Zinoviev and Kamenev, forced out of all their posts, proposed an alliance to their old enemy Trotsky. The United Opposition of 1926—1927 criticized Stalin for making concessions to the kulaks, refusing to industrialize the country, and bureaucratizing the state apparatus. This criticism of Stalin's policies, however, could not save the Opposition because it suffered from an inherent weakness.
The Fifteenth Party Congress, entirely dominated by the Stalinists, was held in December 1927 after a two-year interval, the first time that a congress had not been held once a year since the party had come to power. At the congress Kamenev gave a speech of repentance in which he said there were only two possible roads. One was the creation of a second party. "This road, under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship, would be disastrous for the revolution. ... This road is closed to us, forbidden, ruled out by our entire system of ideas, by all of Lenin's teachings on the dictatorship of the proletariat." The other road was "to submit wholly and entirely to the party." "We have chosen this road," said Kamenev, "because we are deeply convinced that a correct Leninist policy can triumph only within our party and through it, not outside it or against it."219 Trotsky himself, even after being deported from the Soviet Union in February 1929, held the same position, that the Soviet state was still the historical instrument of the working class.
Capitulation did not save the Oppositionists. Kamenev and 121 other
Opposition leaders were expelled from the party by the Fifteenth Congress. Some had already been arrested. Rykov concluded a speech at the congress with these words: "I don't think we can guarantee that the prison population will not have to be increased somewhat in the near future."220 Ten years later, while sitting in prison, he may have regretted those words.
To the Opposition s objections that Stalin was using terror against party members, the general secretary replied: "Yes, we are arresting them and we will continue to. ... Some say that in the history of our party such incidents have never been seen before. Untrue. What about the Myasnikov group? And the Workers' Truth group? Who does not know that the members of those groups were arrested with the full agreement of Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Kamenev?"221
The Fifteenth Congress ended the dispute over the succession to Lenin and definitively answered the question, Who will prevail? Over a period of five years Stalin had carried out what Boris Souvarine called his "molecular coup (ГёЬаЬ."222 He assumed the mantle of Lenin.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT CULTURE?
In April 1918 some representatives of the newly organized Union of Activists in the Arts gathered at the home of Maxim Gorky for a meeting with the commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, an occasional dramatist and literary critic in his own right. They proposed that the executive committee of their union be placed in charge of the arts instead of the existing collegium, or board, of the Commissariat of Education. In other words, they wanted artists to administer the arts. Lunacharsky responded: "We were against the Constituent Assembly in the political arena. We are all the more opposed to a Constituent Assembly in the arts."223
The party announced its intention to administer art and culture directly. This involved two elements: (1) what artists should not write, paint, sculpt, etc.; and (2) what they should. The first part of this program was easy to carry out. Press censorship was introduced immediately after the revolution, in November 1917. Then after the civil war, on June 8, 1922, the Council of People s Commissars announced the formation of a Main Press Committee, whose purpose was to "unify all existing forms of censorship in Russia." Two months later a government decree established the Main Literature and Art Administration (Glavnoe Upravlenie po Delam Literatury i Iskusstva), which became famous under the acronym Glavlit as the main Soviet censorship agency over the years and which exists to this day. The duties of Glavlit, according to its founding decree, included "prior examination of all literary works, periodical and nonperiodical publications, maps, etc., intended for publication and distribution." In addition, Clavlit was to "issue all official authorizations for printed works of any kind, prepare lists of banned books, and work out provisions governing printing establishments, libraries, and the book trade."224
The second part of the program was harder to implement. Practical experience with ways of pressuring artists into doing what the party required had not yet accumulated.
First of all, the party had to assert its inalienable right to act as the sole authority in cultural matters. A challenger to this right was a group that called itself Proletkult, short for Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organization. Its leader, the ex-Bolshevik Aleksandr Bogdanov, had worked out the theory of an autonomous proletarian culture even before the revolution. He held that the "organizational principle of the bourgeoisie" was individualism and that therefore bourgeois culture was individualistic. The organizational principle of the proletariat was collectivism. The proletariat had to reexamine all previously existing culture from this point of view, reevaluate it, and take control of it. The proletariat would then transform all old science and scholarship and create a new "universal organizational science," which would enable it to "organize all human existence in a harmonious and complete fashion." After the February revolution, the supporters of Proletkult announced themselves as an independent worker's organization—independent, that is, of the Provisional Government's Ministry of Education. After the October revolution numerous Proletkult circles, studios, and laboratories were organized for industrial workers who wanted to paint, write poetry, or take to the stage. Proletkult published books and pamphlets, held conferences, and opened what it called the Proletarian University in Moscow. The work of "creating a proletarian culture" had begun.
Lenin declared war on Proletkult. Bad enough that it was led by his former friend Bogdanov, who had become a dangerous enemy, a man whose philosophical writings Lenin never ceased to denounce; in addition, Proletkult was seeking "to wall itself off from the party's leadership."225 Bogdanov held that "Proletkult was the class organization of the proletariat for culture and the creative arts just as the workers' party was its political organization and the trade union was its economic organization." Lenin answered that the proletariat has only one organization, the party, which "guides and directs not only in politics but also in economics and culture."226 In 1919 the Proletarian University in Moscow was closed down, particularly because a course in Bogdanov's "organizational science" had been given there. In its place a so-called Communist University was founded. In October 1920 the Politburo took up the question of Proletkult three times. At the session on October 9, Lenin spoke nine times on the question; so did another expert on culture, Stalin.227
On December 1, 1920, Pravda published a letter by the Central Committee on the subject of Proletkult. This was the first in an endless series of Central Committee pronouncements on cultural questions. Proletkult was stripped of its autonomy, and Communist party members were removed from the central committee of Proletkult and obliged to acknowledge the guiding role of their party and its leadership in this sphere. The letter expressed the Central Committee's views on other cultural questions as welclass="underline" for example, that futurism reflected "perverse and absurd tastes." Soon after the publication of this letter Proletkult renounced its former ties with the futurists and passed a resolution stating that "futurism and comm- futurism are ideological currents characteristic of the final phase of bourgeois culture in the age of imperialism" and therefore must be recognized as "hostile to the proletariat as a class."228