The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" ( Kto kogo ?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays―two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here―which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District , arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Fron t is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.

Genres: History, Russia, Soviet Union, Art, Soviet History, Russian History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Sheila Fitzpatrick (born June 4, 1941, Melbourne) is an Australian-American historian. She teaches Soviet History at the University of Chicago.

Fitzpatrick's research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Stalinist period, particularly on aspects of social identity and daily life. She is currently concentrating on the social and cultural changes in Soviet Russia of the 1950s and 1960s.

In her early work, Sheila Fitzpatrick focused on the theme of social mobility, suggesting that the opportunity for the working class to rise socially and as a new elite had been instrumental in legitimizing the regime during the Stalinist period. Despite its brutality, Stalinism as a political culture would have achieved the goals of the democratic revolution. The center of attention was always focused on the victims of the purges rather than its beneficiaries, noted the historian. Yet as a consequence of the "Great Purge", thousands of workers and communists who had access to the technical colleges during the first five-year plan received promotions to positions in industry, government and the leadership of the Communist Party.

According to Fitzpatrick, the "cultural revolution" of the late 1920 and the purges which shook the scientific, literary, artistic and the industrial communities is explained in part by a "class struggle" against executives and intellectual "bourgeois". The men who rose in the 1930s played an active role to get rid of former leaders who blocked their own promotion, and the "Great Turn" found its origins in initiatives from the bottom rather than the decisions of the summit. In this vision, Stalinist policy based on social forces and offered a response to popular radicalism, which allowed the existence of a partial consensus between the regime and society in the 1930s.

Fitzpatrick was the leader of the second generation of "revisionist historians". She was the first to call the group of Sovietologists working on Stalinism in the 1980s "a new cohort of [revisionist] historians".

Fitzpatrick called for a social history that did not address political issues, in other words that adhered strictly to a "from below" viewpoint. This was justified by the idea that the university had been strongly conditioned to see everything through the prism of the state: "the social processes unrelated to the intervention of the state is virtually absent from the literature." Fitzpatrick did not deny that the state's role in social change of the 1930s was huge. However, she defended the practice of social history "without politics". Most young "revisionists" did not want to separate the social history of the USSR from the evolution of the political system.

Fitzpatrick explained in the 1980s, when the "totalitarian model" was still widely used, "it was very useful to show that the model had an inherent bias and it did not explain everything about Soviet society. Now, whereas a new generation of academics considers sometimes as self evident that the totalitarian model was completely erroneous and harmful, it is perhaps more useful to show than there were certain things about the Soviet company that it explained very well."

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had hoped to get from this work a general overview of the principles behind Soviet marxist cultural policy; after all, stories of artistic repression and cronyism abound. The Cultural Front, however, does not offer an ideologically satisfying answer. Rather, it sketches a picture of a nation in tumult and upheaval, in which the Communist Party saw itself forced, broadly speaking, to adhere to a line of pragmatism rather than theoretical puritanism. The path to socialism is paved with what works.

It gets exhausting to always have to read between the lines of liberal historiography - unsourced paragraphs announcing that a certain view surely holds water, credence given to theories and figures we now know are disreputable, etcetera; the hard facts must constantly and consciously be sifted from conjecture and ideology they find themselves presented in. Thorough and principled revisionists like Fitzpatrick in her Cultural Front make this task a lot easier. At times a tad boring but overall a fascinating look at the oftentimes contradictory and ambiguous relation between elites (cultural and social), upwardly mobile workers and engineers, and the ruling party. The final paragraph of the book bears repeating:

In Western discussion of Stalinist culture, the question Kto kogo? ("Who will beat whom?") has not been asked because the power relationship between party leadership and intelligentsia seems obvious. Yet power and cultural authority were in different hands under Stalin: the party had the political power to discipline the old intelligentsia but lacked the will or resources to deny its cultural authority. In cultural terms, then, who was assimilating whom?

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knew? Sheila Fitzpatrick views the so-called proletarian culture promoted under Stalin as a duplicate of the middle-brow culture promoted in America to this day.

For more of my review:
http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid20...

[Zhelana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Halfway through and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in this book.

[K Porcelain · Rating 5 out of 5]

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