A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

* * * The revolution of 1917 came in the middle of Russia's so-called Silver Age, the first three decades of this century when the avant-garde flourished in all the arts. Many of the country's finest writers and artists took part in Proletkult and other Soviet cultural ventures during and after the civil war: Belyi, Gumilev, Mayakovsky and Khodasevich taught poetry classes; Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Eisenstein carried out an 'October Revolution' in the theatre; Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky and Malevich pioneered the visual arts; while Chagall even became Commissar for Arts in his native town of Vitebsk and later taught painting at a colony for orphans near Moscow. This coalition of commissars and artists was partly born of common principles:.the idea that art had a social agenda and a mission to communicate with the masses; and a modernist rejection of the old bourgeois art. But it was also a marriage of convenience. For despite their initial reservations, mostly about losing their autonomy, these cultural figures soon saw the advantages of Bolshevik patronage for the avant-garde, not to speak of the extra rations and work materials they so badly needed in these barren years. Gorky was a central figure here — acting as a Soviet patron to the artists and as an artists' leader

to the Soviets. In September 1918 he agreed to collaborate with Lunacharsky's commissariat in its dealings with the artistic and scientific worlds. Lunacharsky, for his part, did his best to support Gorky's various ventures to 'save Russian culture', despite Lenin's impatience about such 'trivial matters', from the publishing house World Literature, where so many destitute intellectuals were employed, to the Commission for the Preservation of Historical Buildings and Monuments. Lunacharsky complained that Gorky had 'turned out completely in the camp of the intelligentsia, siding with it in its grumbling, lack of faith and terror at the prospect of the destruction of valuable things under the blows of the revolution'. The nihilistic wing of the avant-garde was especially attracted to Bolshevism. It revelled in its destruction of the old world. The Futurist poets, for example, such as Mayakovsky, practically threw themselves at the feet of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as an ally of their own struggle against 'bourgeois art'. (The Italian Futurists supported the Fascists for much the same reason.) The Futurists pursued an extreme iconoclastic line within the Proletkult movement which enraged Lenin (a conservative in cultural matters) and embarrassed Bog-danov and Lunacharsky. 'It's time for bullets to pepper museums,' Mayakovsky wrote. He dismissed the classics as 'old aesthetic junk' and punned that Rastrelli should be put against the wall (rasstreliat in Russian means to execute). Kirillov, the Proletkult poet, wrote:

In the name of our tomorrow we shall burn Raphael Destroy the Museums, crush the flowers of Art.²⁰

This was by and large intellectual swagger, the vandalistic pose of second-rate writers whose readiness to shock far outstripped their own talents.

Stalin once described the writer as the 'engineer of human souls'. The artists of the avant-garde were supposed to become the great transformers of human nature during the first years of the Bolshevik regime. Many of them shared the socialist ideal of making the human spirit more collectivist. They rejected the individualistic preoccupations of nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' art, and believed that they could train the human mind to see the world in a different way through modernist forms of artistic expression. Montage, for example, with its collage effect of fragmented but connected images, was thought to have a subliminal didactic effect on the viewer. Eisenstein, who used the technique in his three great propaganda films of the 1920s, Strike, The Battleship Potemkin and October, based his whole theory of film on it. A great deal of fuss was made of the 'psychic revolution' which was supposed to be brought about by the cinema, the modernist art form par excellence, which, like the psychology of modern man, was based on 'straight lines and sharp corners' and the 'power of the machine'.²¹