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power of veto. The Writers’ Union served as model for the other creative

unions (Cinematographic Workers, Actors,Artists) that were soon established.

While it is apparent in retrospect that these policies were the tools with

which the government regimented the arts, it is important to understand why

artists in the years 1932–4 might have greeted them with relief. When journals,

museums and theatres, arts academies and other cultural institutions fell under

the control of the self-proclaimed proletarians, artists found that to sell their

work, they must submit to humiliating review by critics with low aesthetic but

high political standards. Often these standards were arbitrary and depended on

which administrator was in charge. Many artists eventually found it impossible

to make a living. The unions and socialist realism regularised commissions and

standards of review, and guaranteed payment for artistic work. While the life of

a creative artist was very tenuous at the outset of the 1930s, life for a successful

artist was extremely proﬁtable by the end of the decade, placing artists among

the wealthiest citizens in the land of socialism. Few seemed bothered by the

silencing, imprisonment or even death of artists. For the consumers of culture,

who had suffered through a long period in which few new movies or books

emerged, the policies boded an outburst of culture for popular tastes. Though

a good deal of the work labelled socialist realism was mediocre, the decade

witnessed a steady stream of literature, movies and popular songs that are

read, viewed and sung with great pleasure even today. And since a watchword

of the aesthetic was accessibility, all of it was perfectly understandable and

enjoyable for the mass consumer.

Socialist realism, ﬁrst formulated by writers and promulgated by the Writ-

ers’ Union, was very much a literary principle. It called for clarity of language

and narrative, simplicity and steadfastness of character, and a forthright polit-

ical stance. For a brief few years in the middle of the 1930s, the seeming

impracticality of the method gave artists great latitude, particularly in popular

music and the cinema. The ﬁlm industry, restructured into a new organisation

called Soiuzkino and headed by Boris Shumiatskii, took as its goal the creation

of a popular, self-ﬁnancing ﬁlm industry. Shumiatskii felt that the aesthetically

ambitious ﬁlms of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov, as well as the younger

Aleksandr Dovzhenko, had alienated the common Soviet spectator. The box

ofﬁce bore him out to a degree. Shumiatskii demanded ﬁlms that were ‘acces-

sible’, enjoyable and entertaining. Although political ﬁdelity was still a must,

it soon became clear that politics would yield to fun as the primary mission.

40 Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge,

1993).

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Two ﬁlms of 1934 carried the banner of the new cinema. The ﬁrst bore

the name of Furmanov’s 1923 novel Chapaev. The novel depicted Chapaev as

a simple soldier, brave and charismatic but politically untutored. Under the

guidance of his commissar, he gradually understands the cause he instinctively

supports, and teaches his undisciplined troops the primacy of the cause over

the individual. On the silver screen, Chapaev’s rough-cut personality, full of

grand gestures and petty foibles, became the main draw. The second hit of 1934

was Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows (Veselye rebiata), directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov.

Travelling to Hollywood in 1930–2 as Eisenstein’s assistant director, Aleksan-

drov had seen how the musical ﬁlm could exploit the new talking medium and

win a mass audience. He set about creating the Soviet musical, and selected

Leonid Utesov as his lead man. Renowned for his performance of the slangy

songs of his native Odessa, with a strong admixture of jazz, Utesov played

a simple shepherd in the movie. Living in the Crimean village of Abrau, his

singing talent is discovered by vacationing Muscovites. He is whisked away to

the capital, and soon ﬁnds himself leading a jazz band. Anybody, it seemed,

could be a star in Soviet Russia.

Music for the ﬁlm was written by Isaak Dunaevskii, a mainstay of the

Soviet song-writing industry. Soviet popular music betrayed the signiﬁcant

inﬂuence of jazz, an inﬂuence that had not been fully digested when the

Cultural Revolution rendered it politically suspect. Soviet audiences loved jazz,

both the foreignjazz theyheardonrecordsandthenative jazz played byRussian

bands. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s jazz was rarely heard in ofﬁcially

recognised musical forums, but Utesov’s performance in Fellows relegitimised

jazz in its heavily Russiﬁed form. Soviet-Russian jazz was more melodic than

rhythmic and it abstained from the improvisation that is problematic in a

heavily censored culture. Soviet jazz borrowed its melodic inﬂuences from

sources ranging from American jazz to Russian folk music. What made it

‘jazz’ to its Soviet audiences was the use of unfamiliar instruments such as

the saxophone and trombone, the unfamiliar rhythms, and the exuberant

performance style alien to classical music. Dunaevskii was the composer who

most successfully combined these inﬂuences; and because of his willingness

to write his music for the heavily politicised lyrics of Mikhail Isakovskii and

Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, among other lyricists, he fared well with cultural

watchdogs. Other composers, such as the Pokrass Brothers, Matvei Blanter, or

A. V. Aleksandrov (founder of the Red Army Chorus) created a more distinctly

Soviet style of music in which the march was the favoured genre. The presence

of ideological music did not eclipse more traditional musical concerns, and

the love song was still the most popular genre of the decade, with the young

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lyricist Evgenii Dolmatovskii scoring his ﬁrst successes. As for performers,

the Red Army Chorus made its ﬁrst tours at this time, yet the overwhelming

audience favourites remained jazz players like Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman,

or vocalists such as Izabella Iur’eva, Konstantin Sokol’skii, and Vadim Kozin,

who ignored politics and who harkened back to the great torch singers of

pre-revolutionary years.

Soviet arts organisations had gained complete control over cultural life

by the mid-1930s. In retrospect, these were golden years for average Soviet

audiences. Hugely popular songs, novels and movies were easily available,

and came out in a fairly steady stream. Audiences had more free time and

disposable income than they ever had before. That these resources were paltry

in comparison to Western societies seemed to matter little. Yet much of the

same witch-hunting that struck the political world during the purge trials of

1936 took place as well in the arts, invisible to the public eye. By the end of the

decade, artists as diverse as Mandel’shtam and Kozin were either dead or lost

in the prison camps, as were many, many others, including Babel’, Meyerhold

and Pil’niak. Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel Master and Margarita, a decade

in the making, was completed and lost deep in a desk drawer, not to emerge

until 1966, after which it became perhaps the most beloved Russian novel of the

century. Cruel fate struck artists from the most popular to the most elusive,

from wholehearted Bolshevik to apolitical elitist, from Russian to Jew.

Emblematic of the unpredictability was the fate of two operas, Lady Macbeth

of Mtsensk, composed by Dmitrii Shostakovich, and Ancient Heroes (Bogatyri),

a libretto written by Demian Bednyi to an old comic opera by Borodin. The

young Shostakovich was a rising star in Soviet music, and Lady Macbeth one of

his ﬁrst resounding successes. Based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, the opera

tells of a strong-willed woman trapped in a loveless marriage in the Russian

provinces, ruined ﬁnally when her passionate affair leads to the murder of

her husband and his father. First performed in 1934, it won instant acclaim for

the daring use of instruments such as the trombone and saxophone, and its

bold dissonance and discordant rhythms. Yet when Stalin attended a 1936 per-

formance and walked out in evident disgust, Shostakovich was dangerously

exposed. Within two days Pravda featured an editorial entitled ‘Chaos instead

of Music’, castigating Shostakovich, and performance of the opera ceased.

More surprising was the fate of Bednyi. A poet and staunch comrade of Lenin,

Bednyi had once deﬁned Soviet political correctness. During the civil war his

caustic verse scored points against priests, capitalists and monarchists, and

41 Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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afterwards he remained an effective political versiﬁer. His libretto for Heroes

was in the same spirit of mockery, yet much to his shock, Pravda denounced

its debut performance for disparaging the role of Christianity in Russian

history.

Though the ﬁnal third of the 1930s was a period of profound repression in

the arts, to many Soviet citizens it was a time when their tastes were served.

Audiencescontinued to ﬁnd newmovies to suit their tastes,manyof them in the

musical genre they had come to love. Aleksandrov scored new hits with Volga-

Volga (1938) and Radiant Path (Svetlyi put’) (1940), both starring Liubov’ Orlova,

and he soon found a rival in the young Ivan Pyr’ev, who directed the popular

musicals Rich Bride (Bogataia nevesta)(1938), Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy)(1939)

and Swineherd and the Shepherd (Svinarka i pastukh)(1940). These ﬁlms seem

today to be clich

es of socialist realism, in which kolkhozniks and shock workers

ﬁnd true love and happiness, but they resonated deeply with their intended

audiences. Music of all kinds continued to be performed, recorded and played

on the radio, and if the socialist marches of Aleksandrov and Dunaevskii

received the lion’s share of ofﬁcial attention, crooners and jazz singers were

still commonly available. In fact, one of the most popular entertainments of the

era were vast outdoor masquerades and dance parties, such as those arranged

in Moscow’s Gorky Park, where carefree thousands danced the night away.

Here, as well as in dance halls throughout the land, jazz and the cruel romance

held sway. The music played on, as long as nobody uttered the word ‘jazz’.

Perhaps the most democratic shift in cultural organisation was the state’s

willingness to sponsor amateur arts to a degree that rivalled the profes-

sional. Falling under the broad rubric of samodeiatel’nost’, roughly translated

as amateur, but meaning ‘self-actuating’, amateur arts organisations bloomed

throughout the Soviet Union. Devoted to all forms of activities and hob-

bies, clubs provided space, equipment and instruction to the working masses.

Although ‘Organise Cultured Leisure’ was the pervasive if unappealing slo-

gan of cultural authorities, the slogan should not obscure the fact that the

movement allowed simple Soviet citizens tremendous opportunity to enjoy

themselves, to socialise and to share their accomplishments with friends. Most

commonly, amateur arts groups were devoted to singing and dancing, with a

repertory that included dollops of ofﬁcially approved Soviet marches and large

shares of the folk music that only a few years before had been the target of prole-

tarian critics. In the Slavic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian ethnic republics,

42 Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1970 (New York: Norton,

1972).

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the revival(often artiﬁcial) of folk music and dance was used to demonstrate the

deep roots of Soviet nationalities policy. The amateur arts movement allowed

common citizens to participate in Soviet cultural life. Oddly the movement,

whose folk aesthetics were in utter contradiction to socialist realism, thrived

most during the years when the state promoted socialist realism most avidly.

The repressions of the immediate pre-war years undermined the world of

culture. Popular song and amateur arts seemed to thrive, but the movie busi-

ness was producing fewer and fewer ﬁlms every year, artists were conﬁned

to narrow ranges of expression and the literary world lost many of the great

writers who had made the ﬁrst decade of Soviet literature so rich. Arts admin-

istrators maintained their jobs by parroting the most recent party line, and

in doing so destroyed the careers of talented peers. Artistic unions formed

to defend the interests of artists now existed to control them. Soviet culture

suffered from a deep split between artists, administrators and audiences.

Similar rifts within Soviet society left the country unprepared for the war

that began in June 1941. The army, whose command structure had been

destroyed in the purges of 1938, could not resist German attacks; the state

found it impossible to organise retreat or resistance in the early months of the

war. The party central leadership seemed incapable of response. Yet Soviet

artists responded immediately and powerfully to the German invasion, creat-

ing songs, posters, newspaper and radio reports and later stories and movies

that gave Soviet citizens an outlet for their fury and despair. The ability to

adapt to war footing far faster than the army, party or state suggests that

Soviet cultural organisations were much stronger than would have seemed

possible.

The most difﬁcult years for many Soviet artists were the two between the

signing of the Soviet–German Non-aggression Pact in August 1939 and the

German invasion. The tremendous pressure on cultural organs to provide

ideological support for the never-ending purges, for the growing cult of Stalin

and for the forced incorporation of territories into the Soviet Union challenged

even loyal minions. Three years of bloody purges left them unsure of whom to

praise and wary of paying tribute to any policy line that could, within the space

of several days, be declared anathema. The sudden ﬂip-ﬂop into friendship

with Hitler’s Germany was even more traumatic. Many younger journalists,

songwriters and artists had learned their craft by castigating the Nazi scourge.

43 Frank Miller, FolkloreforStalin: RussianFolkloreand Pseudofolklore of theStalin Era (Armonk,

N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).

44 Richard Stites (ed.), Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1995).

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Some fell silent, others turned their attention elsewhere. Still others ignored

the situation, The most popular singers of that era were Kozin (soon to be

arrested) and Iur’eva, honey-voiced crooners of love songs. In the cinema the

most popular offerings were Pyr’ev’s sweet musical comedies. Movies such

as Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Liberation (Osvobozhdenie)(1940), which chronicled

the ‘reuniﬁcation’ of Western Ukraine (otherwise known as eastern Poland)

under the terms of the Soviet–German Treaty, or Vasilii Belaev’s Mannerheim

Line (1940), about the Soviet–Finnish war, quickly passed as embarrassing bows

to government campaigns.

Sergei Eisenstein provides an illustration of an artist who continued to iden-

tify with the state, yet wished to maintain artistic integrity. When anti-German

feeling was at its height, he directed his classic Aleksandr Nevskii (1938), which

chronicled how in 1242 that Novgorodian prince uniﬁed the Russians and

repulsed the invasion of the Teutonic Knights. The climactic battle on the ice

of Lake Peipus is one of cinema’s great action scenes, and the ﬁlm score com-

posed by Sergei Prokoﬁev offers one of ﬁlm’s greatest collaborations between

composer and director. Unmistakable analogies between the Teutonic Knights

and modern Germans, Nevskii’s Novgorod and Stalin’s Soviet Russia made

the ﬁlm an effective piece of propaganda. The unfortunate shift in foreign pol-

icy that followed within a year made the ﬁlm politically obsolete, and it was

removed from circulation. Soon after the signing of the pact, Eisenstein was

commissioned to direct Richard Wagner’s Die Walk

ure, the apotheosis of the

German spirit, at the Bol’shoi Theatre. Meant as a gesture of cultural friend-

ship, the production left German representatives at the 1940 premiere offended

by its aesthetic innovations, ‘deliberate Jewish tricks’ as they called them. The

German invasion soon erased the controversy. Wagner was removed from the

repertory, and Nevskii was once against released to Soviet screens.

Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War came from an ability of society to

rally around the war effort, to tap into deep wells of patriotic faith, to unify

itself behind the state and its leader Joseph Stalin. Soviet culture played an

integral part in this enterprise. The ﬁrst rallying cries issued from the pens

of the young journalists, artists and songwriters who had made their careers

during the purge era. The venom that they so deplorably unleashed against

their compatriots seemed entirely appropriate when directed against Fascist

invaders. The war seemed to liberate writers and artists who had previously

operated inside Soviet cultural rules, to give them a subject matter appropriate

45 The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1998); Al LaVal-

ley and Barry P. Scherr (eds.), Eisenstein at 100: A Reconsideration (New Brunswick, N.J.:

Rutgers University Press, 2001).

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to their style, allowing them to access once unacceptable cultural idioms. Most

remarkable in this regard was the widespread use of Christian symbols as a

source of Russian national identity. Only one day after the German attack,

Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, erstwhile lyricist of orthodox Soviet songs (‘Life’s

Getting Better and Happier Too’, 1936; ‘The Common Soviet Man’, 1938),

and General Aleksandr Aleksandrov, director of the Red Army Chorus, wrote

and recorded ‘Holy War’, a stirring march that served as anthem for the

war. Political cartoonists such as Boris Eﬁmov, who had cut his teeth on

anti-Trotskyite caricatures for Pravda, and Kukryniksy, a trio of cartoonists

who had begun publishing cartoons in 1933, immediately drew anti-German

posters that were distributed throughout the country. They continued to do

so throughout the war, and remained the most effective graphic propagandists

in the country. A similar development took place in journalism, where older

political journalists such as Boris Gorbatov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Aleksandr

Korneichuk were joined by recent graduates such as Konstantin Simonov

in creating an effective brand of wartime journalism. In the earliest months

of the war, when the mass media at their worst were pretending that the

war effort was going well, these journalists made the perilous journey to

the front, addressed the obvious catastrophe and yet offered their readers

hope and courage. Ehrenburg proclaimed German barbarity to be the sign

of a cultural rot that could not defeat Soviet civilisation. Simonov travelled

to western Russia, witnessed the caravans of soldiers and common people

streaming east before the German tanks and wrote poems of heartfelt grief.

His ‘Wait for Me’ (Zhdi menia) and ‘Smolensk Roads’ (Ty, pomnish’, Alesha,

dorogi Smolenshchiny) were recited as prayers throughout the war and after.

Newspapers, posters and popular songs, which could be generated quickly

and distributed throughout the vast country, were the most effective means

to rally the people in the ﬁrst year of the war. Most of the Soviet Union was

accessible by radio and print. Radio proved a particularly effective medium.

Soviet broadcasting switched from the wire-fed system that had allowed the

state to control content and cut off outside broadcasts, to shortwave broadcasts

that could reach over enemy lines to the occupied territories. Journalists could

report developments on the front immediately, allowing breathless listeners

to follow the heroic defences of Stalingrad and Leningrad. Soldiers could hear

the latest recordings of their favourite singers singing 1930s classics or new

hits. Mark Bernes sang his beloved ‘Dark Night’ (1942), Klavdiia Shulzhenko

her romantic ‘Blue Scarf ’ (1941) and Leonid Utesov recorded his satiric ‘Baron

von der Pschick’ (1942). For all the popularity of Soviet-produced culture,

however, listeners on the front and at home most avidly followed readings

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Culture, 1900–1945

of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Voina i mir). The Russian defeat of a foreign

invader through persistence and endurance offered a comforting analogy to

the present.

The desperation and raw emotion of the ﬁrst year, which gave birth to

short genres with an immediate response to the surrounding world, and a

direct route to the emotions of readers and listeners, gave way to more sub-

stantial artistic forms later in the war. This was due to the fact partly that artists

and writers had more time to work and plan, and partly that cultural insti-

tutions that had ceased to function recovered their footing. Censors that had

ceded their functions to editors and administrators in the early months of war

once again became an effective barrier to unorthodox expression. Arts-funding

organisations once again received the political guidance they needed to oper-

ate. The Bol’shoi Theatre in Moscow, and the large theatres in Leningrad could

again offer the classics of drama, opera and ballet. Productions boosted morale

in the big cities where they were performed, and throughout Russia where

they were broadcast. They infused Soviet citizens, foremost Soviet Russians,

with a pride in their culture at a time when national pride constituted the core

of public morale; and they offered proof that civilisation could survive in the

face of Fascist barbarity.

The conﬁdence in ﬁnal victory gained by the summer of 1943 gave Soviet life

an unprecedented legitimacy. Soviet culture, commissioned by party and state,

accomplished its design. Inspired by Marxism-Leninism, devoted to the cause

of the working people, obedient to their representative, the Communist Party;

committed to a single message, and receptive to artists of all circumstances

of birth: such were the ideals it embodied. Soviet artists and writers had an

immediate relationship with their audience that might have been the envy of

artists throughout the world. Oddly enough, it was only the German invasion

that made the vision of a cultural monolith come true.

Conclusion

Russian-Soviet culture was fundamentally different after ﬁfty years of social

and institutional change. An institutional framework based on the autocracy

had given way to private and informal institutions, which were then swept

away by the October Revolution. Soviet cultural institutions came into being

only slowly, hindered ﬁrst by ﬁnancial constraints, then by a shortage of knowl-

edgeable cadres and later by unpredictable ideological shifts. The centrality

of social mission to art, an article of faith to the intelligentsia that had been

tested by modernism and market-based popular culture, was institutionalised

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in Soviet times and made obligatory. The modernist impulse so strong in the

early years of the century, which had enriched Russian artistic culture and had

responded to the revolutionary spirit, was ultimately rejected for the aesthetic

of socialist realism. It is important to understand that Soviet popular culture

was often genuinely popular, and that the political orthodoxy unpalatable to

other cultures and other times did not always bother the intended audience.

Many products of Stalinist popular culture were beloved by Soviet audiences

long after their political context had faded. Soviet classics enjoy great popular

support even today, now that the Soviet Union is a distant memory.

One must not forget, however, that Soviet culture was founded on coercion.

The state and party controlled all the institutions of arts education, creation,

production and distribution. Artists had no choice but to conform to artistic

controls, and audiences knew little but what the state provided them. The

audience’s apparent enjoyment of Soviet cultural products in pre-war years,

and the deep response during the war, took place in the absence of compe-

tition. No less a legacy of Soviet culture is the wretched treatment of gifted

artists, writers, composers. Those who died, and those who were hounded

into silence, were also beloved by Soviet readers, and their legacy lives on.

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josephine woll

During the more than half a century covered in this chapter, the Soviet Union

experiencedabewilderingarray of changes, up to and including its owndemise.

The ﬁnal years of Stalin’s life and rule, when the country had to regenerate

itself after the devastation of the Second World War, involved major cultural

repressions amid a climate of isolationism and xenophobia. Between Stalin’s

death in 1953 and the mid-1960s, Soviet ofﬁcialdom shed its most tyranni-

cal aspects, and despite frequent reimposition of cultural controls, artistic

creativity ﬂourished. Brezhnev’s reign curtailed much of the dynamism char-

acteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged during Gor-

bachev’s ﬁve years of perestroika and glasnost’. Finally, after the upheavals

that ended Gorbachev’s rule, Russia now vies for attention and proﬁt in a

world market. In slightly more than half a century, then, the society has gone

from absolute political centralisation to substantial if jagged decentralisation,

from state-planned mega-economic structures to market-dependent enter-

prises, from power- and prestige-based hierarchies to money-based class struc-

tures. Its creative artists, once tacit partners with the state in a contract based

on mutual support, must fend for themselves in a difﬁcult and competitive

environment.

Paralysis, 1945–53

Although Soviet culture was never entirely monolithic and univocal, it prob-

ably came closest to that condition between Victory Day (8 May 1945) and

Stalin’s death nearly eight years later. Broadly speaking, the arts in those years

had nothing whatever to do with an artist’s unique and untrammelled creative

energies, and little to do with the art prevalent in the 1920sand1930s, born

My thanks to Caryl Emerson, Julian Graffy, Joan Neuberger, Robert Sharlet and Ron Suny

for their extremely helpful comments and corrections on earlier drafts of this essay.

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