the great retreat in the arts: social realism

decree april 1932

• abolishes all proletarian artistic + literary organisations e.g., RAPP

• ordered artists to come together under a single union

• dramatic reversal of the official attitude to intelligentsia

• avant-garde artists excluded from mainstream of artistic life

what did socialist realism

• seeing life as it was becoming and ought to be, than it was

• subjects = men + women inspired by ideals of scoialism, building the glowing future

art social realism

• 1930s soviet paintings

  • tractors, threshing machines + combine harvesters/ peasants beaming out of scenes with tables groaning with food

vera mukhina’s industrial worker + the kolkhoz woman

• massive image of the soviet people striding into the future

• during the height of purges

artist censorship

• content of pictures tightly controlled

• no pictures of domestic/family scenes

music socialist realism

• music = joyous + positive

• symphonies = major key

• folk songs + dance → songs in praise of the happy life of onward marching soviet man

shostakovich never writes operas again as Stalin doesn’t like it

changes in literature

• 1932 rapp is criticised for being too narrow + abolished

• replaced by union of soviet writers → party + non-party officials

• strong degree of state control

• some great writers e.g., anna akhmatova practise the “genre of silence” and gave up serious writing altogether

• simple, direct language + cheap mass editions were accessible to a newly literature readership

boris pasternak

• 1890-1960

• 1913 first published avant-garde poems

• 1917 leading lyrical poet

• intially welcomes the revolution → disillusioned by the soviets

• criticised as bourgeois for writing about the individual, love + nature

• didnt compromise with socialist realism + became translator of classic (inc. georgian works that stalin liked)

maxim gorky

• left russia in 1921 → disillusion

• returns permanently 1931 → first president of the union of soviet writers + flattered

• never allowed to leave the soviet union again

• dies two months before stalin’s show trial (convienient as gorky would have critiqued)

• yagoda (head of NKVD in 1936) confesses to ordering his death

challenges to the great retreat

• no retreat on private ownership of land/ production or on hiring labour

• rest of the world still sees russia as distinctly anti-capitalist

• stalinist culture embraces tradition but content is still modern: e.g., stress on economy, socialist utopia, national defence + adulation of leader

change + advance not a retreating society

governing elite very different in 1928 + 1941

attempt to instil socialist values = different from social conservatism of tsarism