C. Vaughan James Auth. Soviet Socialist Realism Origins and Theory
C. Vaughan James Auth. Soviet Socialist Realism Origins and Theory
C. Vaughan James Auth. Soviet Socialist Realism Origins and Theory
c. V AUGHAN JAMES
Senior Fellow in Language SJudies in Jhe Universily 0/ Sussex
Palgrave Macmillan
C. Vaughan James 1973
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1973
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission.
List 0/ Plates vi
I ntroduetion ix
1 ART AND THE PEOPLE
3 A FEW DECREES 38
4 SOCIALIST REALISM 84
Appendiees
I V. L. Unin, Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905) 103
11 V. I. Lenin, In Memory of Herzen (1912) 107
III (I) V. I. Lenin, On Proletarian Culture (draft resolution);
(2) On the Proletkults (letter from the Central Committee
of the Russian Communist Party, 1920) 112
IV On the Party's Poliey in the Field 01 Literature (resolution
of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist
Party (b), 18 June 1925) 116
V On the Reformation of Literary-Artistie Organisations
(decision of the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party (b), 23 April 1932) 120
and 3 (A Few Decrees ... ) these will assist the reader to draw his own
conclusions. Other party statements from the 1920S are discussed in
Chapter 3 at some length since they are not, as far as I know, available in
English nor - indeed - are they easily obtained in Russian. Unless other-
wise stated, the translation of a11 documents and extracts is my own, as
are italics marked with an asterisk.
The reader who follows Soviet literary affairs as reflected in the Western
press may we11 feel inclined to comment that in this book I have spent
very little time discussing such well-known names as those of Pasternak,
Sinyavsky, DanieI and Solzhenitsyn. It is quite tme that they figure very
litde in the text; yet in a sense the entire book is about them. For each of
them in some way and to some degree either failed to observe or chose to
disregard one or several of the canons of Socialist Realism and in so doing
incurred the displeasure of the Union of Writers and the Communist
Party. Each of them questioned or rejected some element in the theoryof
the role of the artist in society, the individual in the collective, the intel-
lectual in the mass. It is my belief that although the study of exceptions
may tell us a great deal about the norm, the reverse is also true. A study
of the 'dissidents' is clearly illuminating; but our understanding of them
can only be deepened by a study of the philosophy from which they dis-
sent. My aim has not been to discount the celebrated names which have
become so familiar; rather has it been to embrace the coundess others of
whom the average reader never hears.
There are many ironies in the Soviet situation. Thus a sad legacy of
Stalinist days is that the very appellation 'socialist realism' tends to be
taken almost automatically as referring to something wholly negative,
though the socialist dream of a better reality continues to inspire millions.
And 'socialist realism' is similarly taken to mean the total negation of
artistic experimentation, though it is itself an artistic experiment on an
unprecedented scale. For not only is it an attempt to enlist the poet as
philosopher, the writer as tribune and the artist as teacher in the transla-
tion of the socialist dream into reality, but it explores the almost unknown
interstices between artistic genres by uniting poet, painter, sculptor,
singer, ac tor, dancer and director in one common socio-aesthetic system.
And as the fearful problems of the 1920S that faced an isolated revolu-
tionary regime clinging grimly to power over a largely illiterate populace,
hungry for bread as well as circuses, become with the passage of time less
awesome, there are signs that the purely restrictive aspects of Socialist
Realism may be giving way at last to the more creative elements. But its
history has been a chequered one: whenever a theory is elaborated to
INTRODUCTION xiii
regulate an evolving situation, then one of two things must surely happen;
either the theory must itself evolve - in which case it may come near to
contradicting itself, or, if it remains rigid, it will become a bar to progress
and a force for conservatism. It is arguable that the 'method' of Socialist
Realism has exhibited both these characteristics even, on occasion, at one
and the same time.
For readers who are unfamiliar with the Russian language, the pronuncia-
tion of names is frequently something of a problem. I have attempted to
lessen this by using a form of transliteration in the body of the text wh ich,
while not entirely consistent, is scientific without being pedantic. And on
commonly-used names, etc. I have marked the stressed syllables with an
acute accent (e.g. Mayak6vsky) and the letter e, pronounced [0] or [yo]
(e.g. Khrushchev).
I should like to thank my Sussex colleagues Beryl Williams, Robin
Milner-Gulland and Christopher Thorne for their interest and advice,
Hazel Ireson for deciphering my script, and my publishers for their toler-
ance and support.
This need not necessarily lead us to conclude that it was Unin's per-
sonal and somewhat conservative tastes that determined the course of
development of Soviet arts. It seems unlikely that even Unin (who in his
day was hardly less powerful than Stalin was later to become) could have
inflicted his own views on so many of the party intellectuals if they had
not in fact been already quite closely in tune. Certainly such cultured and
influential figures as LunacMrsky had strong and sophisticated attitudes
which, though they might occasionally have been upset by some modish
fancy or have differed from Unin's on matters of detail (and we shall
mention more than one such occasiOll in the course of our investigation),
coincided nevertheless with his on the one important point - their evalua-
tion of the cultural heritage of the pre-revolutionary era.
This was the crucial point. It may seem paradoxical that the revolu-
tionary leaders who seemed intent on sweeping the old order off the face
of the globe and transforming 'reality' in its entirety should have been so
adamant in protecting the cultural heritage from their own followers,
inisisting (as indeed they may ultimately be seen to have done in many
other spheres) on the essential continuity of artistic traditions. Yet this
was the keystone of the policy that emerged in the 1920S, and this is what
gives Socialist Realism its paradoxical but inescapable air of de;a vu.
Tbe policy rests, in the first instance, on the principles of narodnost'
and kldssovost', and in the following paragraphs we have attempted to
present the sort of explanation of them that a Soviet critic himself makes.
It is perhaps not surprising that except for certain points of detailed inter-
pretation, there is little disagreement amongst orthodox Soviet theoreti-
cians. 1 Nevertheless it seemed wise to select one authority for the exposition
of the Soviet view, remembering that since our object is to examine that
view, such an authority becomes in fact a primary source. Readers familiar
with Soviet criticism will appreciate the problem involved in reducing
lengthy and often convoluted arguments into brief and clear statements;
such, however, is the object of this chapter.
The authority selected is Bases 01 Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics (Osnovy
markslstsko-leninskoi estetikt), 1960 edition, published by the State Pub-
lishers of Political Literature, Moscow, Institutes of Philosophy and His-
tory of Art of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and edited by
A. Sutyagin. This publication is intended for home consumption, and an
important part of the argument is the evidence adduced from the Marxist
classics. Such references are therefore reproduced here, though much
abbreviated. The date of the edition is significant, since it marked a high
point of the Khrushchev era, when the process of de-Stalinisation was
ART AND THE PEOPLE 3
leading to a re-examination and restatement of attitudes. Other useful
sources are the series of textbooks published by various Soviet universities,
both for their own students and for foreigners, especially from the 'third
world'. Unfortunately there are no such publications in English, since
the language of instruction is Russian. It is therefore hoped that the
following pages will represent a faithful summary of the argument and
will go some way to make up for the lack. To distinguish the summary
from the rest of my text, the relevant paragraphs are set in smaller print
and preceded by an asterisk.
teehniques would not operate, as the romanties had suggested, against the in-
terests of art; on the eontrary, it would afIord every member of society ample
leisure and facilities for the development and enjoyment of the arts. IO
In nineteenth eentury Russia, the eritie Dobrolyubov demonstrated that
the precious 'popular' elements in the works of the great prose writers of
the times were essentially inaeeessible to the masses,l1 and the poet N ekrasov
dreamed of the time when the peasant would return from the market with
the works of Belfnsky and G6gol in his bag.l 2 In the twentieth eentury
Lenin took up the theme, laying the foundations of subsequent Soviet
poliey: ' ... Art must have its deepest roots in the very depths of the broad
masses of the workers. It must be understood by those masses and loved by
them. It must unite the feelings, thoughts and will of the masses and raise
them up. It must arouse the artists among them and develop them. 13
Wehave seen that in a dass society art develops along two distinct lines,
refIecting the dichotomy in the society itself. Folk art continues to
develop amongst the masses, but the ruling dasses develop professional,
individual or academic art which is to varying degrees inaccessible to those
masses. We must now define what role is played by nar6dnost' in each of
these two kinds of art and the relationship between them.
This question was mueh diseussed amongst the ideologists of the En-
Iightenment, who represented two rather eonflicting points of view. Pro-
eeeding from the general proposition that art should develop on the basis of
the ideas and forms worked out in the popular eonsciousness, Lessing never-
theless did not eonsider that this meant areturn to primitive forms. For hirn,
the artist should eombine elements of folk art with the most progressive ideas
and in his working out of popular subjeets and themes he should make use
of the entire battery of artistic teehniques evolved throughout the ages. By so
doing he carries nar6dnost' on to a higher plane. Rousseau, on the other
hand, thought it necessary to return to the primitive art forms preserved in
the masses. Thus folk poetry was superior to the work of individual poets,
who should therefore adopt the folk forms. This belief did in fact exert a
partly beneficial influenee in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies, but it remains untrue that only the traditional folk arts may be
termed 'popular'.
The nineteenth century Russian revolutionary democrats analysed the
problem of nar6dnost' in great detail, demonstrating, in particular, the role
it plays in art that does not proceed directly from the masses. f especial
importance in this context is the work of V. G. Belfnsky (I8n-48), the first
great theorist of Russian realism.
BeHnsky defined two distinct periods in the history of every people - an
early, instinctive period and a later, conscious period. In the first the national
peculiarities of the people are more sharply expressed and its poetry is there-
fore highly individual to it and consequently inaccessible to other peoples.
ART AND THE PEOPLE 7
Henee, for example, the sharp emotional impact of Russian folk songs on
Russians and the difficulty of conveying this impact to non-Russians. But in
the second period poetry attains a higher level of sophistication, beeomes less
accessible to the masses, but is proportionately more accessible to other
peoples. 14 This second kind of poetry is always superior to the first, which is
the 'childish prattie' of an as yet inarticulate people. The poetry of the second
period is articulate and refined and achieves a balance between form and con-
tent by evolving forms appropriate to the ideas embodied in them. The
highest degree of nar6dnost' is found in art that reflects the basic interests of
the masses and develops the most progressive ideas of the epoch. 'Popular'
art is art which fadIitates the progress of society along the path to freedom.
BeHnsky's assessment of Pushkin is a good example of his approach;
Pushkin understood the impossibility of resorting to slavish imitation of folk
poetry in academic art, but he nevertheless enriched his own poetry from
that source, and by his link with the revolutionary movement of the epoch
he exerted a great influence on progressive thought. Such an appraisal does
not in any way imply denigration of folk poetry, which possesses a quality
'that cannot be replaced by academic poetry'.ls
An essential aspect of BeHnsky's two periods is that the second is an
organic development of the first. Thus academic poetry embodies elements
of folk poetry, with its own overlay. It is a consdous development of earlier
forms which, though the period in which they arose may be long since past,
still continue to provide aesthetic pleasure.
While largely sharing BeHnsky's attitude to folk art, Marx offered a
different solution of the problem of nar6dnost' by considering it on a sodo-
historical basis within the framework of the development of dass society.
By destroying the feudal basis of society, he said, the bourgeoisie also con-
demned to extinction the art forms associated with it. But the revolutionary
element in the exploited dass of the new, bourgeois society begins to pro-
duce its own, new 'popular' art and it is to this that Marx and Engels turned
their attention. They dted, for example, the 'Song of the Weavers' 16 of the
Silesian workers. They were not unaware of the limitations of such pheno-
mena but they saw in them evidence of both the ability and the des ire of
the workers to create their own art. This argument was taken further by
Lenin in a number of articles and in the Soviet Union such forms of new
'popular' art are actively encouraged and subsidisedP
However, a sociaIist society not only preserves the best in folk or
'popular' art; it instils new ideas into them, leading to a fusion of tradi-
tional forms with the finest achievements of academic art. Universal educa-
tion and the consequent raising of the cultural level of the entire people, with
improved living standards and ample leisure, will then give rise to the 'new,
great Communist art' 18 that Unin predicted.
From even such a brief exposition it becomes dear that nar6dnost' in the
arts does not simply pertain to accessibility to the masses in the sense of
8 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
For most of its history, human society has been divided into dasses, and
this has led to a dash of ideologies between them. This is inevitably re-
ected in art, though in complicated and sometimes oblique fashion.
All great works of art reect, to some extent, the dass ideology of the
artists who created them, but this does not mean that they do not contain
'popular' elements. Even folk art reflects dass differences; peasant art, for
instance, has a different ideological content from proletarian art. - Moreover
in a capitalist society the ideology of the ruling dass is partly echoed in the
art of the masses. (In a socialist society, these elements of rulingclass ideo-
logy, 'survivals of capitalism', must be isolated and expunged.) And within
the ruling dass certain ideological differences may develop, though these are
quickly reconciled in the face of a common threat. 19
The content of a work of art is not entirely determined by the ideology
of the artist hirnself, since every genuine artist is a reection to some degree
of the reality of his epoch. His subject is life in all its basic aspects, and the
major importance of his work lies in its objective content, even though this
may be obscured or even contradicted by his own subjective views, dictated
by the form of the society in which he works.
At some stage each rising dass, moving towards the status of ruling
dass, embodies progressive, social-evolutionary tendencies and therefore
represents the interests of the majority, induding the exploited dass. Hence
the necessity in every case to determine the concrete historical conditions in
which the dass nature of any work of art is manifested. In every society, as
Lenin indicated, there are two cultures - the culture of the exploiter and the
culture of the exploited,20 So when considering a given epoch it is essential
to decide what is reactionary and what is genuinely 'popular', avoiding the
errors resulting from the automatie application of 'vulgar sociological'
criteria.
By revealing the immorality of the dergy in the Decameron, Boccaccio
displayed his opposition to feudalism; by describing his Utopia, in which
private property did not exist, Thomas More took up an anti-bourgeois posi-
tion; and by portraying the miserable consequence of an unhappy marriage
in Anna Karenina, ToIst6y condemned the values of the society of his day.
No matter what sphere of human life the artist portrays, he reveals his atti-
tude to society and consequently the ideology of the dasses within that
society and their relationship with the masses.
Likewise in the visual arts, in which, as in literature, the choice of subject
Though Soviet society is said to he c1assless in the conventional sense, it neverthe-
less admits of two major c1asses - the peasants and the industrial proletariat - and a
stratum (pros16ika) of intelligentsia.
ART AND THE PEOPLE 9
or hero may betray dass attitudes. This may be explicit, as in Venetsianov's
choice of peasant life as the subject of his painting instead of the traditional
portraits of the nobility. Or it may be more subtle: the art and sculpture of
the Middle Ages, under the influence of religious faith, emphasised man's
spiritual aspect, whereas the masters of Renaissance art - Raphael, Michel-
angelo, Leonardo da Vinci - aspired to portray the harmony between his
spiritual and physical attributes.
4
These examples illustrate the widely different ways in wh ich dass atti-
tudes may be seen in works of art. Marxist analysis sets out to show that
art has profound social significance even when it has no obvious or direct
concern wirh social problems. In this argument an especially important
and difficult question is that of the philosophy (world-view) of the in-
dividual artist, for the artist's own philosophy is also inseparable from his
art.
Genuine art cannot flourish on the basis of a false philosophy: under-
lying all great art are ideals of humanism, belief in life and in man, faith in
the capacity of the human mind to comprehend reality, indignation at social
evil and avision of the perfect conditions for the development of the human
personality. But if the work of an individual artist betrays conservative or
reactionary views, thls does not necessarily mean that his entire philosophy
is false. Balzac was a legitimist, but this does not detract from his con-
demnation of bourgeois greed. Similarly Tolst6y's principle of non-violent
resistance to evil was misguided but it was not central to his work which,
in the main evinced a correct understanding of his times. An artist's philo-
sophy embraces the whole of life and must not be judged on the basis of
isolated false or erroneous ideas conditioned by the society in which he lives.
Marxism reveals that art always bears traces of dass interests and has
always participated in the dass struggle, though this is most dearly visible
at times of social upheaval. Thus in the period preceding the French revolu-
tion the arts played an important role in ideological preparation for that
event and in nineteenth century Russia the poetry of Pushkin, Lermontov and
Nekrasov; the writings of G6gol, Turgenev, Chernyshevsky and Tolst6y;
the plays of Ostr6vsky; the paintings of Kramsk6y, Surikov and Repin; and
the music of GHnka, Chaik6vsky, Borodin, Dargomyzhsky and Rimsky-
K6rsakov all played an enormous part in awakening social consciousness
and protest. Similarly du ring the Revolution and Civil War artists took an
active part in the struggle - Mayak6vsky with his verse, Demyan Bedny
with his satire, and M60r and Den! with their posters. But a scientific appli-
ca ti on of the principle of kldsso/Jost' in an examination of ideological matters
requires careful study of all aspects if the errors of 'vulgar sociology', al ready
mentioned, are to be avoided.
They have not always been avoided, and in the early stages of the de-
velopment of Soviet literary studies certain erroneous ideas gained great
10 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
popularity. Attempts were made to relate the progress of art too directly to
the technical-economic base of society (e.g. to relate statistics concerning the
import-export of corn in the early nineteentth century directly to Pushkin's
poetry I), even though Marx had warned against this. 21 The 'popular'
quality of artistic works will guarantee their survival long after the society
that gave them birth has receded into past history and this contributes to the
complex nature of the relationship between art and society.
A similar error lay at the root of the Proletkult 22 desire to renounce all
bourgeois art - all the art of the pre-revolutionary era. The members of this
movement did not realise that by renouncing bourgeois art they were cutting
themselves off from the genuinely 'popular' elements that it contained.
Lenin's opposition to the Proletkult/3 wh ich is sometimes presented as
merely the Communist Party's opposition to any kind of rivalry, may
therefore be seen to have had a deep ideological eause, and this is a valu-
able lesson in the eorreet understanding of the meaning of nar6dnost'.
We shall return to thi~ topie in our diseuss!on of poliey in the 1920S.
dass, but by producing an objective reflection of life and the laws that
govern its development he creates a work of art that transcends the bounds
of dass ideology. Though Plekhanov saw ToIst6y as merely a representative
of the 'conscience-stricken nobility', Lenin was able to show that the basis
of his philosophy was the ideology of the masses of the peasantry. And
Dostoyevsky, though in later works such as the novel Devils (Eesy) a frank
proponent of reaction, has nevertheless great social significance because of
the depth of his psychologicaI analysis and of the themes and conflicts
portrayed in his writing. Concerning such authors as Dostoyevsky the
question that must be put is not a dogmatic - 'Was he a "popular" artist or
not ?', but a dialectic - 'What elements in his work have an essentially
"popular" nature?' All artists are conditioned by the dass structure of the
society in which they live, but by their reflection of objective reality, their
realism, their works assume a genuinely 'popular' aspect even though the
artists may appear as protagonists of reaction or of illusory solutions to the
problems of society.
All art is dass art. The dass nature of art is visible even in socialist
societies; wherever dass antagonisms exist, they are reflected in art. The
Soviet Union, being a dassless society in the sense of having no dass antagon-
isms within it, is nevertheless almost unique and alone in a predominantly
capitalist world, and in such a context all Soviet art is also dass art. But
Soviet society is monolithic, hence the nar6dnost' and klassovost' of Soviet
art coincides. And since Soviet society is united behind the Communist
Party, the nar6dnost' and ktassovost' of Soviet art find their expression in
partfinost' - the third major tenet of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics.
5
The principle of partlinost', perhaps the most individual and certainly
the most controversial Leninist gloss on Marxist aesthetics, arouses pas-
sions both inside and outside the Soviet Union. In a sense it is the pro-
fessional, practical revolutionary's logical, if extreme, development of the
early Marxist theoretician's principle of tendentiousness in art. Extra-
polated from one single article 28 it gives Soviet aesthetics their unique
Ravour, though it traces its antecedents back, in particular, to the works
and activities of the founders of Marxism.
separably Iinked with the revolution of 1830 and Courbet is rightly con-
sidered the artist of the Paris Commune.
Engels called this identification with a politieal or social cause 'ten-
dentiousness' and saw it most dearly at times of heightened dass antagonism.
But the degree of social awareness of such artists was dearly restrieted by
their lack of understanding of kldssovost'; hence a dear distinction must
be drawn between tendentjousness - the artist's desire to take up a political
stance, and partfinose' - a fully artieulated awareness of the political function
of art. These are two dosely related concepts, sometimes even indistinguish-
able from one another, but they must not be considered identical.
The founders of Marxism appreciated the problem of consolidating
artistie forces around the proletarian revolutionary movement and making
the most talented artists conscious partisans of the working dass cause,
though they did not see this in terms of allegiance to a political party. Their
task was essentially an educative one, as witnessed by their correspondence
about Herwegh and Freilingrath,30 their critical analysis of Lasalle's drama
Pranz von Sjckingen,31 and Engels's mentorship of Margaret Harkness 32 and
Minna Kautsky. Writing to the last named in Paris in November 1885, on
the subject of her novel Old Ones and the New, Engels stated: 'Thus the
socialist problem noveI ... fully carries out its mission if by a faithful por-
trayal of the real relations it dispels the dominant conventional illusions
concerning those relations ... without itself offering a direct solution of the
problem involved ...33
The crucial moment in the evolution of the principle of partJinose' was
the publication in G6rky's journal Novaya Zhizn' (The New Life) of Unin's
artic1e on 'Party Organisation and Party Literature' in 1905, at a time when
publication of the party 'press' had become legal for the first time. This
artide is of fundamental importance to an understanding of subsequent
developments, for despite allegations that it was dietated simply by the tem-
porary politieal requirements of the times, it has in fact been vitally influ-
ential in determining party poliey toward the arts ever since it first
appeared. 34
'Emerging from the captivity of feudal censorship', Lenin wrote, 'we
have no desire to become, and we shall not become, prisoners of bourgeois-
-shopkeeper literary relations.' Then follows one of the most significant state-
ments: 'We want to establish, and we shall establish, a free press, free not
simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism and, what is
more, free from bourgeois-anarchist individualism.'
This definition of freedom is central to Unin's argument, for the free-
dom of the artist as he envisaged it is vastly different from the 'bourgeois
freedom' he attacked. In a bourgeois society, art serves only the 'upper ten
thousand', and this in itself imposes obvious limitations on the freedom of the
artist. Bourgeois freedom is in fact ilIusory, depending ultimately on the
purse. Art may be genuinely free only when it is released from all hindrance
in the fulfilment of its true social function, which is to serve the interests of
the masses, 'the miIIions and tens of millions of working people - the flower
of the country, its strength and its future'. Thus Unin relates the freedom of
the arts to their nar6dnost', contrasting the 'hypocritically free literature,
ART AND THE PEOPLE 13
which is in reality linked with the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that
will be openly linked with the proletariat'. It will be free because it will
not feed on 'greed or careerism' but on 'the idea of socialism and sympathy
with the working people', serving the interests of the masses and enriching
revolutionary thought with the practical experience of the socialist proletariat.
'In this way it will bring about a 'permanent interaction between the experi-
ence of the past (scientific socialism ...) and the experience of the present .. .'
The essence of partiinost' is the open allegiance of art to the cause of the
working dass, a conscious decision on the part of the artist to dedicate his
work to the furtherance of socialism. It is not inimicable to freedom; on the
contrary, it affords the artist the optimum conditions for the development of
his ideological aspirations, guaranteeing hirn an organic link with the people
and a place within its ranks. Literature therefore becomes 'part of the com-
mon cause of the proletariat', part of 'one single, great Social-Democratic
mechanism set in motion by the entire politically<onscious vanguard of the
entire working dass'. It becomes an organic element in the struggle for
socialism and an active weapon in that process.
From this it follows that Party guidance is essential if art is to escape
from 'bourgeois-anarchie individualism', with its damaging effect on the
relationship between the artist and the masses and hence on art itself. The
'organised socialist proletariat' must supervise it from beginning to end and
'infuse into it the life-stream of the living proletarian cause', putting an
end to the traditional situation in whieh 'the writer does the writing, the
reader does the reading'. The reader must have a hand in the writing, too.
Unin acknowledges that literature lends itself least of all to 'mechanical
adjustment or levelling', and that 'in this field greater scope must un-
doubtedly be allowed for personal initiative, individual indination, thought
and fantasy, form and content'. But all this means is that allowance must be
made for the specific features of literature in a purely technical sense: 'This,
however, does not in the least refute the proposition, alien and strange to
the bourgeoisie and bourgeois democracy, that literature must ... become an
element of Social-Democratie work, inseparably bound up with the other
elements.'
,. ,. ,.
From such a source the principle of partlinosl has evolved into the most
important, single guiding factor in Soviet poliey toward the arts, provid-
ing the unifying element that draws together the several strands in
Marxist-Leninist aesthetics that we have examined. It embodies, or
'demands from the artist', a threefold, eonseious deeision: (I) art must
fulfil a speeifie social funetion; (2) that funetion is to further the interests
of the masses; (3) to further the interests of the masses, art must become
part of the aetivity of the Communist Party.
Although the argument continues about what preeisely Unin meant
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
in his article - it raged particularly fiercely inside the Soviet Union during
the per iod following Stalin's death - there is no doubt of the importance
attached to that article, and its interpretation, in present-day Soviet
aesthetics: 'Exclusion of the principle of partfinost' not only impoverishes
the principle but gives grounds to our ideological enemies for placing a
distorted interpretation on it - grounds of which they frequently take
advantage.' 35
In the introduction to this book it was pointed out that one of the most
outstanding Soviet writers, Mikhall Sh6lokhov, is often quoted by Wes-
tern commentators as having been unable to explain what Socialist
Realism iso On the other hand, Soviet critics would themselves quote a
passage from Sh6lokhov's speech at the Second Writers' Congress (1954)
on the subject of partfinost': 'Our furious enemies in other countries say
that we Soviet authors write according to the dictates of the Party. But
the fact of the matter is a little different. Each of us writes according to
the dictates of his heart, but all our hearts belong to the Party and to the
people, whom we serve with our art.' 36
Socialist Realism, it must be stressed in conclusion, is the 'artistic
method' whereby the artist fulfils the demands put upon hirn by the
Communist Party. It should therefore be carefully distinguished from
that social realism which, in the parlance of Western critics, may be taken
to refer to the artist's concern with social themes, not with a political
programme. In a Russian context such social realism was very much a
nineteenth century phenomenon, whereas Socialist Realism is a twentieth
century development. The relationship between the two is the theme of
our second chapter.
2 Art and the Party
... He would not attaek the book at onee, he would start with some
sacrosanet pronouneement by Be!insky or Nekrasov - something that
only the blaekest villain eould quarre! with - and he would subtly
twist their words, give them a meaning they were never intended to
have - and very soon he would show, with Be!insky or Herzen as
his witness, that Galakhov's new book showed his vicious, anti-
social character and revealed the shaky foundations of his philosophy.
SoIzhenitsyn: T he First Circle
Support for sueh a point of view is also addueed from the eomments of
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's widow. 4
For the student of the arts in the Soviet Union the question of what
preeisely Lenin did mean is of less importanee than the use to whieh
his statements have been put. Our objeet in this study is not to pass judge-
ments on Soviet poliey or to eriticise the premises on wh ich that poliey
is based, so mueh as to reveal preeisely what the poliey is and how it was
formulated. On the other hand we ean fully understand neither the poliey
nor the practice without a further examination of Unin's thinking in
related fields, espeeially as he devoted eomparatively little of his writing
to a diseussion of the arts as such at least in a conventional sense. For the
basie question, surely, is not whether in 1905 Lenin had in mind only
the Social Demoeratie press, but whether - if he had - this would in-
validate his propositions for application in the ehanged eireumstanees that
followed the suecessful assumption of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. If
in 1905 he had in mind only the Social-Demoeratic press, ean his proposi-
tions not logically be applied to the whole of the press in a situation in
whieh that party - in a new guise - is the only party? Similarly in a situa-
tion in whieh the arts are assigned a speeifie socia! funetion defined in
terms of support for a politieal programme, are we not, in attempting to
divoree literature from other forms of writing, imposing a distinction
without a differenee? We may gain some useful insight into Unin's
thinking by an examination of his periodisation of the Russian revolu-
tionary movement, but first let us look briey at his attitude to the
sanctity of Marx's writings, in reply to the 'revisionist's' allegation that
the propositions embodied in - or extrapolated from - the 1905 article
have no precedent in Marx.
wntmgs, in which his constant theme was the necessity to define and
take due account of the specific peculiarities of the Russian situation in
order to work out the correct organisation and policy for the Russian
Sodal Democratic party. The raw material that had to be sifted was the
history of socialism and democracy in the West, as weIl as the history and
experience of the revolutionary movement in Russia, but 'the actual
"working-Qut" of the material must be independent, for there is nowhere
for us to find ready-made models .. .' 7 In reply to the literalists and
vulgarisers he asserted that imitation and borrowing were legitimate only
when the precise problems in Russia were the same as those elsewhere,
'but in no circumstances must they lead to a neglect of the peculiarities of
the Russian situation ... ' 8 In fact, on various topics Unin looked upon
\1arx's writings as essentially raw material that must be developed on
Russian soil to meet the precise demands of the specifically Russian
dilemma: 'We certainly do not consider Marx's theory complete and
inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it provides only the
cornerstone for the science that socialists must push further in all direc-
tions, if they do not wish to lose contact with reality ... '9
In this context we might do well to point out that Unin's own 'theory',
too, was neither 'complete' nor 'inviolable'. He certainly had no detailed
plan of action for each situation or field of activity, and the arts is perhaps
one such field. Yet it is the development of Unin' s theory that forms the
basis of current policy, which is the object of our present interest.
the petty-bourgeois: 'In point of fact, it was not socialism at a11, but so
many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expression
at that tim~ of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as
weH as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence
of those democrats.' 14
The second period of the revolutionary movement dates from the 1860s,
after the emancipation of the serfs and the disillusion that foHowed it.
The mental revolution experienced by the Russian intelligentsia in the
sixties, Lenin agreed, was as great as that experienced by the French
intelligentsia in the second half of the eighteenth century.15 The period
was marked by a change of leadership in the revolutionary movement,
from the nobility to the raznoch!ntsy, and the rise of a culture that was
reflected in literature and criticism, journalism, pedagogy, the arts and
the sciences. The vanguard was now the elassless intelligentsia 'who
belonged not to the nobility but to the civil servants, urban petty bourgeois,
merchant and peasant elasses,' 16 and their forerunner, even before the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861, was BeHnsky, whose influence was
paramount. Though the socialism of the Petrashevsky cirele was utopian,
not scientific, Lenin nevertheless considered that 'the embryo of the
populist movement (nar6dnich~sttlo) was conceived not in the 1860s but
in the 1840s',17 and this he attributed to BeHnsky.
Questioning the traditional analysis of the Slavophil/Westerner con
troversy, Lenin saw BeHnsky's great contribution as the polarisation of
the Westerners into liberal reformers, on the one hand, and revolution-
aries, on the other. In particular, BeHnsky's attitude to the role of art in
the social debate was very much to Lenin's taste. 'In our times art and
literature have become more than ever before an expression of social
questions', BeHnsky had stated approvingly in his article 'On the Russian
Literature of 1847', and in Lenin's opinion his 'Letter to G6gol' had been
one of the best things published in the uncensored democratic press,
which 'preserves an enormous and active interest to this very day.' 18 In
his attack on the anthology Vekhi (Landmarks), which defined BeHnsky's
letter as 'a lurid and classic expression of intellectual sentiment' and wh ich
he dubbed 'an encyelopaedia of liberal renegacy', Unin defended BeHnsky
as a publicist against the charge of expressing, with Chernyshevsky and
Dobrolyubov, 'only a mood of the intelligentsia, rather than a genuine,
democratic motif'. 19 And in W hat is to bt: Dont:? he related the role of
S.S.R.-2
20 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
the classless inte11igentsia with his concept of the role of the Party, further
developed in the artide of 195: ' ... th~ role 01 th~ vanguard fighter can
be lulfilled only by a party which is guided by the advanced theory.20 In
order to understand what this means at a11 dearly, let the reader reca11
the predecessors of Russian Social-Democracy, like Herzen, BeHnsky,
Chernyshevsky and the brilliant galaxy of the revolutionaries of the
seventies.' 21
In claiming a direct !ine of descent from the Russian thinkers of the
nineteenth century, the Marxist-Leninist does not, of course, imply that
his forebears were not themselves influenced by ideas imported from the
West. Various commentators, notably Isaiah Berlin, have remarked how
seedlings imported from Western Europe run riot when transplanted in
Russian soil, acquiring a mutant nature unknown to their originators. It
was above a11 from the French revolution that the Decembrists had re-
ceived their inspiration, though their own background necessarily made
them somewhat selective in their choice of models. Few of them approved
of the Committee of Public Safety, and whereas they exto11ed the virtues
of Lafayette and Mirabeau, they were horrified by Robespierre and Marat.
And it is of particular interest to English readers to recall that one of the
Decembrists, N. I. Turgenev, travelled to England to become acquainted
at first hand with Robert Owen's New Lanark experiment. There was an
al ready long-established tradition of russification of Western ideas when
Unin thought it necessary to warn of the dangers of slavish imitation. 22
It seems indisputable that Herzen and BeHnsky were acquainted with
Marx's early works, but contemporary Soviet scholars see not so much
the influence of Marx as a parallel development of thought. 23 They point
to striking resemblances, for instance, between BeHnsky's criticism of
Eugene Sue's Mysteres de Paris and Marx's own assessment of that novel,
while commenting that 'as yet there are no works elucidating the un-
questionable similarities and major differences between the ideological
evolution of Marx and Engels, on the one hand, and BeHnsky and Herzen,
on the other.' 24 Even so, in his analysis of the Russian nineteenth century
revolutionary movement, Lenin moves significantly in this direction, and
in his own writing he was hirnself a bridge between the two.
Whatever his attitude to BeHnsky and Herzen, there is ample evidence
that dosest to Unin's heart amongst the forerunners of Russian Marxism
was undoubtedly Chernyshevsky, whose novel What is to b~ Don~? (a
title subsequently to be used by Lenin) inspired hirn from his early student
days. Lenin's literary taste is interestingly illuminated by his reaction to
this novel: 'Now this is realliterature I It teaches, guides and inspires!' 2S
ART AND THE PARTY 21
But each in his own way evolved poetic forms appropriate to the content,
though for Nekrasov this was largely overlooked during his lifetime, and
for Mayak6vsky attention to the more obvious innovations of form has
sometimes led to a neglect of balanced evaluation of their relationship
with that content.
It is certainly beyond doubt that Nekrasov more than any other poet
moulded Unin's appreciation of verse. 'He loved Nekrasov and had a
magnificent knowledge of hirn,' Krupskaya commented. 'He had almost
learned Nekrasov by heart.' 46
If, to this brilliant gaBery of omen of the sixties' we add another of
Lenin's favourite authors, Saltyk6v-Shchedrfn, whose literary stature is
perhaps less controversial and whose viciously portrayed Iudushka in The
Golovlevs (Gospoda Golovlevy) is one of the most memorable characters
in the whole of nineteenth century Russian prose - we already have
emerging a quite clear picture of Lenin's literary tastes, both in the sense
of the function he defined for art and from the point of view of his
appreciation of more narrowly 'literary', technical mastery. We must, of
course, not commit the 'vulgar' error of assuming that any of these figures
were Marxists or that Unin considered them to be such. They were
bourgeois democrats and their oudook, from Lenin's point of view, was
therefore severely limited. But each of them, consciously or otherwise,
contributed to the evolution of the role that art, and in particular literature,
was to play in the later, proletarian period of the revolutionary movement.
In a direct - if apparently paradoxical way - this aB accounts for the
modern assessment of the nar6dnost' of G6rky, whose artistic talent is
plain, whose influence at the turn of the century and thereafter was
immense, but who, as his embarrassingly naive speech at the first Writers'
Congress testifies, was an ideological infant for whom partlinost', if it did
not already exist, had most assuredly to be invented !
Pukirev - and the establishment critics, like Ramazanov, were not slow to
react: 'Everything has now become infected with tendentiousness; it is
all done according to some new recipe prescribed by the Petersburg
journals. One has to regret that mature artists waste themselves on such
banalities. Surely it would be better for a painter to labour in the name of
pure art and to forsake the false path of tendentiousness ... What Per6v
produces is not so much a picture as a tendency, a protest ... 53
With Kramsk6y, Repin (see Plate 11) Savitsky, Shfshkin and the rest,
the peredvizhniki did for painting what Nekrasov did for poetry and,
indeed, their themes were often identical. Like the critics we have already
discussed, they were not Marxists and from a Marxist-Leninist point of
view they were therefore severely restricted in their understanding of the
society of the times, but their nar6dnost' is obvious and the kinship the
socialist-realist artist feels with them is demonstrably based on something
rather more than the arbitrary stroke of a politician's pen.
In music as in painting the new realism took its aesthetic inspiration
from Chernyshevsky, and the peredvfzhniki had something of a parallel
in the moguchaya kuchka, the 'mighty group'. As Fed6tov had followed
on Venetsianov, so Dargomyzhsky followed on GHnka, and each was
harshly criticised while nevertheless becoming forerunner of a significant
trend. But Dargomyzhsky, unlike Fed6tov, lived to find hirnself the
centre of a group of talented, if only partly trained, followers. Balakirev,
Kuf, Musorgsky, Rfmsky-K6rsakov, Borodfn - in a society still hypnotised
by things foreign, they quickly found themselves labelIed 'a nest of
ignorant self-advertisers' perpetrating 'musical mutilation'. But they took
their music to the public, via their Free Music School, just as the pere-
dvizhniki brought their pictures to them in their travelling exhibitions.
Like the painters, the musicians sought their subjects in the life of Russia,
past and present, and in its literature - Snegurochka, Sadk6, BOrls
Godun6v, Khovanshchina, Prince Igor ... Their nar6dnost' was elose to
Nekrasov's, especially that of Musorgsky, who might weil have been
speaking for the entire group when he echoed Chernyshevsky in defining
the purpose of his art: 'Artistic depiction of beauty alone is grossly
infantile, childhood art... You cannot get by with just pretty sounds.
That is not what the modern man wants from art, nor does it justify the
artist's efforts. Life, wherever it manifests itself; truth, however bitter;
boldness, sincere speaking ... that's my taste, that's what I want.' 54
Throughout the seventies the reflection of populism is visible in the
flourishing of the arts. Though the journal Sovremennik had been elosed
in 1866, the policies of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov were continued
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
7
The bomb that mortally wounded Alexander II on r March r88r set off a
chain reaction that reverberated through the entire life of the nation.
Though the government wavered, there was no organised body able to
usurp power, and an era of reaction and reprisal began, with savage re-
pression of the revolutionaries, pogroms and persecution of national
minorities. Russia was 'frozen a litde to prevent it from going rotten' .55
But, 'the murder of individual persons was not the way to overthrow the
absolute power of the Tsar or to annihilate the landowning dass', the
Short History states. 'In the place of the murdered Tsar appeared another,
Alexander III, under whom life became even worse for the workers and
peasants.' 56
Ironically, the success of Nar6dnaya V6lya in assassinating the Tsar led
to the disintegration of the movement. Some of its members, induding
Unin's ill-fated elder brother, Alexander Ulyanov, sought an agreement
with the sodal democrats, while still dinging to their faith in terrorism;
others moved towards the liberals. Thus the former drew doser to a
Marxist position; the latter further away. Yet a third group attempted to
maintain their original stance, and a fourth section, disillusioned, forsook
all political activity.
The crisis likewise affected the opponents of Nar6dnaya V 6lya, the
Cherny Peredet. Certain of them, such as Plekhanov, Akselrod and
Zasulich, all now in emigration in Geneva, par ted finally with populism
and formed the Liberation of Labour movement. But not aB the Cherny
Peredet became Marxists; many turned toward the liberals and a new
wave of populism arose, to be the subject of Plekhanov's attack in his
artide 'Our Disagreements' (Nashi raznog/asiya). In Unin's view the
new populists were 'disgusting reactionaries';57 to Plekhanov they were
becoming more and more an expression of 'the interests of that section of
the peasantry that represents the principle of individualism and kulak
ART AND THE PAI.TY 31
money-grabbing';511 to Korolenko their philosophy wali 'wretched and im-
poverished,.~g Thm populism, wh ich in the seventies had contributed so
much to the development of the revolutionary movement despite its
utopian nature, had by the eighties - and the arrival on the scene of
Unin - become a force for reaction.
Despitethe government's repressive policies, therevolutionary movement
continued to grow throughout the decade. Peasant revolts numbered more
than 500 between 1883 and 1890; in 1885 the first great industrial strike took
place (at the Mor6zov factory in the Vladfmir district); student resent-
ment at the new policy toward universities expressed itself particularly
forcefullyon the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Dobrolyubov's
death in 1886, after the execution of Alexander Ulyanov and other
members of the Nar6dnaya V6lya terrorist fraction in 1887, and at the
memorial ceremonies for Chernyshevsky in 1889. But the decisive factor
was the transfer of allegiance by a significant part of the intelligentsia
from populism to scientific socialism - to Marxism.
To Unin, the 1880s were the crucial years that transformed the revo-
lutionary movement from a loose alliance of intellectuals into the embryo
of a scientific, solidly-based mass movement. 'It was precisely in this
period that the old Russian populism ceased to be a visionary view of the
future and conducted an examination of the economic realities of Russia
which was to enrich Russian social thought. It was precisely in this
per iod that Russian revolutionary thought became most intensive and
created the basis of the social democratic outlook. Yes, we revolutionaries
are far from denying the revolutionary role of reactionary periods.' 60
The Liberation of Labour group had come into being formallyon 25
September 1883, largely on the initiative of Plekhanov. Once an ideologist
of populism, he had studied the achievements of Western socialists during
his emigration and now, in aseries of publications beginning in the
'Library of Contemporary Socialism', he attacked the renascent populism
and began to outline a programme of action for the social democrats
which won the acclaim of Engels. 'I am proud', Engels wrote to Zasulich
in 1885, 'that among Russian youth there is a party that has sincerely and
unequivocally accepted Marx's great economic and historical theories and
has broken decisively with all the anarchist and somewhat slavophil
traditions of its predecessors.' 61 The group also began translating Marx
and Engels into Russian, an essential step in making them accessible to
the masses and a precedent for later practice. Plekhanov's programme, in
fact, was to form the basis of Lenin's own programme some fifteen
years later, and in these early days Lenin was effusive in his praise of
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
battle there is always a degree to which the Party is in fact struggling with
elements in its own make-up.
As we enter our discussion of the twentieth century developments in
Russia, let us first pause to sum up what we have already seen, remem-
bering that it has not been our purpose to present apotted political
history or history of art, but to point to the significant moments in the
relationship between the two as an aid to our understanding of the role
of the artist in Soviet society. What conclusions may we draw from
looking at the first two periods that will help us understand events in
the third?
First, though in the SlavophiljWesterner controversy of the first half
of the nineteenth century the latter may have gained the day, we would
do well to be always conscious of the former. Though the precise role of
slavophilism in the populist movement can hardly be defined, its inBuence
was dearly very great and did not cease automatically with the failure
of the movement. In times of crisis its continued presence becomes notice-
able, and this is still tme in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Second, though in the 1860s the Westerners polarised rapidly into
liberal reformers and revolutionaries, each group - in its own way - was
very much preoccupied with social problems. In other words, the really
fundamental division came not with the question of the role of social
problems in art but with that of the identification of art with a call to
revolution. Both groups were tendentious, in Engels's definition; the split
concerned political orientation, explicitly a twentieth century phenomenon
but having its antecedents in the aesthetics of Chernyshevsky and Dobrol-
yubov, since an obligation to condemn social or political evil implies the
need for a communicable and viable alternative programme.
Third, the formation of political parties came late; the focal point of
both literary and socio-political debates was the journal. This was especi-
ally tme with regard to the social-democratic revolutionaries; the line
between 'literature' and 'publicism' was never dear, and when Lenin
wrote of 'literature' in his 1905 article he made no attempt to draw such
a distinction. It is of interest that the literary journal still plays a greater
role in Soviet art than perhaps in any other.
Fourth, as the nineteenth century writer seemed drawn by 'reality'
into the social debate, so he sometimes retreated from it into his own
inner world at times of disillusion or disaster. Such a process is noticeable
within the lifetime of individual artists, as weH as leading to periodic
movements under the banner of 'transcendental art' or 'art for art's sake'.
The turn of the century was one such period.
ART AND THE PARTY 37
Fifth, the crucial socio-political feature of the turn of the century was
the advent of Marxism in an increasingly capitalist society. This led to
fission within the intelligentsia and, through mass political agitation, the
involvement of the masses in the social and political struggle. In this
context art was not only to renew itself from its ancient sources in the
people; it was to become a weapon in the dass war.
Western Marxist theory had to be interpreted for application to the
specifically Russian situation. Interpretations differed, and political and
artistic groupings differed accordingly. Lenin's gloss - Marxism-Leninism
- becoming the ideology of a Leninist-type party, incorporated Cherny-
shevsky's definition of the reforming role of art and related it to a
specifically political programme. Thus the social role of art, which had
been broadly accepted by the bulk of the intelligentsia at least since
BeHnsky, became a political role - a qualitative change that was to
encounter much resistance and does so even today.
In the space of rather less than two decades at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth, a general and imprecise social
democratic outlook had become, with Plekhanov, a programme embodied,
by Lenin, in a party. And art, which since Griboyedov and Pushkin had
reflected social relations (realism), and had been directed by Cherny-
shevsky and Dobrolyubov to pass judgement on those relations (critical
realism) was now, on behalf of the Marxist-Leninist party, to present an
alternative, socialist system of relations (Socialist Realism).
The 1903 BoishevikJMenshevik dispute had involved the journallskra,
and in I90S publication of political 'literature' was legalised for the first
time. It was therefore essential that the relationship between the party
and the 'press' should be darified; hence Lenin's artide on 'Party Organ-
isation and Party Literature'. In the context of his periodisation theory
and the progression of the relationship of 'literature' and 'politics' in the
journals of the time, the extrapolation of the principle of partlinost' as
the vital force in Socialist Realism does not, perhaps, seem illogical. Such
is the reasoning on which the Soviet critic's argument is based, and on
such a background we shall consider the role of the artist in the Soviet
Union and his artistic method, Socialist Realism.
3 A Few Decrees ...
We are not suggesting, of course, that this transformation of literary
work ... can be accomplished all at once. Far be it from us to
advocate any kind of standardised system, or a solution by means of a
few decrees ...
Lenin: Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905)
WE HAVE seen in our previous chapters how Lenin related his own poli-
tical viewpoint, embodied in a party bearing his own individual stamp,
to the traditions of the nineteenth century Russian social democrats, and
how the social role of art was to become, within the context of that party,
a political role. The truly 'popular' artist was to further the cause of the
masses by integrating his efforts in those of the Party as a whole, and this
relationship was expressed in the principle of partilinost'. Further light
may be cast on the reason why the Party found it necessary to demand
such unquestioning support if we take a more detailed look at the argu-
ment concerning culture in general during the early years of the
Soviet era. In particular, a glance at some of the extra-artistic problems
with which the Party had to cope, and the influence those problems
exerted on its attitudes and consequent actions toward the arts, may
serve to provide a more balanced picture than we might otherwise per-
ceive. As a basis for our discussion we may take the Party' s own pro-
nouncements, set against a background of the immediately post-revolu-
tionary decade. This was the formative period during which the Party's
policy erystallised. The Soviet erities' argument is that the poliey deve-
loped logically and eoherendy to a point at whieh the formulation of the
method beeame a natural eulmination, and we shall attempt to investigate
the evidenee for sueh a claim.
A feature of the first quarter of the eentury, especially after the dis-
appointments of the 1905 revolution was, in the Marxist-Leninist view, a
erisis in bourgeois eulture and the emergence in the arts of a number of
formalist movements of a reaetionary nature. It is perhaps in his instine-
tive rather than his intellectual attitudes towards these formalist move-
ments that the Western student evinees his first and most graphie
A FEW DECREES 39
disagreement with his Soviet contemporaries. To the one, they are
enormously exciting and stimulating; to the other - at its emdest - they
are pernicious and disgusting. From the vantage point of half a century
later we may now perhaps agree that as movements (in so far as they ever
were coherendy defined in a communicable form) they were by their own
nature bound to be short-lived. On the other hand, as influences in art -
both outside the Soviet Union and within it - they did not disappear
without trace and are visible to the discerning eye even within the
apparendy totally hostile framework of Socialist Realism.
In this chapter we shall examine the evolution of the Party's policy
during the early years of its power to see what evidence there is in sup-
port of the view of the genesis of Socialist Realism already presented. Let
us begin with certain general statements as an introduction to our analysis
of that policy.
First, the battle over formalism in the arts - no matter how loudly and
colourfully it raged - was from a socio-political point of view almost
incidental. To the Western student, who cannot fail to sense the exhilara-
tion of the artistic experimentation of the times, the protagonists of the
new art may seem to have occupied the centre of the historical stage. To
such an observer, this was aperiod of unparalleled brilliance, producing
ideas and personalities that have put their stamp on world art. To the
workers and peasants, on the other hand, much of the debate was incom-
prehensible gibberish, peripheral and of no relevance to the enormous
problems that confronted them, and to the ideologist it marked the final
extreme of decadence, when even the elite was mystified and the gap
between art and the people yawned wider than ever before. In absolute
terms, it produced 'bad art'; and in terms of priorities, the whole argu-
ment was premature. The real batde was between conflicting theories of
the nature of proletarian art, not between realism and formalism as such.
This batde was not joined at once, as the Central Committee's letter of
1920, concerning proletarian literature, makes dear. 'If our Party has not
up to now interfered in this matter, this may be explained only by the
fact that it has been engaged in military affairs at the front and has not
therefore always been able to devote the necessary attention to these im-
portant questions.'l The importance of the issue is not denied, but its
place in the scale of priorities is dearly below that of other, more pressing
matters. In his introduction to Literature and Revolution (1923) Tr6tsky
spelled this out more dearly, pursuing the argument eventually to the
point of heresy.2 'Only a movement of scientific thought on anational
sc ale and the development of a new art', he said, would signify the final
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
success of the Revolution, but 'art needs comfort, evcn abundance', and
the time for these was not yet ... 'The problem above all problems at the
present is the economic problem.' 3 Speaking in similar vein some two
years later at a debate on the early years of Soviet art,4 the People's
Commissar for Education (whose province embraced the arts 5) supported
such a point of view. 'Despite my enormous respect for art,' Lunacharsky
confessed, 'I can say that at this point in time a Communist must prove
that he cannot engage in anything hetter than art .. .' The Party was
faced with 'enormous tasks of another sort', and a Communist would be
directed into the arts only if he could prove his inability to make a contri-
bution in a more productive field. And in reply to a taunt from Maya-
k6vsky, who had - as was his habit - turned this into an aphorism,
Lunacharsky brought the argument right down to the shop Roor: 'lf, for
example, a comrade says "I am a poet" or "I am a dramatist", he may be
released for a year, and if during that time he achieves great success, his
release time may be prolonged. But if not, then he must be compelled to
make up somehow for that year.' Art - except for the artist - was some-
thing of a peripheral matter when bellies were empty ,
Second, no matter how loudly the participants sometimes shouted, the
ideological argument was conducted at a primitively low level. While
acknowledging that the Party's theory of literature was only then in a
state of evolution, we cannot but be impressed by the apparent incom-
prehension of the Marxist-Leninist attitude by many of its supporters and
opponents alike. Much of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion of
the ideological dispute between the proletarian writers' organisations and
the Party as a catalyst to the crystallisation of c1ear-cut principles; we
shall therefore not anticipate it here. But equally good examples may be
found in the other literary movements of the twenties. For Mayak6vsky
and his Futurists, for example, the quest ion of accepting or rejecting the
Revolution simply did not arise;6 they espoused what they believed it to
be with 'storms of applause', but from a study of their pronounce-
ments it quickly becomes apparent that their image of the Revolu-
tion had little in common with the real thing. Hence Lenin's energetic
rebuttal of 'vulgarising sociology', a term elsewhere applied to the Prolet-
kult but equally relevant to the Futurists. In a sense there was less danger
from the frank opponent without than from the misguided sympathiser
within.
The level of the argument may be illustrated by reference to the same
public debate, held in 1925, at wh ich Lunacharsky analysed the progress
of Soviet Literature and crossed swords with Mayak6vsky, now spokes-
A FEW DECREES
This attitude was not simply the instinctive reaction of a cultured man
- it had a deep-seated ideological motive. Lenin's belief in the organic
relationship that must exist between the new, 'great, communist art' 13
that would eventually develop and the cultural heritage of pre-revolu-
tionary epochs contrasted sharply with the nihilistic attitudes of his idee-
logical opponents, with whom the struggle that was to take place during
the ensuing decade was to be the crucible in which subsequent party
policy toward the arts was compounded. For the desire to smash and
destroy was also not simply instinctive fury but had an ideological basis,
too. To the protagonists of such a point of view the culture of pre-
revolutionary epochs must be swept away to make room for new
growths,14 whereas for Lenin 'only by a precise knowledge of the culture
created by the whole development of mankind, and by a re-working of
this, will it be possible to create a new, proletarian culture.' 15
The government's concern for the safety of works of art began even
before the fighting had ceased. The Moscow Soviet set up a special sec-
tion under the chairmanship first of the writer Veresayev,16 and then of
the architect Malin6vsky with, as one of its urgent tasks, that of the
preservation of the Kremlin, to which many treasures had been evacuated
at the outbreak of the war. This body included such universally respected
figures as the painters Repin and Polenov, and it is a testimony to its
success that various of the cases in which the ohjets d' art were stored re-
mained untouched until they were officially unsealed in 1922. Similar
measures were taken in Petrograd, where articles looted from the Winter
Palace (now the Hermitage Museum) were sought out in a campaign
directed personally by Dzerzhlnsky, with the scholar, Vereshchagin, as
adviser. And in both capitals and subsequently the provinces detailed in-
ventories were made of all the property that had now passed into the
hands of the State.
But theft and destruction were not the only dangers; depreciation and
damage from lack of proper care were also taking their toll, and especi-
ally in the provinces a thriving black market had quickly appeared. Enor-
mous quantities of works of art had been taken out of the country during
the time of the Provisional Government, and after the Revolution many
others were sold ridiculously cheaply to Western and Russian profiteers
by citizens wishing to emigrate. The danger to what was now regarded
as the people's rightful inheritance was countered in 1918 by two govern-
mental measures, both over the signatures of Lenin. These were the
decrees 'On the prohibition of the export of art treasures and objects of
historical importance' and 'On the registration, collection and storage of
A PEW DECREES 45
art treasures and objects of historical importance in the possession of
private societies and institutions' Under the enlightened guidance of
Lunacharsky such measures were administered with a degree of cour-
tesy and tact, but offenders in both cases were liable to confiscation of
goods and to imprisonment.
Such measures required appropriate organisational channels, and since
the inherited structure operated automatica11y to the advantage of the
bourgeoisie, new Soviet organisations had hastily to be elaborated. The
old Ministry of Education (prosveshcheniye) had been abolished and re-
placed by the People's Commissariat (Narkompr6s) under Lunacharsky
and Krupskaya, and it was to this in the first instance that the preserva-
tion of works of art was entrusted. For a short while the duties were
devolved to a special commission under Malin6vsky, but by late 1918
they had again become a function of N arkom pr6s proper.
If the problems involved in bringing art to the people were to a great
extent administrative and organisational, those inherent in the task of
bringing the people to art were of a quite different order, requiring - it is
true - certain administrative and organisational measures but demand-
ing, above a11, a considerable if unpredictable period of time. They were,
in fact, largely educational, and their indusion in the purview of the
Commissariat of Education was a natural step, as asserted by the head
of the section concerned with the theatre, Olga Kameneva : 'While art is
in the Commissariat of Education, the government has one aim - an
educative one, to demonstrate and explain. Russia is in the stage of
development when it has to be educated in art.' 17 But although the
question of aesthetic training was tackled from the very outset (entry to
institutions providing training in the arts was, for example, greatly
facilitated for applicants from the proletariat, peasantry and Red Army),
the first and major task was very much more basic; it was the elimination
of illiteracy. For at the time of the Revolution, more than three-quarters
of the population of the Russian Empire were tota11y illiterate, some
forty-eight nationalities had no written tradition, and four-fifths of the
children of the working dass had no access to schooling.
Desperate straits required desperate measures. In November 1917 a
mere matter of days after the coup d' etat, an 'address to the people' an-
nounced the primary aim of an all-out attack on illiteracy, and although
during the Civil War it proved almost impossible to proceed with this,
the fighting was still raging sporadica11y when, in December 1919, the
Council of People's Commissars (Sovnark6m) prodaimed its decree 'On
the liquidation of ilIiteracy amongst the population of the RSFSR:18
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
frozen faetories and starving towns and gone horne again to the land,
whieh he now eonsidered to have beeome his own. And when the land-
owner was driven into emigration, the bourgeoisie destroyed and the tiny
urban proletariat rendered d&lasse, he was pampered by NEP and his
eternal self-interest eonfirmed. Like its nineteenth eentury forefathers,
the Communist Party - self-appointed vanguard of a proletariat still
to be born - had somehow to move the peasant into its brave new world,
exhorting, enticing and fina11y beating hirn into eomplianee, and in so
doing it adopted many of his attitudes. 'Serateh a Russian,' goes the
old saying, 'and you'11 find a Tatar.' Serateh a Russian worker and you'11
find a peasant.
Between 1920 and 1932 three major party pronouneements were made
on poliey toward literature: On the Proletkults (1920), On the Party's
poliey in the field of literature (1925), and On the reformation of literary-
artistie organisations (1932). These, with Lenin's article Party Organisa-
tion and Party Literature (1905) and his speech In Memory of Herzen
(1912) are usually quoted by Soviet literary-historians as providing the
basic doeumentation of the evolution of Socialist Realism up to the first
meeting of the Writers' Union in 1934, and a11 five doeuments are given
in translation as appendiees to this book. However, it is - as we have
seen - quite misleading to eonsider 'artistie literature' 23 in isolation
from other forms of the printed word - news papers and journals, eduea-
tional publieations, printed matter associated with propaganda and poli-
tieal agitation, ete. - a11 subsumed under the bl anket term, 'the press'
(peehdt').24 We sha11 therefore plaee the three statements eoneerned
specifieally with the arts in the eontext of aseries of other statements. A
fuller list is as fo11ows :
I. On the Proletkults
(Letter from the Central Committee, R.C.P., I.XIl.20)
2. Resolution on the Questions of Propaganda, the Press and Agitation
(XIlth CongressofR.C.P. (b), 1923)
3. Resolution on the Press
(XIllth Congress, R.C.P. (b), 1924)
4. On the Party's Poliey in the Field of Literature
(Resolution of the Central Committee R.C.P. (b), 18.VI.25)
5. On the Work of the Komsom61 in the Field of the Press
(Decision of the Central Committee R.C.P. (b), 14. VIIl.25)
6. On Measures for the Improvement of Youth and Children' s
Literature
(Decision of the Central Committee, A.C.P. (b), 23.VIl.28)
A FEW DECREES 49
7. On the Statement ofPart of the Siberian Writers and Literary
Organisations against Maksfm G6rky
(Decision 0/ the Central Committee, A.CP. (b), 25. VII.29)
8. On Publishing
(Decision 0/ the Central Committee, A.C.P. (b), 15. VIII.]!)
9. On the Molodaya Gvardiya Publishers
(Decision 0/ the Cmtral Committee, A.C.P. (b), 29.VII.]!)
10. On the Reformation of Literary Artistie Organisations
(Decision 0/ the Central Committee, A.C.P. (b), 23.IV.J2)
The first of these statements concerns the relationship between the Party
and the Proletkult,2s a topie on whieh we have already touched during
our discussion of the aesthetic principle of nar6dnost'. The rift between
Lenin's view and those of his opponents on this principle was extremely
deep and of the utmost importance in subsequent developments. With
Plekhanov, for whom the dispassionate study of past cultures was simply
the key to a better understanding of historical processes, Lenin now dis-
agreed sharply, since for hirn the object was a severely practical one of
selecting and employing those 'progressive' elements that lent themselves
for use in building a new culture in the interests of the proletariat. Per-
haps Lenin's own appraisal of Marx will serve as an appraisal of Lenin
hirnself : 'Everything that had been created by human society he sub-
jected to critical reworking, omitting nothing from his scrutiny. Every-
thing that had been created by human thought he reworked, analysed
and tested out in the workers' movement, drawing conclusions that people
confined within bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejudiees
had been unable to make ...26
With the Proletkult the disagreement was even more radieal though
proceeding from the same basic premises. Tbe new proletarian culture
could not, in Lenin's opinion, appear from nowhere, invented by seIf-
styled specialists; it must grow organieally from what had gone before. A
necessary preliminary was a general rise in the cultural level of the
masses - beginning with the Communists, but not confined to them
alone. 27 The slogan 'from each according to his abilities, to each accord-
ing to his needs' implied the development of each individual to the
highest cultural level he was capable of attaining via a massive drive in
whieh the writer would play his part just like any other member of
society. Only from a cultured proletariat could a proletarian culture arise.
But if we anticipate a later formulation directed against one of the lead-
;0 SOVIET SOCIALIST IlEALISM
ing Proletkult theorists: 'To Comrade Pletnev, proletarian culture is a
sort of chemical reaction which can be produced in the Proletkult retort
with the aid of a group of specially selected people. He seems to see the
elements of the new proletarian culture emerging from the Proletkult
studio rather as the ancient goddess appeared ready-made out of the
foaming sea .' 28
A further vital point at issue was that of the definition of 'culture' and
the place within it of 'art'. Not only did the Proletkult wish to produce a
'pure' proletarian culture which could by definition embrace only a tiny
part of the proletariat; it also restricted its activities to art and certain
'dubious' aspects of science. Lenin's much broader concept is made quite
explicit in the opening clause of his draft resolution: 'All educational
work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants in the field of poli-
tical education in general and in the field of art in particular . .' 29 Art is
immediately subsumed in 'the field of political education in general' and
its role is unequivocally indicated.
But the basic hone of contention was the relationship between art and
politics, i.e. between the Proletkult and the Party. Tbe leading Moscow
Proletkult ideologist in 1920 was Bogdanov,30 with whom Lenin's for-
merly cordial relations had greatly deteriorated, their argument having
quickly transcended the bounds of aesthetics or philosophy and become
political. 'Under the guise of "proletarian culture"', Lenin said. 'A. A.
Bogdanov is introducing bourgeois and reactionary attitudes.' 31 Lunach-
arsky, one of the prime organisers of the Proletkult who nevertheless
opposed its attitude to the 'bourgeois' culture of the past, seems to have
occupied something of an intermediate position between Bogdanov and
Unin 32 - hence the latter's clearly felt need to 'correct' Lunacharsky's
VAPP line rather than seeing VAPP as conducting party policy, but this
move was decisively and significantly rejected.
Tbe importance for us of the resultant statement is the fact that the
discussion of literature was conducted within the context of a debate
concerning the press as a whole, of which it was now clearly feit to be a
part. Though certain of the 23 clauses were concerned specifically with
'artistic' Iiterature, it is the degree of integration rather than that of dis-
tinction that is significant, as an examination of the contents of the state-
ment will show.
Noting with approval the progress made in the past year (Clause I),
the XIIth Congress thought that the link between the press and the masses
must be drawn even closer, and that the press 'must concentrate its efforts
on clarifying the basic problems in the life and customs of the worker and
peasant millions' (2). Moreover 'the workers' press must satisfy the
readers' needs in the general educative fie1d' 54 (J) - stipulations not at a11
out of place in a definition of Socialist Realism in literat ure. In the use
of language, there was a need to evolve 'a skilful combination of the
maximum popular nature and expressiveness with serious and concrete
re1evance of content' - an equa11y appropriate prescription. 55 Similarly the
most important function of the press was 'to educate the rising generation
in the spirit of Leninism' (4).56 The press must refine its means of re-
sponding to the demands of the masses; worker correspondents must be
supported and protected from administrative meddling and bureaucracy,
their communist education must be improved, and the constant aim must
be to draw fresh cadres of workers into participation in such activities (8).
Wall newspapers were increasing their importance and must therefore be
brought under party control 0); the network of weekly papers must be
enlarged and improved, and there must be a massive enlistment of rural
correspondents and 'a skilful combination of agit-propaganda with the
e1ucidation of general political and economic questions, especially con-
cerning co-operatives and, fina11y, presentation intelligible to the peas-
antry, without false over-simplification and unnecessary vulgarisation'.
Army and Navy newspapers were important and 'their content and lang-
uage must be adapted to suit the youth on which the army draws'. (10).
Publications of a11 sorts must be deve10ped in the nationallanguages, and
worker and rural correspondents drawn in, with the evolution of 'the
kind of newspaper suited to the level of the back ward peasantry of the
national republics' (11). Special attention must be paid to increasing the
network of young worker and rural correspondents, and a major task for
the Komsom61 must be the creation of literature for the masses of the
A FEW DECREES 61
peasant youth. This must be rigorously supervised for ideological purity
and concentrated on the Bolsheviks' fight against opportunism and
deviation. Children's literature must also be created under similar safe-
guards (12).
An interesting new theme, in Clause 13, concerns the role of woman
in the new society, particularly in the Muslim areas of Central Asia.
Women were to be drawn into work in the press via wall newspapers,
and, of course, through publication in the national languages.
Earmarked funds were to be allotted to support national, peasant and
army presses, and these were to concentrate - amongst other things - on
mass editions of the works of Lenin (15). As a matter of some urgency
these were to be published in the non-Russian languages (we have already
commented on the role of the stimulation of national languages in the
propagation of Marxism) with special attention to editing, intelligibility,
price and distribution (16) - all calculated to give them a maximum
efficacy. The complete works were to be published in Russian, but selec-
tions only in the national languages. The numerous publishing houses
were to co-ordinate their programmes more closely in order to facilitate
control from the centre (17), and the Party was also to exercise stricter
supervision of critico-bibliographic work (18). Clause 19 was devoted to
'artistie' literature :
The Party's basie work in the field of artistie literature must be oriented
on the ereative output of workers and peasants who have become ...
writers in the course of the cultural rise of the broad, popular masses of
the Soviet Union. The worker and rural eorrespondents must be re-
garded as reserves from which new worker and peasant writers will
emerge.
The provision of support and material assistanee for proletarian and
peasant writers who have come into our literature - some from the
lathe, some from the plough, and some from that stratum of the intel-
ligentsia wh ich entered the ranks of the Russian Communist Party and
the Komsomol during the Oetober days and the period of War Com-
munism - must be strengthened in every way.
Special attention must be paid to the Komsomol writers and poets
who are aetive in the heart of the masses of young workers.
Abasie prerequisite for the growth of worker and peasant writers is
more serious artistic and political study and liberation from preoeeupa-
tion with narrow circles of interest, through the comprehensive assist-
anee of the Party, especially party literary erities.
SOVIET SOCIALIST IlEALISM
with the following aims: (1) cooperation in the dass struggle on the liter-
ary front; (2) the eradication of kapitulyanstvo and komchvanstvo; (3) theex-
changeof theoretical and creative experience; (4) cooperative publishing; (5)
organisation al measures to improve the artistic qualifications of youth. In
fact thiswas never to be a veryeffective body, due largely to the obstructive
attitude of V APP, but it was nevertheless a significant step toward the
formation of the Writers' Union which, like the Federation, embraces
party members and non-members alike. Second, within the ranks of
VAPP the growing discord centred around the figure of Furmanov (who
died in 1926) came to a head, resulting eventually in the removal of the
triumvirate (Vardin, Lelevich and R6dov) from their all-powerful posi-
tion. However, this too was only a partly successful measure, since Aver-
bakh, who inherited their mantle, was in many ways a continuer of their
policies. Even so the original 0ktyabr' platform was re-examined and
revised, though there remained a considerable gap between theory and
practice, in that old habits died hard. In general it may be said that where-
as Vardin, Lelevich and R6dov considered the 1925 statement spelled the
end for VAPP and therefore opposed it, Averbakh (supported by Fade-
yev) chose to regard it as approving much of the VAPP generalline and
tried to adapt it to suit the rest. Under his aegis V APP began to be more
concerned with literary theory and less with organisational and political
polemics, attempting to apply Marxist theory to literature to produce a
'dialectical materialist artistic method'. Their mentor, however, was not
Lenin but Plekhanov, and in this they again began to deviate from the
party line.
In the four party statements examined so far we have already seen the
seminal stages of the principles embodied in the theory of Socialist
Realism. Indeed, all the fundamental roots are already there, and their
growth or mutation in response to developing or chan ging circumstances
need occasion very little surprise. These processes are dearly visible in
subsequent party pronouncements.
Some two months after the approval by the Party Congress of its state-
ment on policy toward literature, the Central Committee published its
resolution 'On the Work of the Komsom61 63 in the Field of the Press'
(14 August 1925) in which it elaborated the points made in Clause 12, etc.
of its 1924 statement. This spells out, among other things, the overall aims
of the Komsom61 press and the topics on which it should concentrate, and
makes interesting reading in the light of the ideinost' - preoccupation
with 'concrete' current problems - required of socialist-realist literature.
A mass newspaper, Komsom6l'skaya Pravda, was to be started, close1y
A FEW DECREES
linked with the Komsom61 Central Committee and with Pravda (3). This
was to be aeeompanied by a theoretical journal coneerned with problems
of the youth organisations, Party policies, the Comintern, etc. where
appropriate, in national languages (4). The pe asant element must be
strengthened and the press must work toward worker-peasant unity
under the guidance of the proletariat (5). The enormous size of the young
correspondents' movement in town and country necessitated inereased
party interest in them (6). The growth of wall newspapers equally re-
quired attention; rural versions must concentrate on explaining party
agricultural policy, etc. 0'). There was an urgent need for books for
youth - explanations of the principles of Leninism, the history of the
revolutionary movcment, the Civil War, international relations; 'Artistic
literature has great significance lor worker and peasant youth, and in
aceordance with the Central Committee' s direetive on literature, atten-
tion must be paid to its creation'. '*' There was also need for books on tech-
nical subjects, professional training and Komsom61 activities (8). The
provision of books for the peasant youth was especially important 0).
Series of popular brochures must be compiled for Komsom61 use in rural
areas on such topics as: Soviet decrees; agriculture; financial questions;
the strueture of the Soviet system; the functioning of cooperatives, eollec-
tive economy, ete.; the campaign to liquidate illiteracy; the Komsom61
system; worker and peasant unity; the Getober Revolution, etc. (10). The
Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) publishers were to be made eorres-
pondingly stronger (I I). Mass series issued via periodicals must eneourage
systematic reading (13)' Komsomol journals should specialise on certain
types of readership; Smena (Shift) - on worker youth; Peasant Youth
Journal - rural youth, both party members and non-members; 'The
journals must beeome loeal points lor groups 01 young poets and writers,
young eorrespondents, ete.' '*' (14)' Increased attention must be paid to
eatering for the needs of non-Russian minorities (15)'
The enormous importance of the role assigned to youth, the attention
devoted to it in the early days of the Soviet regime,64 and the prominent
part its representatives were exhorted to play in subsequent political,
social and artistic developments are a11 to be seen in this statement. Tbe
publieations mentioned have long since become household names in the
Soviet Union; a large number of outstanding modern writers began their
literary eareers through Komsom61 journals, and from the point of view
of theme (industrialisation, collectivisation, etc.), genre (the novella and
the novel), and style (a tendency to black-and-white characterisation, si m-
plicity of language and imagery, pointing of the moral at the end of a
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
were the portentous events of which the Party's debates on the role of the
arts formed part of the background in the period under discussion.
Stalin's victory over Tr6tsky was not simply that of one aspiring leader
over another - as subsequent developments might suggest. Above all it
was a victory for Lenin's concept of the Party and the principle of
partiinost' - a victory ironie in that it was inflicted by one whom Unin
had with his dying breath disowned over one to whom he had in extremis
turned for support.
In the literary debates throughout this period the same processes were
at work. The 1926 V APP plenum had decided it was essential 'to open a
discussion on questions of the artistic platform' ,68 which showed it was
taking some heed of the Party's exhortation to devote itself more to
literary theory and less to organisational and political polemies, but the
discussion it proposed was to be conducted 'on the basis of the heritage of
Marx and Plekhanov, the basis of dialectical materialism'. This was the
beginning of the evolution of the 'dialectical materialist artistic method'
to which, according to some critics,69 the theory of Socialist Realism was
needed as a deliberate counter. In 1927 according to the report in the new
journal, the MAPP conference showed both the strength and the weakness
of the new direction in which that organisation had embarked after the
shocks of 1925: 'The conference's main attention was occupied by the
question of the creative paths of proletarian literature. There is no doubt
that proletarian literature will develop along the line of artistic realism ...
We mean a new, proletarian artistic realism, which has assimilated the
achievements of world literature and is developing along special paths ...
The path of the psychological revelation of the living man - such is the
path of proletarian realism .. .' 70
The adherence to realism was not new, but the 'assimilation of the
achievements of world literature' and preoccupation with psychological
a
revelation of character la Tolst6y 71 were steps that took V APP, from
the point of view of the Party, in the right direction.
At the first congress of proletarian writers, in 1928, it was decided to
form an All-Union League of Associations of Proletarian Writers,
VOAPP, but this remained largely a cipher, the real power being concen-
trated in the equally newly formed RAPP, with Averbakh at the helm.
The conference was notable for fierce debates on the 'artistic platform',
which now had a number of planks, some of which were distinctly un-
stable from the ideologie al aspect. The role of revolutionary romanticism
(whose antecedents in the nineteenth century democrats we have already
seen) 72 was, for example, denied in the RAPP concept of proletarian
A FEW DECREES 73
realism. The debates did not, however, result in the formulation of a
comprehensive programme, and the desperate passion with which RAPP
theoreticians espoused certain principles as 'critical' or 'decisive' suggests
a fundamental lack of confidence and certainty.
Indeed, as the 1925 statement had reminded them, the RAPP leaders
were in fact only self-appointed experts, and they were now facing the
challenge of highly trained products of the party schools and other estab-
lishments set up after the Revolution. 73 If their skill as literary craftsmen
had always been reckoned inferior to that of the fellow-travellers (the
perhaps not flattering cause of another dimension in their antipathy), their
ideological weaknesses were now being equally exposed. Moreover the
other literary movements were gaining maturity and becoming more
ideologically acceptable without suffering from RAPP's arrogant dog-
matism.
Within the Federation of Soviet Writers - which was not able to hold
its inaugural meeting until1927 because of the tactics employed by RAPP,
the organisation continued its polemics. Although in theory all member
associations had joined on equal terms, RAPP again claimed a right to
the leading role in the name of the proletariat. Its vicious attacks on
Vor6nsky were crowned with apparent success when the latter fell from
grace in 1927 in association with the down fall of Tr6tsky. But it also
aimed its sights at rather less vulnerable figures, including that of Makslm
G6rky.
The RAPP attitude in fact occasioned the publication of a special
Central Committee statement in 1929, directed at the perhaps surprising
target of the Siberian writers' associations. Their attack on G6rky,74
whom they considered a fellow-traveller who had 'got off' at the bour-
geois revolution of February, 1917 had begun in 1928 in a speech by
YermHov 7S accusing him of individualism, an equivocal attitude to the
intelligentsia, antipathy to the peasantry, and humanism - by which was
meant an anti-collective position. G6rky's return to the USSR in that
year was the occasion of rapture and eulogy (see Plate I) but Na
literaturnom postu alleged that he was unreliable, and A verbakh led an
onslaught on him for his defence, in Pravda, of a minor poet, Molchanov
(who was also to be lampooned by Mayak6vsky in Klop - The Bedbug).
In fact G6rky's point had simply been that such inexpert writers should
be treated tactfully and aided, rather than being ruthlessly destroyed
by RAPP ('valued and taught, not yelled and barked at'),'6 but this
marked the start of a crusade in which Molchanov was apretext rather
than a cause. G6rky was now accused of condescension and conceit, and
74 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
his total loyalty to the proletariat was questioned. Pravda took G6rky's
part, but Averbakh's attacks in Na literaturnom postu were echoed in the
journal Nastoyashcheye (The Present), published by the Siberian writers'
organisation, wh ich had been founded by none other than R6dov (for-
merly of the VAPP triumvirate) and whose editor, Kurs, was an admirer
and emulator of Averb:ikh. In tirades of mounting fury G6rky was called
a dass enemy and said to be protector of anti-Soviet elements. At this
point the Party stepped in with a resolution 'On the Statement of Part of
the Siberian Writers and Literary Organisations against Maksfm G6rky'
(25 July 1929):
Leaving a detailed discussion of the basic arguments to be dealt with
in another statement, the Central Committee considered 'grossly mis-
taken and bordering on hooliganism' the description of G6rky's position
as that of 'a crafty, disguised enemy' (Siberian Proletkult, N astoyash-
cheye, Nos. 8 and 9, 1929); the accusation that he was becoming ever
more frequently 'a cover for the whole reactionary section of Soviet
literature (Nastoyashcheye, 5, 6 and 7); and that he was a defender of
'Soviet pilnyak6vshchina 77 in all its manifestations, i.e. not only on the
literary front' (Soviet Siberia, No. 218). Such attitudes betrayed the dis-
torted literary-political line of various Siberian associations (the Nas-
toyashcheye group, the Proletkult, the Siberian APP) in their attitude to
G6rky. The Central Committee therefore resolved:
A series of works on the history of the Party, ete., linking their themes
with eurrent problems, must be oriented on the generation just entering
produetive labour (2), and: ' ... To reeet, in artistic literature, the
heroism of the building of socialism, the role of youth in it, the trans-
formation of social rdations and of the new men - the heroes of socialist
eonstruetion .. .' (3).
Teehnical series were to be ereated at onee, together with books de-
signed to draw Pioneers 82 into social aetivities, ete. (4). The faults pre-
viously indicated - dryness and so on - must be eradicated (5).
Then follows a new referenee to the role of the fellow-travdlers, the
last before they, like a11 the others, beeame 'Soviet' writers or eeased to be
writers at a11. The referenee is remarkable in that it does not suggest the
slightest change of poliey toward them: 'The participation of major
authors and artists must be enlisted in the ereation of ehildren's books.83
WhiIe attraeting proletarian writers into the ereation of ehildren's books,
it is essential at the same time to maintain eonsiderate rdations with
fellow-travdler writers and artists aspiring to ereate Soviet ehildren's
books, drawing them into this work and guaranteeing them politieal eon-
sultation and informed and eomraddy eriticism.'
Various organisation al measures, on whieh we need not dwell, are
listed. We need perhaps note only their drastic nature, involving minute
supervision by the Central Committee. And in a paragraph deseribing
the desired nature of ehildren's literature we have yet another indication
of the dements of nar6dnost' - stimulation of the artistic potential of the
ehiId, with partiinost' - the promotion of the Party's viewpoint, via
ideinost' - explanation and presentation of eurrent policies: 'Children's
literature must be militantly bolshevik, a call to struggle and to victory.
The ehildren's books must portray the socialist transformation of the
eountry and the people in bright and imaginative forms, bringing up
the ehiIdren in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. While radic-
ally improving the presentation of ehildren's books and illustrations,
eare must be taken that this does not lead to misinterpretation of the
political objeet of the books or distortion of the aim of the artistic educa-
tion of the ehildren.'
In fact, as the RAPP leaders eontinued to devdop their 'dialeetieal
materialist artistie method', the Party's own poliey had gdled into a
eoherent and eommunicable whole.
We need not rehearse an the ingredients yet again. The Communist
Party's attitude to the artist, the politician's rdationship with the writer,
was by 1931 quite clear. Indeed in broad terms it had been clear for some
A FEW DECREES 81
ten years, and no brief formula could have been more expressive than
that which occurred in a draft report in 1921 and which we chose to
introduce this book: 84 'Agitation and propaganda acquire special edge
and efficacy when decked in the attractive and powerful forms of art .. .'
There remained only to formalise and institutionalise this relationship
and control its future development.
The society of 1931 was vastly different from that of 1921; in the space
of one decade the Party had halted the retreat that was NEP and in its
drive to create heavy industry and collectivise the land it was now very
much on the offensive.8s With the end of NEP (1928) came the end of
overt opposition to the regime, and the time for equivocation was past.
Those intellectuals who, in the early twenties had lived in daily expecta-
tion of the collapse of the Bolsheviks had now bitterly to acknowledge
their disillusion. Those who had stood uncommitted on the sidelines were
finding such a stance increasingly uncomfortable. 'Friend or foe?' and
'Those who are not with us are against us' became cries that were no
longer to be ignored; the time had come when each writer had either to
cast his lot with the Party or master 'the genre of silence'.86 For more
than a decade the Party had urged its aspiring young artists to learn from
the 'specialists' it had so assiduously wooed, but now a whole new genera-
tion that had served this apprenticeship was entering the field. Though
their gifts were uneven and limited, as the quality of writing in the thirties
was soon to demonstrate, they no longer needed to defer quite so tactfully
to their elders. However, this did not imply that they had automatically to
subscribe to the principles laid down by RAPP. All the Party demanded
of the writer, whatever his origin, was that he support its programme and
be ready to dedicate his art to that end. The need was for some broad
framework in which all such sympathetic writers could work together in
harmony.
In the politicalleadership, too, the changes which we earlier suggested
were necessary if the theories elaborated by the pre-revolutionary bolshe-
vik intellectuals were ever to be translated into practice were now coming
about. The 'steel' had been 'tempered' 87 in the Civil War and its after-
math and was now cutting through to the surface of the party apparatus,
and successive cohorts from the party schools were challenging not only
the non-party men but their own 'fathers', too. Zhdanov's words at the
1934 Congress of Writers were to sum up their programme quite suc-
cinctly: ' ... the Party is organising the masses for the struggle to destroy
capitalist elements once and for all, to eradicate the vestiges of capitalism
in our economy and in peop/e's minds.' 88 It was in this last connection,
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
clearly, that the writer as the engineer of the human soul was to be en-
rolled to play his part.
In such eireumstanees, some formalisation of poliey toward the arts
seemed ineseapable. Nor was the form it took an oecasion for surprise. The
Party had always looked to the proletarian writer to earn his 'hegemony' ,
and despite its multiplying differenees with the RAPP leadership,89 its
natural allies and strength lay in the RAPP members, many of whom
had long since been out of sympathy with Averba.kh's policies. By 1932
the differenees were in any ease perhaps more on the level of explieit
policies than of implieit goals, and if the Party was to extend its now
fully worked-out policy to embraee the entire intelleetual stratum, then
RAPP as an exclusive organisation had to go, though mueh of its philo-
sophy would remain.
The final party statement on our list, the 1932 Central Committee de-
cision 'On the Reformation of Literary-Artistie Organisations' (Appendix
V) was brief and very mueh to the point, and seems to have been greeted
with some enthusiasm (if limited comprehension) by most of the writers
of the time. Apart from its refreshing brevity, it is very reminiscent in
tone of the 1925 statement.
The position that had obtained in the early 1920S, the Central Committee
said, had now been reversed: proletarian literature was strong and 'alien'
elements weak. But the existing proletarian organisations were too re-
strietive for the new eireumstanees; they were therefore to be abolished
and replaeed by one single union - for eaeh branch of the arts, but begin-
ning with literature - whieh would aecommodate 'all writers supporting
the platform of Soviet power and aspiring to take part in the building of
socialism,' and would include a communist fraction. VOAPP and RAPP
were therefore dissolved.
Dissolved, too, though this was not stated, were all the other artists'
associations, since any artist who supported the regime could do so via the
new union. He need not, of course, become a member of the Party;90 in-
deed, a high proportion of the members of the Writers' Union are not
party members even today. But he could not overtly express dissent
without running the risk of being accused of a criminal offence - as
was to be the case in more recent times with Sinyavsky 91 and Daniel -
since it was expressly forbidden by law to issue, publish or distribute any
works containing 'agitation and propaganda against the Soviet regime
and the dictatorship of the proletariat' - terms capable of widely different
interpretations. Enforcement of this ruling is part of the wider function
of the Chief Administration for the Preservation of State Secrets in the
A FEW DECREES
Press (Glavllt),92 which dates in its present form from June 1931, though
its origin goes back to 1922, a time when the new republic feIt itseIf iso-
lated and threatened on all sides by very real dangers.
The decision to reorganise RAPP and the other associations was fol-
lowed by aperiod of intense organisational activity, since al1 the details
had still to be worked out. In order to prepare the formation of the newly
decreed Union of Soviet Writers (like the Federation already discussed,
it does .not mention the term 'proletarian' in its tide), a fifty-man All-
Union Organising Committee was set up and this began work in August
1932 with G6rky as President, Gr6nsky as Chairman and Kirp6tkin as
Secretary. To Gr6nsky is ascribed, in one variant, the first use of the term
'socialist realism' .93
Tbe term, whoever first used it, was adopted to designate the 'artistic
method' proclairned by G6rky and Zhdanov at the first Congress of
Soviet Writers in 1934, marking the foundation of the Writers' Union.
In our final chapter we shall examine the analysis of the method given in
'Basis of Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics' (Osn6vy markslstsko-lcninskoi
esthikt), together with certain significant commentaries on its develop-
ment and the attitudes to it of past and present leaders of the Communist
Party.
s.S.R-4
4 Socialist Realism
'Realism' in this sense means art that sets out to present a comprehensive
rcfleetion and interpretation of life from the point of view of socia!
relations; 'Socialist' means in aecordance with the poliey of the Com-
munist Party. Socialist Realism is therefore based on a direct relationship
between the artist and the process of building a new society; it is art
coloured by the experience of the working dass in its struggle to aehieve
socialism.
Socialist Realism embraees all kinds and genres of art, manifesting itself
in a form appropriate to eaeh genre. It progresses with time, so that the
Socialist Realism of the thirties no longer obtains; and it varies according to
country, so that Soviet Socialist Realism cannot simply be transplanted else-
where. For literature, it is defined in the Constitution of the Union of Writers
of the USSR as set out in the proceedings of the First All-Union Congress
of Soviet Writers in 1934: 'Socialist Realism demands from the author a true
and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.
Moreover this true and historically eonerete artistic depiction of reality must
be combined with the task of educating the workers in the spirit of Com-
munism.'8
For music it is similarly described, for instance in the Central Commit-
tee's message to the Second All-Union Congress of Composers in 1958: 9 'The
method of Socialist Realism demands from Soviet composers a systematic
struggle with aesthetic over-refinement, lifeless individualism and formalism,
as weIl as with naturalistic primitiveness in art. Soviet musicians are ca11ed
upon to reflect reality in moving, beautiful, poetie images, permeated with
optimism and lofty humaneness, the pathos of eonstruetion and the spirit of
eollectivism - a11 that distinguishes the Soviet people's perception of the
world.' 10
And for architecture the Central Committee's message to the Second All-
Union Congress of Architects in 1955 sets the tone: 'Developing and multi-
plying the best national traditions in the classical architecture of the peoples
of the USSR, Soviet architects ... must proceed from the demands of Socialist
Realism. Socialist Realism is incompatible with formalist techniques, blind
copying of architectural models of past epochs or negligent attitudes to the
architectural heritage. Simplicity, purity of form, attractive external appear-
SOCIALlST REALlSM
ance and economy of design, attention to functional facilities - these are the
guiding characteristic features of Soviet architecture.' 11
day; therefore the most significant socialist-realist works of any epoch are
those most 'historically concrete' in this sense of being concerned with such
issues. Examples are Fadeyev's The Rout (1925-6), Alexey Tolst6y's Road to
Calvary (Khozdeniye po mukam, 1928-41), and Peter the First (Petr Nrvyi,
1945), Mayak6vsky's poems It's Cood (Khorosho, 1927) and Vladlmir Ilylch
Unin (1924), Tvard6vsky's LAnd 0/ Muravia (Strana Muraviya, 1934---Q), the
film trilogy about Maksim 12 and Johans6n's painting At an Old Urals Works
(Na smrorn ural'skom zavode, 1937, see Plate V).
Such works illustrate the true nature and spirit of Soviet art and culture. 13
Socialist Realism does not present a set of mechanical rules for application
in any work of art, but it does give an indication of the generalline that
is to be encouraged in given circumstances. One of its fundamental
characteristics is a constant attempt to present a profound but up-to-date
depiction of reality, but this must not be confused wih 'photographic' art
or naturalism. Nor does the truth of an artistic image depend on the way
in wh ich it illustrates 'correct' propositions; art that is simply a compound
of abstract ideas will not - however 'correct' the ideas may be - contain
artistic truth. 14
reality' requires the artist to maintain the dosest possible links with the
masses. And since the artist must reveal the processes at work in society,
he must therefore concern himself with the questions that are at any given
moment troubling that society, that is, he must concern himself with topical
questions. This demands a high degree of artistry, for he is continually called
upon to create artistic images of social phenomena that are quite new. (It is
by their ability to evolve an aesthetic in response to the enormous challenge
presented by the socialist transformation of society after the Revolution that
the greatness of Mayak6vsky and G6rky may be judged.) By revealing the
new features of society as it progresses toward Communism and by endors-
ing them, the artist assists the masses to understand them, support them
and assimilate them into their social, moral and aesthetic attitudes. This all
requires an art that is able to express wisdom and emotion and to accom-
modate large-scale characters of universal stature.
SociaIist-reaIist art must portray reality objectively and assist the masses
to understand historical processes and their own role in them. It is thus
94 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
one of the means of devdoping the sodal awareness of the people. Lenin
highlighted this aspect of G6rky's novel The Mother (Mat', 1907};24 it
also explains the importance attached to artistic works from otha coun-
tries, such as Aragon's Les Communistes.
- The role of the arts in this sense was redefined at the XXIst Congress of
the Communist Party by Mr Khrushchev :
In the development and enrichment of the culture of socialist society,
an important part is played by literature and the arts, which actively
facilitate the formation of the man of Communist society . .. There is
no loftier or nobler task than that which stands before our art - to
record the heroie feats of the people, that is building Communism. We
call upon our writers, theatre and cinema workers, musicians, sculp-
tors and painters to raise the ideological and artistic level of their works,
to remain in the future active he/pers of the Party and government in
the communist education of the workers, in propagandising the prin-
ciples of communist morality, the development of a multi-national
socialist culture and the formation of aesthetically good taste.- 2S
One of the aims of the Communist Party is to develop the human per-
sonality to produce 'men who can do everything', and to this end it is con-
ducting broadly educational activities on a very wide scale; the educative
role of Socialist Realism can be understood properly only within the con-
text of this work as a whole. Moreover communist education should not be
considered as concerned only with ideology: it includes the raising of pro-
ductivity on the basis of improved technology, shortening the working day,
communist methods of labour organisation, raising the material standards of
the masses, enIisting public opinion in the drive for better health standards
and more harmonious communal Iiving, the development of general and
specialist education, and the all-round stimulation of initiative by the masses
in all spheres of the economic, communal and public life of the country. In
all this, an enormous role is played by various propaganda techniques, espe-
cially directed towards improving mastery of Marxist-Leninist theory, and by
all the cultural forces - not the least amongst these being art.
- But art, of course, cannot function divorced from life. It can play its part
only when firmly rooted in the life of the society. The distinction between
propagandist works, on the one hand, and works of art, on the other, is
false if based on the assumption that universally significant works of art are
not firmly Iinked with problems of real life: Sophocles' Antigone, Cervantes'
Don Quixote, Tolst6y's War and Peace (Voina i mir) and G6rky's The
Mother (Mat') were all concerned with burning issues of the day.
- 'Educating the workers in the spirit of Communism' means using art to
develop and stimulate the best qualities in Soviet man:
The entire ideological effort of our Party and government is enlisted to
develop the new qualities of Soviet man, to educate him in the spirit of
collectivism and love of work, socialist internationalism and patriot-
ism, the high moral principles of the new society and the spirit
SOCIALIST REALlSM 95
of Marxism-Leninism ... We must develop in Soviet man our communist
morality, at the root of which is dedication to Communism and irreeon-
cilable hostility to its enemies; acknowledgement of social obligations;
active participation in working for the common good; voluntary con-
formity with the basic rules of communal living; comradely mutual aid,
honesty, justice and intolerance of infringements of sodal order. 26
This catalogue of desirable qualities is in fact a programme for the
artist, whose 'true and historically conerete depiction of reality in its revolu-
tionary development' is inseparably bound up wirh communist ideinost'. Art
cannot flourish in isolation, and whereas the Communist Party does not dic-
tate what the author must write about, if he is in tune with society he can-
not help being concerned with the same issues as are occupying the attention
of the Party. But he can understand these issues correctly only via partiinost' :
the ideinost' of his work is revealed in his choice of topie; his partlinost' - in
the point of view from which that topic is perceived.
9
Tbe originality of the artist's work lies in the way in which he expresses
his own individuality, but this does not result from a conscious attempt
to be different by cutting hirnself off from reality. If he is partisan and
genuinely gripped by the 'pathos' of his subject, the artist will perceive it
correctly and consequently be able to embody his perception in a genuine
and original work of art, but this is quite different from merely indulg-
ing a subjective whim.
As society evolves and becomes more compIex, so the educative role of
art as a form of social consciousness also develops. Art does not set out to
train specialists in a narrow sense, but it must become wh at Chernyshevsky
called a 'textbook of Hfe', from which men may learn how to live together.
Socialist Realism has an enormous educative role in teaching people to live
in a communist society. This is at the root of its irreconcilable hostility to
any degree of formalism, i.e. of subjectivism, which denies the social and
educative function of art.
The proper vehicle for the artist's subjectivity is his manner of expres-
sion. But effective participation in the socio-politicaI sphere is possible only
from the correct socio-aesthetic standpoint. Though art cannot be effective
unless it is artistica1Iy convincing, mastery is not simply a question of teeh-
nique. Ir is concerned above all with content.
Genuine art is striking by virtue of the wealth of ideas and emotions
it conveys, whereas inferior art merely degrades what may be a lofty theme.
Hence the importance of the subjective element in art. Eloquence and ex-
pressiveness are not achieved simply by the applieation of formalist tech-
niques; they are a direct function of the writer's involvement in his theme.
But the expression of ideas and emotions nevertheless demands constant
attention to matters of artistry, and the expression of the socialist-realist per-
ception of reality similarly requires the constant development of artistic
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
genres, styles and techniques. Within the limits of its general principles and
objectives, Socialist Realism stimulates free development of individual styles.
By its very nature, art has to do with the infinite variety of man's relation-
ships with the world around hirn, and to encompass this enormously wide
and complex material it gives rise to a similarly wide range of approaches.
Therefore the range of styles does not result from the personal whims of the
artists but from the nature of the subject matter, with a11 its wealth and
variety of perceptions of reality. The difference between Stanislavsky and
Vakhtangov, for instance, resulted not from their allegiance to different
'schools' but from the fact that they perceived and expressed different aspects
of reality.
In the final analysis, every aesthetic ideal is socio-aesthetic. For the
Marxist-Leninist, beauty lies in human relationships shorn of any element
of exploitation. The subject matter of Socialist Realism is the whole of Iife,
but beauty is perceived from the point of view of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics.
Everything that furthers the cause of the building of communism is beautiful.
This provides a dear and unequivocal yardstick of beauty from the
aesthetic, moral and political points of view. And a natural concomitant
is a hatred of a11 forms of social evil, from the dass enemy, on the one hand,
to bureaucracy and insensitivity on the other. All such evils, the 'survivals of
capitalism', must be unmasked and condemned.
10
The object of Soviet policy toward the arts has been to elose the gap that
lay between art and the masses, attacking this problem from the twofold
stand point as outlined by Lenin, bringing art to the people, and the
people to art.
Art has been brought to the people by massive publishing measures,
the spread of cinema networks, establishing of theatres and orchestras, in-
creased numbers of museums, exhibitions, picture galleries, etc. 27 - and
dosing the gap between the people and art is the subject of campaigns for the
aesthetic education of the workers. The object is twofold, for not only must
the cultural level of the masses be raised to the point at which they can
appreciate works of art; the masses must themselves become actively in-
volved in the process of artistic creation. To this end the Soviet authorities
have developed, by a variety of direct and indirect means, a policy of en-
couraging participation in amateur artistic activities in clubs and com-
parable social institutions, and millions of people now take an active part. 2a
However, this does not in the least imply that such activities leave no role
for the professional artist. On the basis of the principles of Socialist Realism,
amateur and professional art should contribute to a developing process of
mutual enrichment.
A tragic contradiction in pre-revolutionary society was that even those
artists with a high element of narOdnost' remained largely unknown to the
majority of the people. Tne cultural revolution was directed at bringing both
SOCIALIST REALISM 97
the classics and contemporary art to the masses, and here the importance
attached to Socialist Realism is that it defines the artist's educative role and
helps hirn to fulfil it. The Soviet writer addresses the people on behalf of
the people, not the elite on behalf of himself. If he ceases to reect the real
thoughts and aspirations of the masses and faBs into the 'error' of sub-
jectivism, this is inevitably reected in his work, which therefore becomes
unacceptable.
To the socialist-realist writer, the people is the maker of history and the
master of its own fate, responsible for the creation of aB that is materially
or spiritually valuable on earth. Therefore the subject of his writing is men,
not problems. 29 Art devoted to problems of production or agriculture, with
no revelation of human character at its heart, cannot effectively fulfil its
function in society.30 This is not to say that individuals take precedence over
social considerations, for the individual is apart of the collective, and his
personal interests are the same as those of the collective as a whole. Moreover
by revealing the relationship between the individual and the collective (dass,
Party, mass), the socialist-realist has a greater scope for profound characterisa-
tion than the pre-Marxist critical realist had. In the same way, the socialist-
realist, with his understanding of the processes of historical development, has
greater possibilities for portraying the historie role of the people as a whole.
IX
ism', which rdates not only to form but to content, militates against pro-
letarian internationalism and is therefore inimicable to Socialist Realism.
The year 1972 marked the fifdeth anniversary of the formation of the
USSR after the uncertainties following the Revolution and Civil War.
This was designated the occasion for deeper analysis of the multi-national
aspects of Soviet culture and art within the USSR and also of the
relationship between Soviet art and progressive art throughout the world.
Visions of 'permanent revolution' were, as we have seen, shattered in
the early days of the Soviet regime, but this is no longer the era of
'Socialism in One Country'; the Soviet Union now stands at the head of a
whole group of people's democracies, each in its way committed to the
building of socialism according to Marxist-Leninist principles. In such
circumstances the Soviet writer is exhorted and enabled to look beyond
the broad frontiers of Soviet culture to an even wider, emergent socialist
art.
All the principles of Socialist Realism discussed above stern direcdy from
the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the process of historical develop-
ment, and the overriding factor is the role of the Communist Party as the
bearer of that understanding. Through the principle of partIinost' the
artist must, in fact, acknowledge the wisdom of the Party and its right to
command his allegiance to its policy. The policy is put forward in positive
terms, presenting an appeal and achalienge, but it does, of course, have
a negative, prohibitory obverse - censorship. The vexed question of
artistic freedom is interpreted, as we have seen, in the light of the extra-
polated significance of Lenin's 1905 article. This was restated after St:l.lin's
death in the Party's message to the Second Writers' Congress in 1954:
In their creative work, Soviet writers receive their inspiration from the
great ideals of the struggle for Communism and genuine freedom and
happiness for the masses against all oppression and exploitation of man
by man. To the false and hypocritical bourgeois slogan of the 'indepen-
dence' of literature from society, and the false concept of 'art for art's
sake', our writers proudly contrast their noble ideological stance of
service of the interests of the masses, of the people. 31
And in his Report of the Central Committee in March 1971, Mr Brezhnev
gave explicit evidence that despite the so-called 'thaw', 'de-Stalinisation'
and a degree of international detente, the change had been simply one of
politicians, not of their relationship with the artists.
SOCIALIST REALISM 99
Having noted earlier in the report that 'our Soviet intelligentsia sees its
mission in devoting its creative energy to the cause of the people, to the
cause of building a communist society' and countered ideological heresies
with a sweeping; 'There is no freedom in general, just as there is no
democracy in general. This is a dass concept', he moved on to discuss the
'moulding of the new man', which was one of the Party's main tasks.
'Communism', he said, 'is inconceivable without a high level of cuhure,
education, sense of civic duty and inner maturity .. : and 'the moral and
political make-up of Soviet people is moulded ... above all, by purposeful,
persevering ideological and educational work by the Party, by a11 its
organisations: This echo of Lenin's 1905 artide is later made a major
theme:
... with our society's advance along the road of communist construction
a growing role in moulding the outlook, moral convictions and spiritual
cuhure of Soviet people is played by literature and art. Quite naturally,
therefore, the Party continues, as it always has done, to devote much
attention to the ideological content 01 our literature and art and to the
role they play in society. In line with the Leninist prineiple of partisan-
ship (partlinost') we believe that our task is to direct the development of
all forms of creative art toward participation in the people's great cause
of communist reconstruction. 33
The Party noted with approval that there had been an 'indisputable
growth of the ideological and political maturity' of the 'creative intelli-
gentsia', whieh had produced a number of talented works in various
genres, dealing with 'truly important problems' and managing to do so
'realistically, from party positions, without embellishment and without
playing up shortcomings'. In other words, there had been no return to the
'varnishing of reality' of Stalinist days, nor yet too critical a view of Soviet
reality after Khrushchev. There had, however, been 'complicating faetors
of another order' which operated 'to belittle the significance' of the
achievement of the Party and the people, 'apparently by dwelling on prob-
lems no Ion ger real and reviving recently discredited phenomena'. This
somewhat cryptic passage, doubtless referring to an obsession by some
artists with the theme of labour camps and violations of 'socialist legal-
ity', 34 Ied to an oblique reference to Solzhenftsyn: 'Workers in literature
and art are involved in one of the most crucial sectors of the ideological
struggle. The Party and the people have never reconciled nor will ever
reconcile themselves to attempts, no matter who makes them, to blunt our
ideologie al weapon and cast a stain on our banner. If a writer sI anders
100 SOVIET SOCIALIST IlEALISM
Soviet reality and helps our ideological adversaries in their fight against
socialism he deserves only one thing - public scorn.'
The ideological weapon, in this context, is Socialist Realism, on the
basis of wh ich the Party .. 'is for an attentive attitude to creative quests,
for the unfolding of the individuality of gifts and talents, for the diversity
and wealth of forms and styles .. .' This, with an earlier concern for artis-
tic standards, seems to showadesire on the part of the politicians to re-
emphasise the positive aspects of their policy toward the arts and to return,
at least in the inflections of their dicta, to the less virulent style of the
twenties. Thus, 'it cannot be said that all is weIl in the realm of artistic
creative work, particularly as regards quality. It would not be amiss here
to note that we are still getting quite a few works that are shallow in con-
tent and inexpressive in form .. .' The artist has sometimes been too easily
satisfied, having chosen to work on 'a good, topical theme' he has not done
it justice because 'he has not put aIl his effort, his talent into it'. But in
startling contrast to Zhdanov's vicious invective or the crude, peasant
coarseness of Khrushchev, Brezhnev remarked mildly that 'it seems to me
we all have the right to expect workers in art to be more demanding of
themselves and their colleagues . .' 35
The 'workers' should be kept up to the mark by the critics, who should
have 'pursued the party line more vigorously'. But, and the tone is once
more reminiscent of early party pronouncements, while adopting 'a more
principled stand' the critic should nevertheless 'combine exactingness
with tact and a solicitous attitude to the creators of works of art'.
Socialist Realism, then, remains the artistic method of the arts in the
Soviet Union, and while evolving with 'reality in its revolutionary de-
velopment' it has persisted impervious to erosion or assault from within
or without. Brezhnev's report stated the Party's attitude to art with com-
plete clarity: 'The strength of the Party's leadership lies in the ability to
spark the artist with enthusiasm for the lofty mission of serving the people
and turn hirn into an ardent participant in the remaking of society along
communist lines.'
In our Introduction to this examination of the origins and principles of
Socialist Realism we cited two antipathetic versions, that of the 'Leninist'
origin and that of the 'Stalinist aberration' theory and we wondered
which was the more convincing. The time has now come to draw our
conclusions.
Ever since Khrushchev made his much publicised 'secret' speech in
SOCIALIST llEALISM 101
1956, denouncing Stalin's despotism and the 'cult of personality', this has
provided a convenient loophole for all the uneasy, both inside and outside
the Soviet Union, to explain away all the 'negative' features of Soviet
'reality'. This is certainly what happens in literary criticism, in which it
is daimed that Stalinist literature was not an inevitable form of Socialist
Realism but a distortion of it. Although it is from Lenin's 1905 artide
that the principle of partfinost' derives, the blame for wh at happened in
the arts in the 1930S is attributable not to Lenin but to Stalin. This argu-
ment seems curiously illogical. If Socialist Realism has a Leninist origin,
it does not follow that Stalinist literature was a distortion of it.
Perhaps Stalin really did corrupt and distort 'reality'; but whereas in
another society he might have encountered much more outspoken opposi-
tion from the writers, in the USSR this could not happen because the
writer's function is to support the Party, whatever it does. In such circum-
stances the Soviet writer: ' ... ceases to be an intellectual, a creator of ideas,
and becomes a retailer of the ideas of others ... He no Ion ger searches for
truth; he begins with the truth as revealed in the pronouncements of party
leaders .. .' 36
This is the basis of partiinost', wh ich lies at the he art of Socialist Real-
ism. Opposition to the Party is unthinkable. The writer must support the
Party and its leaders, and in proportion as one single leader becomes pre-
eminent, so his reflection in the 'press' will grow, and the 'cult of person-
ality' is born. It may have reached its most incredible proportions with
relation to Stalin, but it was at least incipient with relation to Khrushchev
hirnself. I t is a direct result of partlinost'.
The quest ion therefore arises as to whether or not the principle of pard-
in ost' is properly attributable to Lenin. Here it would seem that although
Lenin was obviously not in 1905 writing of the circumstances, unforeseen
and unforeseeable, of - say - 1925, his later writings and, in particular, his
draft resolution on the Proletkult (1920)37 are strong indications that the
principle of parttinost' as later formulated would have met with his appro-
val. Though Lenin disappeared comparatively early from the scene, his
draft resolution set the tone and at no time during the twenties was any
abrupt change of policy noticeable nor any obviously alien element intro-
duced. On the contrary, there is ample evidence - as we have seen - that
the policy that deve10ped organically throughout the decade was a logical
development of Lenin's ideas. It may weH be that had he foreseen the
precise outcome of this relentless elaboration of his thesis, he would him-
self have demurred, but this must be only speculation. 38 Partlinost' sterns
directly from Lenin's concept of the party, and though successive party
102 SOVIET SOCIALIST llEALISM
leaders have dissociated themsdves from St:Hin's excesses, each has re-
asserted the principle. It was Leninist partlinost' that made Stalinist art
possible.
A rather different impression of the origins of Socialist Realism may
certainly be gained - and this may explain the prevalence of a point of
view contradictory to that given above - if we insist on divorcing a con-
sideration of literature and art from the socio-political context in which
they arise and if we ignore the place occupied by 'artistic literature' in the
Soviet concept of the 'press'. If art is placed in the centre of the stage and
the momentous social and political events of the period recede into a
hazy background, then the fate of the modernist movements of the first
quarter of the century must indeed seem arbitrary and crud. From such a
viewpoint the transition from the 'liberal' tones of the 1925 decision 39 to
the peremptory finality of the 1932 decision 40 must indeed seem abrupt,
and Socialist Realism must indeed seem 'alien and strange'.41 But it seems
to me that this is an unreal vision, more acceptable, per ha ps, than harsh
reality, but rather less fruitful if our aim is really to understand. Whether
we approve or not is another matter.
Appendix I
And we socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in
order to arrive at a non-dass literature and art (that will be possible only in a
socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature,
which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be
openly linked to the proletariat.
It will be a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with
the working people, and not greed or careerism, will bring ever new forces
to its ranks. It will be a free literature, because it will serve, not some satiated
heroine, not the bored 'upper ten thousand' suffering from fatty degeneration,
but the millions and tens of millions of working people - the flower of the
country, its strength and its future. It will be a free literature, enriching the
last word in the revolutionary thought of man kind with the experience and
living work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about permanent interaction
between the experience of the past (scientific socialism, the completion of the
development of socialism from its primitive, utopian forms) and the experience
of the present (the present struggle of the worker comrades).
To work, then, comrades I We are faced with a new and difficult task. But it
is a noble and grateful one - to organise a broad, multiform and varied litera-
ture inseparably linked with the Social-Democratic working.dass movement.
All Social-Democratic literature must become Party Iiterature. Every news-
paper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganising
its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another,
be integrated into one Party organisation or another. Only then will 'SociaI-
Democratic' literature really become worthy of that name, only then will it
be able to fulfiI its duty and, even within the framework of bourgeois society,
break out of bourgeois slavery and merge with the movement of the really
advanced and thoroughly revolutionary dass.
N6vaya zhizn', No. 12 Collected Works,
13 November 1905 Vol. 10, pp. 44-49
Signed: N. Unin
Appendix 1/
v. I. LiNIN: In MemoryofHerzen 1
ONE hundred years have elapsed since Herzen's birth. The whole of liberal
Russia is paying homage to hirn, studiously evading, however, the serious ques-
tions of socialism, and taking pains to conceal that which distinguished
Herzen, the revolutionary from a liberal. The Right-wing press, too, is com-
memorating the Herzen centenary, falsely asserting that in his last years
Herzen renounced revolution. And in the orations on Herzen that are made
by the liberals and Narodniks abroad, phrase-mongering reigns supreme.
The working-elass party should commemorate the Herzen centenary, not for
the sake of philistine glorification, but for the purpose of making elear its own
tasks and ascertaining the place actually held in history by this writer who
played a great part in paving the way for the Russian revolution.
Herzen belonged to the generation of revolutionaries among the nobility
and landlords of the first half of the last century. The nobility gave Russia the
Bir6ns 2 and Arakcheyevs,3 innumerable 'drunken officers, bullies, gambiers,
heroes of fairs, masters of hounds, roisterers, floggers, pimps', as weil as
amiable ManHovs.4 'But', wrote Herzen, 'among them developed the men of
December 14,5 a phalanx of heroes reared, like Romulus and Remus, on the
milk of a wild beast ... They were veritable titans, hammered out of pure
steel from hc:ad to foot, comrades-in-arms who went deliberately to certain
death in order to awaken the young generation to a new life and to purify the
children born in an environment of tyranny and servility.' 6
Herzen was one of those children. The uprising of the Decembrists awakened
and 'purified' hirn. In the feudal Russia of the forties of the nineteenth cen-
tury, he rose to a height which placed hirn on a level with the grc:atest
thinkers of his time. He assimilated Hegel's dialectics. He realised that it was
'the algebra of revolution'. He went further than HegeI, following Feuerbach
to materialism. The first of his Letters on the Study 01 Nature, 'Empirieism
and Idealism', written in 1844, rc:vc:als to us a thinker who even now stands
head and shoulders above the multitude of modern empirieist natural seien-
tists and the host of present-day idealist and semi-idealist philosophers. Herzen
came right up to dialectical materialism, and halted - before historical
materialism.
It was this 'halt' that caused Herzen's spiritual shipwreck after the defeat of
the revolution of 1848. Herzen had left Russia, and observed this revolution at
elose range. He was at that time a democrat, a revolutionary, a socialist. But
his 'socialism' was one of the countless forms and varieties of bourgeois and
108 SOV1ET SOC1AL1ST REAL1SM
petty-bourgeois socialism of the period of 1848, which were dealt their death-
blow in the June days of that year. In point of fact, it was not socialism at all,
but so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expres-
sion at that time of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as
well as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence of
those democrats.
Herzen's spiritual shipwreck, his deep scepticism and pessimism after 1848,
was a shipwreck of the bourgeois illusions of socialism. Herzen's spiritual
drama was a product and reflection of that epoch in world history when the
revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats was already passing away
(in Europe), while the revolutionary character of the socialist proletariat had
not yet matured. This is something the Russian knights of liberal verbiage,
who are now covering up their counter-revolutionary nature by florid phrases
about Herzen's scepticism, did not and could not understand. With these
knights, who betrayed the Russian revolution of 1905, and have even forgotten
to think of the great name of revolutionary, scepticism is a form of transition
from democracy to liberalism, to that toadying, vile, foul and brutal liberalism
which shot down the workers in 1848, restored the shattered thrones and
applauded Napoleon III, and which Herzen cursed, unable to und erstand its
dass nature.
With Herzen, scepticism was a form of transition from the illusion of a
bourgeois democracy that is 'above classes' to the grim, inexorable and in-
vincible dass struggle of the proletariat. The proof: the Letters to an Old
Comrade - to Bakunin - written by Herzen in 1869, a year before his death. In
them Herzen breaks with the anarchist Bakunin. True, Herzen still sees the
break as a mere disagreement on tactics and not as a gulf between the world
outlook of the proletarian who is confident of the victory of his dass and that
of the petty bourgeois who has despaired of his salvation. True enough, in
these letters as weil, Herzen repeats the old bourgeoisdemocratic phrases to
the effect that socialism must preach 'a sermon addressed equally to workman
and master, to farmer and townsman'. Nevertheless in breaking with Bakunin,
Herzen turned his gaze, not to liberalism, but to the International - to the
International led by Marx, to the International which had begun to 'rally the
legions' of the proletariat, to unite 'the world of labour', which is 'abandon-
ing the world of those who enjoy without working'.'
Failing as he did to understand the bourgeois-democratic character of the
entire movement of 1848 and of all the forms of pre-Marxian socialism, Herzen
was still less able to understand the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolu-
tion. Herzen is the founder of 'Russian' socialism, of 'Narodism'.8 He saw
'socialism' in the emancipation of the peasants with land, in communal land
tenure and in the peasant idea of 'the right to land'. He set forth his pet ideas
on this subject an untold number of times.
Actually, there is not a grain of socialism in this doctrine of Herzen's, as,
indeed, in the whole of Russian Narodism, induding the faded Narodism of
the present-day Socialist-Revol utionaries. 9 Like the various forms of 'the
APPENDIX 11 109
socialism of 1848' in the West, this is the same sort of sentimental phrases, of
benevolent visions, in which is expressed the revolutioTlism of the bourgeois
peasant democracy in Russia. The more land the peasants would have re-
ceived in 1861 and the less they would have had to pay for it, the more would
the power of the feudallandlords have been undermined and the more
rapidly, freely and widely would capitalism have developed in Russia. The
idea of 'the right to land' and of 'equalised division of land' is nothing but a
formulation of the revolutionary aspiration for equality cherished by the
peasants who are fighting for the complete overthrow of the power of the
landlords, for the complete abolition of landlordism.
This was fully proved by the revolution of 1905: on the one hand, the
proletariat came out quite independently at the head of the revolutionary
struggle, having founded the Social-Democratic Labour Party; on the other
hand, the revolutionary peasants (the Trudoviks 10 and the Peasant Union 11),
who fought for every form of the abolition of landlordism even to 'the aboli-
tion of private landownership', fought precisely as proprietors, as small entre-
preneurs.
Today, the controversy over the 'socialist nature' of the right to land, and so
on, serves only to obscure and cover up the really important and serious his-
torical question concerning the difference of interests of the liberal bourgeoisie
and the revolutionary peasantry in the Russian bourgeois revolution; in other
words, the question of the liberal and the democratic, the 'compromising'
(monarchist) and the republican trends manifested in that revolution. This is
exactly the question posed by H~rzen's K61okol,12 if we turn our attention to
the essence of the matter and not to the words, if we investigate the dass
struggle as the basis of 'theories' and doctrines, and not vice versa.
Herzen founded a free Russian press abroad, and that is the great service
rendered by hirn. Polyarnaya Zvezda 13 took up the tradition of the Decem-
brists. K610kol (1857-67) championed the emancipation of the peasants with
might and main. The slavish silence was broken.
But Herzen came from alandlord, aristocratic milieu. He had left Russia
in 1847; he had not seen the revolutionary people and could have no faith in it.
Hence his liberal appeal to the 'upper ranks'. Hence his innumerable sugary
letters in K610kol addressed to Alexander II the Hangman, which today one
cannot read without revulsion. Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Serno-Solo-
vyevich,14 who represented the new generation of revolutionary raznochintsy,
were a thousand times right when they reproached Herzen for these depart-
ures from democracy to liberalism. However, it must be said in fairness to
Herzen that, much as he vacillated between democracy and liberalism, the
democrat in hirn gained the upper hand nonetheless.
When Kavelin,15 one of the most repulsive exponents of liberal servility -
who at one time was enthusiastic about K610kol precisely because of its liberal
tendencies - rose in arms against a constitution, attacked revolutionary agita-
tion, rose against 'violence' and appeals for it, and began to preach tolerance,
Herzen broke with that liberal sage. Herzen turned upon Kavelin's 'meagre,
absurd harmful pamphlet' written 'for the private guidance of a government
pretending to be liberal'; he denounced Kavelin's 'sentimental political maxims'
which represented 'the Russian people as cattle and the government as an em-
IIO SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
'If only my words could reach you, toiler and sullerer of the land of Rus-
sia! ... How weil 1 would teach you to despise your spiritual shepherds,
placed over you by the St. Petersburg Synod and a German tsar ... You hate
the landlord, you hate the official, you fear them, and rightly so; but you still
believe in the tsar and the bishop ... do not believe them. The tsar is with
them, and they are his men. It is hirn you now see - you, the father of a
youth murdered in Bezdna, and you - the son of a father murdered in
Penza ... Your shepherds are as ignorant as you and as poor ... Such was
another Anthony (not Bishop Anthony, but Ant6n of Bezdna) who sullered
for you in Kazan ... The dead bodies of your martyrs will not perform forty-
APPENDIX 11 111
eight miracles, and praying to them will not eure a toothaehe; but their
living memory may produee one miracle - your emancipation.' 21
This shows how infamously and vilely Herzen is being slandered by our
liberals entrenehed in the slavish 'legal' press, who magnify Herzen's weak
points and say nothing about his strong points. It was not Herzen's fault but
his misfortune that he eould not see the revolutionary people in Russia itself
in the I 840S. When in the sixties he eame to see the revolutionary people, he
sided fearlessly with the revolutionary democraey against liberalism. He fought
for a vietory of the people over tsarism, not for a deal between the liberal
bourgeoisie and the land lords' tsar. He raised aloft the banner of revolution .
In eommemorating Herzen, we clearly see the three generations, the three
classes, that were aetive in the Russian revolution. At first it was the nobles
and landlords, the Deeembrists and Herzen. These revolutionaries formed but
a narrow group. They were very far removed from the people. But their
effort was not in vain. The Deeembrists awakened Herzen. Herzen began the
work of revolutionary agitation.
This work was taken up, extended, strengthened, and tempered by the
revolutionary raznochlntsy - from Chernyshevsky to the heroes of Nar6dnaya
V6/ya. 22 The range of fighters widened; their eontact with the people became
doser. 'The young helmsmen of the gathering storm' is what Herzen ca11ed
them. But it was not yet the storm itself.
The storm is the movement of the masses themselves. The proletariat, the
only dass that is thoroughly revolutionary, rose at the head of the masses
and for the first time aroused millions of peasants to open revolutionary
struggle. The first onslaught in this storm took place in 1905. The next is
beginning to develop under our very eyes.
In commemorating Herzen, the proletariat is learning from his example to
appreciate the great importance of revolutionary theory. It is learning that
selfless devotion to the revolution and revolutionary propaganda among the
people are not wasted even if lang decades divide the reaping from the harvest.
It is Iearning to ascertain the role of the various classes in the Russian and in
the international revolution. Enriched by these lessons, the proletariat will
fight its way to a free alliance with the socialist workers of a11 lands, having
crushed that loathsome monster, the tsarist monarchy, against which Herzen
was the first to raise the great banner of struggle by addressing his fru Rus-
sian word to the masses.
DRAFT RESOLUTION
(I) All edueational work in the Soviet Republie of workers and peasants, in
the field of politieal edueation in general and in the field of art in partieular,
should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the
proletariat for the sueeessful aehievement of the aims of its dictatorship, i.e.,
the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of classes, and the elimination
of all forms of exploitation of man by man.
(2) Henee, the proletariat, both through its vanguard - the Communist
Party - and through the many types of proletarian organisations in general,
should display the utmost aetivity and play the leading part in all the work
of publie edueation.
(3) All the experienee of modern history and, particularly, the more than
half-century-old revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of all eountries sinee
the appearanee of the Communist Manifesto has unquestionably demon-
strated that the Marxist world outlook is the only true expression of the in-
terests, the viewpoint, and the culture of the revolutionary proletariat.
(4) Marxism has won its historie signifieanee as the ideology of the revolu-
tionary proletariat beeause, far from rejeeting the most valuable aehievements
of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the eontrary, assimilated and refashioned
everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of
human thought and eulture. Only further work on this basis and in this diree-
tion, inspired by the praetical experienee of the proletarian dictatorship as the
final stage in the struggle against every form of exploitation, ean be recognised
as the development of a genuine proletarian eulture.
APPENDIX 111 113
(5) Adhering unswervingly to this stand of principle, the A11-Russia Prolet-
kult Congress rejects in the most resolute manner, as theoretica11y unsound
and practically harmful, a11 attempts to invent one's own particular brand of
culture, to remain isolated in self-contained organisations, to draw a line
dividing the field of work of the People's Commissariat of Education and the
Proletkult, or to set up a Proletkult 'autonomy' within establishments under the
People's Commissariat of Education and so forth. On the contrary, the Con-
gress enjoins a11 Proletkult organisations to fully consider themse1ves in duty
bound to act as auxiIiary bodies of the network of establishments under the
People's Commissariat of Education, and to accomplish their tasks under the
general guidance of the Soviet authorities (specifically, of the People's Com-
missariat of Education) and of the Russian Communist Party, as part of the
tasks of the proletarian dictatorship
Comrade Lunacharsky says that his words have been distorted. In that case
this resolution is needed all the more urgently.
the worker intelligentsia in the field of artistic creativity, it wants, on the con-
trary, to create the most healthy and normal conditions for it and to give it the
opportunity to be reected fruitfully in the whole matter of artistic creativity.
The Central Committee realises dearly that now that the war is drawing to an
end interest in questions of artistic creativity and proletarian culture will grow
more and more in the ranks of the workers. The Central Committee values
and respects the progressive workers' des ire to raise, in their turn, questions of
the spiritually richer development of the personality, etc. The Party will do all
it can to ensure that this matter really does fall into the hands of the worker
intelligentsia, and that the workers' government will give the worker intelli-
gentsia all it needs for this purpose.
From the draft instructions worked out by the People's Commissariat of
Education and confirmed by the Central Committee of our Party, all interested
comrades will see that complete autonomy of the reorganised workers' Prolet-
kults in the field of artistic creativity is guaranteed. The Central Committee has
given quite detailed directives on this point for action by the People's Com-
missariat. And the Central Committee will watch, and entrusts the Provincial
Party Committees to watch, that there is no petty tutelage of the reorganised
Proletkults.
At the same time, the Central Committee realises that in the field of the
arts the same intellectual currents that have been exerting a disruptive inu-
ence in the Proletkults have made themselves feit up to now in the People's
Commissariat of Education itself. The Central Committee will achieve the re-
moval of these bourgeois currents from the People's Commissariat, too. The
Central Committee has taken a special decision, according to which the Pro-
vincial Departments of Public Education, which by the new resolution will
direct the work of the Proletkults, will be made up of men who have been
dosely vetted by the Party. In the coalescence of the Provincial Departrnents
of Public Education with the Proletkults, the Central Committee sees a
guarantee that the best proletarian elements hitherto uni ted in the ranks of the
Proletkults will now take the most active part in this work and therefore
aid the Party in giving all the work of the People's Commissariat of Educa-
tion a really proletarian character. The dosest possible combination, amicable
work in the ranks of our educational organisations, which must become in
practice, not simply in words, the organs of a genuine, not contrived proletarian
culture - these are the aims for which the Central Committee of our Party now
enlists uso
S.S.R-5
Appendix IV
Therefore although the dass war is not eoming to an end, it is ehanging its
form, for before the seizure of power the proletariat aspired to destroy the
society of the times, but in the period of its dictatorship it gives priority to
'peaceful organisational work'.
(6) Preserving, consolidating and always widening its leadership, the prole-
tariat must occupy a similar position in aseries of new seetors of the ideological
front also. The process of the penetration of dialectical materialism into quite
new fields (biology, psychology, the natural sciences in general) has dearly
begun. The conquest of this position in the realm of literature must also sooner
or later become a fact.
(7) However, it must be remembered that this task is infinitely more compli-
eated than the other problems that the proletariat is now solving. For even
within the limitations of a eapitalist society the working dass was able to pre-
pare for victorious revolution, building up eadres of fighters and leaders and
working out a magnifieent ideological weapon for the politieal struggle, but it
could not work out the problems of the natural sciences nor teehnieal prob-
lems, nor - being a eulturally oppressed dass - could it elaborate its own
literature, its own special art form, its own style. If the proletariat already has
in its hands infallible criteria of socio-political content, it has not yet such
definite answers to all the questions coneerning artistic form.
(8) The above must determine the poliey of the ruling party of the pro-
letariat in the field of literature. The following questions are pertinent in the
first instance: the inter-relationships between the proletarian writers, the
peasant weiters and the sO<alled 'fellow-travellers' and the rest; the Party's
poliey toward the proletarian writers themselves; questions of eritieism; ques-
tions of style and form in literary works and the method of working out new
art forms; and finally, questions of an organisational charaeter.
(9) The inter-relationship between the various groupings of writers according
to their social-class and social-group content is determined by our general
poliey. However, it must be borne in mind here that guidanee in the field of
literature belongs to the working dass as a whole, with all its material and
ideologieal resources. There is not yet a hegemony of proletarian writers, and
the Party must assist those writers to earn their historie right to sueh hege-
mony. Peasant writers must be awarded a friendly welcome, and they must
have the advantage of our uneonditional support. The problem is to steer their
growing cadres onto the rails of proletarian ideology, while in no way
expunging from their work the peasant literary images that are an indispens-
able prerequisite for inRuencing the peasantry.
(10) As regards the 'fellow-travellers', it is essential to bear in mind: (I) the
fact that they differ amongst themselves; (2) the signifieanee of some of them
as qualified 'specialists' in literary technique; (3) the degree of wavering in
this stratum of writers. The general directive here must be one of a taetful and
eonsiderate attitude to them, i.e. an approach that will guarantee them condi-
tions for as quiek as possible a transfer of allegiance to the side of eommunist
ideology. While weeding out the anti-proletarian and anti-revolutionary ele-
ments (whieh are now extremely insignificant) and eombating the ideology of
the new bourgeoisie which is now in the process of formation amongst apart
of the 'felIow-travelIers' of the Changing Landmarks 2 persuasion, the Party
118 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
must address itself to the interstitial ideological forms, patiently assisting these
inevitably numerous forms to return to full health in the process of an in-
creasingly e10se and comradely cooperation with the cultural forces of Com-
munism.
(II) As regards the proletarian writers, the Party must take up the following
position: assisting their growth in aII ways and giving fuII support to them
and their organisations, the Party must by aII possible means forestaII the ap-
pearance of communist boasting (komchtlansttlo),3 since this is a most perni-
cious phenomenon. Precisely because the Party sees in them the future idee-
logical leaders of Soviet literature, it must combat in every way any ippant
or negligent attitude toward the old cultural heritage or toward specialists in
the artistry of words. Equally deserving of condemnation is the position of
underestimating the very importance of the struggle for the ideological hege-
mony of the proletarian writers. Against kapitulyansttlo 4 on the one hand and
communist boasting (komchtlansttlo) on the other - this must be the Party's
slogan. The Party must also combat attempts at pure hot-house 'proletarian'
literature : a broad encompassing of phenomena in all their complexity; not
being confined within the framework of the factory alone; becoming a litera-
ture that does not belong in a workshop but to the great fighting e1ass that
brings the miIlions of peasants in its train - these must provide the framework
for the content of proletarian literature.
(12) the foregoing is what defines in general and in toto the task of criti-
cism, which is one of the most important weapons of education in the hands
of the Party. Without for one moment reiinquishing a communist position or
moving one iota from proletarian ideology in revealing the objective e1ass
significance of various literary works, communist criticism must struggle mer-
cilessly against counter-revolutionary manifestations in literature, unmask the
Changing Landmarks liberalism, etc., while at the same time showing the very
greatest tact, caution and patience in relation to those Iiterary strata that could
and will join cause with the proletariat. In its everyday usage communist
criticism must drop the tone of Iiterary command. It will have deep educative
significance only w hen it reIies on the excellence of its ideals. Marxist criticism
must decisively expel from its midst any pretentious, semi-Iiterate and smug
komchtlansttlo. Marxist criticism must adopt the slogan of study, and it must
reject all trashy writing and egocentricity from its own midst.
(13) While gaining a deep and unerring knowledge of the socio-class content
of the literary streams, the Party can in no way bind itself in adherence to any
one direction in the sphere 01 artistic form. Though supervising literature as a
whole, the Party can as little support any one literary fraction (e1assifying such
fractions according to their views on form and style) as it can decide by decree
the question of the form of the family, though in general it undoubtedly
supervises and must supervise the building of a new way of life. All this leads
to the supposition that the style appropriate to the epoch will be created, but
it will be created by other methods, and no decision of this question has yet
been remarked. All atternpts to bind the Party to one dire\tion at the present
phase of the cultural development of the country must be firmly rejected.
(14) Therefore the Party must pronounce in favour of free competition be-
tween the various groupings and streams in this sphere. Any other decision of
APPENDIX IV
The bulk of sources consulted in the writing of this study were in Russian. I
have therefore listed them in transliteration, using a system slightly different
from that used in the body of the text. References to Lenin's articles are to
the Collected Works unless otherwise stated. Since my object in Chapters I,
2 and 4 has been to present the Soviet viewpoint, I have restricted myself
as much as possible to references made by the Soviet critics in the works con
sulted, citing translated versions wherever possible so that the non-Russian
speaking reader may check them for aptness. However, in the interests of
brevity and darity I have had to add various references of my own, though
these are kept to aminimum.
INTRODUCTION
The major source of the argument set out in this chapter was Osnovy
markslstsko-leninskoi estetiki, ed. A. Sutyagin et al. (Moscow: Gosizdat politi-
cheskoi literatury, 1960), which may be regarded as representing an officially
approved point of view.
I. See A. C. Wilson 'The Soviet Orthodoxy in Aesthetics, 1953-70', New
Zealand Slavonic Journal (Winter, 1971, published by the Department of
Russian of the Victoria University of Wellington).
2. Osnovy markslstsko-!eninskoi estetiki (Ak. Nauk S.S.S.R., 1960).
3. The word narod has an almost mystic ring to Russian ears, meaning far
more than simply 'the people', and being doser, perhaps, to the German
Volk. The root is extremely productive and care should be taken not to
confuse narodnichestvo - which is usually translated 'populism' and narod-
122 SOVIET SOCIAL1ST REAL1SM
nost'. The adjective nar6dny means 'pertaining to the people' and may
thus be translated as 'popular', but when associated with nar6dnost' it has
a more specific connotation, conveyed in this book by single inverted
commas - thus 'popular'.
4. Certain Western commentators seem not to take this point. John Berger,
for instance, takes 'popular' to mean 'universally liked' and then sets out to
disprove his own erroneous interpretation (Art and Revolution (Penguin
Books, 1969) p. 50).
5. Cf. Winston Churchill's alleged remark concerning the reconstruction of
the House of Commons after bombing: ' ... We shape the buildings, then
the buildings shape us.'
6. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel' s ob iskusstve (Moscow: 'Iskusstvo', 1957)
1202.
7. Ibid., p. 15 2 .
8. HegeI, Sochinlniya, XII 280.
9. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel's ob iskusstve 1 250.
10. However, Marx's dictum that there would come a day when there were no
professional artists but only men who, amongst other things, were artists,
when reflected in Pletnev's article 'On the Ideological Front', Pravda, 1922,
as: 'The proletarian artist will be artist and worker at the same time'
received very curt comment from Lenin in a pencilled margin note:
'Rubbish " (Vzdor). Quoted by S. Sheshuk6v, Nelstovye revnfteli (Mosk6v-
skii rab6chii, 1970) p. 28.
II. Dobrolyubov, 0 stlpeni uchastiya nar6dnosti v razvftiyi russskoi litera-
tury.
12. Nekrasov, Komu na Rus; zhit' khorosh6? (For whom is lile in Russia
good?)
13. Collection V. I. Llnin 0 literature i iskusstve (Goslitizdat, 1957) p. 583.
14. V. G. BeHnsky, P6lnoye sobraniye (Ak. Nauk S.S.S.R., 1954) v 308.
15 Ibid., p. 309.
16. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel's ob iskusstve, p. 559.
17. Examples cited are the formation of the Moiseyev Folk-Dance Ensemble
and the establishment of puppet theatres. Such reasoning explains the ap-
pearance in the USSR of 'modern traditionaI songs', i.e. songs in the folk
idiom but concerned with such aspects of contemporary life as the factory,
the collective farm and even space-travel. These should not be I ,onfused
with artificially preserved - or invented - 'folksy' local colour.
18. Collection V. I. Unin 0 literature i iskusstve, p. 254.
19 Collection K. Marks i F. Engel' s ob iskusstve, 1 112.
20. V. 1. Unin, Krit1cheskiye zamltki po natsional 'nomu vopr6su (Critical
Notes on the Nationalities Question), 1913; e.g. - 'In every national culture
there are in fact two national cultures. There is the Great-Russian culture
of the Purishkeviches, the Guchk6vs and the Struves; but there is also the
Great-Russian culture characterised by the names of Chernyshevsky and
Plekhanov .. .'
21. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel's ob iskusstve, p. 134.
22. Proletkult: abbreviation for Soyuz proletdrskikh kul'turnoprosvetftel'nikh
organizatsii (Union of Proletarian Cultural-Educative Organisations),
REFERENCES AND NOTES TO PAGES 3-18 123
whose aim was to create a new, revolutionary proletarian art and to dis-
regard the art of all previous epochs (see Chapter 3)'
23. See Appendix 111, Docum~nts on th~ Proletkult.
24. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel' s ob iskusstv~, p. 99.
25. Ibid., pp. II6- I 7
26. V. I. Lenin, Pamyati Gertsena trans. as In Memory 0/ Herzen, collection
V. I. Lenin on literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
pp. 63--9, given as Appendix 11 of this book.
27. V. I. Unin, L. N. Tolst6i kak zerkalo russkoi revolyutsiyi, trans. as L. N.
Tolstoy as th~ Mirror 0/ the Russian Revolution in the collection V. I.
Lenin on literature and Art, pp. 28-33; see also pp. 48-62.
28. V. I. Unin, Partlinaya organizatsiya i partlinaya literatura (see Appendix I).
29. Collection K. Marks i F. Engel's ob iskusstve, I 346-7.
30. See Kar! Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1965) pp. 73, 100, etc.; see also the article by Ge6rgi
Kunitsyn, Lenin on Partisanship and Freedom 0/ Creativity in the collec-
tion Sodalist Realism in Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1971).
31. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, pp. II 6-20.
32 Ibid., pp. 401-3.
33 Ibid., pp. 390-1.
34. For a fuller discussion of partlinost' see the article by Ge6rgi Kunitsyn,
note 30 (above).
35. See A. S. Myansik6v and Ya. Ye El'sberg (eds), Uninskoye naslMiye i
literatura XX veka (Moscow: 'Khud6zhestvennaya literatura', 1969) p. 34.
36. Vtor6i vsesoyttznyi s'yezd sovhskikh pisatelei, 1956 (stenogra/lcheskii
otchet).
The major source of the argument set out in the early sections of this chapter
was V. I. Unin i rttsskaya obshchestvenno-politicheskaya mysl'XIX-nachala
XX v., ed. Sh. M. Uvin et al. Leningrad: Nauka, 1969)'
I. V. I. Unin, Partiinaya (organizatsiya i partlinaya literatura (see Appendix
I).
2. Osn6vy markslstsko-Mninskoi estetiki, p. 337.
3. V. I. Unin, Partlinaya organizatsiya i partiinaya literatura.
4. See, for example, John Berger, Revolution and Art (Penguin Books, 1969)
p. 54; see also Lukacs, Solzhenitsyn (Merlin Press, 1970) p. 77.
5. V. I. Unin, Nasha programma, IV 182.
6. G. V. Plekhanov, 0 sotsial'noi demokratiyi v Rosslyi.
7. V. I. Unin, Nasha blizhaishaya zadacha, IV 189--90'
8. V. I. Unin, Zadachi russkikh sotsial-demokratov, II 459.
9. V. I. Unin, Nasha programma, IV, 184.
10. V. I. Unin, Iz pr6sh/ogo rab6chei pechati v Rosslyi / From the History 0/ the
Workers' Press in Russia (excerpts) in the collection V. I. Lenin on Litera-
ture and Art, p. 97.
Ir. G. V. PlekMnov, speech in Geneva, 14 December 1825 made in 1900 and
s.S.R-5*
124 SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
his own letter to the paper, Lenin said: 'But this is lalsification of historical
materialism. It is playing at historical materialism.' (quoted by I. M. Tere-
khov).
29. V. I. Lenin, Dralt Resolution 'On Proletarian Culture', see Appendix IU.
30. Krupskaya related how Lenin refused to join the god-seeking activities of
Bogdanov and G6rky on Capri in 195: 'I cannot and will not have any-
thing to do with people who have set out to propagate unity between
scientific socialism and religion.' In fact he did go to Capri but no recon-
ciliation resulted. N. K. Krupskaya, Memories 01 Lenin (Panther Books,
1970).
31. V.I. Unin 0 literature i iskusstve, p. 684.
32. Lunacharsky was Bogdanov's brother-in-law and had also been involved
in the god-seeking controversy.
33. At a later date Lunacharsky himself acknowledged the justice of Lenin's
fears: 'Lenin talked about this when it had not even entered my head, and
I simply could not see it .. .' Russkaya literatura p6s1e Oktyabrya, a lecture
delivered at Sverd16vsk University in February 1929 (quoted by I. M. Tere-
khov).
34. By 1920 the Proletkults had some 40,000 members, of whom as many as
80,000 were actively working in clubs, studios, theatres, etc.
35. The Futurist Manifesto, proclaimed over the names of Burlyuk, Kruche-
nykh, Mayak6vsky and Khlebnikov in 1912, had said: 'Throw Pushkin,
Dostoyevsky, ToIst6y et al., et al., overboard from the Ship of Modern-
ity .. .' (for full text, see V. Markov, Russian Futurism).
36. N6voye 0 Mayak6vskom (See Chapter 4, note 4).
37. V.I. Unin on Literature and Art, p. 214. For original, see N6voye 0 Maya-
k6vskom .
38. According to Lunacharsky's first wife, this protest was in fact prompted by
Lenin (quoted by I. M. Terekhov, p. 524)'
39 A. V. Lunacharsky, L6zhka protivoyadiya in the journal Iskusstvo Kom-
muny, 1918 (quoted by I. M. Terekhov).
40. V. I. Unin 0 literature i iskusstve, pp. 662-3'
41 A. V. Lunacharsky, letter to A. K. Vor6nsky, 1923, quoted by I. M.
Terekhov.
42. For a discussion of NEP see Alec Nove, An Economic History 01 the
U.S.S.R. (Pelican Books. 1972).
43 Although the task of educating the peasantry has dominated much of
Soviet policy ever since the Revolution, the Proletkult had tended to ignore
it, and this was another reason for Lenin's antipathy.
44 The 'Old Guard' was a name coined by Lenin (in a letter to M610tov in
March 1922: XXXIII 228-30) to refer to the veteran Bolsheviks of pre-
revolutionary vintage. It highlighted a basic dilemma: the 'Old Guard',
all occupying positions of great authority, had lost their class identity, but
the new inux of party members undoubtedly contained many who were
petty bourgeois in outlook and therefore unreliable. So in the period of
the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', that proletariat hardly existed and,
where it did, had very little authority.
45 ROSTA - the Russian Telegraph Agency, whose posters, drawn in many
REFERENCES AND NOTES TO PAGES 50-60 129
56. Cf. Constitution of the Union of Writers, given in: Pervyi vsesoyuznyi
s'yezd sovltskikh pisatelei : stenograflcheskii otchEt, 1934).
57. It is significant that a very high proportion of prominent Soviet writers
began their careers by contributing to news papers.
58. See Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (Faber & Faber, 1969; translated
from French).
59. See, for exarnple, R. M. Hankin, 'Soviet Literary Controls', in Continuity
and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. E. J. Simmons (Harvard
University Press, 1955).
60. N6voye 0 Mayak6vskom.
61. Kapitulyanstvo: an invented pejorative label formed on the root kapitu-
lyatsiya (capitulation) and applied to attitudes considered to operate to the
advantage of capitalism at the expense of socialism.
62. Initial members were VAPP, the All-Russian Union of Peasant Writers,
and the Constructivists' Literary Centre, and these were later joined by
Kuznitsa and Pereval - the fellow-travellers' organisation formed as a de-
fence against RAPP. The Constructivists later withdrew. A significant
feature was the use of the tide Soviet, which made it possible to avoid
stressing the proletarian or bourgeois composition.
63. Komsom61 - Communist Youth League, an organisation including mem-
bers up to their mid-twenties formed to assist the C.P.S.U. and acting, in
part, as a recruiting and training agency.
64. Western visitors to the USSR are frequendy surprised at the political nature
of Soviet youth organisations. In fact they have litde in common with such
organisations as the Scouts.
65. The 1921 Party Congress had accepted a ban on inner-party factions.
66. For an exciting account of the Tr6tsky /Stalin confrontations see Isaac
Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (Oxford Paperbacks, 1970).
67 As editor of Pravda, Bukharin was a powerful ally of Stalin at this time.
68. Na literaturnom posttl (which replaced Na postu after 1925), No. 9, 1927,
p. 2, quoted by Sheshuk6v.
69 See, for example, V. Shcherbfna's argument in the article '0 nekotorykh
vopr6sakh sotsialistfcheskogo realfzma' in the collection Za vys6kuyu
idtinost' sovetskoi literatury (Moscow: Gos khudlit, 1959).
70 Na literaturnom postu, No. 9, 1927, p. 2 (quoted by Sheshuk6v).
71. A prime mover in the RAPP enthusiasm for Tolstoyan methods of charac-
terisation had been Fadeyev.
72. See our discussion of Pisarev (Chapter 2).
73 Cf. Stalin's speech to the Komsom61 Congress in May, 1928: 'We cannot
now confine ourselves to training Communist forces in general, Bolshevik
forces in general, people who are able to jabber a litde about anything.
Dilettanteism and universalism are nowfetters on our ankles. Whatwe now
need are BoIshevik specialists .. .': Joseph Stalin, TheTasks ofYouth (New
York: International Publishers) p. 28 (undated).
74. For a detailed account of this controversy see Sheshuk6v, pp. 216-26.
75 Yermflov: a resilient critic-cum-literary bureaucrat whose attacks on Maya-
k6vsky influenced the poet's mood at the time of his suicide and who was
mentioned in the suicide note (see N6voye 0 Mayak6vskom).
llEFEllENCES AND NOTES TO PAGES 00-82
90. The term poputehik - 'fellow-traveller' was never officially adopted; there
is, however, an officially recognised category of bezpartlinyi - 'one without
a party', i.e. one who supports the policies of the CPSU but is not him-
self a member.
91. Apart cause of the venom with which Sinyavsky was attacked was the
fact that inside the USSR he enjoyed a considerable reputation as an
'establishment' critic. The key article on G6rky in the 1958 Academy of
Sciences three-volume History of Russian Soviet Literature, for example,
bears his signature.
92. For details of the operation of GlavlJt see T he Polities 0/ Ideas in the
U.S.S.R., ed. Robert Conquest (Bodley Head, 1967).
93. See, for example, Sheshuk6v.
4 SOCIAL1ST REALISM
I. This translation is taken from Lenin on Literature and Art (Moscow: Pro-
gress Publishers, 1970)'
2. The political strike of October 1905, which compelled the Tsar to issue the
Manifesto of 17 October, granting civil rights. The Bolsheviks took advan-
tage of this new freedom to bring out their newspapers legally. After the
failure of the armed rising in December 1905, the workers' organisations
and press were again attacked.
3. Bulletin 01 the Soviet Workers' Deputies: the organ of the St Petersburg
Soviet of Workers' Deputies, published from October to December 1905.
Ten issues were published; the eleventh was seized by the police.
4 A. 1. Guchk6v (1862-1936), industrialist and leader of the bourgeois-
landowner Octobrist Party; he emigrated after the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917.
5. Pro/etdry: an illegal newspaper founded by the Bolsheviks after the Fourth
Congress of the RSDLP, published 1906-9 in Finland and later in
Geneva. Closed down in 1910 by decision of the Central Committee. Per-
manent editor, Unin.
13. Polybnaya Zvezd4 (The Pole Star): a literary political series of 8 volumes
published by Herzen alone (vols. I-m) and with Ogaryev in London,
1855-62 and Geneva, 1868.
14. Serno-Solovyevich, A. A. (1838-69): prominent revolutionary democrat
of the 1860s who emigrated in 1862 and criticised Herzen for his liberal
waverings.
15. Kavelin, K. D. (1818-85): professor of history at Moscow and St Peters-
burg, represented bourgeois landlord-liberalism and opposed the revolu-
tionary-democrat movement.
16. The article was written by Ogaryev.
17. Cadet: from the initials K. D. - Constitutional Democrat - the main party
of the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie, founded in 1905 and the prime oppo-
nent of the Soviet regime in the Civil War.
18. A. I. Herzen, N. G. ChernysMvsky.
19. A. I. Herzen, Gossip, Soot, Grime, dc.
20. A. I. Herzen in a letter to Turgenev, 10 April 1864.
21. A. I. Herzen, Primordial Bishop, Antcdiluvian Govcrnmcnt and Dcceivcd
People.
22. Nar6dnaya V6lya (Pcoplc's Will): secret political organisation of populist
terrorists formed in 1879 by a split in the major populist Zemlyd i V 61ya
(Land and Will). It was responsible for the assassination of Tsar Alexander
11 in 1881 and was stamped out in the consequent reprisals.
Blake, P. and Hayward, M., Hal/way to the Moon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1964).
Brown, E. J., The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature (New York, 1953).
Gibian, G., Interval 01 Freedom (University of Minnesota Press, 1960).
Hayward, M., and Crowley, E. L. (eds), Soviet Literature in the Sixties
(Methuen, 1965).
Markov, Vladimir, Russian Futurism (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968).
Mathewson, R. W., The Positive Hero in Russian Literature (Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1958).
Vickery, W. N., The Cult 01 Optimism (Indiana University Press, 1963).
West, James, Russian Symbolism (Methuen, 1970).
IV TllANSLATED WOllKS
Brezhnev, L., Lenin's Cause Lives On and Triumphs (Moscow: N6vosti Press
Agency Publishing House, 1970).
- - , Report 01 the Central Committu 01 the Communist Party 01 the Soviet
Union (Moscow: N6vosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1971).
G6rky, M., On Literature (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House).
How the Soviet Revisionists Carry out All-Round Restoration 01 Capitalism in
the U.S.S.R. (peking : Foreign Languages Press, 1968).
Khrushchevon Culture (Encounter Pamphlet, No. 9)'
Kosygin, A., Directives 01 the Five-Year Economic Devdopment Plan 01 the
USSR lor 1971-75 (Moscow: N6vosti Press Agency Publishing House,
1971).
Krupskaya, N., Memories 01 Unin (Panther Books, 1970).
Unin, V. I., On Culture and Cultural Revolution (Moscow: Progress Pub-
Iishers, 1970).
- - , On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).
- - , Questions 01 National Policy and Proletarian lnternationalism (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960).
- - , What is to be Done? (trans. S. V. and P. Utechin), (Panther Books, 1970).
Lulclcs, G., Solzhenitsyn (Merlin Press, 1969; translated from German).
- - , The Meaning 01 Contemporary Realism (Merlin Press, 19~; translated
from German).
Mao Tse-tung, On Literature and Art (Peking : Foreign Languages Press,
1967).
- - , Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conlerence on Pro-
paganda Work (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967).
Marx, K., and Engels, F., Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Pub-
Iishers, 1955).
Miliukov, P., Outlines 01 Russian Culture 11 - Literature in Russia (New
York: A. S. Barnes & Co. Inc., 1942).
Sodalist Realism in Literature and Art (trans. C. V. James) (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1971).
SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
VI PARTY STATEMENTS