Narkompros Versus Proletkult: Festivals and Proletarian Art After the Bolshevik Revolution

Chapter 3 Narkompros versus Proletkult: Festivals and Proletarian Art after the Bolshevik Revolution

Narkompros versus Proletkult

If revolution can give art its soul, then art can give revolution its mouthpiece. Anatoly Lunacharsky, 19201

On 24-25 November 1917, the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets had given authority to the Bolsheviks to organise a Council of Peoples’ Commissars as its executive body. The already-scheduled elections nonetheless took place, and the Bolsheviks still represented only a minority (about 24 per cent, with the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries being the majority), so Lenin had to move to replace this democratic form of government. When the assembly convened on 5 January 1918, non-Bolshevik delegates faced intimidation by Red Guards. However, they still turned down many of Lenin’s proposals, so the Bolsheviks walked out. Later that day, delegates were forcibly evicted by the Red Guards, and the Bolsheviks formally dissolved the Constituent Assembly the next day. The Dic- tatorship of the Proletariat had begun, but an important point here is that it would be a major task and an urgent need to convince the Russian people that the Revolution had been a mass movement, achieved by constitutional means and driven by a sound and relevant ideology, and not just a cadre seeking power by any means. The Bolshevik leaders recognised that culture of all forms should play a critical part in achieving at once comprehension, solidarity and advancement via education, persuasion and propaganda. But a new society could hardly be presented with old art. The new and radical nature of this society had to be reflected and promoted in its art deliberately and politically from the start. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the Provisional Government had in fact contributed to the growth of new cultural programmes by its parades

1 Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘Revolution and Art’, trans. from Russian in Russian Art of the Avant- garde. Theory and Criticism, ed. by John Bowlt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), p. 191.

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden,2018 | DOI10.1163/9789004355682_005 NarkomprosversusProletkult 93 as well as by its inactivity, although Kerensky and his government did support the democratization of education and the expansion of institutions open to the lower classes. And it only had to be expected that Countess Panina, whose People’s House had played such an important part in the lives of many Peters- burg workers, was named Assistant Minister of Education after the February Revolution. However, the government had neither the time nor the funds to develop bold educational policies that promised significant change or a new approach to cultural affairs. In the meantime, alternative cultural programmes were springing up. Unions and factory committees founded their own educational sectors, as did political parties and soviets. In Petrograd alone, workers’ groups claimed some 150 clubs with one hundred thousand members.2 Participants in these programmes condemned the Provisional Government for its lack of concern for public education, which in turn paved the way for the introduction of new educational policies under the Bolshevik government. In her book of 1990, Culture of the Future. The Proletkult Movement in Revo- lutionary Russia, Lynn Mally observed:

Cultural policy became yet another contested arena between the Provi- sional Government and the opposition. At the national union conference in June 1917 the Menshevik Ivan Maiskii argued eloquently for unions to assume responsibility for cultural training. ‘The workers’ movement is, among other things, also a cultural movement. Only a worker who is consciously concerned with his surroundings can be a convinced socialist and an active participant in the union movement.’3

Building the new society and the new proletarian culture without any histor- ical precedent could not be easy or straight-forward, although in Soviet lit- erature, Lenin’s plan for the development of socialism in Russia was always named as the most original and effective. This plan included three major di- rections in building socialism: industrialisation, collectivisation and cultural revolution. In April 1917, Lunacharsky, future Commissar of Enlightenment, Art and Education, arrived in Petrograd following Lenin from Switzerland in a second sealed train. He soon started writing articles in Gorky’s newspaper, New

2 See G. Bylin, ‘Iz istorii kul’turno-prosvetitel’noi deiatel’nosti profsoiuzov Petrograda v period podgotovki Oktiabs’skogo vooruzhennogo vosstaniia’, in Uchenye zapiski VPSh VTsSPS, 1969, vol. 1, p. 115. 3 Mally, Culture of the Future. The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 23-24.