3- Culture

Question 1

Was it successful- P1 Allowed each leader to achieve their political agenda. Lenin

Answer 1

Commissariat of Enlightenment creation- a ministry of culture to support artists, replacing the heavy censorship, encouraging artists to work with new regime. Prepared to accommodate ‘fellow travellers’ sympathetic to regime. Significant as 300,000 , Constituent Assembly Jan 1918 SR emerged as largest singular Party 21 mil votes compared to 9 mil. In the throes of civil war. Prolekult was a propaganda success. Workers and peasants encouraged to produce own culture. Magazine Smithy. Festivals, extra food rations as incentives to turn up. Avant-Garde - art futurism low literacy rates so stress on visual arts.

Question 2

P1 Lenin The anniversary of the Revolution

Answer 2

Celebrated by a re-enactment of the storming of the winter palace/ over 8000 people. Parades Red Square. The achievements of the workers and the Party that ruled in their name reinforced through the arts

Question 3

P1- Allowed each leader to achieve their political agenda STALIN

Answer 3

Allowed him to consolidate personal power and achieve economic aims- CR during plans and collectivisation. Komosol Full-scale attack on traditional writers & artists- no fellow travellers. Literature- the Russia. Association of Proletarian Writers- condemned new experimental techniques & preferred works stressing the achievements of the workers ‘the cult of the little man’ r.g. Kataev’s novel Time Forward 1932. Story of a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk. Then 1932 closed and changed to Socialist Realism, policed by The Union of Soviet Writers. Art presented idealised images of life under socialism to convince’life has become more joyeous’. Harnessed by regime to project ideal images of life under plans. Stalin had told artists that they should make it clear who was responsible for the achievements of socialism. This
often resulted in a fusion of Socialist Realism with the cult of personality

Question 4

P1- Stalin, continued

Answer 4

Literature- Change of emphasis from the cult of little man to heroes connected to Party. Widespread political indoctrination- low price & tenfold growth in library acquisitions. Through govt agencies, Party controlled what was published and by whom.

Question 5

P1- STALIN, film

Answer 5

Film The achievements of the Revolution were conveyed through films, such as Eisenstein’s October (1927), which presented the heroic version of the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. This served the interests of the government in presenting the Revolution as a mass movement.
During the Second World War, the
cinema was used to promote patriotism in defence of both Mother Russia and socialism: the film Alexander Nevsky was one of the most popular.

Question 6

P1- Socialist realism- easy to criticise as being out-of-touch with reality, but

Answer 6

some committed Party members were willing to believe and others were prepared to use to inspire them to work harder. Other sections
of the population, while not believing them, may have found the images to be a satisfying method of escapism. This range of functions gave the government many
opportunities to use the arts and popular culture to mobilise support at a range of levels for the regime.

Question 7

P1- fitted with Khrushchev’s political agenda of personality cult of anti-STALIN

Answer 7

• Khrushchev’s personal intervention led to the publication of the previously banned book by Solzhenitsyn, which recounted the appalling experiences of life in the Gulag. Fitted in with the new political emphasis of
  de-Stalinisation.