The Thinking Reed

His idea was roughly this. The intelligentsia must work under the leadership of the working class, for the working class, and so on and so forth. But since the workers also lack a voice of their own, the intelligentsia must work under the leadership of the ‘Party’ — that is, of the bureaucracy, which falsely substitutes itself for the working class. If Stalin had recognized the intelligentsia as part of the proletariat, he would have been obliged to recognize also its right to speak for itself. His entire construction would then collapse. Moreover, if it were a part of the proletariat the intelligentsia would be as close as possible to the workers in social position and fundamental interests, and would have no need of a mediator in the shape of the bureaucracy: it would itself be the vanguard of the proletariat.

Recognizing — even if only formally — the independence of the intelligentsia would mean, ultimately, recognizing also the independence of the workers themselves in relation to the statocracy. Stalin needed to see the intelligentsia ‘side by side with the workers and peasants, pulling together with them’.120 The role of driver of this troika fell to the bureaucracy. They decided the direction to be taken, they wielded the whip, and they got all the pleasure from the ride. The masses subject to the statocracy had to be separated from each other and deprived of independence. This was the political aim of the ruling circles. The ‘stratum’ concept helped to justify it.

‘Socialist Realisin’

A special theory was worked out for the sphere of art, establishing a sort of normative aesthetic code which could not be deviated from without incurring penalties. This was the famous ‘socialist realism’ (both words should be in inverted commas, since this aesthetic was in fact neither socialist nor realist).

In 1932 the Party functionaries in the sphere of literature (I. Gronsky and V. Kirpotin) began to affirm this newly invented dogma. At the Writers’ Congress in 1934 the formula ‘socialist realism’ was, for the sake of prestige, put into the mouth of Gorky, to whom its authority was ascribed. Later, and until 1956, Stalin himself was named as creator of the theory (which was evidently not far from the truth). Gorky’s novel Mother was, as is well known, designated as the first example of ‘socialist realism’. All of which, however, tells us nothing about the essence of the theory in question. Every definition of it in the textbooks, given in deliberately unintelligible bureaucratic jargon, is extremely abstract and can be interpreted in any way one likes. Mother was a phenomenon wholly rooted in the Social Democratic propaganda tradition of the beginning of the century, and comparison with it provides no answer. From the standpoint of style and distinctive artistic features Mother is a typical product of turn-of-the-century European naturalism, and a very imperfect and second-rate one at that. A much better example of such writing is Zola’s novel Germinal. Consequently, neither the artistic nor the ideological features of Gorky’s novel (which contained a few well-realized episodes) can be regarded as innovatory in any way. There is not the slightest basis for seeing in it a new ‘artistic method’. Western literary critics therefore conclude, as a rule, that the official theory of ‘socialist realism’ is not to be taken literally, since its ‘demagogic aspect’ is too strongly marked.121 But there is in it an element which cannot be left without comment or overlooked: the idea of ‘partisanship’ as officially interpreted. This is the key concept in normative aesthetic of ‘socialist realism’.

As I have said already, Stalin’s interpretation of ‘partisanship’ had little in common with Lenin’s, although he claimed continuity. This contradiction was to be noted by critical intellectuals at the beginning of the 1960s, when they protested that ‘partisanship in literature is now understood quite differently from the way Lenin understood it.’122 However, it is the very ‘originality’ of Stalin’s idea of partisanship that interests us here.