertently realized the unfulfilled hope of tsarist bureaucrats of bringing all schools under their control.¹¹⁷

Shortly after taking power, the government ordered revolutionary changes in Soviet Russia’s primary and secondary education.¹¹⁸ A uniform network of Consolidated Labor Schools (Edinye Trudovye Shkoly) was introduced with standardized curricula on two levels: the lower for children 8 to 13, the higher for those 13 to 17. Whereas under the old system a student required a diploma from a certain kind of secondary school to qualify for admission to institutions of higher learning, henceforth there was to be but a single “staircase” leading from kindergarten to university. Attendance was obligatory for school-age children of both sexes, who were to be taught coeducationally.

In the new schools the authority of the teaching staff was severely curtailed, for they were known to be hostile to Lenin’s dictatorship: in the Russian Republic as late as 1926 only 3.1 percent of the teachers in primary schools and 5.5 percent in secondary schools belonged to the Communist Party.¹¹⁹ No longer called “teachers” (uchiteliia) but “school workers” (shkolnye rabotniki, or shkraby for short), they were forbidden to discipline pupils, to assign them homework, or to give them examinations and grades. The students’ progress was to be judged by a collective. School administration was vested in committees in which “school workers” shared authority with the older pupils as well as with workers from nearby factories.

Lunacharskii, who admired John Dewey’s educational philosophy, wanted pupils to “learn by doing.” He believed that knowledge communicated through a combination of work and play would hold for youths an irresistible attraction. In essence, he sought to introduce on a mass scale the principles of progressive Western education, such as Dewey’s “activity school,” the English “Dalton system,” and the Montessori method, which in the West were confined to experimental institutions. The most radical exponents of Soviet educational philosophy in the early 1920s went further still, calling for the abolition of schools and the shift of education to collective farms and factories.¹²⁰

These educational theories remained largely on paper. The material condition of Soviet schools simply precluded experimentation: those that did not shut down for lack of fuel and light had no textbooks and were desperately short of notebooks and writing implements. The teachers, miserably paid, if paid at all, had no idea what was expected of them.^* Krupskaia returned in the summer of 1919 from an inspection tour of the schools in the Volga-Kama region very discouraged. “Matters stand badly,” she wrote a friend: “The Consolidated Labor School produces literally nothing but nonsense.… The entire initiative is left to the teachers, and this is the most miserable ‘nation.’ Only here and there do they begin to make some sense of it, but the majority understands nothing and asks such absurd questions that you stand astounded.”¹²¹ Lunacharskii himself had to concede in 1920–21 that the new school system had proven a Utopian dream and that Russian schools were dying.¹²² As a consequence, with the introduction of NEP, many of the innovations were abandoned or substantially modified: progressive education yielded to more traditional methods, with added stress on indoctrination.

Such indoctrination was not left exclusively to the mistrusted teaching staff. For this purpose the Communist Party relied heavily on two youth organizations, the “Pioneers” and the “Union of Communist Youth” or Komsomol. The Pioneers were founded in 1922 on the model of the Scouts, but with a strong political component added. Eligible to join were children under 15. The Pioneers were to inculcate Communist values: the first duty of members was to be faithful to the working class and to Communism.¹²³ The organization served as a recruiting ground for the Komsomol, which, in turn, furnished candidates for the Communist Party. In actuality, the Pioneers were not subjected to heavy ideological pressure, for which reason they were popular with children. The Komsomol was used to carry out various propagandistic assignments, especially against religious institutions and practices.¹²⁴

Contemporary sources indicate that Soviet primary and secondary education approximated Lunacharskii’s ideal only in a few model schools; elsewhere things went on as before, only worse.¹²⁵ The contrast between intention and reality, characteristic of all Soviet life, was nowhere starker than in this field. According to one Communist historian, nine-tenths of the material published in Soviet pedagogical journals of the time consisted of abstract and irrelevant speculations.¹²⁶ From other materials one gains the impression the only innovations that struck root were those directed against academic standards and teachers’ authority. The following excerpt from a contemporary literary work, written in the form of a 15-year-old boy’s diary, conveys something of the atmosphere of the early Soviet schoolroom:

October 5

Our whole group was outraged today. This is what happened. A new shkrabikha [“school worker”] came to teach natural science, Elena Nikitishna Kaurova, whom we named Elnikitka. She handed out our assignments and told the group:

“Children!”

Then I got up and said: “We are not children.”

To which she: “Of course you are children, and I won’t call you any other way.”

I replied: “Please be more polite, or we may send you to the devil.”

That was all. The whole group stood up for me.

Elnikitka turned red and said: “In that case be so good as to leave the classroom.”

I answered: “In the first place, this is not a classroom but a laboratory, and we are not expelled from it.”

So she: “You are a boor.”

41. Moscow youths “pledge their allegiance to the anti-imperialist world struggle,” 1924.

And I: “You are more like a teacher of the old school. Only they had such rights.”

That was all. The whole group stood up for me. Elnikitka ran off like she was scalded.¹²⁷

The ideal of universal primary and secondary education came nowhere near realization—indeed, as the following table indicates, by the time of Lenin’s death, compared to tsarist times, the number of both schools and pupils had regressed.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLING IN RUSSIA¹²⁸ (within boundaries of the USSR as of September 1, 1939)

1914/15

1923/24

Schools

101,917

85,662

Pupils

7,030,257

6,327,739

The failure of the government to provide universal schooling was caused by fiscal constraints. Measured in terms of financial commitment to education, the Communist regime lagged behind its tsarist predecessor, which was not known to be lavish in this respect. Lunacharskii time and again complained that budgetary allocations to his commissariat fell far short of needs, given that it bore responsibility for all of the nation’s schools, including those that before 1917 had been financed by the church and local authorities. In 1918–21, Narkompros’s share of the national budget stayed under 3 percent: in Lunacharskii’s estimation, this was between one-third and one-fourth of its requirements.¹²⁹ Under NEP this share fell further. According to Lunacharskii, Soviet per capita allocations for education in 1925–26, a time of relative prosperity, in real rubles were one-third lower than in 1913.^* The ideal of free and universal education had to be abandoned. This was first done (1921) by local organs from necessity, and in early 1923 as a matter of national policy.¹³⁰ As had been the case in the final years of the tsarist regime, in 1923 only some 45 percent of eligible children attended school.¹³¹

Neither the new schools nor the Communist youth organizations succeeded in their primary mission, inculcating a Communist world-outlook. A survey conducted in 1927 among schoolchildren 11 to 15 years of age provided striking evidence of how little progress had been made in this regard. The pupils, all of them products of the Soviet educational system, displayed little ability to analyze current events in a Communist manner, responding at best with memorized clichés. Forty-nine percent professed to believe in God. Especially disturbing to the authorities was evidence that with each year of schooling pupils developed more negative attitudes toward Soviet life.¹³²

Surveying the results of Communist educational policies, Lunacharskii had to concede failure. On the fourth anniversary of the October coup, he wrote:

War Communism seemed to many the shortest road to the kingdom of Communism.… For us, Communist pedagogues, the disappointment was especially keen. The difficulties of building a socialist system of popular education in an ignorant, illiterate country grew beyond all measure. We had no Communist teachers at all; the material means and the money were insufficient.¹³³

The melancholy truth was that for all the boasting about advances in the quality and accessibility of education, many children not only lacked the benefit of formal schooling, but lost through the Revolution and its aftermath the most elemental educational right, available to all but the most primitive animals, parental care. These were the besprizornye—orphans and abandoned children—who in the 1920s roamed Russia like prehistoric creatures.¹³⁴ Their number increased sharply during the famine of 1921, when it was common practice for relatives to take over the properties of orphans’ parents and chase the children from the village.¹³⁵ It has never been possible to determine how many homeless children there were in postrevolutionary Russia because they had no stable home and evaded the census takers. In 1922–23, Lunacharskii and Krupskaia estimated their number at between 7 and 9 million.¹³⁶ Three-quarters were children of peasants (54.5 percent) and workers (23.3 percent); 15 percent were aged 3 to 7, and 57.1 percent, 8 to 13.¹³⁷ They lived in gangs in abandoned buildings, railroad terminals, lumberyards, coal depots, and wherever else they could find a roof: “Going about in packs, barely articulate or recognizably human, with pinched animal faces, tangled hair and empty eyes,” recalled Malcolm Muggeridge, “I saw them in Moscow and Leningrad, clustered under bridges, lurking in railway stations, suddenly emerging like a pack of wild monkeys, then scattering and disappearing.”¹³⁸ They survived by begging, scrounging, and stealing; many, possibly most of these children, both girls and boys, engaged in prostitution.¹³⁹

In 1921, the security police turned its attention to the homeless waifs, placing those it was able to catch in state-run colonies. Displayed to foreign visitors as model self-governing communities (“children’s republics”), they are said to have rather resembled penal institutions. The besprizornye proved psychically broken and socially unassimilable.

Initially, Soviet publicists blamed this phenomenon on the “capitalist legacy,” from which one observer deduced that tsarist Russia must have been the world’s most developed capitalist country since Soviet Russia had the largest proportion of homeless children.¹⁴⁰ Only in 1925 did Krupskaia admit that it was “three-quarters” the product of “contemporary” conditions.¹⁴¹

42. Besprizornye.

Until the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks did not interfere with institutions of higher learning.¹⁴² Many of these suspended operations in any event, in part to protest the Bolshevik putsch, and in part because their students, forced to make ends meet, stayed away. The Bolsheviks left the universities alone for the time being even though they realized that the faculties, a high proportion of whom were Constitutional-Democrats, solidly opposed them. They knew that several university faculties had passed resolutions in October and November 1917 condemning their coup; in Petrograd, the new regime was denounced by the rectors of all the institutions of higher learning.¹⁴³ They chose to overlook such opposition because they needed the universities to raise the country’s scientific and technological level. Lunacharskii recalled having been told more than once by Lenin: “A great scholar, a leading specialist in this or that field, must be spared to the most extreme limit, even if he is a reactionary.”¹⁴⁴ The verb “spare” (shchadit’) in this context suggests that such tolerance was meant to be temporary.

The policies of the Bolshevik regime in regard to higher education had four objectives: (1) to eliminate faculty self-government; (2) to do away with those faculties, essentially the humanities and what came to be known as “social sciences,” whose curricula could clash with Communist ideology; (3) to put an end to the “elitist” character of higher education; and (4) to develop on a massive scale vocational training.

The premier scholarly institution in Russia, the Academy of Sciences, fared tolerably well under Communism. Its hostility to the Bolshevik dictatorship was no secret: a conference of the Academy on November 21, 1917, passed a resolution condemning the Bolshevik power seizure and demanding that Russia remain in the war on the Allied side.¹⁴⁵ But Lenin chose to overlook its politics because he attached great value to the expertise of its 41 members and staff of 220, in whose ranks were some of the country’s leading scholars and scientists. To enlist them in his service he was prepared to make far-reaching concessions in the matter that concerned the Academicians the most, institutional autonomy. Eventually, a compromise was struck. The Academicians agreed, although without much enthusiasm, to shelve fundamental research and concentrate instead on the applied sciences so as to help the government solve pressing economic and technical problems. In return, the Academy retained full discretion in choosing members (at any rate, during the 1920s). It was the only cultural institution exempt from control by the Commissariat of Enlightenment.¹⁴⁶

Interference with universities started in the summer of 1918. The measures worked out by Lunacharskii’s Commissariat far exceeded the curbs imposed on Russian academic institutions by the reactionary regimes of Nicholas I and Alexander III. Between 1918 and 1921 the Communists liquidated academic self-government, abolished, for all practical purposes, faculty tenure, and flooded the institutions of higher learning with unqualified but politically promising students.

A decree of October 1, 1918, did away with higher academic degrees (doctor, master) and dismissed professors who had taught at the same institution for ten or more years or had held professorial appointments anywhere for fifteen years or longer: their chairs were thrown open to nationwide competition among all who, in the words of the decree, had acquired a reputation as a scholar or teacher.¹⁴⁷ In early 1919, elections were held for the vacated positions: at Moscow University, the country’s most defiant, the faculty reappointed every one of the ninety professors who had lost their chairs under the October 1 ruling, except for the single Communist in the group.¹⁴⁸ Elsewhere, the decree played havoc with university life. In many universities unqualified persons were appointed and lecturers were raised to the rank of professor by administrative order. This held especially true of the numerous new universities and scientific institutes. On January 21, 1919, it was decreed that four new universities would be founded and two institutions raised to university status.¹⁴⁹ In the summer of 1918, the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences came into being, and in 1920, the Sverdlov Communist University, the latter a propaganda school that enrolled exclusively party members, most with no more than an elementary education.¹⁵⁰ In the winter of 1918–19 the authorities closed university juridical faculties and the history departments of the historical-philological faculties, where the opposition to the new regime was strongest. They were replaced by faculties of social science,¹⁵¹ a concept that embraced economics, history, and law. The curriculum stressed the antecedents of the October Revolution and the inevitable worldwide triumph of Communism.¹⁵² An Institute of Red Professors (Institut Krasnoi Professury), composed mostly of Socialist Academy personnel, was set up in 1921 to train professors to teach history, economics, and philosophy in the Marxist manner.¹⁵³

By 1925, the number of universities had increased from ten (1916) to thirty-four. The faculty, however, grew more rapidly than the student body: while the latter increased by one-third (from 38,853 in 1916 to 51,979 in 1925), the teaching staff more than tripled (from 1877 to 6174).¹⁵⁴ Many of the latter, however, had qualifications chiefly of a political nature. In 1921, on Lenin’s instructions, all students at institutions of higher learning had to take obligatory indoctrination courses on historical materialism and the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1924, the history of the Bolshevik Party was made a required subject.¹⁵⁵

The status of Soviet institutions of higher education was definitively regulated by the university statute of September 2, 1921, which revived many provisions of the reactionary university statute of 1884.¹⁵⁶ Setting aside the liberal practices followed in Russia since 1906, it deprived faculties of the right to choose rectors and professors: the authority to do so was transferred to the Commissariat of Enlightenment.^* The new statute also gave soviets supervisory powers over institutions of higher learning in their area. These measures aroused great hostility among professors and students. In November 1921, over one thousand Petrograd students marched in a protest demonstration.¹⁵⁷ The following spring, several hundred Moscow University professors took part in a protest strike.¹⁵⁸ As punishment, seven of the striking professors were expelled from the country. In 1921–22 party organs engaged in systematic surveillance of faculties teaching the social sciences, purging teachers who did not toe the official line.¹⁵⁹ The results were more dismissals and expulsions abroad.¹⁶⁰

While eliminating university autonomy—the self-government of the faculties, especially in matters of appointment, and their right to set the curriculum—the new regime also interfered with student admissions. Its objective was to open access to higher education to youths of lower-class origin, especially children of workers and poor peasants, regardless of their academic qualifications.

The first and critical step in this direction was a sensational decree issued on August 2, 1918, which made it possible for all citizens over 16 years of age, male and female, to enroll at any institution of higher learning without having to submit proof of previous schooling, undergo entrance examinations, or pay tuition fees.¹⁶¹ Masses of unqualified youths took advantage of this ruling. The professors, however, succeeded for the time being in neutralizing its effects by refusing to admit unqualified students to their seminars. Before long, many of those enrolled under the “open admission” policy dropped out.¹⁶² Workers and poor peasants had neither the desire nor the leisure to pursue higher education: it proved unrealistic to expect them to attend university courses because the milieu was unfamiliar and most of them had no money for living expenses. Summarizing the results of the new admissions policy, an official Narkompros report declared:

In this connection we must state with great bitterness that the vast majority of our students already have had a higher education, that the vast majority of the remainder have completed secondary schooling, and that only an insignificant number can, in terms of their status, approach the proletarian masses.… The proletarian masses did not come to us: who came was the intelligentsia.¹⁶³

Women, in particular, stayed away: there were more female students in Russian universities in 1914 than in 1930.¹⁶⁴

Once they became aware of these facts, the authorities took remedial steps, phasing out “open admission” and setting up special schools to prepare workers for the university. On September 15, 1919, institutions of higher learning were ordered to establish Workers’ Faculties (Rabochie Fakultety or Rabfaki) to offer workers and poor peasants crash courses in secondary education. Most students who enrolled in Rabfaki belonged to the Party and its youth organizations, having gained admission on the recommendation of their party cells or trade unions; half studied part-time, the rest, full-time. In the middle of 1921, there were 64 Rabfaki with at least 25,000 students.¹⁶⁵ Despite deplorable living conditions, workers kept on enrolling, for completing a Rabfak opened opportunities to leave the factory for a white-collar job. By 1925, two-thirds of the students admitted to university faculties of science and technology, half of those in economics, a quarter in agriculture, and a fifth in medicine, were graduates of Rabfaki.¹⁶⁶ From their ranks came the Communist “cadres” Stalin would employ in the 1930s to replace the old intelligentsia.

In 1923, the government took further measures to rectify the social imbalance by introducing preferential admission quotas for students of the desired background. It also resorted to “purges” of students whose social origin was unacceptable: in 1924–25 some 18,000 students were expelled on such grounds.^*

And still, the Bolsheviks never quite succeeded in transforming higher education from a preserve of the intelligentsia into mass institutions. Neither policies of discrimination against the intelligentsia nor those favoring workers and poor peasants significantly altered the social composition of the student body. The academy retained its “elitist” character for the rest of the decade. On the eve of World War I, 24.3 percent of the students at Russian universities had come from worker and artisan families; in the academic year 1923–24 workers accounted for only 15.3 percent of the student body. There was a significant rise in the proportion of peasants: 22.5 percent in 1923–24 as compared to 14.5 percent in 1914. The overall proportion of members of these two classes, then underprivileged and now favored, was thus actually lower after seven years of Bolshevik discriminatory policies: 37.8 percent in 1923–24 as against 38.8 percent in 1914.^* More ruthless measures applied from the late 1920s onward did succeed in altering the balance of social groups at the institutions of higher learning, but as late as 1958, Khrushchev made the astonishing admission that in Moscow between 60 and 70 percent of the students came from families that were neither worker nor peasant.¹⁶⁷

The reasons for the failure of the regime appreciably to alter the social composition of the student body are not hard to find. First, higher, specialized learning does not come either easily or naturally: respect for it has to be inculcated at home, in the family. Children from homes of the intelligentsia are more likely to aspire to it than those raised in illiterate or semiliterate homes. For this reason, no matter how much the regime encouraged them, children of workers and poor peasants either avoided the university or, if enrolled, tended to drop out. Secondly, those who did persevere automatically ceased to be workers and poor peasants. Students of lower-class origin at the universities and Rabfaki, upon completion of their studies, having joined the Party, hardly ever returned to the factory or to the field but took white-collar jobs.^† Their sons and daughters, therefore, qualified as children of the “intelligentsia” (in the Communist sense of the word).

When they were not blaming hostile foreign powers, the Communist leaders liked to attribute their difficulties and failures to the low cultural standards of the population, of which illiteracy was the best indicator. Clara Zetkin once told Lenin that he should not complain of illiteracy in Russia, since it had helped the Communists to “sow seeds on virgin soil”—the minds of workers and peasants unpolluted by “bourgeois concepts and attitudes.” Lenin agreed up to a point: “Yes, that’s true.… Illiteracy tolerated our struggle for power and the need to destroy the old state apparatus,” but, he felt, once the Communist state was in place, it became a hindrance.¹⁶⁸

On December 26, 1919, Moscow decreed the “liquidation of illiteracy” among citizens aged 8 to 50.¹⁶⁹ All adults, male and female, were required to learn to read either Russian or their native tongue. Those unable to do so were to be taught by literate citizens whom the Commissariat of Enlightenment was authorized to draft for the purpose. The intention was to enable the entire population to take “a conscious part in the country’s political life.” Citizens who refused to learn were liable to criminal prosecution.

The Communist campaign has been described as “the most sustained and comprehensive attempt yet made to liquidate illiteracy.”¹⁷⁰ Tens of thousands of “liquidation points” were set up in cities and villages, offering crash courses that usually lasted three months and required 120–144 hours of classroom attendance. Despite warnings of punishment, it proved difficult to attract peasants, who associated these courses with atheistic propaganda. In response to their complaints, this aspect of instruction was eventually attenuated. A rough estimate is that between 1920 and 1926 some 5 million persons went through the literacy schools in European Russia.¹⁷¹

The Communist government liked to convey the impression that the overwhelming majority of its citizens was illiterate: thus Trotsky spoke of the need to teach reading skills to “hundreds of millions.”¹⁷² In reality, illiteracy in prerevolutionary Russia was nowhere near that prevalent and, in any event, it steadily declined. As the following table indicates, at the time of the Revolution, 42.8 percent of the country’s population was literate: among men, the proportion was 57.6 percent. In 1920, urban boys and girls aged 13 to 19 showed between 84.2 and 86.5 percent literacy.¹⁷³

LITERACY IN RUSSIA/U.S.S.R.¹⁷⁴

Year

Population as a whole

Male population

1867

19.1%

26.3%

1887

25.6

37.0

1907

353

49.2

1917

42.8

57.6

1926

51.1

66.5

These figures indicate that despite the publicity accompanying the anti-illiteracy drive, the results obtained showed no dramatic spurt but rather continued the progress achieved before the Revolution.

As with attempts to abandon admission standards for higher education, the drive against illiteracy suffered from shortcomings inherent in cultural crash programs. Soviet criteria of literacy were very low: to pass, a person had merely to be able to read large print, syllable by syllable. Ability to write was not required. According to one Soviet authority, many products of the campaign emerged semiliterate if not illiterate.¹⁷⁵ Allowance also had to be made for recidivism among the newly literate, which was not inconsiderable, since on completing the course they often lost contact with the printed word.

Especially disappointing was evidence that children 9 to 12 years old continued to show 45.2 percent illiteracy, which meant that as fast as adults were taught, young people without access to schooling filled the ranks of illiterates.¹⁷⁶ On the tenth anniversary of the decree of 1919, after the census of 1926 had revealed the realities behind the propaganda claims, Krupskaia conceded that not a single one of its provisions had been even approximately realized.¹⁷⁷ She pointed out that while every year one million adults acquired reading skills, a like number of school-age children entered society without the benefit of schooling. Hence, the actual achievement of the Communist regime was to “stabilize” illiteracy.¹⁷⁸

The Russian language underwent interesting changes in the course of the Revolution and Civil War.¹⁷⁹ The most striking innovation was the widespread use of acronyms and telescoped words, such as Sovnarkom, NEP, and Proletkult. “Discredited” words of the old regime were replaced by more acceptable synonyms. Thus, the bureaucrat, chinovnik, became a “Soviet official” (sovetskii sluzhashchii), the tsarist policeman (gorodovoi) was relabeled militiaman (militsioner), and “sir” (gospodin) gave way to “comrade” (tovarishch). The attempt to replace the traditional expression for “thank you”—spasibo, derived from “God save you” (Spasi Bog)—with what were thought to be neutral words, such as merci (“May God have mercy on you”), never gained acceptance. Jocose euphemisms were coined for the business of killing: “to send to a meeting,” “to dispatch to Dukhonin’s headquarters” (with reference to General N. N. Dukhonin, lynched by soldiers in late 1917) “to put into an envelope and mail,” the last signifying to arrest and then execute.

Such was the language of the Soviet city. Peasants in the village as well as those serving in the Red Army garbled and redefined the new words in ways that indicated they understood next to nothing of what was happening around them. They assimilated abstractions now no better than under tsarism, and translated the foreign-sounding vocabulary promoted by the Communists into concrete actions and objects. Thus, they interpreted “ultimatum” to mean “either you pay up, hand over the horse, or I will kill you.” The following are other examples of peasant definitions as collected by contemporary linguists:

Civil marriage: Unmarried people living together

Kammunist (also “kamunist” or “kamenist”): One who does not believe in God

Commissariat: Where they register and send to war

Mars, Karlo-Mars: The same as Lenin

Billion (milliard): Paper money

Peners, pianers: Small children, like Bolsheviks, they walk with drums and sing

“Revolution,” sometimes pronounced “levolution” (levoliutsiia), was understood to mean “doing what you like” (samovol’shchina).

In December 1917, the government institutionalized a new orthography which had long been advocated by some linguists and introduced by the Provisional Government. It simplified spelling by eliminating a number of redundant letters.¹⁸⁰ “God” was henceforth to be written with a small g.

Marxists regarded ethics as a branch of metaphysics and, as such, unworthy of serious attention. Marxist literature provided Soviet Russia’s leaders with little guidance in this matter; but since every society requires norms of behavior, they had no choice but to address themselves to it. The principal Bolshevik ethical theoreticians were Eugene Preobrazhenskii and Nicholas Bukharin.

Preobrazhenskii’s Of Morals and Class Norms (O morali i klassovykh normakh), published in 1923, sought to formulate a system of morals for Russia’s victorious proletariat. The premises were familiar: in societies divided into classes morals serve the interests of the class in power; so-called eternal ethical “truths” are a fiction designed to conceal this reality. In dealing with its class enemy, the proletariat must not be inhibited by moral constraints: “every struggle has its rules of victory.” Wherever the proletariat triumphs, individuals must submit to the dictates of the collective, and view themselves as “instruments of the working class.” “Conscience” is replaced as the regulator of behavior by social approval and disapproval. All actions, including such seemingly private matters as sex relations and family life, are subordinate to the needs of society and the “race.” “In the interest of safeguarding the race,” society has the right to prevent syphilitics and other ill or deformed citizens from “poisoning” the blood by breeding. Society has the undeniable right to intervene in the sexual life of its citizens in order, through scientific “selection,” to improve the race.¹⁸¹

Bukharin dismissed ethics as useless baggage. What philosophers call ethics is merely “fetishism” of class standards. As the carpenter performs whatever actions are necessary to make a bench,

43. Nicholas Bukharin.

exactly so does the proletariat in its social struggle. If the proletariat wishes to attain communism, then it must do such and such, as does the carpenter in building a bench. And whatever is expedient from this point of view, this must be done. “Ethics” transforms itself for the proletariat, step by step, into simple and comprehensible rules of conduct necessary for communism, and, in point of fact, ceases to be ethics.¹⁸²

The obvious flaw in this ethical philosophy is that it assumes the abstraction called “proletariat” to be capable of acting. In point of fact, a communist society, like any other, is directed by individuals—in this case, the leaders of the Communist Party—and these individuals, with every action they undertake, make decisions. There is no scientific way of predetermining what is “necessary” for the cause of a class, since at every point there emerge choices: choices that are not only technical but also moral. Years later, Preobrazhenskii and Bukharin, having been subjected to torture and then executed for crimes they had not committed, by their own ethical standards had no grounds for complaint: “Communism” in this instance, too, acted as it deemed necessary.

The Revolution was intended to bring fundamental changes in the status of women and the relationship of the sexes. The classic Marxist statement on the subject, Engels’s Origin of the Family, denied that the monogamous family was in any sense a natural institution. It was nothing but the by-product of specific historical circumstances attending the triumph of private property over primitive, communal property, one result of which was the subjugation of women. In the monogamous family, which invests the ownership of property in men, woman is reduced to the status of “head servant.” To emancipate herself, she requires economic independence, which she can attain only by being relieved of domestic duties and taking an outside job. This will spell the end of the “monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”¹⁸³ Society must assume full responsibility for the traditional female tasks, child-rearing and cooking. The resulting sexual liberation will be equally beneficial to men and women: adultery and prostitution will disappear, yielding to love based on mutual inclination:

The care and education of children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the “consequences,” which today is the most essential social—moral as well as economic—factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves. Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse?¹⁸⁴

Engels’s views greatly influenced socialist attitudes toward the so-called “woman-question”: once in power, the Bolsheviks promptly proceeded to put them into practice. They passed laws designed to loosen traditional family ties by facilitating divorce, abolishing discrimination against illegitimate offspring, and making society assume responsibility for the rearing of children. But in this case, too, intentions were defeated by economic realities. As the Bolsheviks were to discover before long, the family was an economic and social entity no less beneficial to them than to capitalist society. After an initial outburst of legislation subverting the monogamous family, they reversed themselves and restored it to its traditional role. And since Communism led to a general lowering of living standards, the net effect of Communist innovations was for the condition of married women appreciably to deteriorate.

Soviet divorce legislation was the first in the world to allow either spouse to terminate the marriage and to do so on the sole grounds of incompatibility. The rationale behind it was the idea of Engels’s that insofar as marriage presumed love, once either partner no longer felt love the bond lost meaning and should be terminated. The decree of December 16, 1917, required minimal formalities for the dissolution of marriage: it sufficed for one partner to submit to the court a petition to this effect.¹⁸⁵

Although it did not formally legalize abortion, in the first three years the Soviet government treated it with forbearance. Because many abortions were performed by unqualified individuals under unhygienic conditions causing infections and death, a decree of November 18, 1920, legalized them under strict medical supervision. Discouraged as a “moral survival of the past,” they were to be available free of charge at the mother’s request provided they were performed in hospitals by physicians.¹⁸⁶ This, too, was the first law of its kind.

In the best of all worlds Communist educators would have liked to take charge of children from the day they were born, removing them from their parents and placing them in communal nurseries. This was partly to free women for productive work, but also and mainly for purposes of conditioning and indoctrination. The wife of Zinoviev, Zlata Lilina, an official of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, insisted that it was best for children to be removed from their homes: “Is not parental love to a large extent love harmful to the child? … The family is individualistic and egoistic and the child raised by it is, for the most part, antisocial, filled with egoistic strivings.… Raising children is not the private task of parents, but the task of society.”¹⁸⁷ In the Soviet Ukraine, which went furthest in this direction, it was actually planned to withdraw children at the age of four from parental care and place them in boarding schools where they would be “socialized.”¹⁸⁸ Such proposals came to nought for lack of money and personnel. The social care of children proved unfeasible: for while mothers were prepared to devote countless hours of free labor to care for their offspring, hired caretakers had to be paid, and this required funds that were not available. The number of children in Soviet boarding schools never exceeded 540,000 (1922), declining to one-half that number under the NEP (1925).¹⁸⁹

In Soviet Russia, as in the rest of Europe, World War I led to a loosening of sexual mores, which here was justified on moral grounds. The apostle of free love in Soviet Russia was Alexandra Kollontai, the most prominent woman Bolshevik.¹⁹⁰ Whether she practiced what she preached or preached what she practiced, is not for the historian to determine; but the evidence suggests that she had an uncontrollable sex drive coupled with an inability to form enduring relationships. Born the daughter of a wealthy general, terribly spoiled in childhood, she reacted to the love lavished on her with rebellion. To escape home, she married young, but left her husband after three years. In 1906 she joined the Mensheviks, then, in 1915, switched to Lenin, whose antiwar stand she admired. Subsequently, she performed for him valuable services as agent and courier.

In her writings, Kollontai argued that the modern family had lost its traditional economic function, which meant that women should be set free to choose their partners. In 1919 she published The New Morality and the Working Class,¹⁹¹ a work based on the writings of the German feminist Grete Meisel-Hess. In it she maintained that women had to be emancipated not only economically but also psychologically. The ideal of “grana amour” was very difficult to realize, especially for men, because it clashed with their worldly ambitions. To be capable of it, individuals had to undergo an apprenticeship in the form of “love games” or “erotic friendships,” which taught them to engage in sexual relations free of both emotional attachment and personal domination. Casual sex alone conditioned women to safeguard their individuality in a society dominated by men. Every form of sexual relationship was acceptable: Kollontai advocated what she called “successive monogamy.” In the capacity of Commissar of Guardianship (Prizreniia) she promoted communal kitchens as a way of “separating the kitchen from marriage.” She, too, wanted the care of children to be assumed by the community. She predicted that in time the family would disappear, and women would learn to treat all children as their own. She popularized her theories in a novel, Free Love: The Love of Worker Bees (Svobodnaia liubov’: liubov’ pchel trudovykh) (1924), one part of which was called, “The Love of Three Generations.” Its heroine preached divorcing sex from morality as well as from politics. Generous with her body, she said she loved everybody, from Lenin down, and gave herself to any man who happened to attract her.

44. Alexandra Kollontai.

Although often regarded as the authoritative theoretician of Communist sex morals, Kollontai was very much the exception who scandalized her colleagues. Lenin regarded “free love” as a “bourgeois” idea—by which he meant not so much extramarital affairs (with which he himself had had experience) as casual sex. What the Communist Establishment thought about sex may be gathered from Lenin’s ruminations, unmistakably directed at Alexandra Kollontai and her followers, as reported by Clara Zetkin:

I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard it. The first country of proletarian dictatorship surrounded by the counterrevolutionaries of the whole world. The situation in Germany itself requires the greatest possible concentration of all proletarian, revolutionary forces to defeat the ever-growing and ever-increasing counter-revolution. And the women comrades discuss sexual problems.… Such misconceptions are particularly harmful, particularly dangerous in the youth movement. They can easily contribute to over-excitement and exaggeration in the sexual life of some, to the waste of youthful health and strength.…

You must be aware of the famous theory that in Communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad.… Young people, particularly, need the joy and force of life. Healthy sport, swimming, racing, walking, bodily exercises of every kind and many-sided intellectual interests.… Healthy bodies, healthy minds!¹⁹²

Studies of the sexual mores of Soviet youth conducted in the 1920s revealed considerable discrepancy between what young people said they believed and what they actually practiced: unusually, in this instance behavior was less promiscuous than theory. Russia’s young people stated they considered love and marriage “bourgeois” relics and thought Communists should enjoy a sexual life unhampered by any inhibitions: the less affection and commitment entered into male-female relations, the more “communist” they were. According to opinion surveys, students looked on marriage as confining and, for women, degrading: the largest number of respondents—50.8 percent of the men and 67.3 percent of the women—expressed a preference for long-term relationships based on mutual affection but without the formality of marriage.¹⁹³

Deeper probing of their attitudes, however, revealed that behind the facade of defiance of tradition, old attitudes survived intact. Relations based on love were the ideal of 82.6 percent of the men and 90.5 percent of the women: “This is what they secretly long for and dream about,” according to the author of the survey. Few approved of the kind of casual sex advocated by Kollontai and widely associated with early Communism: a mere 13.3 percent of the men and 10.6 of the women.¹⁹⁴ Strong emotional and moral factors continued to inhibit casual sex: one Soviet survey revealed that over half of the female student respondents were virgins.¹⁹⁵

The decisive influences on the sexual behavior of the postrevolutionary generation were economic: the unprecedented hardships of everyday life, especially the shortages of food and housing, and the stresses induced by relentless government demands. They forced the majority of Soviet youth, particularly women, to follow traditional norms of sexual behavior: the evidence gives “little support to the suggestion in the impressionistic literature of the time that promiscuity and an ideology of sexual liberation were widespread among women students.”¹⁹⁶ Asked how the revolution had affected their sexual desires, 53.0 percent of the men reported these desires to have weakened; 41.0 percent of the men blamed hunger and other deprivations and pressures for complete or partial impotence; 59.0 percent of the female respondents saw no change in their desire for sex.¹⁹⁷ This was not what the authorities had expected. The author of one survey concluded that, regrettably, Soviet youth “still drew on the poisoned sources of the old sexual morality,” with its preference for “hypocritical and spurious monogamy.”¹⁹⁸ Another sociologist reported that of the seventy-nine women in his survey who admitted to having had sexual relations, “fifty-nine are married, and the rest dream of love and marriage.”¹⁹⁹

Unrestrained sexual license did not prevail, because it was not acceptable to most young people, nor, in the end, to the authorities: the trend was toward traditional values. The reaction culminated in 1936 with the promulgation of a new family code that outlawed abortion.²⁰⁰ Under Stalin, the state sought to strengthen the family: “free love” was condemned as unsocialist. As in Nazi Germany, stress was placed on raising sturdy soldiers for the fatherland.²⁰¹

Lenin’s relative tolerance of the intelligentsia came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1922. He turned against them with a fury that can only be explained by the sense of failure that had haunted him since the spring of the preceding year, when the virtual collapse of the economy and nationwide rebellions forced him to adopt the New Economic Policy. He took a personal interest in the fate of hostile intellectuals, providing the GPU with names and indicating punishments he wished imposed.^* His fanatical self-confidence now yielded to homicidal vindictiveness.

In March 1922 Lenin declared open war on “bourgeois ideology,” which, in effect, meant war on the intelligentsia.²⁰² He was infuriated by the glee with which academics and writers criticized his regime and gloated over its reverses. Previously, when confident of victory, he had dismissed such talk as the rantings of has-beens. Now it touched a raw nerve and he reacted like a man obsessed. On March 5, in a confidential note, he declared a review of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which he had read in a Soviet periodical, “a literary cover for a White Guard organization.”²⁰³ Two months later he instructed Dzerzhinskii to have the GPU undertake a thorough study of literary and academic publications to determine which were “overt counterrevolutionaries, accomplices of the Entente, the organization of its servants and spies, and corrupters of student youth,” and hence, “candidates for exile abroad.” Such “military spies” were to be “regularly and systematically” apprehended and expelled from the country.²⁰⁴ If Lenin seriously believed what he was saying—and the presumption is he did since he made these remarks in a confidential communication—one cannot help but suspect that he was suffering from some form of persecutory paranoia. For these “military spies” were some of Russia’s most distinguished minds, who, hostile as they were to Communism, refrained from political activity, and certainly engaged in no espionage. Dzerzhinskii faithfully carried out Lenin’s mandate, with the result that in the summer of 1922 scores of academics and writers were imprisoned.

On July 17, Lenin sent Stalin a note, which Stalin passed on to Dzerzhinskii, listing groups and individuals whom he wanted expelled from the country. He placed special emphasis on intellectuals connected with the SR Party, whose show-trial was then in progress. His orders were clear:

Decisively “eradicate” (iskorenit’) all SRs … all of them—get out of Russia. This must be done straight away—by the end of the SR trial, no later. Arrest a few hundred and without explaining the motives—“Out you go, gentlemen!”²⁰⁵

To give these instructions a legal form, the government issued, on August 10, a decree reintroducing administrative exile. It empowered the security services on their own authority to exile persons accused of “counterrevolutionary” activities either abroad or within the Russian Republic for a maximum term of three years.²⁰⁶ The provisions on domestic exile revived the practices of late Imperial Russia: Lenin himself had been sent to Siberia in 1897 in this manner and for this term. The clauses authorizing exile abroad had no tsarist precedent.

In a report submitted to Lenin on September 18, G. G. Iagoda, the Chief of the Secret Operational Directorate of the GPU, wrote that in response to his instructions the GPU had arrested 120 anti-Soviet intellectuals (69 in Moscow and 51 in Petrograd). Taken into custody was the flower of Russia’s academic intelligentsia, including the rectors of both Moscow and Petrograd universities, some of the country’s leading agronomists, cooperative leaders, historians, sociologists, and philosophers.²⁰⁷ The majority were subsequently placed on ships bound for Germany. Although officially the maximum term of administrative exile was three years, those deported abroad were banished for life: before departing, they had to sign documents acknowledging that if they either refused to leave or attempted to return they would be subject to execution. It would be difficult to find in recorded history a precedent for such mass expulsion of a country’s intellectual elite.

Soviet cultural policies must be judged relatively more successful than the attempts to create a more democratic political system and a more efficient economy, but only relatively so. They did inhibit creativity, but they also made art, literature, and learning accessible to a mass public. If they did not accomplish the cultural revolution they had hoped for, the cause must be sought in their narrow conception of culture. For culture is not a by-product of economic and social relations, as they had convinced themselves, but a thing-in-itself, which influences the economy and society at least as much as it is influenced by them. Nor is it synonymous with books, paintings, or musical compositions. Least of all is it limited to science and technology. Broadly defined, culture is a way of coping with life under particular conditions as learned from experience and passed on from generation to generation: art and literature are only two of its expressions. By its very nature it cannot be regimented. Deprived of freedom or used for any purpose foreign to itself—especially politics—it turns sterile. Because the new regime ignored these precepts, the history of Communist literature and art is one of declining creativity: at first still driven by prerevolutionary impulses, it gradually dried up, ending in the barren conventions of “socialist realism.” Worse still, the Communist regime methodically corrupted the “low” culture of ordinary people, with its customs acquired from ancestors and values rooted in religion, to make room for its own utilitarian and technological culture. The result was a spiritual vacuum that eviscerated Communism and contributed greatly to its ultimate demise.

^* René Fülöp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus (Zurich, 1926), 274–87; also Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams (New York, 1989), 149–55. Gastev was arrested in 1938 and perished in 1941: Peter Gorsen and Eberhard Knoedler-Bunte, Proletkult, II (Stuttgart, 1974), 150.

^† Bogdanov, a physician by training, subsequently turned his attention to medicine. In 1926 he founded an Institute of Blood Transfusions. He died in 1928 in consequence of an experiment he had performed on himself.

^* On it, see A. I. Nazarov, Oktiabr’ i kniga (Moscow, 1968), 135–88. Gosizdat actually began to function only in May 1919 and acquired responsibilities for censorship on December 12, 1921.

^* SV, No. 21/22 (1923), 8–9; R. Fülöp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus (Zurich, 1926), 75. The order apparently was not carried out, for it was reissued in 1923. S. A. Fediukin, Bor’ha s burzhuaziei v usloviiakh perekhoda k NEPU (Moscow, 1977), 170–71, claims that the list was not drawn up by Krupskaia and that she annulled it. See Pravda, No. 81 (April 9, 1924), 1.

^* The number of books forbidden by Glavlit in 1921–22 was low: 3.8 percent in Moscow, and 5.3 percent in Petrograd: PiR, No. 6 (1922), 131. But these figures are meaningless, given that authors only submitted manuscripts they thought had a chance of being published.

^† BSE, Ist ed. (Moscow, 1934), Vol. 60, 474. Less understandably, a standard Western monograph on its parent organization, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, by the American historian Sheila Fitzpatrick completely ignores Glavlit. A symposium called Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1985) achieves the seemingly impossible feat of avoiding all mention of Glavlit even in the chapter devoted to “Lenin and the Freedom of the Press.”

^* Renato Poggioli, The Poets of Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 298; Anweiler and Ruffman, Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion, 193. Of these émigrés, five eventually returned: Ehrenburg and Tolstoy in 1923, Gorky in 1931, Kuprin in 1937, and Tsvetaeva in 1938. Ehrenburg, Gorky, and Tolstoy went on to make careers under Stalin. Kuprin died the year after his return, and Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. See further Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad (New York and Oxford, 1990), passim. By contrast, Mussolini, whose cultural policies were incomparably more liberal than Lenin’s, managed to attract a number of prominent writers, including Luigi Pirandello, Curzio Malaparte, Giovanni Papini, and Gabriele d’Annunzio. Even writers and artists who rejected his regime found it possible to live in Fascist Italy and relatively few emigrated.

^* LN, Vol. 65 (1958), 210. Trotsky was no kinder to this work, saying that the author meant it to be “titanic, but, as a matter of fact, it was at best only athletic”: Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow, 1924), 114.

^* It has subsequently become known that Mandelshtam’s attitude to Bolshevism was quite ambivalent and that in 1937, while in exile in Voronezh, he had written two panegyrics to Stalin: Gregory Freidin in RuR, XLI, No. 4 (October 1982), 400–26. The texts of the “odes” are reproduced by Bengt Jangfeldt in Scando-Slavica, XXII (1976), 35–41.

^* Cited in Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature Since the Revolution (New York and London, 1963), 95. One circle of authors, who called themselves Nichevoki, or “Nothingers,” responded to this situation by deciding not to write at all: ibid., 29.

^* A. Z. Iufit, ed., Russkii sovetskii teatr 1917–1921 (Leningrad, 1968), 272–74; see further Frantizek Deak in The Drama Review, Vol. 19, No. 2 (T-66, June 1975), 15–21. In 1927, Sergei Eisenstein duplicated the spectacle of the “storming” of the Winter Palace in his film October. Since then, stills of this fictitious scene performed by cinematic extras have been frequently reproduced in the Soviet Union and the West as authentic documentary photographs: RR, 495.

^* Jan Leyda, Kino (London, 1960), 142–43. “In 1923–24, the study of the American film was the formal battle-cry of our cinematic innovators,” wrote a Soviet film critic. “Griffith’s formula for melodrama, based on the principle of the ‘montage of attractions’ and reinforced by the examples of [his] films … was decisive in shaping the first years of the Soviet cinema”: A. Piotrovskii in Zhizn’ iskusstva, June 30, 1929, 7.

^* “That Letatlin flew but a few yards in a test flight,” write two Western historians of the movement, “is immaterial to its service as an extraordinary symbol of the desire to imbue the social realm of the practical with the spirit of an artist in touch with universal truths.” Richard Andrews and Milena Kalinovska in The Henry Art Gallery, Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1932 (Seattle, Wash., 1990), 10. Whatever these “universal truths” may have been, they clearly were not those of aerodynamics.

^* In 1925, teachers received a fraction of workers’ wages. From letters to the editor of a pedagogical journal it transpired that a well-qualified teacher of the second level in Kiev earned 45 rubles a month, whereas the school janitor received 70 and the parents of her pupils between 200 and 250 rubles. A. Radchenko in NP, No. 1 (1926), no.

^* NP, No. 2 (1926), 9. In 1928, he further said that the Soviet government spent on elementary school pupils 75 percent, and on those in secondary schools one-quarter of the sums allocated by the ancien régime: RiK, No. 11 (June 15, 1928), 21.

^* According to the 1921 statute, Narkompros was to select rectors from lists drawn up by professors, students, trade unionists, and soviet officials. In 1922 a new provision empowered it to appoint to this post anyone it wanted: James McClelland, “Bolsheviks, Professors, and the Reform of Higher Education in Soviet Russia, 1917–1921” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1970), 398. In practice, rectors were nominated not by Narkompros but by the Party’s Central Committee and local party cells: ibid., 399.

^* James C. McClelland in Past and Present, No. 80 (August 1978), 130. This was in emulation of the policies of Nicholas I, who had sought to restrict admission to the institutions of higher learning to the gentry.

^* The 1914 figures are from Anweiler and Ruffman, Kulturpolitik, 10; those for 1923–24, from McClelland in Past and Present, No. 80 (1978), 131. It must be noted, however, that the pre- and postrevolutionary figures are not fully comparable because (1) those for 1914 refer to legal status rather than occupation, and (2) the category of “workers and artisans” before the Revolution included individuals whom the Soviet regime regarded as “petty bourgeois.”

^† “One may assume that more than half, if not two-thirds, of workers belonging to the party were compelled to abandon daily physical labor in factories and plants and go to work for the state and the party.”: N. Solovev in Pravda, No. 190 (August 28, 1921), 4.

^* See, e.g., his dispositions concerning eight Petrograd professors arrested in May 1921 in RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 1, delo 24559. Lenin raised the case of the Menshevik historian N. A. Rozhkov at four separate Politburo meetings: Rodina, No. 3 (1992), 49. He was so obsessed with him that on December 13, 1922, when in a critical condition, he found the strength to send instructions that he be exiled: RTsKhIDNI, F. 2, op. 2, delo 1344.