Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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david holloway
by the removal of price controls, which resulted in sharp increases in the
cost of equipment, electricity and other services. The post-Soviet government
made a sharp and sudden reduction in defence expenditure in 1992, with a
corresponding cut in military R&D.
134
One indicator of the depth of the crisis was the number of scientists who
emigrated or quit science in order to pursue other careers in Russia. According
to the Russian Ministry of Science, about 2,000 researchers a year left Russia
between 1991 and 1996; after that, the outflow fell to under 1,500 a year. These
are conservative figures, however; other estimates suggest that more than
30,000 scientists emigrated in this period. The internal brain drain is even
more difficult to estimate, because many researchers remained formally on
the staff of research institutes even while devoting themselves to non-scientific
activities such as business. It appears that the internal brain drain was far
greater than the number of scientists who emigrated.
135
The international community did not want to see the Russian scientific com-
munity destroyed; it especially feared that knowledge of advanced weapons
technologies would find its way to states hostile to the West. International
organisations and foreign governments took steps to provide assistance to
Russian scientists. The financier George Soros set up the International Science
Foundation, which over the years 1993–6 granted about $130 million to sup-
port basic research in the natural sciences. Learned societies and philanthropic
foundations gave significant help. The United States, Japan and the European
Union established the International Science and Technology Centre in order to
fund civilian projects by scientists who had been engaged in weapons research.
By one Russian estimate, about half of Russian basic science was being funded
from foreign sources in 1995.
136
During the twentieth century the scientific community had shown remark-
able resilience, and it was called upon to do so again at the century’s end. The
Academy of Sciences once again displayed considerable powers of survival. No
radical reform of scientific institutions took place. Change was evolutionary:
co-operation between the Academy of Sciences and the universities began
to grow; the government set up a fund to support basic research; collabora-
tion with foreign scientists increased. By the very end of the century there
were signs that the situation had stabilised. It was still unclear, however, what
shape Russian science would take. Would the universities and the Academy
134 Irina Dezhina and Loren Graham, Russian Basic Science after Ten Years of Transition
and Foreign Support (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002),
pp. 8, 10.
135 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 136 Ibid., pp. 17–25.
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Science, technology and modernity
work more closely together? Would the universities become more important
centres of research? Was a thoroughgoing reform of science and education
needed? Would a capitalist Russia be more successful at commercialising sci-
ence than the Soviet Union was? Would Russian industry develop advanced
civilian technologies? Would the scientific community, which found itself on
the sidelines in the 1990s, find a secure position in Russian society?
Conclusion
Less than six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, V
´
aclav Havel
claimed that the end of Communism signified the end not only of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries but also of ‘the modern world as a whole’. The
modern era, he wrote, had been dominated by the belief that ‘the world . . . is
a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that
man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit’.
137
Havel presented
the Soviet experience as the perverse extreme of scientific rationalism.
The Soviet Union did indeed appear to many people to offer a vision of
modernity that was more attractive than Western capitalism, especially in
the 1920s and 1930s when capitalism was in deep crisis, and the commitment
to science and the claim to be guided by a scientific theory were important
elements in that vision. Optimism about science was high again in the Soviet
Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when successes in space dramatised
the possibilities of scientific-technical progress and de-Stalinisation offered the
prospect of political change. These hopes were not realised, however. From the
late1960s on, it became increasingly clear that central planning was not effective
at generating technological progress, that the party leadership feared reform
and that the state had pursued industrial development with little regard to
the consequences for public health or for the environment. The Soviet system
began to lose legitimacy at home and abroad. This shook the self-confidence
of the political leadership and prompted the attempts at radical reform in the
late 1980s.
Andrei Sakharov proposed an alternative approach to politics, derived from
his conception of science. The state, in this model, would be guided in its
policies by a public opinion formed in the process of reasoned debate and
discussion. ‘Progress is possible and innocuous only when it is subject to the
137 V
´
aclav Havel, ‘The End of the Modern Era’, New York Times, 1 Mar. 1992, section 4,
p. 15.
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david holloway
control of reason,’ he wrote in his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture.
138
A reasoned
approach to the great challenges of the scientific-technical revolution, such as
nuclear weapons and environmental change, would be possible only if human
rights were guaranteed. Only then would society be able to engage in the pro-
cess of debate and discussion that would ensure that decisions were grounded
in reason. Sakharov’s views can be read as a commentary on the Soviet expe-
rience of harnessing science to politics: debate and discussion were extremely
restricted in the Soviet Union, with harmful consequences for science and for
society. Sakharov’s views can be taken also as a rejoinder to Havel’s equation
of modernity with the Soviet experience, by suggesting an alternative vision
of the application of reason to human affairs.
138 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Peace, Progress, and Human Rights’, in Andrei D. Sakharov, Alarm
and Hope (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 9.
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21
Culture, 1900–1945
james von geldern
Russian culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century came under
influences that could be found in most European cultures. New audiences
transformed taste cultures. The decline of monarchies and ascent of industrial
capitalism made art patrons of the bourgeoisie.
1
Modern technology turned
the lower classes into a mass audience. Aristocratic arts institutions faced
competition from new organisations, many of them private and open to the
general public. Cultural life reached social groups once excluded on the basis
of class or nationality. The fast-paced, fragmented life of the modern city
insinuated itself into all art forms, from the cinema to painting and poetry, and
artists struggled to create satisfying art forms from the chaos of modern life.
2
Russian culture was also influenced by circumstances distinct from other
cultures. The first was the intelligentsia, a self-defined class of educated people
who sustained social and cultural life under the profoundly undemocratic
conditions of tsarism.
3
The second was the October Revolution, which sepa-
rated Russia from European cultures after 1917, and fundamentally reconfig-
ured the cultural life of the country. The Bolsheviks considered themselves
heirs to the great tradition of the intelligentsia when they seized power on
25 October 1917. As an underground party before the revolution, they had
organised the working masses by propaganda and education. After the revolu-
tion, they used the resourcesof the state to foster an entirelynewconsciousness
in Soviet citizens, particularly those who came of age after they took power.
1 Beverly Whitney Kean, All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-
Revolutionary Russia (New York: Universe Books, 1983); Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D.
Kassow and James L. West (eds.), Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest
for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
2 Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds.), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revo-
lution, 1881–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
3 Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State, 1917 to the Present
(London: Verso, 1988); Christopher Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The
Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1990).
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Few would argue the reach of this cultural programme, though many would
dispute the quality of the transformation and the benefits gained by the Soviet
people.
If the Bolsheviks felt themselves heirs to the great tradition, others consid-
ered them betrayers of the tradition. A deep split had begun to appear within
the intelligentsia around the dawn of the twentieth century, as materialists and
idealists forwarded alternative versions of the intelligentsia mission. Radical
materialists devoted their attention to the sciences or politics as most promis-
ing for the betterment of humanity. Some of the most undeviating adherents
of materialism could be found in the revolutionary underground, including
Vladimir Ul’ianov (Lenin). Other members of the artistic intelligentsia found
this unswerving commitment to social change commendable but sterile. They
sought a better life in the refined beauty of artistic creation, and their search to
recover the unique power of art constitutes the opening chapter of twentieth-
century Russian culture.
Modernism had many manifestations and inspirations in Russia and cannot
be traced to a single source or moment.
4
A figure who inspired the respect of
many, who stood as a symbol of integrity and transcendent talent and whose
birth as an artist coincided with the birth of the century was the poet Aleksandr
Blok.
5
His first published collection, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o prekrasnoi
dame)(1904), was greeted by older Symbolist poets as an embodiment of their
movement, yet Blok stood beyond any specific movement, and spoke to many
different readers. His was a poetic world beyond material reality, of ideals
that could never be fully expressed and would be destroyed by engagement
with everyday life. Though his ethereal early verses were distant from social
issues, Blok never turned his back on the world around him. He responded
to the social upheavals of his day with poems of urgent foreboding, most
remarkably The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’)(1918), one of the first artistic responses to
the October Revolution. Taken by Bolsheviks to be a paean to the revolution,
Blok’s poem was, much like Andrei Belyi’s modernist novel Petersburg (1916),
an ambivalent recognition of social turmoil, and an attempt to find value in
it. The unmatchable lyric power of Blok’s verse and his faithfulness to his
vision served as inspiration to later generations who suffered under the Soviet
4 Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (eds.), Cultural Mythologies of Rus-
sian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992); Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (eds.), Creating Life: the Aesthetic
Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Stephen C.
Hutchings, RussianModernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
5 Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979–80).
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Culture, 1900–1945
regime. He insisted that artistic vision gave the clearest view of the future and
stayed faithful to his singular genius by avoiding political allegiance.
Organised cultural life in Imperial Russia was dominated by the autocracy
until late in the nineteenth century. The Romanov dynasty lavishly supported
the performing arts, as with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow or the Mariinsky
Theatre in St Petersburg, and it sponsored the Academy of Art and schools that
discovered and trained Russia’s immense artistic talent. The theatre monopoly
guaranteed that Russia’s finest talents performed on the imperial stages, and
produced a performing tradition in drama, opera and ballet that achieved first-
rank status in Europe. The imperial grip on the arts world loosened early in
the twentieth century. When the theatre monopoly was lifted in 1882, private
theatres appeared, such as the Korsh Theatre, Aleksandr Tairov’s Chamber
Theatre, and the Moscow Art Theatre, home to Konstantin Stanislavsky and
his productions of Chekhov’s plays.
6
In the visual arts, private art schools, such
as the Moscow Art School, introduced young artists to the modernist trends
sweeping Europe, and patrons from merchant families, such as the Mamon-
tovs, Morozovs, Shchukins and Tret’iakovs encouraged new directions. These
factors and relaxed censorship allowed for a nascent public sphere that freed
aesthetic achievement from the narrow tastes of the ruling class. Art could
operate according to its own rules, without support from the autocracy or
permission from the censor.
The pre-revolutionary capitals of St Petersburg and Moscow offered artists,
writers and performers a community in which they mingled intimately and
stayed abreast of new developments around the world. They mixed in the
same caf
´
es, theatres and private salons, and drew inspiration from each other’s
work. Poets discovered new techniques in painting; theatre directors looked
to poets for new language; painters sought inspiration in the theatre. Infor-
mal venues accommodated a greater range of tastes than imperial institutions
had. These included nightclubs such as the St Petersburg Stray Dog, the kapust-
nik improvisational evenings at the Moscow Art Theatre, or the Wednesday
evening literary salons in the ‘Tower’ apartment of poet Viacheslav Ivanov.
The Symbolists organised journals such as The Golden Fleece, Scales or Apollo.
7
6 Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905–1932 (New York: Abrams, 1988);
Robert Russell and Andrew Barratt (eds.), Russian Theatre in the Age of Modernism (New
York: St Martin’s Press, 1990); J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Comme-
dia dell’arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1993).
7 Ronald E. Peterson (ed.), The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology of Critical and Theoretical
Writings (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986); Michael Green (ed.), The Russian Symbolist Theatre: An
Anthology of Plays and Critical Texts (Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1986).
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james von geldern
Aleksandr Benois of the World of Art organised yearly art exhibits starting in
1899, which evolved into international exhibitions promoted by Sergei Diag-
ilev. Diagilev’s creation of the Ballets Russes in 1909 exported the choreography
of Mikhail Fokin, the dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky, and later the music of Igor
Stravinsky to Paris and beyond, in such productions as Firebird and Petrushka
(see Plate 2).
8
The visual arts were perhaps most fractured by competing artistic pro-
grammes. Pre-war years saw the Academy and the now influential World
of Art challenged by a dizzying array of groups, including Rayonists led by
Mikhail Larionov and Suprematists led by Kazimir Malevich. Other artists,
including Vasilii Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Nataliia Goncharova and Vladimir
Tatlin, seemed to defy group definition. The ultimate impact of Russian mod-
ernism was not in its organisations, but in the achievements of its brilliant
artists, and their legacy to the next generation of artists, whose fate was to
encounter the October Revolution at the moment of their maturity.
9
Many modernists thought of their art as addressing social concerns. Yet it
was apparent that the audience for modernist art did not go far beyond the edu-
cated classes, and that the lower classes, who did not possess much leisure time
or spare income, were largely indifferent to their work. These lower classes
were not, as many supposed, lacking in cultural stimulation. The invention
of new technologies, such as the gramophone, cinema and mass typogra-
phy exposed more consumers to cultural expression than ever before. Cheap
printing spurred a boom market in paperback detective stories, robber tales,
romantic love stories, sometimes even light pornography.
10
The gramophone,
which could be purchased for the home or listened to in a public parlour,
brought music to listeners who could not afford imperial theatres, music
halls or beer gardens. Such luminaries of the imperial stage as opera singer
Fedor Chaliapin became popular recording stars, as did caf
´
es chantants and vari-
ety singers, such as Nadezhda Plevitskaia, Varia Panina, Anastasia Vial’tseva.
The Russian film industry, dominated by foreign companies before the First
8 The World of Art Movement in Early 20th-Century Russia (Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers,
1991); Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works
through Mavra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
9 John Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New
York: Viking Press, 1976); The Russian Avant-Garde in the 1920s–1930s: Paintings, Graphics,
Sculpture, Decorative Arts from the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, ed. Evgeny Kovtun (St
Petersburg: Aurora Art Publishers, 1996).
10 Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); also Louise McReynolds, The News under
Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991).
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Culture, 1900–1945
World War, boomed when the war isolated the country and created domestic
opportunities for Russian studios. By 1917, directors such as Petr Chardynin,
Vladimir Gardin, Iakov Protazanov and Evgenii Bauer were presenting view-
ers with distinctive Russian views of life and history, played by recognisable
stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin and Vera Kholodnaia.
11
Popular culture was produced by profit-making enterprises, which varied
from small family-owned printing presses to the large movie studios. All were
subject to the marketplace and responsive to the changing tastes of the popular
audience. Disdained by the arbiters of elite culture, popular culture encour-
aged literacy, exposed audiences to a variety of music, and in the cinema,
exposed them to unknown worlds. Lower-class consumers did not seem to
share the intelligentsia’s assumption that culture need be edifying to be worth-
while. In its sensationalism, popular culture often exposed audiences to social
trends ignored by other art forms. Sensational crime stories often revealed the
social tensions underlying violence. Sexual innuendo and scandal-mongering
encouraged the creation of independent female characters, who in their search
for passion transgressed once impenetrable social barriers. Anastasia Verbit-
skaia, writer of the best-selling novel Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi shchastiia), and
Count Amori (Ippolit Rapgof ), wildly successful writer of film scenarios, were
two of the many signs that women and non-Russian nationalities were becom-
ing part of Russian culture.
12
The Bolsheviks showed a great capacity to exploit cultural change when
they seized power. The years following the war probably would have seen
tremendous cultural innovations even without the Bolsheviks, as was the
case in Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks made the
lower classes the ultimate client of culture. Their long-term policy was to turn
cultural institutions to the advantage of the new ruling classes.
Soon after taking power, the Bolsheviks launched an ambitious cultural pro-
gramme that ran counter to the extremely limited means at their disposal. The
11 Denise Youngblood, The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908–1918 (Madison: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural
Reception (London: Routledge, 1994).
12 James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds(eds.), Entertaining Tsarist Russia:Tales, Songs,
Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779–1917 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998); Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and
Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Stephen Frank and
Mark Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late
Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Catriona Kelly, Petrushka:
The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Si
`
ecle
Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).
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james von geldern
policy, executed by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and its
leader, Anatolii Lunacharskii, relied on the extensive seizure and nationalisa-
tion of existing cultural institutions, and on a much smaller and unco-ordinated
effort to create new institutions.
13
The first enterprises to fall under Bolshe-
vik power were printing presses.
14
The monopoly on the press, a policy that
history has come to associate with the Bolsheviks, came about haphazardly,
without a programmatic decision from the party. The two revolutions of 1917
had given birth to a vigorous and diverse press. By early 1918 few non-Bolshevik
newspapers were open, and they were subject to strict censorship and closed
when their criticisms became too acute. One newspaper to be closed was New
Life (Novaia zhizn’), edited by Lenin’s friend and political sympathiser Maxim
Gorky, perhaps the most popular living writer in Russia.
15
Similar actions took
place in other institutions inherited from the Old Regime, including imperial
theatres, universities, art and music academies. Employees of these institutions
had once been members of the privileged elite, and resented their new masters
bitterly. It would take several years to bring the institutions under control, a
decade in the case of some universities.
Chaos often overwhelmed signs of health and vigour. The economic catas-
trophes that accompanied the civil war destroyed much of the productive
capacity of cultural institutions. Popular education was in disarray, leaving a
generation for whom culture, even literacy, was an unattainable luxury. Deep
divisions appeared among artists and institutions about the fundamental pur-
pose of art. Before the revolution most artists could, despite their differences,
agree that artistic expression had some purposes entirely apart from social
progress. The Bolsheviks did not agree. They came to power convinced that
culture, politics and society are part of a great whole, infused with the same
spirit. It was unimaginable to them that the political and cultural life of a
country could function on opposing principles, that the state could pursue
a socialist agenda while cultural life was determined by the dictates of the
market.
16
The hope that revolution would liberate the working class to create its
own culture had been cherished before the revolution. Some counted on the
13 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education
and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970).
14 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–
1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
15 Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–
1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
16 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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Culture, 1900–1945
so-called ‘worker-intellectuals’(samouchki, or self-taught intellectuals), uncom-
mon men from the working and lower-middle classes who by force of will
found time in their hard lives to read and write. The first worker-intellectuals
had become visible in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century, there was
a significant body of literature by these men.
17
Aleksandr Bogdanov, a doc-
tor, philosopher, economist and leading Bolshevik thinker, proposed another
model of working-class culture. As described in the science fiction classic Red
Star (Krasnaia zvezda)(1908), Bogdanov’s vision was one in which work and
leisure merged into one, and art reflected the deep-seated principles of free-
dom and equality. Bogdanov believed that the proletariat could not properly
exploit political power before it possessed socialist consciousness, disagreeing
with Lenin, who believed that socialist culture could not be created before
political power was in proletarian hands. While the Bolsheviks were planning
insurrection in the autumn of 1917, Bogdanov and colleagues were creating a
cultural network that came to be called Proletkul’t.
18
At its peak, the network
encompassed over a thousand clubs throughout Russia with a hundred thou-
sand members, most devoted to basic instruction in writing, theatre and the
arts. The central leadership of the movement followed an ambitious agenda
that claimed to be the sole arm of proletarian cultural management, supersed-
ing the state. When the Bolsheviks consolidated their power at the conclusion
of the civil war, Proletkul’t became an impediment to unified state manage-
ment. Lenin himself devoted considerable energy to reining in the movement,
so that by 1921 its influence was greatly diminished. No fully autonomous pro-
letarian cultural organisation ever again arose in the Soviet Union.
A more immediate need in the years of revolution was to mobilise pop-
ular support, by means of agitation, propaganda and education. The classic
distinction of agitation and propaganda belongs to Lenin. According to him,
agitation was a short-term activity that informed the masses of tasks for the
immediate future and enlisted them on the side of progress. Propaganda was
instructive and enlightening, aimed at establishing deeper understanding of
the goals of the revolution.
19
Agitation was essential during the revolution,
for it allowed the Bolsheviks to recruit the worker masses into the Red Guard
and Red Army, and to defeat better-situated opponents. Many Bolshevik lead-
ers had been underground journalists and were masterful communicators.
17 Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–
1925 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).
18 Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movementin Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990).
19 For an earlier distinction, see Allan K. Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution:
Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
585