Cultural Revolution (Soviet)

Etymology and Early Discussion

The phrase 'cultural revolution' appeared in Russia in the Gordin brothers' 'Manifesto of Anarchism' in May 1917, and Lenin introduced it into Soviet political language in 1923 in 'On Cooperation.' That finding is attributed to the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and many scholars trace the idea to Alexander Bogdanov, treating his Proletkult movement as the beginning of the Soviet cultural revolution. The standard Soviet exposition of the concept ran from Stalin's speech to the Eighteenth Party Congress (1938), elaborated in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd ed., 1953); the pioneering Western work on the episode was Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform (1934).

Development

The cultural revolution as a change in the ideology of society began soon after the October Revolution. A decree of 23 January 1918 separated church from state and school from church, and a party-state apparatus for managing cultural life was created (Agitprop, Glavpolitprosvet, Narkompros, Glavlit). Cultural institutions were nationalized, freedom of the press was abolished, atheist propaganda and persecution of religion were carried out, and strict censorship was introduced. Because the 1920 census recorded only 41.7% literacy among those over eight in Soviet Russia, fighting illiteracy was the primary task, and its results were also necessary for later scientific and technological development.

The party's ideological hegemony over literature and art was constant, and the Komsomol played a major role. The authorities initially intervened little in literature and art, but from the second half of the 1920s cultural figures were required to support the party's 'general line' (RAPP, RAPM, RAKh), and in 1932 literary-artistic associations were dissolved and replaced by sectoral creative unions, with 'socialist realism' proclaimed the only admissible direction.

Examples

National alphabets were created for nationalities that had lacked writing, and a wide network of workers' faculties (rabfak) prepared working youth for university admission regardless of primary education. The Communist University, Istpart, the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors were established to educate a new intellectual elite, while commissions were created to improve the living conditions of 'old' scientific personnel.

On the other side, more than 200 prominent representatives of Russian science and culture were expelled from the country on the 'Philosophers' Ship,' from the late 1920s bourgeois specialists were pushed out through the Academic Trial, the Shakhty Trial and the Industrial Party Trial, and from 1929 'sharashki,' special technical bureaus of prisoners run by the internal affairs bodies, carried out important research and design work.

Documented results include a literacy rate of 87.4% in the 1939 census, an extensive school system, and significant development of science and the arts; an official Marxist-class culture produced a new 'Soviet intelligentsia' from the working-peasant milieu. One view holds that Bolshevik ideologization broke with centuries of historical cultural heritage, while a number of authors dispute this and conclude that traditional values were only slightly transformed and that the Bolshevik project of creating a 'new man' should be considered largely failed. These competing assessments are presented as competing rather than resolved.

Distinctions and Periodization

The Leninist and the Stalin-era senses are distinct. In the First Five-Year-Plan period the earlier Leninist sense of non-militant mass education was replaced by the class-war sense, and the period of official sponsorship of class-war cultural revolution can be dated from the Shakhty trial (early summer 1928) to Stalin's statement of reconciliation with the old technical intelligentsia (June 1931).

The entry's startYear 1917 and endYear 1939 are the outer span of the program as a whole. The 'cultural revolution' began soon after October 1917, and the 1939 census literacy figure is the terminal datum commonly used to close the period. An alternative framing restricts the intensive class-war phase to 1928–1931, and modern historiography treats the traditional correlation of the Soviet cultural revolution with 1928–1931 alone as contested. The entry's period '1917–1930s' represents both phases.

References

• Lenin, 'On Cooperation' (1923): a whole historical epoch of cultural development, including universal literacy and the habit of book reading, is needed to bring the whole population into cooperatives.
• Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences; Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (1953); Max Eastman, Artists in Uniform (1934).
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, 'Cultural Revolution as Class War,' in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (1978).