The party now intended to give literature and art firm direction. Stalin told the writers that they were the “engineers of human souls,” but he did not give them the blueprint. That was to come from the method of “socialist realism,” and at the first Writers’ Congress in 1934 A. A. Zhdanov and Maksim Gorkii, assisted by the former oppositionists Bukharin and Radek, tried to define what that was. The idea was to “reflect reality in its revolutionary development.” The implication was that the writer needed to show the great changes in Soviet life, but avoid concentrating on mistakes or shortcomings, and indicate how society was moving forward. The result was to demand a kind of official optimism that was very hard to provide in practice, as it would lead to flattened characters and unconvincing conflicts. The other side of socialist realism was that it was to become the art of the people and as such had to be accessible. This issue peaked in 1936, not over literature, but as a result of the staging of Dmitrii Shostakovich’s opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The composer thought that he had made a good Soviet opera, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov that showed the dark, oppressive world of pre-revolutionary Russia. Instead he met savage criticism for his adoption of modernist musical language similar to that found in Western music of the time. In the minds of his critics, the opera was cacophonic and incomprehensible. It was “formalist,” a term that immediately became one of the most serious charges an artist could face. The writers as well understood the implications of the attack on Shostakovich, and realized that their styles would have to change. Many of them, even the most loyal supporters of the revolution, had employed style and narrative techniques that were innovative and modern in the 1920s, but now they were supposed to construct a novel much as Turgenev had done in the nineteenth century.
Besides mandating the correct direction in the arts, the party leadership in the later 1930s moved to expand and subsidize artistic institutions, and indeed the intelligentsia as a whole. The great theaters, the Bolshoi in Moscow and the Mariinskii (Kirov) in Leningrad, no longer scraped by on small budgets. The opera and ballet became central parts of Soviet culture, and although they were concentrated in the two main cities, they were not restricted to those places. Older cities such as Kiev and Tbilisi, now serving as republican capitals, also found their theaters with more solid budgets. In provincial cities and new republican capitals large theaters for musical performances and concerts sprang up. The great companies were encouraged to do provincial tours. Budgets for dramatic theaters also increased, as did the number of theaters in provincial and republican capitals. The theaters and orchestras supported a great many actors and musicians and in a style that became increasingly removed from that of the Soviet population. The Writers’ Union actually spent most of its effort in the 1930s not on ideological issues but on securing control of superior housing in the cities and the dacha districts, and even building them when it could. Pasternak was able to acquire a two-story house in Peredelkino – a dacha village for writers near Moscow – to use as his home for the rest of his life. Writers had access to the Union’s closed food and consumer goods distribution service. By the war, Shostakovich had a multi-room apartment, servants, and a car with driver. Thus the artistic elite came to match the scientists in standards of living, remaining only slightly less well off than the party elite itself.
Perhaps the central art form of the 1930s was film. During NEP, the necessary resources were simply unavailable for mass production and circulation of movies, and Hollywood productions filled the theaters. The cultural revolution tried to change this situation, but the works of that era were as shallow and short-lived as they were in other art forms and they came under heavy criticism, to boot. In the course of the 1930s the Soviet film industry changed radically. The state devoted increasing sums to the production of film stock and studio facilities, and bought expensive equipment abroad, including the entire technology for sound films acquired from the United States. Unlike all the other arts, cinema was a state industry under the state film committee, which answered directly to the central government, not a branch industrial unit. In keeping with its central status, it also received personal attention from Stalin himself. Most of the new films were shown in the Kremlin in the presence of the heads of the film industry, who received extensive comments from the leader. Stalin’s views of cinema were surprisingly sophisticated: he found most of the early films on revolutionary or other political subjects boring, and told the filmmakers that the country needed more comedies. That was a tall order, since the scriptwriters and directors were mostly afraid to satirize Soviet institutions, even mildly, though Stalin told them directly that they should do so. Ultimately the result was a series of authentically popular musical comedies, many of them starring Liubov’ Orlova, who became the leader’s favorite actress.
The expanded institutional base in film and theater came with much greater ideological demands on the arts. All forms of art were to be accessible as well as politically correct. The 1936 attack on formalism led to particular kinds of productions. In the ballet the many small experimental studios of the 1920s closed, and in their place came the large ballet companies that presented a basically classical choreography but with new sorts of ballets. There were attempts at “revolutionary” content, but very quickly Soviet dance moved toward story ballets, which were often based on literary classics and performed with undistinguished music – Boris Asaf’ev’s Fountain of Bakhchisarai (based on Pushkin) became the most popular of all. Shostakovich turned to more accessible musical styles, and Sergei Prokofiev, back in the Soviet Union since 1935, did the same. His music for Romeo and Juliet gave the repertory at least one ballet that fit the required esthetic but provided great music, as did his film music for Eisenstein’s two masterpieces, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. No one escaped criticism: Eisenstein had two movies banned in the 1930s and returned to favor only in 1938 with Alexander Nevsky.