Socialist Realism

Establishing the doctrine

Socialist Realism was proposed in 1932 and formally adopted at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Its adoption ran together with the process by which the resolution of 1932 on restructuring literary and artistic organizations dissolved the existing literary groups and established a single Writers' Union. Organizational unification and the establishment of an aesthetic doctrine were one operation.

The core formulation required a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development. The point of the formulation is that the demand for truthfulness extends beyond depicting reality to indicating the direction of its development: not only present facts but the future growing within them were to be shown.

Working criteria

In practice the doctrine operated through several working criteria. Party-mindedness required that a work accord with the party's political standpoint; popular character required forms the mass audience could understand; typicality required that individual characters represent social types. A requirement of the positive hero operated alongside, so that the resolution of conflict and the presentation of prospects entered the structure of narrative.

These criteria had the effect of excluding experimental form. That is why the denunciation of formalism proceeded in the same years, and after 1936 the anti-formalism campaign functioned as the enforcement of the boundaries of Socialist Realism.

Spread and dissolution

The doctrine spread through the USSR and the allied socialist states and became the standard regulating creative work in every genre: painting, literature, music, sculpture, and film. Reception differed from country to country, and Yugoslavia formally abandoned the doctrine in the 1950s.

Interpretation widened during the thaw after Stalin's death. Works treating inner life and the conflicts of everyday experience became possible, and through the 1960s and 1970s the formal maintenance of the doctrine coexisted with an actual diversification of practice. In the glasnost period of the late 1980s it lost its official standing.

Assessment divides. A view that treats the doctrine as an apparatus of political control over art stands against one that treats it as a movement in twentieth-century art with specific aesthetic achievements, the latter taking in particular the painting, film, and architecture of the 1930s as material for reassessment.