The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

The Stalin years 193

Stalin-era diaries suggests that “forging an identity,” for a young Soviet citizen, was not the individualizing process familiar in the West (or in Tolstoy), with its goal of a unique voice free from societal constraint. More likely it was the reverse, a striving for the transcendence of the personal: “a Communist should make himself permanently at home in a heroic universe by means of uninterrupted, sustained ideological thinking and acting” and should understand failure as a matter of one’s “personal deviations from a mandated norm.”1 This model recalls the saint’s life, which a human subject internalizes and “grows into” as into an ideal prototype. Such self-fashioning complemented a more general shift toward active monitoring of creative acts. To the negative censorship familiar from tsarist Russia (deleting what could not be said) was added a new layer of positive censorship (dictating what must be said). This peremptory guidance was transmitted through a sotsial'nyi zakaz or “social command”.

The Soviet state had another carrot, however, which in the minds of many creative artists worked to offset the constant intimidation, control of culture by thugs and hacks, and silencing of the disobedient. This was the fact that the state and Party were committed to sponsoring serious art - and, at the same time, to ensuring that a large spectrum of artistic media and genres were considered “serious.” As part of the Leninist cultural revolution of the early 1920s, lavishly financed outreach programs in the popular arts reached mass audiences. Factory workers were organized into brigades and bussed to theatre performances; crews of writers and musicians were dispatched to factories to explain operatic plots and teach workers how to write poetry. Such aggressively proletarian programs were discontinued in the 1930s. By that time artists no longer explained their craft; their craft was explained to them by censorship and repertory boards. But traces of this cultural populism remained. Musical theatre and film were valued as moral education, not only as entertainment, and the nation’s most gifted artists produced magnificent scenarios, propaganda canvases, and musical scores on commission.

As state violence became more capricious and widespread in the upper ruling circles, public campaigns intensified for “culturedness” [kul'turnost'] at the local level. Culturedness drives, beginning in the mid-1920s, covered not only literary and visual education - the domain of writers and filmmakers -but also personal behavior, mental attitude, health and hygiene. Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya is on record saying that to persuade workers to wash their hands would be a revolutionary step forward. Much attention was paid to the proper use of sexual energy, where “spontaneity” could easily be unproductive unless harnessed for society’s benefit and regulated by the norms of kul'turnost'. Although the Party resisted laying down strict rules in this realm, Leninist pamphlets explained to Soviet youth the most seemly, efficient means