World War, boomed when the war isolated the country and created domestic opportunities for Russian studios. By 1917, directors such as Petr Chardynin, Vladimir Gardin, Iakov Protazanov and Evgenii Bauer were presenting viewers with distinctive Russian views of life and history, played by recognisable stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin and Vera Kholodnaia.[11]
Popular culture was produced by profit-making enterprises, which varied from small family-owned printing presses to the large movie studios. All were subject to the marketplace and responsive to the changing tastes of the popular audience. Disdained by the arbiters of elite culture, popular culture encouraged literacy, exposed audiences to a variety of music, and in the cinema, exposed them to unknown worlds. Lower-class consumers did not seem to share the intelligentsia's assumption that culture need be edifying to be worthwhile. In its sensationalism, popular culture often exposed audiences to social trends ignored by other art forms. Sensational crime stories often revealed the social tensions underlying violence. Sexual innuendo and scandal-mongering encouraged the creation of independent female characters, who in their search for passion transgressed once impenetrable social barriers. Anastasia Verbit- skaia, writer of the best-selling novel Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi shchastiia), and Count Amori (Ippolit Rapgof), wildly successful writer of film scenarios, were two of the many signs that women and non-Russian nationalities were becoming part of Russian culture.[12]
The Bolsheviks showed a great capacity to exploit cultural change when they seized power. The years following the war probably would have seen tremendous cultural innovations even without the Bolsheviks, as was the case in Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks made the lower classes the ultimate client of culture. Their long-term policy was to turn cultural institutions to the advantage of the new ruling classes.
Soon after taking power, the Bolsheviks launched an ambitious cultural programme that ran counter to the extremely limited means at their disposal. The policy, executed by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and its leader, Anatolii Lunacharskii, relied on the extensive seizure and nationalisation of existing cultural institutions, and on a much smaller and unco-ordinated effort to create new institutions.13 The first enterprises to fall under Bolshevik power were printing presses.14 The monopoly on the press, a policy that history has come to associate with the Bolsheviks, came about haphazardly, without a programmatic decision from the party. The two revolutions of 1917 had given birth to a vigorous and diverse press. By early 1918 few non-Bolshevik newspapers were open, and they were subject to strict censorship and closed when their criticisms became too acute. One newspaper to be closed was New Life (Novaia zhizn), edited by Lenin's friend and political sympathiser Maxim Gorky, perhaps the most popular living writer in Russia.15 Similar actions took place in other institutions inherited from the Old Regime, including imperial theatres, universities, art and music academies. Employees of these institutions had once been members of the privileged elite, and resented their new masters bitterly. It would take several years to bring the institutions under control, a decade in the case of some universities.
Chaos often overwhelmed signs of health and vigour. The economic catastrophes that accompanied the civil war destroyed much of the productive capacity of cultural institutions. Popular education was in disarray, leaving a generation for whom culture, even literacy, was an unattainable luxury. Deep divisions appeared among artists and institutions about the fundamental purpose of art. Before the revolution most artists could, despite their differences, agree that artistic expression had some purposes entirely apart from social progress. The Bolsheviks did not agree. They came to power convinced that culture, politics and society are part of a great whole, infused with the same spirit. It was unimaginable to them that the political and cultural life of a country could function on opposing principles, that the state could pursue a socialist agenda while cultural life was determined by the dictates of the market.16
The hope that revolution would liberate the working class to create its own culture had been cherished before the revolution. Some counted on the
13 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
14 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 19171929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
15 Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 19171918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
16 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
so-called 'worker-intellectuals' (samouchki, or self-taught intellectuals), uncommon men from the working and lower-middle classes who by force of will found time in their hard lives to read and write. The first worker-intellectuals had become visible in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century, there was a significant body of literature by these men.[13] Aleksandr Bogdanov, a doctor, philosopher, economist and leading Bolshevik thinker, proposed another model of working-class culture. As described in the science fiction classic Red- Star (Krasnaia zvezda) (1908), Bogdanov's vision was one in which work and leisure merged into one, and art reflected the deep-seated principles of freedom and equality. Bogdanov believed that the proletariat could not properly exploit political power before it possessed socialist consciousness, disagreeing with Lenin, who believed that socialist culture could not be created before political power was in proletarian hands. While the Bolsheviks were planning insurrection in the autumn of 1917, Bogdanov and colleagues were creating a cultural network that came to be called Proletkul't.[14] At its peak, the network encompassed over a thousand clubs throughout Russia with a hundred thousand members, most devoted to basic instruction in writing, theatre and the arts. The central leadership of the movement followed an ambitious agenda that claimed to be the sole arm ofproletarian cultural management, superseding the state. When the Bolsheviks consolidated their power at the conclusion of the civil war, Proletkul't became an impediment to unified state management. Lenin himselfdevoted considerable energy to reining in the movement, so that by 1921 its influence was greatly diminished. No fully autonomous proletarian cultural organisation ever again arose in the Soviet Union.
11
Denise Youngblood,
12
James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds (eds.),
13
Mark D. Steinberg,
14
LynnMally,