Anti-Formalism Campaign

The opening of 1936

The article Muddle Instead of Music, published in Pravda in January 1936, defined Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as a formalist perversion. It appeared unsigned and was read as a document conveying the party's judgement. At this point formalism ceased to name a particular aesthetic tendency and became a political category covering any experiment that departed from the norms of Socialist Realism.

The first phase was not confined to music. Formalism was denounced in architecture, painting, and theatre as well, and the closure of Meyerhold's theatre in 1938 belongs to the same current. What was demanded of artists was not argument but public self-criticism.

The decree of 1948

The campaign intensified again after the war. From 1946 a series of decrees issued under Zhdanov's name addressed literature, theatre, and cinema, and the Central Committee decree of 10 February 1948, On Muradeli's Opera The Great Friendship, was the culmination in music.

The decree named Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and other leading Soviet composers for anti-popular formalist perversions. The works in question were dropped from concert programmes, the composers performed self-criticism at meetings of the Composers' Union, and some were dismissed from teaching posts. Composers responded in this period by separating work whose passage through censorship was assured from work they did not present at all.

Lifting and legacy

Pressure eased after Stalin's death in 1953, and a Central Committee decree of 28 May 1958 corrected the 1948 judgement as mistaken and formally rehabilitated the composers. The correction took the form of admitting an error of particular judgement and did not put the party's direction of the arts itself in question.

The anti-formalism campaign shows how cultural policy operated. What mattered more than any list of prohibitions was the condition of not being able to predict what would be defined as formalism, and that uncertainty made self-censorship routine. Combining with the rootless cosmopolitanism campaign of the same years, the denunciation of formalism also came to overlap with the exclusion of a particular group.