Proletkult

Bogdanov's theory

Proletkult is a contraction of proletarian culture, and the organization rested on the theory of Alexander Bogdanov. His argument was that it was not enough for the working class to take power in politics and the economy: it had to create for itself a culture of its own class, distinct from the bourgeois inheritance. What characterizes the theory is that autonomous development in the cultural field is set as a task equal in standing to political revolution.

Organizational autonomy followed from this view. Because proletarian culture forms through the creative activity of workers themselves rather than through direction by state or party, cultural organization had to be independent of state institutions.

Scale and work

The organization grew quickly after the revolution. At its peak in 1920 it had some 84,000 members in 300 branches with around half a million casual participants, and it ran literary circles, theatre companies, art workshops, and publishing. Direct participation by workers in creative work was the core of its activity.

Results were most visible in literature and theatre. Work by poets of worker origin was published, theatre activity spread at factory level, and many of the forms of mass participation that later Soviet cultural policy addressed were first attempted in this period. Internal argument continued at the same time over what the content of proletarian culture was to be.

Conflict with the party

The demand for autonomy became the cause of conflict. Lenin criticized the view that a proletarian culture could be constituted without inheriting the achievements of earlier culture and argued that cultural work belonged under the direction of the People's Commissariat of Education. His long-standing philosophical opposition to Bogdanov also bore on the criticism.

A Central Committee resolution of November 1920 subordinated Proletkult to the education commissariat. The organization lost funding, staff, and influence afterwards, and it was formally dissolved by the Central Committee resolution of April 1932 on the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations.

The questions Proletkult raised did not disappear. Whether the culture of a new society is an inheritance from or a break with what preceded it, and whether the subject of cultural creation is the professional artist or the mass itself, returned repeatedly in later phases of Soviet cultural policy and in twentieth-century debates in cultural theory.