To the writers and artists, whatever their reaction to the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution was not so much the seizure of power by Lenin and his comrades as a fundamental and total upheaval, a descent into chaos and anarchy. It seemed to them that Russia had returned to the Time of Troubles, that all the veneer of civilization that the country had acquired since Peter the Great had been blown apart by a massive upsurge of popular anger and violence. For many it was the reign of Antichrist.
A small number of the writers, however, were sympathetic to the revolution, if not to the specific Bolshevik platform. Alexander Blok’s most famous poem, “The Twelve” (1918), depicts the anarchy and violence of Petrograd in the dark of the winter, but the twelve working-class Red Guards marching through the half-deserted streets are following a leader who is Jesus Christ. In contrast Vladimir Mayakovskii was entirely in the Bolshevik camp, and spent the years of the Civil War writing not only poetry but also agitational verse and drawing pictures for political posters. He changed his elegant futurist suits for a proletarian look in dress and a shaved head. In his poetry he tried to make the masses the heroes, most famously in “150,000,000” that began
150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem.
Its rhythms – bullets,
Its rhymes – fires from building to building.
150,000,000 speak with my lips…[trans. E. J. Brown]
Some of the painters and artists worked for the Reds as well, making huge modernist decorations for the May Day parades and other Bolshevik rituals. Most writers and artists, however, waited on the sidelines or hoped for White victory. Many moved south to the White-occupied territories. As the Reds drove the White armies out of the country, large parts of the intelligentsia followed them, producing a Russian culture in exile in Berlin and Paris.
For the musicians, dancers, and some of the painters, the move to Western Europe or America was the start of another career. Rakhmaninov made so much money from concerts that he was able to support other Russian émigrés, contributing to Igor Sikorsky’s aircraft company in Connecticut. Prokofiev, the great singer Fyodor Shaliapin, and the dancers of the Ballet Russes worked throughout the world. Though the Ballets Russes fell apart after Diagilev’s death in 1929, it left a legacy to the world of ballet in its many active dancers and in the work of George Balanchine in America. For the writers, however, the emigration was largely a disaster. Dependent on a Russian audience, they were cut off from Russia where their works could not be published and ceased to circulate legally after the early twenties. Russian émigrés did set up publishing companies, journals, and newspapers in Paris and elsewhere, but their readership was necessarily small, limited to the Russian and Russian-speaking exile communities in the West. Nevertheless, some were able to create remarkable works, especially in the early years. The poet Marina Tsetaeva wrote through the revolution, and when she came to Paris in 1921 continued to publish her verse in large quantity until about 1925. Even the older writers were able to produce a great deal at first, but the lack of audience soon began to tell. Western publishers were not interested in translations of any other than a select few, and even Ivan Bunin’s 1933 Nobel Prize could not awaken much interest in the latest émigré literature.
In the emigration new intellectual currents arose, like Eurasianism, the idea that Russia was not really European, but part of a separate “Eurasian” civilization exemplified by the Mongol Empire. Other small groups elaborated new philosophies of religion, or drifted toward fascism. Some made their peace with the Soviets and returned home, such as the writer (Count) Alexei Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Tolstoy. Prokofiev returned in 1935. Maxim Gorky, who had maintained his distance from both the Soviets and emigration after 1920, returned in 1932 to become a major figure in the Soviet literary world. Others were not so lucky: Tsvetaeva, after returning, committed suicide in 1941.
CULTURE AND NEP
In the years of NEP the fate of the émigré writers and artists abroad seemed to be increasingly irrelevant, as the cultural world of the new USSR burgeoned with new artistic trends and new names. In the early years the Bolsheviks had no definite position on the arts. During the Civil War some of the radicals in the party formed the Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations, known as Proletkult, which combined schools to teach workers to write poetry and paint with radical esthetic notions. Lenin and Trotsky were skeptical of Proletkult, believing its claims to represent the correct proletarian line in art to be spurious. The Bolshevik leadership was also generally skeptical of much modernist art: Lenin reproached the Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii for printing so many copies of the works of Mayakovskii. Whatever their content, the verses failed to impress Lenin with their quality and he thought the money better spent elsewhere.
The Civil War had a catastrophic effect on music and the theater, for the simple reason that there was no money to keep the theaters going at any but the most minimal level. The Imperial Ballet School closed, and the ballet and opera theaters closed for various periods until the early 1920s. Orchestras suffered similar fates. With NEP and the revival of the Soviet economy, the Soviet government gradually reestablished the old theaters and orchestras under different names, and at the same time the NEP economy and the absence of a defined party line on the arts meant that many smaller ballet companies and theaters of various types came into existence. Instrumental music did better, for the conservatories continued to function with many of the old staff, and produced a whole generation of new composers. By the end of the 1920s Dmitrii Shostakovich already had a name, both for his “serious” compositions and for film music. Perhaps the most innovative theater was established under the leadership of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in 1922. Meyerhold had begun under Stanislavskii in the Moscow Art Theater, but by 1917 had rejected the master’s ideas to develop his own theory and style of acting which he called “biomechanical.” The idea was that the actor should not strive for naturalism but use his body and his voice for the most expressive possible performance, making his point by an “unnatural” style that would strike the audience more powerfully. Meyerhold in turn had a powerful effect on another art form that was just coming into its own at the time, the cinema. Sergei Eisenstein was just starting on his career as a director in the 1920s with his historical masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin. The actors in the film reflected Meyerhold’s theories, while the overall structure was the product of Eisenstein’s technique of montage, using a series of discontinuous images to hammer home his esthetic and political points. This was a radical break with the normal technique of Hollywood and other films of the time, which stuck to visual continuity to tell the story. Eisenstein’s innovations seem to have bothered no one among the Soviet authorities, for whom film was in some ways the perfect art form: it spoke to the masses, was based on the latest technology, was easy to reproduce, and was cheaper and more portable than the stage. It was also much more adaptable for political messages, as Eisenstein and other directors proved. As Lenin had said, in a comment endlessly repeated, “of all the arts, cinema is the most important to us.” The Soviet authorities funded movies through their cultural offices, but resources were inadequate to produce films in large numbers. The great majority of the movies shown in the NEP era were actually imported Hollywood films.
With the end of the Civil War, publishing also revived, and in the NEP years a number of private publishers supplemented the products of the state publishers. The rich artistic world of the past could not be recreated. The NEP cafés lacked the elegance and panache of their pre-revolutionary prototypes, and the state publishers did not pay very well. The young Shostakovich survived by playing the piano in movie theaters to accompany silent films. The economy of artistic life was only one issue, as artists had to deal with the ambiguities of Soviet policy toward the intelligentsia, a policy based on an attitude of suspicion combined with an awareness of its value. The party also had very little to say about art. Certainly openly anti-Soviet works could not be p
ublished and the émigré writers gradually disappeared from the bookstores. Yet the party did not even publish a statement on literature until 1925, and that one contained little in the way of positive recommendations. The gist was that the party should help and promote “proletarian” writers as well as writers from the peasantry, but should also show tolerance of the “fellow travelers” (originally Trotsky’s phrase), writers from the intelligentsia to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic or at least neutral toward the new order. Party critics should not expect the “fellow travelers” to have and express a complete Bolshevik world-view. In a sense, the party’s position on the writers was similar to its position on engineers or government officials from the old intelligentsia. Until the end of the decade, the party relied on their skills and seemed to be willing to let them gradually move toward a friendlier attitude to the party and its aims.
The result of all these different elements was a great deal of varied writing, much of it innovative in language, style, and narrative technique. Even the “proletarian” writers wrote in a language that was full of slang, local dialects, and obscenities, a language that was later edited out of reprints of their work after the 1930s. While some of the proletarians wrote stories of Civil War sacrifice and heroism, pulling few punches to describe the horrors of the war, others tried to write about the working class in their factories, accounts of the rebuilding of Soviet industry and the new forms of life emerging around them. There were not very many of the actual proletarian writers, however, and most literature of the time presented a wide variety of daily life – often the semi-criminal margins of Soviet urban life, the complexities of the personal and private life of the intelligentsia and party officials. While many of the writers also spent much time in acrimonious debate among the various groupings, others managed to produce work of more enduring significance. In 1921 Boris Pasternak published a collection of poetry, “My Sister Life,” which instantly established him as a leading poet. In 1926 Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry with its brutal honesty placed it at the head of all descriptions of the Civil War. The stories of NEP-era marginal characters culminated in 1928 with Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, whose con man hero Ostap Bender passed into Soviet and Russian folklore. Other writers found it impossible to publish: Anna Akhmatova was not published from 1925 to 1940, and Mikhail Bulgakov began to have difficulties from the mid-twenties. Though his Civil War–era play “Day of the Turbins” was scarcely a flattering portrait of the White cause, it was also not crudely hostile, and the play was repeatedly banned and then allowed again until it finally disappeared from the repertory to return only in the 1960s. His other works were simply forbidden entirely. Some writers were allowed to emigrate, such as Yuri Zamiatin whose novel of an anti-utopian society We would come to influence Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
In literature and art, the 1920s were in many ways a continuation of the Silver Age under new conditions. Many of the most important voices of the twenties, Mayakovskii or Pasternak, Meyerhold or Prokofiev, were already accomplished artists by 1917, and the younger generation that came to maturity after 1920 was profoundly influenced by the culture of the pre-revolutionary decades. Even some of the young “proletarian” writers with their new themes wrote with Belyi or Blok in the back of their heads. The numerous literary or artistic platforms and groups maintained some of the organizational forms of artistic life of the Silver Age until the end of the NEP era.
THE NATURAL SCIENCES
For the natural sciences, in contrast, the revolution marked a more fundamental break, not so much intellectually but institutionally. The years before the revolution had been a period of change for Russian science. Perhaps the most important innovation had been the foundation of the new engineering schools under the Ministry of Finance. These technical schools not only produced sorely needed engineers but also were less conservative in their curricula than the universities under the Ministry of Education. Thus they were open to rapidly changing and growing disciplines like physics, while the universities tended to keep chemistry at the center of scientific education. The technical institutes were more open to society. They maintained ties with business, and were less restrictive about their admissions. Thus Jewish students like Abram Ioffe finished the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, studied in Germany, and received his first position in physics at the new St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, which was Witte’s creation. His years there from 1906 to the Revolution were to be the incubation period of the later Soviet physics, for Ioffe quickly revealed his talent for organization and intellectual leadership. Yet the conditions of science as a whole left much to be desired. Physics had suffered a major blow in 1911 when much of the science faculty of Moscow University and the Kiev Polytechnic Institute resigned over Minister of Education Kasso’s illegal repression of student meetings (a meeting in honor of Tolstoy’s death was at issue). There were few other institutions where the scientists could move, though some managed to find a home in the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Among the successful few among the protestors was the geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii, one of the founders of the science of ecology, who managed to find a place in the Academy.
For the scientists, laboratory equipment and space was a crucial issue, and unfortunately most government offices did not see it as a priority. Pre-revolutionary Russian scientific laboratories and research stations were mostly small divisions within ministries or government offices like the Division of Agriculture within the Ministry of Finance or the small research laboratories of the Ministry of War, devoted to such problems as the production of optical sights for artillery. Most science took place in university departments, and there were scarcely any privately financed laboratories. Science was already dependent on government support throughout the world, but Russia was still too poor and backward to provide facilities similar to those of Germany or France. There were exceptions, like the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Physiology in St. Petersburg which had state funding and aristocratic donors and patrons, primarily Prince A. P. Oldenburgskii, a relative of the tsar and a general. It produced medicines while Pavlov conducted experiments on conditioned reflexes. Most scientists lacked such facilities, and all these problems came to a head during the First World War, in which Russia’s technological backwardness played a crucial role in its defeats. The scientific community was patriotic if not monarchist and in 1915 the Academy of Sciences founded a Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, that was designed to survey the Russian Empire for natural resources that would be useful in war and industry. The result was a massive accumulation of data that came to be used by an entirely new regime after 1917.
The new Bolshevik government inaugurated a revolution in Russian science. For the Bolsheviks, the natural sciences were central to their utopian project. Their own ideology, Marxism, was in their minds a science, not just a political viewpoint. To them it was an objectively true account of the character and laws of development of human society. They believed that knowledge of the natural sciences would help convince people of the truth of Marxism, as it would impart knowledge of scientific methodology. There were other more practical benefits. The spread of scientific knowledge would combat religion, a high Bolshevik priority in the early years. Most important, however, they believed that science held the key to technology, and that the new Soviet Union needed technology to become a modern state and society.
Right from the beginning, the Bolshevik regime treated science and scientists very differently from other sectors of the old intelligentsia. The Soviets preferred large-scale, state-financed institutions mostly detached from university teaching, and the scientists were mostly in favor of the same structure, frustrated by the conservatism and limited resources of the pre-1917 Ministry of Education. Thus as early as 1918, as the Civil War was beginning, the Soviet government set up what became the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute under Abram Ioffe. As the Civil War ended, Ioffe’s institute was given
a series of buildings and money to build new laboratories at a time when the state had almost no resources and famine swept the interior of Russia. Similarly, the Section of Applied Botany and Selection, a small laboratory of the old Agriculture Department, became the All-Union Institute of Plant-Breeding under the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.
These were highly sophisticated institutions, and the Soviet government did not spare expense. Vavilov’s institute moved into the former mansion of the tsarist Minister of State Properties off St. Isaak’s Square in the center of Leningrad, with greenhouses and research facilities in Tsarskoe Selo (renamed Detskoe Selo in the 1920s and later Pushkin) in confiscated properties from the old regime. Even more important, Vavilov was sent abroad to Europe and to the United States to acquire scientific literature, equipment, and seeds for research. In the United States he traveled widely, met Luther Burbank, and spoke at American universities – all of this at Soviet government expense. Ioffe and the physicists fared as well or better. Ioffe made a similar journey to Europe in 1920–21, and the students at the physics institute were not only allowed but even officially encouraged to spend years abroad working at Cambridge, England, with Ernest Rutherford or in Germany with the leading physicists of the time. In the rapidly changing world of physics in the early twentieth century, these contacts were crucial and established international reputations for many Soviet physicists. They published their works in the German Annalen der Physik, until 1933 the leading outlet for physics research in the world. Vladimir Vernadskii, in spite of his participation in the Kadet party before the Revolution, spent several years working in Paris in the 1920s with the full approval of the Soviet authorities. The Soviet government created a system that supplied scientists with better housing and favored access to consumer goods even in the 1920s, when the NEP market could have supplied many of their needs and wants. Pavlov, who was openly anti-Soviet, was appointed the head of the new Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences in 1925.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 41