It was the course of history that by the time of the revolution the authors of «critical realism» works were either dead or managed to join the consuming “elite” of the empire.
Those of the men of arts belonging to this movement who had survived the revolution refused to accept the new regime not only because they were afraid of repressions. To a large extent the reason was their unwillingness to lose that hard-won “elite” status. As a result, many of them left for foreign countries (I. Bunin, I. Repin, A. Gorky). When life in the USSR became stable, some of them agreed to return to their motherland. Here those who returned continued working but performed different roles (A. Tolstoy and A. Gorky: A. Tolstoy was an active socialist realist writer, while A. Gorky was considered to be the founder and personification of socialist realism, though he was rather a devoted nihilist than a realist aspiring to the future).
The others died abroad (I. Repin, I. Bunin), refusing to return to their homeland and thereby to «serve the regime» which would employ their creative work or authority (so they thought), the regime where national bolshevism and anti-national Marxist psychic Trotskyism — equally alien to them — were intertwined. Yet actually they refused to serve not the regime but their people because they refused to contribute their artistic work to the cause of separating bolshevism and psychic Trotskyism in all fields of people’s life, and thereby they refused to contribute to the cause of liberating the country and people from the power of psychic Trotskyism.
The conservative cultural movement existing in the USSR of the period of transition to socialism consists of permanent revolutionary Marxist psychic Trotskyites from the ideological point of view, and from the artistic style point of view — of all sorts of abstractionist avant-gardism which is the expression of psychic Trotskyism. In other words, in psychic Trotskyism there was no conflict between its social science and art. But there was a conflict between psychic Trotskyism and life. That is why many who genuinely searched for new forms and ways to express the sense of Life in art and aspired to the future could not survive in that environment. One of them was V. Mayakovsky who became known as an avant-garde futurist[263] poet as far back as the pre-revolutionary years. There were also many others who were hunted down by the members of RAPP[264] and of other associations of r-r-revolutionary artists.
The bolshevist leadership of the USSR headed by J.V. Stalin was not mistaken[265] in equating the political fraction of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) led by L. Bronstein (Trotsky) which formed the opposition to bolshevists and the avant-gardism in the post-revolutionary art, though many men of arts did not understand then and do not understand now the reasons for the bolshevists to reject avant-gardism and the goals of suppressing it.
The reality is that most of mentally ill people are not aware of their illness. It is mainly schizophrenic people and dopers who applaud to schizophrenia and ravings stimulated by dopes (from cigarettes and alcohol to heavier drugs) expressed in artistic work. What schizophrenic and delirious art, especially the one produced by men of great talent, evokes from mentally healthy people is mainly pity. But apart from complete mental cases — those who have a more or less acute mental disease, there are quite a lot of people in a crowd-“elitist” society whose psychic stability and self-control leave much to be desired. And such people, depending on what circumstances they find themselves in, what kind of art (above all, music, art, cinema and in future computer interactive[266] games and virtual plays) they are influenced by, can either become mentally ill or escape this unfortunate lot which is dangerous both for themselves and their fellow citizens.
Therefore one must distinguish suppressing nihilistic avant-gardism, which does not care about the people’s future destiny from oppressing a creative search of novel artistic forms and means of expressing the sense of Life in art. Suppressing nihilistic avant-gardism is objectively the means of protecting teenagers whose psyche is still being molded, as well as many adult mentally unstable people, preventing them from becoming more or less mad owing to the influence of avant-garde art. This is a means of protecting the society’s moral and psychic health[267], though since it cannot substitute the rest of such means it isn’t self-sufficient.
During the last two decades of the USSR’s existence the intelligentsia (mostly people with I-centric individualist or individualist-corporate cast of psyche) has been making lots of fun over «socialist realism». It has been the custom to accuse it of creative barrenness, servility towards the ruling regime which caused socialist realist artists do nothing but embellish, decorate and create a false impression of the «foul socialist» reality.
Everyone got their share: M. Sholohov for “Virgin Soil Upturned” and for the alleged plagiarism of “The Quiet Don”[268], A. Gorky for being at the head of the team of authors who wrote the book “The Stalin Channel”[269] about how the White sea — Baltic sea channel was designed and built between 1929 and 1932 by prisoners of the NKVD’s GULAG (special prisoner servitude camps). But it was the cinema that received the largest share of condemnation, as cinema in the USSR was a state monopoly serving the state’s policy from the very beginning. Due to the exclusively state nature of cinema in the USSR it must be considered the most prominent manifestation of socialist realism both at its best and at its worst.
Let us therefore turn to cinema. “The Kuban Cossacks” movie alone suffered hundreds of attacks and accusations from the democratisers for its false bombast (affluence in a kolkhoz in the days of crops failure and famine of the 1949), for embellishing and «embroidering» the reality. Yet at the time this film had many fans, including people in Kuban. The critics of the democratic wing explain such examples of socialist realist arts’ popularity by saying that people escaped from the dreadful Soviet reality into a world of dreams.
They seem to be sure that Bolsheviks, the advocates of socialism and communism, have nothing to disprove that assumption with. But those who think so actually enter an intellectual blind alley, because that assumption leads to a very simple question:
What was it that people returned with back to the world of Soviet reality from the world of dreams created in socialist realist movies and other arts?
The most general answer would be that they returned from the world of Soviet movie-dreams with something completely different from what modern teenagers come back with from the world of Hollywood movie-dreams and what drunkards and other drug addicts of all times including the times of bourgeois reforms in Russia come back with from their drug-dreams.
Of course, socialist realism altogether was not a homogeneous phenomenon. It did have servility to the regime amounting to vindication of all abuses committed by officials and attempts to prove them non-existent, as well as claiming any accusations directed against those officials to be calumny. But there was also something else, something which makes the answer to the question about the way of coming back from the world of dreams evoked by socialist realism to the social and historic reality to be the answer to the question about the true nature of socialist realism and its historic momentum which is very much different from the opinions of the dissident intelligentsia. This statement cannot be proven logically. But art speaks for itself, not depending on the manner in which it is presented by the critics and what terms they use to define its styles and genres. Let us then turn to facts.