The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. 'A new science, art, literature, and morality', wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918, 'is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs.'33 The roots of the movement went back to the 1900s when the Forward (Vperedist) group of the Social Democrats (Gorky, Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky)
had set up schools in Italy for workers smuggled out of Russia. The object was to educate a tier of 'conscious proletarian socialists', a sort of working-class intelligentsia, who would then spread their knowledge to other workers and thereby ensure that the revolutionary movement created its own cultural revolution. In the Vperedists' view the organic development of a working-class culture was an essential prerequisite for the success of a socialist and democratic revolution, because knowledge was the key to power and, until the masses controlled it, they would be dependent on the bourgeoisie. The Vperedists clashed bitterly with Lenin, who was dismissive of the workers' potential as an independent cultural force, but after 1917, when the leading Bolsheviks were preoccupied with the more pressing matter of the civil war, cultural policy was left largely in their hands. Lunacharsky became the evocatively titled Commissar of Enlightenment, while Bogdanov assumed the leadership of the Proletkult movement. At its peak, in 1920, Proletkult claimed over 400,000 members in its factory clubs and theatres, artists' workshops and creative writing groups, brass bands and choirs, organized into some 300 branches spread across the Soviet territory. There was even a Proletarian University in Moscow and a Socialist Encyclopaedia, whose publication was seen by Bogdanov as a preparation for the future proletarian civilization, just as, in his view, Diderot's Encyclopedic had been an attempt by the rising bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century France to prepare its own cultural revolution.34 As one might expect in such a broad movement, there was a great diversity of views on the proper content of this revolutionary culture. The main ideological division concerned the relationship between the new and old, the Soviet and the Russian, in the proletarian civilization. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult there was a strong iconoclastic trend that revelled in the destruction of the old world. 'It's time for bullets to pepper museums', declared Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, a loose association of Futurists and Constructivists which sought to link the avant-garde with Proletkult and the Soviet state. He dismissed the classics as 'old aesthetic junk' and punned that Rastrelli, the great palace-builder of St Petersburg, should be put against the wall (rasstreliat' in Russian means to execute). Much of this was intellectual swagger, like these lines from the poem 'We' by Vladimir Kirillov, the Proletkult poet:
In the name of our tomorrow we will burn Raphael, Destroy the museum, and trample over Art.35
Yet there was also the Utopian faith that a new culture would be built on the rubble of the old. The most committed members of the Proletkult were serious believers in the idea of a purely Soviet civilization that was entirely purged of historical and national elements. This 'Soviet culture' would be internationalist, collectivist and proletarian. There would be a proletarian philosophy, proletarian science and proletarian arts. Under the influence of such ideas, experimental forms of art appeared. There were films without professional actors (using 'types' selected from the streets), orchestras without conductors and 'concerts in the factory', with sirens, whistles, hooters, spoons and washboards as the instruments. Shostakovich (perhaps with tongue in cheek) introduced the sound of factory whistles in the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October') in 1927.
But was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? How could one have a 'proletarian culture', or a 'proletarian intelligentsia', unless the proletariat was first educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? And if they were so educated, would they, or their culture, still be proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not expect to build their new culture entirely from scratch and that, however Utopian their plans, much of their work would consist of educating workers in the old culture. After 1921, once the Bolshevik victory in the civil war was assured, official policy encouraged something of a rapprochement with the 'petty-bourgeois' (that is, peasant and small-trading) sector and what remained of the intelligentsia, through the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Lenin, a conservative in artistic matters, had always been appalled by the cultural nihilism of the avant-garde. He once confessed to Klara Zetkin, the German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics were firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution's task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. As he put it to Zetkin, 'We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, use it
as a starting point, even if it is "old". Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is "old"? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is "new"?'36
But pressure on the Proletkult came from below as well as above. Most of the workers who visited its clubs wanted to learn French, or how to dance in pairs; they wanted to become, as they put it, more 'kul'turny' ('cultured'), by which they understood more 'refined'. In their habits and artistic taste, the Russian masses appeared to be resistant to the experiments of the avant-garde. There was little real enthusiasm for communal housing, which never escaped its associations with grim necessity. Even the inhabitants of commune houses rarely used their social space: they would take their meals from the canteen to their beds rather than eat them in the communal dining room.37 In the Moscow Soviet's model commune house, built in 1930, the residents put up icons and calendars of saints on the dormitory walls.38 The unlifelike images of the avant-garde were just as alien to a people whose limited acquaintance with the visual arts was based on the icon. Having decorated the streets of Vitebsk for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Chagall was asked by local officials: 'Why is the cow green and why is the house flying through the sky, why? What's the connection with Marx and Engels?'39 Surveys of popular reading habits in the 192Os show that the workers continued to prefer the adventure stories of the sort they had read before 1917, and even the nineteenth-century classics, to the 'proletarian poetry' of the avant-garde.40 Just as unsuccessful was the new music. At one 'concert in the factory' there was such a cacophonous din from all the sirens and the hooters that even the workers failed to recognize the tune of what was meant to be the anthem of their proletarian civilization: it was the Internationale.41