The policies of the Soviet leadership in Asia formed a historic turning point, both in Russian history and in world history, generally. Their impact has far outlasted the particular goals of Lenin and the Comintern in 1919–20. Lenin’s conception of imperialism implied that the European colonial empires provided crucial resources for the dominance of capitalism in the world and over the European working classes in particular. The oppressed people of the colonies were therefore crucial allies of the proletariat in the battle for socialism. The first meetings of the Comintern proclaimed this principle loud and clear, and its agents and supporters around the world spread the news. In Paris a young Vietnamese working at painting pseudo-asian pottery in a French factory read that the Comintern wanted to support the colonized peoples, and he decided to join the Communists. His name was Ho Chi Minh. At the time, however, it was the events in China that took most of the attention of the Comintern’s Asian sections and the Soviet government. In 1911 nationalists led by Sun Yat-sen had overthrown the Ching dynasty and established a republic, but the struggle raged to make the republic work and to expel, or at least radically weaken, the treaty regime that held China in bondage to the Western powers and Japan. The Comintern and the infant Chinese Communist Party supported the Nationalists, only to have Chiang-kai Shek turn on them and virtually exterminate the Communists in 1927. The Chinese Communists would recover, but for the time being Soviet policy in China was one of the major reasons Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1927, provoking a war scare in Moscow that lasted for several months. The small groups of Communists in the various Asian colonies continued to exist, largely ignored by all but the colonial administrations, but their actions would eventually have enormous consequences that the modest growth of Communism in Europe could not match.
In spite of the failure in China the Soviet leadership was convinced that the setbacks were only temporary. Stalin, as well as his opponents in the party, was convinced that a new war was inevitable sooner or later – a war between the western powers, for the “contradictions”, in Marxist terminology, between Britain, France, and Germany were too serious to be resolved in any other way. War would lead to another social crisis like that after World War I. In 1928 the Comintern made a sharp turn to the left, proclaiming that a new era of instability and revolution was coming soon, a notion that the depression beginning in 1929 seemed to confirm. Stalin was entirely behind the new Comintern line, especially as it urged the Communists to focus their attack on Social Democrats in the hopes of weaning the working class away from moderate leaders. At the same time he did not want to provoke a war with the great powers, and the policy of the Soviet state was much more conciliatory than the Comintern’s proclamations. Stalin needed peace on his frontiers, as he was about to launch a giant upheaval.
18 Revolutions in Russian Culture
Unlike Russia’s state and society, its culture did not experience such a sharp break in 1917. The period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1920s was full of artistic revolutions, happening simultaneously and in entirely different directions. These revolutions shared many characteristics with artistic movements in the rest of the world, but paradoxically the Russian culture of the Silver Age, as it is known (by comparison to the Golden Age in the nineteenth century) has never acquired an audience outside of Russia comparable to that which the writers and musicians of the earlier period secured. Perhaps one of the main reasons is that most of the truly talented writers of the Silver Age were poets, masters of that most untranslatable of art forms. The natural scientists, in contrast, began to acquire an international audience, in large part because of the efforts of the Soviet regime to encourage and use the sciences to build a new society.
LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND ART
The writers and artists who came to maturity in the 1890s were a mixed lot: symbolists and realists in literature, the “World of Art” group in the visual arts. In about 1910 new waves, or often wavelets, came on to the scene. A whole series of new movements in poetry, futurism, acmeism, and other groups contended for the attention of readers and critics, while the Ballets Russes introduced both new forms of dance and the radical (it seemed) new music of Igor Stravinskii. The speed of innovation only increased. Working in Germany, Wassily Kandinsky produced entirely abstract work by 1911, and in St. Petersburg Kazimir Malevich painted his “Black Square” in 1915. The revolution and civil war split Russian culture in two, with many of the great names of the time staying abroad or emigrating, and others remaining behind with varying degrees of sympathy for the Bolsheviks. The émigrés largely continued their earlier styles, while in Soviet Russia the situation was more complex. Some saw the new order as of the same essence as their artistic revolution, while others espoused even more radical notions and still others tried to combine modernism with socialist content. By the end of the twenties, with the aging of the émigrés and the new Soviet order in art, a new phase began.
The generation of the 1890s confronted not just new ideas but also new conditions of work. The Russian publishing industry had expanded enormously since the Emancipation, and by 1900, prominent writers could actually live and even prosper on the earnings from their writing alone. Maxim Gorky was the first to be able to do so and in a spectacular fashion. As recounted in his autobiography, he came from a family of minor traders and earned his living by casual labor until he started writing. Virtually a tramp, he followed the course of the Volga working on the boats and taking factory jobs for short periods. By 1905 he was the best-paid author in Russia with a worldwide reputation and he spent his time mostly in Capri or Paris. Gorky was also typical of the artistic currents of the time, a fact muffled by later Soviet attempts to cast him as the father of “socialist realism.” Gorky’s prose was “realist” only by comparison to that of his contemporaries, for it also reflected his worldview, a kind of anarchistic rebelliousness and admiration for strong individuals. European critics immediately branded him a follower of Nietzsche, which was incorrect (Gorky read Nietzsche for the first time long after he formed his ideas and style) but it was an understandable mistake. His other great fascination was with religion, though not with official Orthodoxy but with what he saw as the semi-pagan and mystical religion of the people. It was the latter fascination that drew him to the Bolsheviks, for he saw in Marxism a kind of religion of the future that could lead the people to salvation.
Equally famous in the 1890s were the plays of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov’s great fame was preceded by over a decade of writing short stories for newspapers, and in some ways he was aesthetically closer to the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev. In his theatrical practice, however, he was in the Russian vanguard, for the most famous stage for his plays was the Moscow Art Theater. The Moscow Art Theater was the first major Russian dramatic theater that was not an Imperial Theater, for the court had abandoned its monopoly in 1882. The Moscow Art Theater was strictly a private enterprise operation with the sponsorship of local businessmen such as Savva Morozov, the heir to the family textile fortune. It was also the first major laboratory for the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who reformulated theatrical performance in Russia and much of the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky’s demand that the actor live his role from the inside was a new departure over the (as he saw it) declamatory styles of the nineteenth century.
If Gorky, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky remained influential or at least revered for decades afterward, they were not entirely typical of an era dominated by Symbolism and other new trends. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii was the most prominent of the symbolists, beginning his career with a series of critical articles attacking the utilitarianism of the liberal and radical artistic theories of the previous generation. His call was for a sort of pure art, but in fact his own works were suffused with the philosophical and religious ideas of his generation. His subject matter was far from that of the earlier Russian classics – his first great success being a trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome (Julian the Apostate), the Renaiss
ance, with Leonardo Da Vinci as its hero, and the Russia of Peter the Great. The idea was the eternal struggle of paganism and Christianity, with Peter as a sort of neo-pagan in the tradition of the emperor Julian and Da Vinci. Now largely forgotten, Merezhkovskii was a dominant figure for a generation. A more vital legacy was in the poetry of the younger symbolists, especially Alexander Blok.
Music and art also changed rapidly at the end of the century. For the St. Petersburg musicians the appearance of a patron, the timber merchant Mitrofan Beliaev, opened new possibilities in the 1880s. Beliaev not only sponsored concerts, but he also ran a Friday evening salon that featured regular performances of new music, and even more important, he founded a music publishing firm in Leipzig to publish Russian music and paid generous honoraria. The core of Beliaev’s circle comprised the survivors of the Five, though Balakirev rarely attended the salon. The Beliaev circle was also broader in its tastes than the original Five: to their admiration of Berlioz and Liszt they added Wagner, and grew more friendly to Tchaikovsky. Rimskii-Korsakov was the strongest artistic influence, though Stasov continued to command deep respect. As time passed, a younger generation such as Alexander Skriabin and Sergei Rakhmaninov benefitted from the circle’s attention. The end of the monopoly of the Imperial theaters also allowed the formation of a private opera company in Moscow sponsored by the millionaire businessman Savva Mamontov, whose company attracted Russia’s greatest singer, Fyodor Shaliapin. Mamontov also was the patron for a whole series of innovative painters, especially Valentin Serov. For Serov the light in his paintings was as important as the subject, as in the case of the Impressionists in France. This sort of art was a sharp break with the Itinerants and their fascination with the Russian landscape and the Russian people and its dilemmas.
In St. Petersburg the Russian artistic scene was transformed under the leadership of Sergei Diagilev, the main force behind a new magazine devoted to the visual arts named Mir Iskusstva (World of Art). The journal gave its name to a whole movement, a revolution in subject matter if not in technique. Though World of Art painters had a definite look that differed from the older painters of the Itinerant school, their greatest innovation was the turn from peasant life, landscape, and portraits of the intelligentsia toward more decorative depictions of interiors, retrospective pictures of eighteenth-century France or Russia, and portraits that stressed appearance and style as much or more than the sitter’s inner life. The World of Art was also notable in that its impulses came to a large part from European painting, but there was no direct European prototype. Impressionism, Art Nouveau/Jugendstil, and other European trends played a role. The World of Art group also valued European styles from the past, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, which the Itinerants despised. The same was the case with Russian art: Diagilev was perhaps the first to discover the value of eighteenth-century Russian portraiture. He organized regular exhibits of contemporary European art, starting with that of Finland and Scandinavia, to educate the Russian public. The goal was to promote painting that was not concerned with social issues and only rarely sought to affirm Russian nationality. Yet the artists like the writers of these years were not yet in pursuit of pure art. Almost all of them were looking for some reality behind the world of appearances, and found it in mysticism, theosophy, encounters with mediums, or occasionally even Orthodox Christianity. They also revealed a great deal of cultural pessimism, and a profound sense of ending. The World of Art painter Alexander Benois published a history of Russian art in 1898 that ended with the statement that art was now coming to an end, and would either cease to exist among humanity or be replaced by an art that served a religious idea.
Into this artistic ferment came the Revolution of 1905. The artistic world reacted variously to the events, but most of the artists were not sympathetic to the tsarist regime. In 1905 the issues were not only the general ones of political representation of the people and the social state of the workers and peasants, because the artists also chafed under the various hindrances and monopolies imposed by the state. Writers were doing well economically, but still had to deal with state censorship. Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection could not be published in Russia and was passed around by students in mimeographed copies. The great theaters were under the Ministry of the Court, and their capacities and repertoire were far behind the expectations of the audience in the big cities. In St. Petersburg the only state-financed orchestra, the ancestor of the later Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was still technically the private orchestra of the tsar, and was founded only in 1882. The imperial patronage of music and the arts that made much of Russian artistic life possible in earlier decades was no longer necessary and felt as a burden.
Thus the establishment of the state Duma in 1906 and the accompanying relaxation of censorship found great approval among writers and artists, who quickly moved to exploit the opportunities. Whole new subject matter appeared in literature: the first novels to make sexuality an explicit theme and books with all sorts of heterodox religious conceptions that the Orthodox Church could no longer keep out. Alongside the more traditional locations of cultural activity, St. Petersburg and Moscow quickly developed a café and cabaret culture that attracted the leading lights of literature and art alongside the general public. A bohemian style of life was increasingly fashionable, including various experiments in sexuality and dress. Some writers acquired signature appearances, dandified clothing and hairstyles, or a studied artistic look. Sergei Diagilev had pioneered all this with his elegant suits and a lock of hair died silver to make him look more distinguished.
Private patronage became easier and more abundant as Russian businessmen prospered. After 1909 Sergei Kussevitskii was the conductor of a private orchestra in Moscow, the first in Russia to be successful. (After emigration in 1920 he became the long-time conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the founder of the Tanglewood Festival.) The most famous example of a private dance company was Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, which made its debut in Paris in 1909 as well. In the following year the company presented the premiere of Igor Stravinskii’s ballet, the Firebird and in 1913 his even more revolutionary Rite of Spring. The latter caused an uproar with its dissonances and apparent celebration of pagan sexuality and vigor, brilliantly interpreted by the lead dancer Vatslav Nijinskii. Stravinskii was the vanguard of Russian music, but not the whole of it. Of the older generation, Rimskii-Korsakov was active until his death in 1910 and among the younger musicians Sergei Rakhmaninov and Sergei Prokofiev took different paths to fame, Rakhmaninov with his rich neo-romanticism and Prokofiev already heading toward the irony and precision of neo-classicism. Not only Diagilev but also many of the musicians began to gravitate to Paris and Berlin, for the St. Petersburg theaters and orchestras with the necessary resources were usually too conservative for the new music and performance styles.
The painters also moved very rapidly. Kandinsky in Munich had a limited impact on his Russian colleagues, but in Russia painting evolved very quickly. Especially in Moscow a group of young painters in several informal groups (“Jack of Diamonds” and “Donkey’s Tail”) under the influence of Cubism and Russian folk art began to move sharply away from realist technique. One of the most talented among them, Kazimir Malevich began to turn toward full abstractionism, painting his famous “Black Square” and other fully non-representational works. Malevich evolved the notion of Suprematism, in which the artist should work with geometric forms, in their turn the key to hidden reality behind the appearance of the world. Few of his associates followed him all this way, but it was this world that produced such painters as Marc Chagall.
For writers the years after 1905 were equally frenetic with change. The most important of the new prose writers, Andrey Belyi, published his phantasmagoria of St. Petersburg in the revolution, the novel Petersburg, in 1913. Belyi was emblematic of the period in other ways, as he was an adept of the “anthroposophy” of Rudolf Steiner, at whose center in Switzerland he spent much of his
time. The poets were even more active and contentious, with new groups, each with a manifesto, forming every year. The Acmeists in St. Petersburg met in the Stray Dog café and proclaimed Apollonian clarity against the “Dionysian” symbolists. Mostly very young, their most striking work came long afterward, as in the case of their greatest writer, the poet Anna Akhmatova. The futurists appeared a bit later with their manifesto, appropriately titled “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” The futurists were as apocalyptic as the Symbolist generation in their evaluation of the world, but saw the approaching upheavals in a more positive light. They were fascinated with technology and saw the end of the older forms of art as liberating. The principal writer of the futurists was the poet Vladimir Mayakovskii, who was not only an artistic revolutionary but also a revolutionary in real life. Earlier on he had worked in the Bolshevik party and later he was to become the most famous poetic spokesman for the Reds after 1917.
Mayakovskii’s attraction to Marxism was as unusual among the writers and artists as it was among the intelligentsia as a whole. The intelligentsia, however, outside the artistic avant-guard in Petersburg and Moscow, remained committed to the older ideals of the nineteenth century, liberalism in politics, occasional populist socialism, and its artistic canons as well. They preferred Turgenev to Merezhkovskii or Belyi, and only some of the poets managed to break out of the rarified atmosphere of the St. Petersburg cafés to reach the provincial reader. When the war came, most of the writers followed the general reaction of the country and the intelligentsia and supported the war effort. The revolution was another matter. By 1917 most realized that the war effort had largely failed, and they were happy with the fall of the tsar but were not heavily engaged in politics or at first even distracted by it. While Mayakovskii enthusiastically worked for the Bolsheviks, the composer Prokofiev was more typical: 1917 was one of his most productive years as he composed major works having nothing to do with the cataclysm around him. Most of the artists and writers, like the rest of the intelligentsia, greeted the Bolshevik revolution with hostility, but it was the outbreak of the Civil War and the economic collapse of Petrograd that forced them to make decisions.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 40