USSR: Culture and the Arts Flashcards
What did the government aim to create with arts and culture?
The “new Soviet man”- an ideal socialist who thinks and acts according to socialist values.
What was the status of culture, according to Lenin?
According to Lenin, culture was vital but subordinate to class conflict and the retention of power.
What were Lenin’s own cultural tastes?
Lenin’s cultural tastes were conservative, with a liking for classical Russian culture. He wanted the Party to keep high-calibre writers and artists on side as much as possible.
What was one important development Lenin implemented early on?
One important development Lenin implemented early after the seizure of power was to create a Commissariat of Enlightenment, a ministry of culture, to support and encourage artists. This was a development welcomed by artists as it replaced the heavy restrictions and censorship of the old regime. (1917)
This encouraged many artists to collaborate with the regime.
Who were “Fellow Travelers”?
Lenin seemed prepared to accommodate those artists who were not communists but who were sympathetic to the ideals of the Revolution and who found plenty of material for their work in the events of the period. These artists were labelled by Trotsky as “Fellow Travelers”. Not all Bolsheviks were happy with this approach.
Who was the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment?
Anatoly Lunacharsky
Who were Constructivists?
Those who wished to create a new proletarian culture based on the worker ad industrial technology.
How were the workers and peasants encouraged to produce their own culture?
The magazine “Smithy” was established, which contained poems about machines and factories. The government also made use of festivals to develop a new culture based on socialist values, and extra food rations were sometimes used as an incentive for crowds to turn up.
How were the achievements of the workers, and the Party, reinforced through the arts?
The anniversary of the Revolution in 1920 was celebrated by a re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace using over 8,000 people. Parades through Red Square in Moscow were organised and directed by the Party to the extent that they were examples of street theatre.
What is high culture and how did the Prolekult compare?
High Culture: This is used to refer to those art forms, such as ballet, opera and fine art, that are geared towards a restricted and exclusive audience. The Bolsheviks disliked “high” culture, as opposed to “low” culture, seeing it as “bourgeois art”.
Prolekult was a direct challenge to high culture and it became popular for a time, but by the early 1920s the government was concerned at the variety of viewpoints expressed through this culture from the people and started to impose restrictions.
Why did the Bolsheviks put so much stress on visual arts?
Due to low literacy rates and the hope to convey the Communist message through copious amounts of propaganda.
How was a new futuristic world presented in art?
The influence of Modernism, with its emphasis on abstract art, was coupled with that of Futurism as artists attempted to convey visions of a futuristic world.
How was Cinema used to benefit the regime?
As it was relatively new, the cinema was open to vast experimentation. Sergei Eisenstein was particularly innovative and he had already made Strike by 1924 and Battleship Potemkin was in production, to be released in 1925.
Lenin had stated the importance of cinema as a tool for promoting political messages, but it was sometimes too sophisticated for the audience. Therefore, if culture was to mould people’s beliefs and values, the avant-garde movement was not the answer.
What was the Cultural Revolution?
The movement by Communist Party activists to purge all “bourgeois” elements from Soviet culture. It was caught up in the pressures that led to the Five-Year Plan and collectivisation and was part of an overall shift away from the middle classes.
What happened to Fellow Travellers under Stalin?
They were removed and replaced by artists whose loyalty to socialism was not in question.
How were bourgeois elements disrupted during the Cultural Revolution?
- Young enthusiastic communists from Komsomol were encouraged to root out and attack “bourgeois” elements.
- Theatre productions of suspect plays were disrupted by booing and whistling
- In literature, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) made increasingly bitter attacks on the Fellow Travellers and condemned the decadent individualism of writers who adopted new experimental techniques.
What types of works did RAPP prefer?
Influenced by the ideas of the Prolekult movement, RAPP preferred works that stressed the achievements of the workers, in what became termed the cult of the “little man”.
What was the cult of the “little man”?
The writing of novels that glorified the achievements of the industrial worker and collective peasant. It was encouraged by the government and was a criticism of “bourgeois” writing, which often focused on wealthy people of high status.
