Political theatre in postrevolutionary Russia combined agitation (the use of catch-phrases and half-truths to exploit popular grievances) with propaganda (the use of historical and scientific arguments for purposes of indoctrination) in a form that came to be called agitprop. This form of theatre is explicitly intended to arouse the audience to action and to propagate the views and values of the sponsoring organization. In practice, the term agitprop is usually reserved for left-wing political theatre, though the form itself does not imply any particular ideology, nor is it restricted to politics. In fact, one of the greatest uses of agitprop techniques today occurs in commercial advertising. The reputation of political agitprop for poor aesthetic quality probably reflects the fact that many of the groups using it have viewed the political message as the raison d’être for the work and any aesthetic considerations have been deeply distrusted as interfering with its political purity.
Immediately after the Revolution the various arts were enlisted to further the propagandist aims of the Bolsheviks. Ships and trains were decked out with a variety of communicative devices ranging from poster art to poets reading their work. In a country where few could read the newspapers, actors acted out the news stories in a Living Newspaper. In 1921 a group of Moscow actors formed the Blue Blouses, a company named for the workers’ overalls its members wore as their basic costume. This group inspired the formation of other professional and amateur factory groups throughout the Soviet Union. Their work and methods set the standard for political theatre groups in other countries between 1921 and 1939.
The performances of the Blue Blouses were typically around an hour and a half long and began with a parade in which the actors presented themselves to the audience. The aim of this and similar groups was to be able to perform anywhere, and staging demands were extremely simple. The performances were montages comprising dramatic monologues, sketches, dialogues, mass declamations, and movement derived from dance and gymnastics. They frequently made use of animated posters for rapid cartoon characterization—similar to the photographers’ dummy boards with cutout faces that permit tourists to be photographed as cowboys or bathing beauties. Music was a prominent element, including instrumental numbers and folk and popular songs, often with satiric lyrics. Film was rarely used, but the Blue Blouses made a specialty of using flickering light on slowly moving actors to create the illusion of silent film. The dance and gymnastic routines seem to have been the most conventional and apolitical forms, but they were in practice the Blue Blouses’ greatest strength. In the process of moving scenic pieces, the actors could acrobatically combine to compose pictures, diagrams, and structures. One report of a sketch entitled “Industrialization” describes actors in costumes representing factories and power stations finally coming together to represent the government program for industrialization.
The Blue Blouses constructed their programs cleverly, juxtaposing the more overtly political pieces with the more entertaining pieces. The organization of a bill in this way was not new, since music hall and variety theatres had used this sort of planning for many years. What was new was the use of these skills for an ideological purpose, rather than simply to extract applause from an audience.
Ironically, the Blue Blouse movement was suppressed by Stalin in 1928. The reason seems to have been that the Blue Blouses saw satire as a legitimate part of their repertoire and proceeded to attack the inequities that followed the Revolution and the survival of prerevolutionary thought and class distinctions. In 1928 such a program was held to be counterproductive, and a more agreeable line of thought was called for. The doctrine that followed was called Socialist Realism, a political derivative of Naturalism that sought to present typical figures in a typical landscape. With state direction these were always liable to turn into idealized figures in an idealized landscape.
Just before their disbanding, the original Blue Blouse group made a tour of Germany in 1927 to celebrate 10 years of the Revolution. The visit coincided with the presence in Germany at a Communist-backed congress of representatives from many other countries. As a result, there arose an international movement of workers’ theatre groups performing, with varying degrees of skill, agitprop in the Blue Blouse mode. Whereas the Blue Blouses in their heyday could expect official support for their minimal required facilities, the groups in nonsocialist countries could not, and a new resourcefulness resulted. One of the many German groups formed had a furniture pantechnicon in which it toured the working-class tenement courtyards, lowering a side of the van to reveal a ready-made stage that could quickly be folded up and driven away in advance of a police raid. Groups elsewhere took their theatre to public gathering places, often symbolic sites. Groups performed in the streets, on the backs of flat motor trucks, at mass meetings in city squares, as well as on the steps of employment exchanges and government offices. The Korean resistance to the Japanese invasion was aided by agitprop groups that stayed one step ahead of the Japanese troops. Troupes of this kind were used later by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. Agitprop has remained a consistent part of the Chinese government’s education program in rural areas. The techniques of the Blue Blouses and other agitprop groups were emulated by the Teatro Campesino, the first of the Chicano theatres in the United States, which was founded in California as part of the farmworkers’ union campaign for recognition in the mid-1960s. Political festivals
In the years immediately following the Russian Revolution, mass spectacles were mounted in many Soviet cities. The subjects of these spectacles were drawn from events in the Revolution and the subsequent Civil War. They were a conscious attempt to create a new form of social ritual out of the celebratory reenactment of revolutionary events. They also represent an attempt to create a new proletarian art form, and in this they arose naturally from the broader movement to utilize art for social purposes. The former Futurists and Suprematists painted the fronts of buildings and exploited the bustling atmosphere of street markets for their performances. The ideological point of such actions was that the theatres, concert halls, and art galleries had been the preserve of the privileged; proletarian artists proclaimed their allegiance by creating it in the streets.
It seemed only reasonable that St. Petersburg, which had seen so much of the high drama of the Revolution, should be the city that presented the most memorable mass spectacles. In 1920, five of these were presented, climaxing in The Storming of the Winter Palace, directed by Evreinov, with the help of the directors of the other spectacles. The performers numbered more than 8,000, and the spectators have been estimated at 100,000. A 500-piece orchestra provided accompaniment. The spectacle reenacted the events leading up to the October Revolution in St. Petersburg, on the site at which they actually happened.
The spectacles corresponded directly with the proposal by Rousseau and Diderot in 18th-century France that the theatre be made the church of the secular state. These productions were almost certainly influenced by the arguments of Romain Rolland for a people’s theatre at the beginning of the century and were the most vivid examples of the large-scale revival of pageant theatre that was very strong in many European countries and North America between the two world wars. A change of Soviet policy in 1921 phased out the mass spectacles, though they did not disappear entirely. The Bicentennial celebrations in the United States in 1976 included reenactments of the Battle of Lexington, among others. During the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984, performers presented a “condensed” history of the settling of the United States. In the socialist countries the tradition was continued in more disciplined and less imaginative forms in military parades and the large athletic Spartakiades.