In theory, communism views revolution as a continuous process which transforms consciousness alongside the transformation of social reality. As implemented by state communism, national programmers of reconstruction, like industrialization or the collectivization of agriculture, were intended to have profound effects on people's habits of thought and behavior, to an extent that would far exceed the mere proaganda of words and images. In practice, communist regimes have represented social change through a screen of censorship and illusion, producing a condition which some have described as dream-like because the official version of reality is so far at odds with everyday life. For the long-lasting regimes, like that of the Soviet Union, the term "propaganda" has not had negative connotations among communists, and because communism is said to provide an objective and scientific understanding of the world, little disctinction is made between propaganda and education. In art, the main expression of state communism has been Socialist Realism, formally defined and introduced under Joseph Stalin in 1934 as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union and later imposed by communist states throughout the world. It has been one of the most widely practised and enduring artistic approaches of the twentieth century.
It has often been argued that Socialist Realism was essentially similar to the official art of Nazi Germany. There are certainly many points of comparison. Both emerged fully in the 1930s and produced images which idealized workers and peasants and elevated their leaders in personality cults. Both used easily readable populist styles. The Soviet and Nazi regimes both backed up the persuasive techniques of propaganda with brutal methods of coercion which included arbitrary imprisonment and mass-murder. But
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a closer look at the iconographies of the two systems reveals important differences. Ideologically, communism and fascism took very different views of nature, technology, work, warfare, history, and human purpose. These ideological distinctions were moulded by deeply rooted cultural and social traditions specific to each national context. A conspicuous contrast, as noted earlier, was between Nazism's mythic glorification of the past and Soviet communism's enthusiasm for progress. Nazism emerged partly as a reaction against the instability produced by Germany's rapid modernization. In the Soviet Union, however, as in other communist nations such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Afro-Marxist states in post-colonial Africa, political revolution took place in advance of substantial modernization. The achievement of modernity was an aspiration closely linked to the establishment of communist society.
"Organizing the Psyche of the Masses"
The imposition of Socialist Realism in 1934 marked a substantial increase in the Soviet state's control over art and was characteristic of Stalin's rule over the Party, exercised since the late 1920s. But it was preceded during the years which followed the October Revolution of 1917 by a period when the leadership had allowed and encouraged the experiments of many different communist art groups and the heated debates between them. These debates were not onl about the most suitable style for communist art, but concerned wider quiestions about the function of art in this new society. From the outset it was clear that the revolution which created the world's first Workers' and Peasants' Government had entirely altered conditions for the patronage, audience, and sites of art. Soviet art was to be principally state-funded, public, and directed to a mass audience. But how were "the masses" to be conceived? What was to be their role in the production of art; what was the status of their tastes; and what was art supposed to do to them? These issues provoked a cluster of further questions: Should culture become "proletarian", or should it just be called "socialist" and aspire to be classless? Should it incorporate the achievements of bourgeois culture, or were all traditional kinds of art irredeemably tainted with capitalism and therefore to be abandoned?
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935) encapsulates a radical view of this unique situation. It consists only of a black square on a white background. Painted shortly before the revolution and exhibited in 1915, Malevich originally conceived it
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as an extremist avant-garde gesture which announced the end of tradition in painting and the beginning of a transcendetal, or what he called "Suprematist," level of perception and representation. He declared: "I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pook of Academic art." The meanings of the painting were altered by the new context of the October Revolution of 1917. From that date, he used it to symbolize a rupture in history, the termination of the old order and the birth of the future out of revoution. For Malevich and his followers in the group UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), old-fashioned approaches to art could only
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confine the human mind to conservative ways of thinking. Against this, they developed abstract art in which a vocabulary of pure geometric forms, usually brightly coloured, were designed to address the viewer's senses with dynamic effect. The Russian avant-garde had described this effect as sdvig - a sudden enlightenment or "shift" of perception. Though he called them "non-objective," meaning abstract, some of Malevich's paintings refer in their titles and appearance to a cosmic or interplanetary environment signifying the transcendence of earth-bound habits of thought and the creation of a new world. Malevich's ideas drew on Apocalyptic beliefs that had long been nurtured in Russian culture, predicting the revelation of God's will to humanity along with the end of the material world and the creation of a celestial realm of pure spirit. A feature of this belief is the idea that divine knowledge will be revealed in abstract form, unmediated by language. Beyond the partial revelations of the Old and New Testaments, a "Third Text" will communicate directly to the human soul. Malevich saw this as a model for the imminent illumination of the consciousness of the proletariat.
The Bolsheviks' leader, Lenin, more pragmatic and suspicious of avant-garde extremes, viewed the function of art as lying within the broader framework of education, for which tackling the illiteracy of 80 percent of the population and the scarcity of basic technical skills were the real priorities. Conservative in taste, he felt that socialist culture should build on the best achievements of the past and, by developing these, "raise" the cultural standards of the masses. This was linked to his view of the role of the Party, the main theoretical element of Marxism-Leninism. To Lenin, the Russian working classes, mainly rural peasants, were not ready to generate revolutionary consciousness by themselves. The outbreak of strikes and rioting in cities in the winter of 1916-17, which forced the abdication of the Tsar, had been what Lenin called with some disdain "spontaneous": a premature, disorganized rebellion uninformed by political awareness. Lenin himself, like many other Bolsheviks, was in exile at the time and had to return to Russia to take charge of the uprising and oust the weak provisional government in the coup of October. The Party was to provide leadership and formulate the theoreical basis of policy. As in Lenin at Smolnyi by Isaak Brodsky (1884-1939), which was painted six years after Lenin's death, many paintings of Lenin show him writing or holding a book; these validate his self-appointed position as the legitimate interpreter of doctrine.
The October Revolution was followed by almost four years of civil war, which saw an emphasis on "agitational propaganda"
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or agit-prop, a term that descirbed the more immediate, emotional techniques of propaganda. Of early agit-prop practices, street festivals and mass-action dramas revealed a version of public art which stressed popular involvement. Aiming to maintain the momentum of revolutionary enthusiasm in th face of the hardships of the civil war, agit-prop gorups sought to create an atmosphere of colourful celebration. Alongside the posters, murals, and huge decorations on buildings, elaborate floats using trucks, trams, or horse-drawn crats carried tableaux of revolutionary themes. Derived partly from festivals of the French Revolution, they also combined the tradition of Russian Orthodox ceremonial processions with the carnivalesque styles of folk entertainment, incorporating clowns, life-size puppets, street criers, and circus acrobats as wellas the ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre. The third anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated by a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace performed by a cast of thousands mobilized by the drama groups of the Red Army and Navy. Outside the palace a stage had been built with two platforms, a red one for the workers and a white one for the aristocrats. A battle was fought out on a bridge between them. The aristocrats were routed and fled in trucks pursued by military searchlight beams and accompanied by artillery salvoes and a volley fired from the Aurora battleship anchored nearby on the River Neva. Inside the palace, with what the director called a "cinematic effect," each
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window in turn was lit up by a spotlight to reveal a sequence of fighting scenes. Victory was announced by a firework display on the roof while a massed band played the Internationale.
The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonized by collective endeavour, become playful or creative. By the late 1930s, this ludic spirit would begin to decay into the dour and ominous parades of marching athletes and military hardware that characterized Stalin's state rituals and that would increasingly resemble the morbid cremonies of Nazi Germany. But in its earliest years, under the slogan"the theatricalization of life," mass drama, evised by artists more than politicians, sought to dissolve distinctions between actors and spectators, and between the production and reception of propganda. This presaged later Nazi methods of mass-participation in propaganda events, but the Soviet version was motivated by more egalitarian values. The implied ideal of ending artistic professionalism and beginning a culture of universal creativity was close to the spirit of the network of proletarian culture organizations called the proletkults. Founded in 1917, the proletkults were a movement of utopian adult education, seeking to generate collective working-class culture from the roots. By the end of 1918 the movement was said to have some 400,000 members, 1,000 traning studios and cells in every major factory. Its leading theorist, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), was a philosopher, science fiction novelist and maverick Party member who believed with mystical fervour in the supernatural powers ready to be set free by
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the collectivization of the working classes and the harnessing of their creative potential. Bogdanov also insisted that art develops independently of economic and political spheres, and sought the autonomy of the proletkults from Party control. To Lenin, however, this amounted to a challenge to the Part's authority and in 1920 he moved against the organization, limiting its powers and bringing it under Party jurisdiction. Bogdanov was forced out of the proletkults and turned his attention to medical experiments. He was fascinated by the potential of blood transfusions, which embodied his faith in science and human regeneration. As if confirming his belief in the sacrifice of the individual for humanity's future, he died in 1928 while experimenting on himself.
Lenin acknowledged the value of the mass dramas, but wanted a more dignified statement of Bolshevism's cultural standards. His own contribution to this was known as the plan for monumental propaganda, which he announced in April 1918 in Pravda under a healine which called for "The Removal of monuments Erected in Honour of the Tsars and their Servants and the Production of Projects for Monuments to the Russian Socialist Revolution." Lenin proposed putting the unemployed to work in pulling down Tsarist statues and replacing them with new monuments commissioned to celebrate revered figures of the past. A list of more than sixty of these was to include historic revolutionaries such as Marx, Engels, Robespierre, and Spartacus, as well as cultural figuers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Rublev, Chopin, and Byron. The statues, in bust or full-length, were hastily knocked up in temporary materials like wood and plaster, and formally unveiled in numerous town squares and on street corners.
Lenin's plan was designed to convey a number of messages about his own views on the role of art. Its ethos was educational - each statue bore a plaque with a brief biography and history lesson - and in contrast with Bogdanov's grass-roots proletarianism, Lenin's was an exercise in sober didacticism aimed at elevating the popular taste. The inclusion of politically conservative writers and artists may also have been intended to reassure the non-communist bourgeoisie about the Part's aesthetic tolerance and respect for Russian heritage.
Extra reading:
Engineers of the Masses: Fordism, Fascism and the Theatre
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