by Kerry Bolton
And, indeed, we are faced with a very acute, although outwardly concealed struggle between two trends in Soviet music. One trend represents the healthy, progressive principle in Soviet music, based upon recognition of the tremendous role of the classical heritage, and, in particular, the traditions of the Russian musical school, on the combination of lofty idea content in music, its truthfulness and realism, with profound, organic ties with the people and their music and songs – all this combined with a high degree of professional mastery. The other trend is that of formalism, which is alien to Soviet art, and is marked by rejection of the classical heritage under the guise of seeming novelty, by rejection of popular music, by rejection of service to the people in preference for catering to the highly individualistic emotions of a small group of select aesthetes.[65]
While some in the Proletkult, founded in 1917 were of Futurist orientation, declaring like the poet Vladimir Kirillov, for example, that ‘In the name of our tomorrow, we will burn Raphael, we will destroy museums, we will trample the flowers of art’, the Proletkult organisation was abolished in 1932,[66] and Soviet culture was re-established on classical foundations. Khdanov was to stress the classical heritage combined with the Russian folk traditions, as the basis for Soviet culture in his address:
Let us examine the question of attitude towards the classical heritage, for instance. Swear as the above-mentioned composers may that they stand with both feet on the soil of the classical heritage, there is nothing to prove that the adherents of the formalistic school are perpetuating and developing the traditions of classical music. Any listener will tell you that the work of the Soviet composers of the formalistic trend is totally unlike classical music. Classical music is characterised by its truthfulness and realism, by the ability to attain to unity of brilliant artistic form with profound content, to combine great mastery with simplicity and comprehensibility. Classical music in general, and Russian classical music in particular, are strangers to formalism and crude naturalism. They are marked by lofty idea content, based upon recognition of the musical art of the peoples as the wellspring of classical music, by profound respect and love for the people, their music and songs.[67]
Zhdanov’s analysis of modernism in music and his definition of classic culture is eminently relevant for the present state of Western cultural degeneracy:
What a step back from the highroad of musical development our formalists make when, undermining the bulwarks of real music, they compose false and ugly music, permeated with idealistic emotions, alien to the wide masses of people, and catering not to the millions of Soviet people, but to the few, to a score or more of chosen ones, to the ‘elite’! How this differs from Glinka, Chaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dargomyjsky and Mussorgsky, who regarded the ability to express the spirit and character of the people in their works as the foundation of their artistic growth. Neglect of the demands of the people, their spirit and art means that the formalistic trend in music is definitely anti-popular in character.[68]
Zhdanov addressed a tendency in Russia that has thrived in The West: that of the ever new and the ‘theoretical’ that is supposedly so profound as to be beyond the understanding of all but depraved, pretentious or commodity-driven artistic coteries in claiming that only future generations will widely understand these artistic vanguards. However, Stalinist Russia repudiated the nonsense and exposed the emperor as having no clothes:
It is simply a terrible thing if the ‘theory’ that ‘we will be understood fifty or a hundred years hence’, that ‘our contemporaries may not understand us, but posterity will’ is current among a certain section of Soviet composers. If this altitude has become habitual, it is a very dangerous habit.[69]
For Zhdanov, and consequently for the USSR, the classics were a folkish manifestation arising from the soul of the Russian people, rather than being dismissed in Marxian manner as merely products of bourgeoisie culture. In fact, as indicated previously, it was modernism that was regarded as a manifestation of ‘bourgeois decadence’. Zhdanov castigated the modernists as elitist, aloof, or better said, alienated from the folk. On the other hand the great Russian classicists, despite their class origins, were upheld as paragons of the Russian folk culture:
Remember how the classics felt about the needs of the people. We have begun to forget in what striking language the composers of the Big Five,[70] and the great music critic Stasov, who was affiliated with them, spoke of the popular element in music. We have begun to forget Glinka's wonderful words about the ties between the people and artists: "Music is created by the people and we artists only arrange it." We are forgetting that the great master did not stand aloof from any genres if these genres helped to bring music closer to the wide masses of people. You, on the other hand, hold aloof even from such a genre as the opera; you regard the opera as secondary, opposing it to instrumental symphony music, to say nothing of the fact that you look down on song, choral and concert music, considering it a disgrace to stoop to it and satisfy the demands of the people. Yet Mussorgsky adapted the music of the Hopak, while Glinka used the Komarinsky for one of his finest compositions. Evidently, we shall have to admit that the landlord Glinka, the official Serov and the aristocrat Stasov were more democratic than you. This is paradoxical, but it is a fact. Solemn vows that you are all for popular music are not enough. If you are, why do you make so little use of folk melodies in your musical works? Why are the defects, which were criticised long ago by Serov, when he said that ‘learned’, that is, professional, music was developing parallel with and independently of folk music, repeating themselves? Can we really say that our instrumental symphony music is developing in close interaction with folk music – be it song, concert or choral music? No, we cannot say that. On the contrary, a gulf has unquestionably arisen here as the result of the underestimation of folk music by our symphony composers. Let me remind you of how Serov defined his attitude to folk music. I am referring to his article The Music of South Russian Songs in which he said: ‘Folk songs, as musical organisms, are by no means the work of individual musical talents, but the productions of a whole nation; their entire structure distinguishes them from the artificial music written in conscious imitation of previous examples, written as the products of definite schools, science, routine and reflexes. They are flowers that grow naturally in a given locale, that have appeared in the world of themselves and sprung to full beauty without the least thought of authorship or composition, and consequently, with little resemblance to the hothouse products of learned compositional activity’. That is why the naivete of creation, and that (as Gogol aptly expressed it in Dead Souls) lofty wisdom of simplicity which is the main charm and main secret of every artistic work are most strikingly manifest in them.[71]
It is notable that Zhdanov emphasised the basis of culture as an organic flowering from the nation. Of painting Zhdanov again attacked the psychotic ‘leftist’ influences:
Or take this example. An Academy of Fine Arts was organised not so long ago. Painting is your sister, one of the muses. At one time, as you know, bourgeois influences were very strong in painting. They cropped up time and again under the most ‘leftist’ flags, giving themselves such tags as futurism, cubism, modernism; ‘stagnant academism’ was ‘overthrown’, and novelty proclaimed. This novelty expressed itself in insane carryings on, as for instance, when a girl was depicted with one head on forty legs, with one eye turned towards us, and the other towards Arzamas. How did all this end? In the complete crash of the ‘new trend’. The Party fully restored the significance of the classical heritage of Repin, Briullov, Vereshchagin, Vasnetsov and Surikov. Did we do right in reinstating the treasures of classical painting, and routing the liquidators of painting?[72]
The extended discussion here on Russian culture under Stalin is due to the importance that the culture-war between the USSR and the USA took, having repercussions that were not only world-wide but lasting.
II
Stalinism and the Art of ‘Rootless Cosmopolitanism’
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br /> The contending outlooks of Stalinist Russia and the USA on the arts during the ‘cold war’ era have been referred to as the ‘Cultural Cold War’. The arts were – and remain – an important part of US subversion against the traditional cultures of the world in the US bid for a ‘new world order’. ‘Cultural imperialism’ is a primary means of imposing the ‘American dream’ over the world by breaking down the unique cultures of peoples and nations, to be replaced by the ‘American’ concepts of the ‘Global Shopping Mall’ and the ‘Global Factory’, with a uniform ‘world culture’, and world consumer market.
Stalinist Russia recognised the importance of the cultural question in maintaining its own cultural integrity and resisting American globalism. Stalinist Russia realised that nihilistic trends in the Left, including those within the USSR, were a corrupting influence, and worked in conjunction with America’s ‘Cultural Cold War’. As previously seen, Zhdanov had already launched an attack on corrupting trends in the arts, and sought to define a ‘Soviet culture’ that was rooted more in the folk-soul of Russia and of Europe, than in Marxist doctrine.
In 1949, the same year that America launched a decade’s long world offensive in the arts, Chernov returned to and developed Zhdanov’s theme, and termed cultural degeneracy ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’. The term is precise in describing the character of artistic nihilism. Rootless cosmopolitans produce their art as narcissists detached – rootless - from any cultural heritage. Here, as in foreign policy, anti-Stalinist Leftists, anarchists and Trotskyites converged with the American ‘Establishment’ against a common enemy: the USSR. Ironically, the USSR served as a bulwark of classical Russo-European culture, purged of Leftist doctrines, while the USA promoted cultural-Bolshevism and patronised sundry extreme Left artists and art theorists, and continues to promote ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in the arts as a strategy.
Abstract Expressionism: America’s ‘Official’ Art
Abstract Expressionism was the first specifically so-called ‘American’ art movement. Jackson Pollock, the central figure in Abstract Expressionism, was sponsored by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. He had worked in the Federal Artist’s Project, 1938-42, along with other Leftist artists painting murals under Roosevelt’s New Deal regime. Abstract Expressionism became the primary artistic strategy of the Cold War offensive against the socialist realism sponsored by the USSR from the time of Stalin. As in much else, Stalin reversed the original Bolshevik tendencies in the arts that had been experimental and as one would expect from Marxism, anti-traditional. On the other hand, American Social Realism, which had been the popular American art form until the 1930s, was by the late 1940s displaced as art critics and wealthy patrons began to promote the Abstract Expressionists.
Many of the theorists, patrons and practitioners of Abstract Expressionism were Trotskyists or other types of anti-Stalinist Leftists, who were to become the most ardent Cold Warriors. Modernist art during the Cold War became a factor in the USA foreign policy. In 1947 the US State Department organised a modernist exhibition called ‘Advancing American Art’ which was intended for Europe and Latin America, reaching as far as Prague.[73]
The Trotskyites had formed an alliance with the anarchists of the modernist movement on the basis of Trotskyite condemnation of Stalinist art policy. It was a cultural offensive that was to be taken on board by the CIA, the Rockefellers and other globalists and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, to use the Stalinist phrase. In 1938 André Breton[74], Mexican communist muralist Diego Rivera[75] and Leon Trotsky issued a manifesto entitled: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art[76]. The manifesto was published in the Autumn 1938 issue of The Partisan Review, a Marxist magazine that was of significance in the Cold War. Trotsky, according to Bretton, had written the Manifesto, which states:
Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity... Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws that govern intellectual creation.
In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible... The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the status of domestic servants of the regime... If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union… True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time - true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society... We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents, not communism, but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy…[77]
The criterion for art given here by Trotsky seems more in the nature of Breton’s anarchism and of the future New Left than of the collectivist nature of Marxism. However, Trotsky, like the CIA and the wealthy American patrons of modernism, recognised the value of modernism as a method of subversion. F Chernov, whose important statement on the arts from a Stalinist viewpoint will be considered below, was to refer to such art as ‘nihilism’. Given that the manifesto was published in The Partisan Review, which was later to receive subsidies from the CIA, Trotsky’s theories provided the basis for the CIA’s ‘cultural cold war’, and for the modernist art movement that developed as an assault upon tradition with the eager patronage of ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ plutocrats such as the Rockefellers and Saatchis.[78]
As Trotsky exhorted in his manifesto, this art is divorced from any cultural legacy or tradition, individualised and uprooted. There is no room for a national or ethnic culture, nor even the ‘proletarian – folk - culture’ that ‘socialist realism’ represented in Stalinist Russia, but only for cosmopolitan, nihilistic, hyper-individualised art-forms; what American conservative theorist Wilmot Roberston called ‘the atomisation of art’.[79] It is from this milieu that the CIA and the globalists recruited their agents and dupes to create their world cultural revolution.
Trotsky wrote Towards a Free Revolutionary Art as a call for mobilisation by artists throughout the world, an ‘Artists of the World Unite!’ Manifesto, to oppose on the cultural front Fascism and Stalinism, which to many Leftists and Communists are synonymous. Trotsky wrote:
We know very well that thousands on thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as ‘degenerate’. Every free creation is called ‘fascist’ by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution.[80]
The two individuals who did most to promote Abstract Expressionism were art critic Clement Greenberg, and wealthy artist and art historian Robert Motherwell[81] who was vigorous in propagandising on the subject. Greenberg was a New York Trotskyite and a long-time art critic for The Partisan Review and The Nation. He had first come to the attention of the art world with his article in The Partisan Review, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ in 1939,[82] in which he stated that art was a propaganda medium, and equally condemned the ‘socialist realism’ of Stalinist Russia and the volkisch art of Hitler’s Germany, his criticism of Soviet art policy being consistent with the 1938 Trotsky manifesto.
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nberg was a particular enthusiast for Jackson Pollock, one of the seminal figures of Abstract Expressionism, and in a 1955 essay ‘American Type Painting’[83], he lauded Abstract Expressionism as the next stage of modernism. Greenberg considered that after World War II the USA had become the guardian of ‘advanced art’. On this basis Abstract Expressionism was adopted by the ‘Establishment’ and the CIA as a method of cultural subversion during the Cold War.
Greenberg became a founding member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF)[84], and was involved with ACCF ‘executive policymaking’.[85] Greenberg continued his support for the Congress for Cultural Freedom even after the exposé by the NY Times and Ramparts in 1966 of CIA sponsorship of the CCF and of influential magazines such as Encounter. Typical of a good Trotskyite, he continued to undertake work for the US State Department and the US Department of Information. [86]
Congress for Cultural Freedom
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses - yes, even among the soldiers - of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people. Professor Sidney Hook, 1949. [87]
Following the publication in The Partisan Review of Trotsky’s Towards a Free Revolutionary Art the Trotskyites set up an international artists’ association to build an anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist movement among artists. This was called the FIARI (Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant). The idea for what became the Congress for Cultural Freedom after World War II, for the purposes of mobilising artists and literati behind an anti-Stalinist movement, seems to have first been created by the Trotskyites of FIARI.