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

As the pioneers of this 'psychic revolution', the avant-garde artists pursued diverse experimental forms. There was no censorship of art at this time — the Bolsheviks had more pressing concerns — and it was an area of relative freedom. Hence there was the paradox of an artistic explosion in a police state. Much of this early Soviet art was of real and lasting value. The Constructi-vists, in particular artists such as Rodchenko, Malevich and Tatlin, have had a huge impact on the modernist style. This could not be said of Nazi art, or of what passed for art in Stalin's day, the grim monumental kitsch of Socialist Realism. And yet, almost inevitably, given the youthful exuberance with which the avant-garde embraced this spirit of experimentalism, many of their contributions may seem rather comical today.

In music, for example, there were orchestras without conductors (both in rehearsal and performance) who claimed to be pioneering the socialist way of life based on equality and human fulfilment through free collective work. There was a movement of 'concerts in the factory' using the sirens, turbines and hooters as instruments, or creating new sounds by electronic means, which some people seemed to think would lead to a new musical aesthetic closer to the psyche of the workers. Shostakovich, no doubt as always with tongue in cheek, joined in the fun by adding the sound of factory whistles to the climax of his Second Symphony ('To October'). Equally eccentric was the renaming of well-known operas and their refashioning with new librettos to make them 'socialist': so Tosca became The Battle for the Commune, with the action shifted to the Paris of 1871; Les Huguenots became The Decembrists and was set in Russia; while Glinka's Life for the Tsar was rewritten as The Hammer and the Sickle.

There was a similar attempt to bring theatre closer to the masses by taking it out of its usual 'bourgeois' setting and putting it on in the streets, the factories and the barracks. Theatre thus became a form of Agitprop. Its aim was to break down the barriers between actors and spectators, to dissolve the proscenium line dividing theatre from reality. All this was taken from the techniques of the German experimental theatre pioneered by Max Reinhardt, which were later perfected by Brecht. By encouraging the audience to voice its reactions to the drama, Meyerhold and other Soviet directors sought to engage its emotions in didactic allegories of the revolution. The new dramas highlighted the revolutionary struggle both on the national scale and on the scale of private human lives. The characters were crude cardboard symbols — greedy capitalists in bowler hats, devilish priests with Rasputin-type beards and honest simple workers. The main purpose of these plays was to stir up mass hatred against the 'enemies' of the revolution and thus to rally people behind the regime. One such drama, Do You Hear, Moscow?, staged by Eisenstein in 1924, aroused such emotions that in the final act, when the German workers were shown storming the stronghold of the Fascists, the audience itself tried to join in. Every murdered

Fascist was met with wild cheers. One spectator even drew his gun to shoot an actress playing the part of a Fascist cocotte; but his neighbours brought him to his senses.

The most spectacular example of revolutionary street theatre was The Storming of the Winter Palace, staged in 1920 to celebrate the third anniversary of the October insurrection. This mass spectacle ended the distinction — which in any case had always been confused — between theatre and revolution: the streets of Petrograd, where the revolutionary drama of 1917 had been enacted, were now turned into a theatre. The key scenes were re-enacted on three huge stages on Palace Square. The Winter Palace was part of the set with various windows lit up in turn to reveal different scenes inside. The Aurora played a star role, firing its heavy guns from the Neva to signal the start of the assault on the palace, just as it had done on that historic night. There was a cast of 10,000 actors, probably more than had taken part in the actual insurrection, who, like the chorus in the theatre of the Ancient Greeks, appeared to embody the monumental idea of the revolution as an act of the people. An estimated 100,000 spectators watched the action unfold from Palace Square. They laughed at the buffoonish figure of Kerensky and cheered wildly during the assault on the palace. This was the start of the myth of Great October — a myth which Eisenstein turned into pseudo-fact with his 'docudrama' film October (1927). Stills from this film are still reproduced in books, both in Russia and the West, as authentic photographs of the revolution.²²