Russia. A History полностью

These years of terror and discrimination also brought incredible hardship and privation. Despite the banner of historical progress, the country appeared to have reversed course, with a return to a natural economy, barter, wages in kind, and ‘currency’ in the form of eggs, clothing, and other basic necessities. It was the era of the ‘bagmen’ (meshchochniki), petty traders who plied the black market in grain and other goods. The state summarily and sporadically punished the black marketeers, but in fact had to tolerate a sector that still supplied much of the food and basic commodities.

Revolutionary Culture

Besides the market-place, culture was another key battleground. Under the Provisional Government, cultural leaders organized unions and demanded the creation of a Ministry of Culture to replace the traditional state and court patronage of the arts. As important as cultural creation was cultural destruction (the iconoclastic demolition of symbols from the ancien régime) and the search for new symbols and festivals.

Here too the party divided into radical and conservative camps, reflected in the debate between A. A. Bogdanov and Lenin over the historical meaning of culture and its place in a proletarian state. Both recognized the importance of culture for revolutionary transformation, but had long disagreed on fundamental principles of Marxism and culture. Lenin (the more orthodox Marxist) saw culture as pure superstructure, subordinate to class conflict and the task of seizing and rebuilding power. Culture (from literacy campaigns to university learning) was crucial, yet secondary; it was just another component of the superstructure. Lenin’s conservative tastes carried an aversion to utopian experiments, an affinity for classical Russian culture, and a desire to integrate artists and writers into well-defined hierarchies under party control. His tool was A. V. Lunacharskii’s bailiwick, the Commissariat of Enlightenment, the very ‘Ministry of Culture’ that intellectuals and artists had proposed in 1917. This new patron of the arts sponsored a full range of artistic activities (including the feeding, shelter, and clothing of the intelligentsia); it also attempted to create a new educational system based on such radical doctrines as the Unified Labour School, which jettisoned traditional disciplines and substituted practical work and learning through labour.

Bogdanov’s vision, similar to that of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, could hardly have been more different. It posited the defining role of culture—i.e. cultural transformation was the pre-condition of social and political transformation. To complete the revolution, argued Bogdanov, it was vital to have ‘new people’ mastering the dominant forces of technocracy and technology, information and language. The new people had to create their own culture and hence create themselves. Bogdanov was a true radical, rejecting the traditional high culture as the product of old élites and hence antithetical to the needs of the proletariat. To help fashion proletarian culture (therefore its own essence or being), Bogdanov created the ‘Proletarian Culture Movement’ (proletkult’), a fusion of organization and theory at the grass-roots level all across the country. It enabled ‘workers’ (broadly defined to include not only factory workers, but also white-collar employees, peasants, and others) to produce their own cultural artifacts, from literature to stage performances, from belles-lettres to literary readings. Although the movement was for a time exceedingly popular, that very popularity sealed its doom: proletcult was culture ‘from below’, inevitably representing an alternative to party dogma and inviting different readings of Marxism itself. In addition, the ‘cultural front’ (a military metaphor typical of the time) had too many players (not only the Commissariat of Enlightenment, but the trade unions and party itself), all competing for scarce resources. By the early 1920s, in short, proletarian culture faced a phalanx of determined foes in this ‘proletarian’ state.