Alin Rus

 

 

Traditional Culture versus Proletcultism

 

 

1. The Bolshevik Revolution – a Cartesian Project

 

The October Bolshevik Revolution wanted to bring about the millenarian dream of a new society and a new man. It was later proved that this revolution had been a coup d’etat, so it only brought about what coups d’etat bring about: terror and violence. In any case, the Bolsheviks succeeded in conquering Russia and they tried to impose their dreams to everybody. However, their dreams were based on Marxist ideology and on Lenin’s vision regarding the perfect society. Without realizing it, they carried on, in a strange form, the Cartesian project based on the “struggle” between Reason and Culture. Descartes was the first in the history of Western thought who tried to oppose Individual Reason to Collective Culture. Some critics claim that this was the beginning of individualism in Western culture and the real victory of self-identity in opposition to society’s rules. The stake of Modernity was the promise of our self-autonomy and, implicitly, the promise of personal self-education, all these indepen­dent of the pressure exercised by the tradition and the culture to which one belonged. But in some places Modernity came about later. This was the case of the Bolshevik Revolution, which was a modern belated revolution. It was produced in the Russian society, an undeveloped society of backward peasants. This revolution would have, therefore, not merely to destroy the monarchical system, but also to ‘fight’ against an ancestral culture. This fight was another trial of modernity, immanent on the Bolshevik Revolution. But, coming so late, this revolution was rather a strange one. All the events following in the aftermath of this revolution were caused by several factors. One of these was Lenin’s personality.

Like other modernist leaders, Lenin had a personal issue with Traditional Culture and wanted to impose his dream onto everybody. How could this be achieved? In two ways: either through persuasion, or through force. This statement about Lenin’s belief seems strange: how could one of the fathers of Socialism have turned Traditional Culture into a personal matter? Someone might contradict us here: ‘Lenin was a man with a collective way of thought, who always placed the prosperity of the masses above everything else!’ We can, however, by examining Lenin’s personality, prove the contrary. As we can learn from Richard Pipes’ book, The Russian Revolution, the real Lenin was totally different from his ideological depictions: ‘Lenin had a strong streak of cruelty. It is a demonstrable fact that he advocated terror on principle, issued decrees, which condemned to death count­less people innocent of any wrongdoing, and showed no remorse at the loss of life for which he was responsible. At the same time, it is important to stress that his cruelty was not sadism, which derives pleasure from the suffering of others. It rather stemmed from complete indifference to such suffering. Maxim Gorky gained the impression from conver­sation with Lenin that for him individual human beings held almost no interest, that he thought only of parties, masses, states…’[1] Another hidden part of his personality was his cowardice: ‘this aspect of Lenin’s perso­nality is rarely touched upon in the litera­ture, although there exists a great deal of evidence for it. Lenin showed a charac­teristic lack of courage while still in his teens when he tried to evade punishment for participating in student disturbances by attempting to withdraw from the university. As we shall note later, he will fail to admit authorship of a manuscript, which cost an associate of his two additional years of exile. His invariable reaction to psychical danger was flight: he had an uncanny ability to make himself scarce whenever there was the threat of arrest or shooting, even if it meant abandoning his troops.’[2] It is known that even as a young man, Lenin was already identifying with an idea: the prole­tarian revolution. Soon, his new knowledge and life’s experiences were to prove the weaknesses of this idea: ‘The longer he observed the behaviour of workers in and out of Russia, the more compelling was the conclusion, entirely contrary to the funda­mental premise of Marxism, that labour (the proletariat) was not a revolutionary class at all: left to itself, it would rather settle for a larger share of the capitalists’ profits than overthrow capita­lism.’[3] In spite of these just observations, he could not relinquish his idea, that of the proletarian revolution: ‘Having concluded that industrial labour was inherently non-revolutionary, Lenin had two choices open to him. One was to give up the idea of revolution. This, however, he could not do, for the psychological reasons spelled out earlier: revolution to him was not the means to an end but the end itself. The other choice was to carry out a revolution from above, by conspiracy and coup d’etat, without regard for the wishes of the masses. Lenin chose the later course.’[4] All this proves once again our idea expressed at the beginning of this paper: Lenin’s project was a modern and Cartesian one, but it came too late and was influenced by many bad factors, one of which was his personality. The struggle between Moder­nity and Tradition in old Russia was destined to take on the form of terror.

Due to this, the Bolsheviks gave a strange form to the Cartesian project. Their project could not simply be an individual one because it implied: the party, the masses, the proletariat, war combat and so on. It was said that Lenin was a creator and that his work material were the popular masses. As a creator, he became dependent on the masses. The Russian Modern project was thus destined to bear the mark of this dependency.

Descartes, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, as Modern creators, had a personal scuffle with Tradition and Society but they tried to solve this problem personally. Lenin also had a personal scuffle with Tradition and Society but he tried to solve this problem through the proletariat. Since we know now the future development of this story, we can learn a moral: if you have a personal scuffle with Tradition or Society, you had better solve it on your own! Nevertheless, the Lenin affair did not remain without traces. He had memorable followers like Stalin, Mao, Ceauşescu, Castro and others. Unfor­tunately they laid the foundations of a certain kind of culture: the culture of terror and political violence, the culture of hostility, dictatorship and distrust.

 

2. The Bolsheviks’ Fight against Traditional Culture

 

When the Bolsheviks came to power, they believed (or at least some of them did) that they would soon set up a proletarian and socialist culture. In fact, the Socialist project was only a utopian one, since a real Communist society could not exist. This utopian project was condemned from its beginnings to permit the accumulation of significant power in the hands of a single person: ‘It is not only that the power which he accumulated allowed Lenin to exert a decisive influence on the course of events but also that the regime which he established in October 1917 institutiona­lised, as it were, his personality.’[5] This problem would become a constant feature of all the Communist regimes that had their roots in the Bolshevik revolution. All these regimes were fraught with the same pro­blem; they could not impose their doctrine peacefully and had to impose it by force. In fact, they underestimated the power of Traditional Culture. This was a problem especially for the Bolshevik party. Their project met the tacit opposition of this Culture. For example, in the first period of their activity, the Bolshevik leaders under­stood that they would have to spread their doctrine throughout the entire country. But in a country of Russia’s size this was a real problem. Additionally, in those times, almost 80 percent of Russia’s population lived in the countryside. This situation had to be solved as quickly as possible, and the first thought of the Bolshevik leaders was how to establish a state monopoly over the printed word, especially over the press. Their attempt to impose the party’s ideology in this way remained, during the first stages, unsuccessful. They had not taken into account the big percentage of illiteracy in the countryside, as well as the incompati­bility between party ideology and the mentality of the people. Another problem was the poverty of the people, who could not afford to buy newspapers. These problems have been very well described and presented in one of the books written by the historian Jeffrey Brooks: ‘A mass audience was accessible, but the Bolsheviks failed to address it effectively. In 1926 literacy among men and women aged nine to forty-nine was 72 and 43 percent, respectively. Yet although many ordinary people could read to some extent, their skills and knowledge were rudimentary. The sixty million rural readers constituted 71 percent of the literate in the country in 1926. The Poor was the first publication specifically for peasants, but it was never popular… Production rose from fifty thousand copies a day in 1918 to eight hundred thousand in 1921. But when a price was put on it in January 1922, after the limited introduction of a mixed economy under the New Economic Policy, circulation tumbled in a single week from five hundred thousand to two hundred thousand copies. Only thirty-five thousand copies a day were printed in 1923, and one authority estimated only seven thousand individual subscribers.’[6] We have to understand this weak response to the “Party Life” or “New Life” not as a form of resistance to the new order imposed by the party, but as a traditional mentality, which could not understand any form of participation other than that in its own community’s rules and norms. This menta­lity, impregnated with a patriarchal and a local sense of community, was specific to rural Russia in those times. The same problem afflicted not only the first Bolsheviks, but also the first reformatory leaders from the Tsar’s period. For them it had also been difficult to understand the social structures of the villages: ‘The life of the Russian peasantry revolved around three institutions: the household (dvor), the village (derevnia or selo), and the commune (mir or obshchina). All three were distinguished by a low degree of continuity, structural fluidity, poorly developed hierarchies, and the prevalence of personal rather than functional relations. In these respects, Russian rural conditions differed sharply from those found in Western societies and certain Oriental ones (notably Japan’s), a fact which was to have profound conse­quences for Russia’s political develop­ment.’[7] Another difficult task, maybe the most difficult, was that of understanding the peasants’ mentality: ‘The most difficult aspect of rural Russia to understand is peasant mentality, a subject on which the scholarly literature is quite unhelpful. There exist many works on the economic condi­tions of the pre-revolutionary peasan­try, on its folklore and customs, but virtually no scholarly studies that explain what the muzhik believed and how he reasoned.’[8] Both of these problems constituted a signal of alarm even for the ministries from the tsar’s times. They were also waging a hope­less war against the feudal network of social relations and rules from the countryside. Sergey White, one of the most important reformatory leaders just before the October Revolution, having familiarized himself with the rural conditions as chairman of a special commission studying the peasants’ needs, felt deeply apprehen­sive about the future: ‘Russia, he wrote in 1905, in one respect represents an exception to all the countries in the world… The exception consists in this, that the people have been systematically, over two generations, brought up without a sense of property and legality… What historical consequences will result from this, I hesitate now to say, but I feel they will be very serious… Legal relations among the peasants are regulated not by precise, written laws, but by customs, which often no one knows… Under these conditions, I see one gigantic questions mark: what is an empire with one million peasants, who have been educated neither in the concept of landed property nor that of the firmness of law in general?’[9] Therefore, the Bolsheviks inherited a hard burden that they would have to solve as fast as possible if they wished to conquer Russia. In fact, this was an anthropological context and question: how to change a cultural system, how to remove an entire system of norms and values so suddenly?

In the history of humanity, the colonial period is now considered as one of the most disastrous, anthropologically speaking. This is because an entire system of norms, values and communities was destroyed. Nowadays we condemn the behaviour of the first colonialists. In those times they had good reasons to justify their actions. Sometimes, they were considered heroes for their deeds. The Bolshevik case is, in some respects, similar.

The Bolsheviks saw the entire cultural system of the people from rural spaces as bearing an implicit opposition to their own norms and values. In the first stage of their system, they viewed peasants as the class enemy. Due to this conception, they tried to solve ‘the peasantry problem’ through force, violence and coercive control. However, the cultural system that represented one of the most difficult problems for the early Bolsheviks proved, at the same time, to be their salvation, especially in Stalin’s time. The draconian measures taken by the Bolsheviks, beginning with the first stages, had met with the tolerance and obedience of the same peasant class. The Russian people took all these with unexpected stoicism and patience, which were also the cultural cha­rac­teristics of Russia’s rural culture. At the same time, the idea of a dictator had a good adherence with the popular masses, whose mentality was impregnated by a patriarchal vision and an inclination to messianic thought, as Ernest Gellner has very well observed: ‘The Russian people, if we are to believe Russian literature, have a certain propensity not only towards religious belief, but also towards a kind of concrete social Messianism. Marxism satisfied both of these dominant aspirations: its scientist character promised the inclusion of Russia into a prosperous materialist Occident, while its moral utopia promised total perfection and a superior morality sur­passing those of the West.’[10]

This idea was very well observed by talented Russian writers. For example, in his book Doctor Jivago Boris Pasternak tells us just such a story. Somebody tries to explain to one peasant from an isolated community that the tzar has been removed from power and that another regime led by Lenin is now ruling the country. Finally, the peasant, who seems to understand the explanation, exclaims: ‘Ah, now I understand, Lenin is the new tzar!’

So, by understanding the Russian peasants’ mentality, we can explain not only the weak opposition met by the Commu­nists, but also its future popularity. Of course there were victims, but these victims, paradoxically, proved once again that the society was on the right track: ‘Totalitarian Marxism reestablished a moral order in a modern sense, in any case, it imposed a modernity in fashion at the end of the twentieth century. But this modernity was immediately accepted by a Russian nation thirsty for justice and modernity. Marxism was modern and embodied the moral messianic fulfilment. The fight between the tendency toward Westerns models and moral mysticism seemed to be over: a doctrine had appeared that satisfied both trends at the same time.’[11]

Marxism embodied a dream and this dream dovetailed with the dream of some individuals who were suffocated in their old culture. Due to this, the old culture had to be replaced with a new one: socialist culture. Nevertheless, time has proved that the former would survive the latter.

3. Socialism against the Individuals

 

One of the first specific features of Socialism in its early forms was the idea that all the individuals from a society had to contribute in their own ways to the building of the new society. The Socialists’ dream had to be the same as the community’s dream. All the people had to behave as a unity in order to guarantee the success of that dream. No sacrifice was too high for the fulfilment of this purpose. Due to this, the individuals had to comply with the request of the society: ‘all the originals who came in such great numbers in the anarchists’ structures: homosexuals, butter­fly collectors, hunchbacks, drug consumers, fetishists, all the people who were obsessed with their personal beliefs, all the cultural, sexual or philosophical minorities would not feel very comfortable in the communist organisations.’[12]

In this context we are bound to find socialism fighting against any form of individualism. Amongst the most important enemies, given their intrinsic character, were the intellectuals. Not only had they been part of a proscribed social class, but, through their activities, they were also condemned to be different from the others. To put this differently, when you are different from the others you would rather be left alone (if you are lucky enough not to be condemned!). Soon, this idea proved to be very real. Stalin himself publicly condemned the intellectuals at the first congress of the Shakhanovists on November 11, 1953.

This decision would constitute the basis of a new culture: the culture of labour. Labour became one of the new myths of Communism. It was believed that labour could be present in all the spheres of the society. Of course it was all about physical labour! Due to this idea, it was clear until the end of the Socialism that physical work would not be replaced with intellectual work. This is what would condemn the Soviet Union to function on the basis of an economic system from the end of nineteenth century: ‘The tragedy of Communism wasn’t its failure but its success. Stalin had built the institutional frame which, defying any logic, caused the success of the Soviet Union. In the ‘70s the Soviet Union had the most advanced economy (since the end of the nineteenth century) and the most competitive and rigid network of industrial colossi in the entire world.’[13] This fact contributed to the perpetuation (in the Socialist countries) of the working-class culture in fashion at the end of the nineteenth century, well until the end of the twentieth century.

It has been said that the Russian Revolution was belated by one hundred years. This fact is also valid for the informa­tional society, which is far from being set up in Russia even nowadays.

In the first stages of the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the major tasks was to obtain a monopoly not only over the written press but also over literature. The writer was, by his nature, an example of individua­lism. He had to express the ideas of the party and, most importantly, to be put under the control of the party. It was an illusion for the Russian vanguard to believe that they would become an independent move­ment if they wrote in the spirit of Socialism. The evolution of the literature of those times proves very well that the real purpose of the Socialist system and of its leaders was not to transform literature into a socialist artefact but to control it. Literature had to become not only the engine of the new revolutionary ideas but also a pawn of the power: ‘The literary and artistic production had to be directly subordinated to the authority of the party in the same manner as industrial or agricultural production… literature had to become party literature, Lenin said.’[14] Independence was not allowed in any form. The writers, who believed that they would be able to work independently from any form of subor­dination, if they proved to be convinced communists, had committed a serious mistake. Some of them were imprisoned and suspicion hovered over the writers’ heads at all times. A new form of art, Socialist Realism was born, but this was also under permanent suspicion. The intellectual was never given total credit.

Nevertheless, being in the service of the party, this new form of art tried to promote and protect the principles of the party, Marxism and Socialism: ‘The artist ought to show life truthfully, and if he shows our life truthfully, he cannot fail to show it as moving towards Socialism. This is and will be Socialist Realism.’[15] Stalin would define the writers as engineers of the souls. Their task was to depict the reality as it was. But they had to be cautious. The reality had to suit the principles of the party. Otherwise, the poor writer would have to bear the consequences of his mistake. Here we can ask ourselves how it was possible for such a kind of literature and art to develop. This evolution could be observed by reading the most important works of Socialist Realism.

 

4. The Works of Socialist Realism

 

All the works of Socialist Realism became engines of the Socialist ideology and were put into the service of the party. Not a single masterpiece can be found amongst all these works. Nevertheless many of them became famous, winning the Stalin prize for literature, and were printed in thousands of copies.

Generally, these works were made after a simple recipe. They would have to depict the people, working in the service of party, working for country, being happy that they could work for the progress of the country, and so on. There are some recurrent themes, which appear in almost all the works of Socialist Realism: the idea that work ennobles the people, the idea of class struggle as a continuous revolution, the idea of a new man, the difference between the landowners and the working class, the hard work of the proletariat, and the fight against the enemy of the Socialist Revolution. In some of the works of Socialist Realism other secondary topics, which will be discussed below, also appeared.

The works of Socialist Realism had to be real moral lessons for the working class and instruments for disqualifying the enemies, especially the landowners and the capitalists. The children’s education had to be modelled after the principles postulated by these works. In this respect, a work that was highly recommended was that of V. Gubarev, entitled Pavlik Morozov. This is the story of a thirteen-year-old child who denounced his counter-revolutionary father. Thus, he began his career as a new man. As we can see, the moral of this story is simple: if you are to become a new man, nothing is too much. Of course the family has come second because ‘the big family,’ the state’s family must come first. This is only a subtle method through which the communist leaders tried to replace the family’s values and norms with those of Socialism.

The most famous works, which give life to the new pedagogical concepts, are, nevertheless, the novels of A.S. Makarenko: The Road to Life (An Epic of Education) and Learning to Live; Flags on the Battlements. These were not simple novels but real ideological pillars. In fact, through these works a great stake was played: the idea that education is much more important than the genetic imprint. In fact, Makarenko was one of the dark personalities of the Bolshevik regime. His final purpose was to create CEKA agents. Especially in the camp symbolically entitled Dzerjinski, after the name of the head of CEKA, he tried to make an experiment, which was destined to confirm one of Communism’s myths: the idea that men can be shaped in any form and that heredity has absolutely no importance. In his colonies three thousand new men were created. The entire colony was based on three principles: collectivism, military regime and authority. Nevertheless, in the book entitled Learning to Live; Flags on the Battlements the author describes the colony as leisure area, where the young stay without being stopped to leave whenever they want to; a place where the young understand that ‘there was no better place in the world for them.’ The main weapon of reeducation, in this colony, as Makarenko said, is conviction. If we read the book and compare it with the real intentions of the author (to create CEKA agents), we will find a major discrepancy. Despite all these, the final purpose of the book is an educational one: to show to the people that work is the most important thing! The cult of labour, a slogan very often repeated by the Communist ideology, is here present and presented in the most exemplary and detailed manner.

In another novel of Socialist Realism, written by N. Ostrovski, the idea of the Cult of Labour is very well resumed, but this time in quite a different register. The novel is autobiographical, and the author is one of the Bolsheviks from the first generation, in fact, a man who sincerely believed in the power of ideology and in the promises of the new system. The name of the novel is very suggestive: How the Steel Was Tempered. As it is shown in the title, the epic line of the novel follows the life of the main character. This man put his entire life into the service of the party and the party’s ideas. His life was a real odyssey dedicated to the revo­lutionary Bolshevik ideas. Suffering from blindness and illness because of working hard in hostile environments throughout his life, Ostrovski wrote this last novel, which was, at the same time, the final product of his life in the service of the party. The main aim of this novel is to show to the people, as it is specified in the title, the recipe for tempering the human soul in order to transform an ordinary person into a good communist. Maybe due to this, or maybe due to the author’s life, the opposition between the working class (proletarians and peasants) and the exploiters (landowners and the bourgeois) dominates the novel. Of course, the representatives of the bourgeois are not regarded as the enemy of the party without reasons, they are enemy of the party because they lack any trace of morality and cruelly exploit the working class. A Bolshevik advertisement for this novel could be: ‘If you want to become a new man, here is the recipe!’

Another way to reach this status can be seen in the works of A. Fadeev. In fact, he was not only a writer but also a theoretician of Socialist Realism. His most famous novels are The Last of the Udege and The Young Guard. We will insist here on the former.

The novel entitled The Last of the Udege has more than five hundred pages and is a real fresco of Socialist Realism. The plot of the novel unfolds in the Russian taiga at the border with China in the year 1919. The novel is full of characters and the epic line is broken off several times in order to introduce new characters or subplots. In this way a very complicated network is created. The novel focuses on the fights during the Russian Civil War. Marginal to the story are also many ethnical groups, which are defined by their affiliation to the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. The characters are classified in the same way. The value of this novel is given by its ambition to include all the main topics of Socialist Realism. The idea of class struggle is presented almost obsessively in the pages of the novel. The opposition between the bright system promised by the Bolsheviks and the dark­ness of the bourgeois system is shown in multiple facets. In this context there appears an opposition between the good characters (those who are on the Reds’ side) and the bad characters (those who are on the Whites’ side). A similar opposition is that between the poor people and the represen­tatives of the bourgeoisie. The moral is that the bourgeois are feeding on the work of the poor people, or the proletarians. Hence, the mission of the Bolshevik Revolution is precisely to repair these inequalities. A secondary but important idea in this book, which is little exploited in other works of Socialist Realism, although is one of the basic ideas of Marxism, is that of the good savage. In fact, the title of this novel is The Last of the Udege, Udege being a commu­nity of primitive people, who live in harmony with nature. The main idea regarding this topic is explained by the author himself in one passage of the book: ‘Eh, such people! You mustn’t think that they are backward! They are true people, real brothers. They don’t consider that this thing is mine and that is yours. Whenever one of them gets something, one shares it with all the others.’[16] Here the critical aspects are certain bourgeois features present, as the author very well observed, in the very character of the Russian people: the desire to obtain more and more goods, avarice and envy.

Generally, the novels of Socialist Realism are not very weak works, but they are severely restricted by the limits of ideology. The recipes and the prescriptions once discovered, the intrigue of the novel disappears. The conflict is also destroyed by the presence of ideology. Here and there appear passages like this: ‘A strong hand embraced her beneath her breasts but Lena wasn’t feeling uneasiness, on the contrary, she felt trust and gratitude for this hand (because it was a worker’s hand!),’[17] or this ‘“I envy you so much because you know what your goal is, because you have an organisation and capable people,” a Korean fighter said.’[18] These fragments and the continuous presence of the language of ideology make these works unnatural. I think that they were hardly digestible for all the readers who had been accustomed with great literature. In this context, there is no wonder that this kind of literature suffered so many amendments and that the old classical authors were periodically resur­rected and put into the frames of official literature.

 

5. The Fight between Socialist Realism and the Traditional Culture

 

An idea rarely noticed by the critics of Socialist Realism, but often present in these works, was that of the struggle between the new cultural system and the old cultural system. Sometimes this struggle took the form of the fight between the new principles imposed by the Bolshevik Revolution and the elements of the old culture. We have already spoken about the difficulty met by the Bolsheviks in their attempt to impose their doctrine in the countryside. This problem appeared with the same pregnancy when the Bolsheviks tried to impose their pedagogy. This problem is confessed repeatedly by the ace of Soviet education, A.S. Makarenko. In his book Learning to Live; Flags on the Battlements, Makarenko expresses very plastically the above-mentioned idea in terms of the struggle between the new, bright doctrine and ‘the old’. Makarenko admitted that his task to create the new man was very difficult: ‘The task was clear for Zaharov and his friends: to educate a new man! But, from the very first days it could be seen that this was to be a very long and difficult task.’[19] In spite of the first successes, the old habits died very hard: ‘There came out many old things, and they didn’t want to die out in silence, on the contrary, they were obstinate, they would dress up in new clothes, mix up the hands and the legs, keep conferences and invent educational rules. The old knew how to write articles in which they simulated defending the Soviet education.’[20]

As we can see, Makarenko’s character Zahanov never confesses clearly about his problems; even in his monologues this idea is always codified: ‘There was a time when the old faced and mocked Zahanov’s work with new expressions asking him at the same time for wonders and heroism. The old offered him fantastical, stupid enigmas and formulated these enigmas in scientific terms and… when Zahanov fell, being very tired, the old pointed fingers at him, screaming, “He has suffered a failure!”’[21]

In Fadeev’s novel The Last of the Udege the opposition between the new and the old is perhaps one of the most evident from all the Socialist Realism works. This opposition is immanent in the novel’s plot itself, namely in the fight between ‘the Reds’ and ‘the Whites’. Of course, ‘the Reds’ represented the new, the change, the good self while ‘the Whites’ represented the old, the degenerate bourgeois desires, the bad self. Besides this physical fight, there is also a symbolical one: the fight between traditional culture and the Bolshevik culture. This problem appears throughout the entire novel. The Bolsheviks want to impose their bright system of values but they encounter the backwardness and the old habits of people everywhere. The innovative Bolshevik trend is always hampered by the people’s mentality, impregnated with elements of the traditional culture, ethnic customs and disorganisation. But here intervenes socia­list optimism, present in all the hearts of the Bolsheviks. This bright optimism is very well condensed in a dialogue in the novel. The partners in this dialogue are: an old peasant (the advocate of traditional culture), a young boy (the representative of the Bolshevik culture) and a girl who comes from the bourgeois culture but is moving toward Bolshevik ideas. The old peasant complains about the injustices made by the bourgeois against him and his family. He tells them about his attempts to fight against this system full of bad people, against tsarist bureaucracy, and about how he was over­whelmed by their number:

“‘If you must fight against each other, this is a correct fight. Thus you can fight and win! Thus, if the cleverest and the most powerful men rise above the weakest or the laziest, this is not an injustice.’

‘So, in your opinion, only people like you must have the power and cleverness, while thousands and millions of common people are like the cattle! This does not seem to be the truth! Do you think that there are only few people with brilliant minds and with a wonderful character, who work every day like prisoners and whom everything forces down to the ground? It seems that the power and cleverness that you are speaking about are not in the minds and hands of the people, but in money. You hadn’t enough of this kind of power, and that is why you are now blocked. You had the bad luck of falling under the wheel where you had wanted to throw the others. But these people that you wanted to crush under the wheel are real people, people like you; just think that they would like to live cleaner and brighter lives, too. We are advocating another type of life, a happy life for all the people!’

‘But even if people could be that happy, nobody could guarantee that while walking in the street, one might not have one’s skull crushed by a falling brick,’ Lena said.

‘I think that the people will learn to build such solid houses that bricks will never fall off crushing their skulls.’

‘But, death nevertheless exists!’

‘It exists only for a moment! For a moment!’ Aliosha said with an intonation which was meant to show that he was already immortal.”[22]

In this dialogue where socialist optimism and faith in the future appear very clearly expressed, the peasants’ faulty ideas of competition and individualism are also contested. What is promoted here is the idea of equalitarianism in the name of the Bolshevik new order.

This socialist optimism appears more poignantly in the Russian newspapers. Especially after World War II, the Russian newspapers were full of articles on the opposition between socialism, as a new and progressive system, and capitalism, as a relic from the past. The leaders of the capitalist states were accused not only of immorality but also of lacking a progressive mentality. They were seen as elements of the past, as people who could not under­stand all the dimensions of the new commu­nist culture. This is the same opposition between the new cultural system and the old cultural system. In these newspapers the economic crisis often appeared depicted under the shape of a skeleton. The subsidiary moral is that death was already present at the core of capitalism, which was an anachronism. Due to this, both the commu­nist newspapers and Socialist Rea­lism’s works frequently feature terms like bright, light and sun regarding the socialist future. In all these works are postulated the disappearance not only of the capitalist system, but also of all the backward elements embodied in the capitalist culture, including the economic system, the human relationships and the people’s life styles. In the final stage, as already postulated by the Communist leaders, the entire mentality of the people would probably have to change, being replaced with Communism’s ideals.

 

6. Defining some Concepts: Traditional Culture, the Culture of Terror, Proletcultism, and Working-Class Culture

 

As we can see from these examples, Socialist Realism, Proletcultism and Wor­king-Class Culture are different terms. We have to make here several distinctions. Socialist Realism was always only a form of art. It was often criticized both by writers who did not take part in this simulacrum of literature and by party leaders who changed their revolutionary ideas in time. Prolet­cultism was a new form of culture that appeared immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. This culture was a kind of artistic manifestation through which workers could express their native talents. Workers were encouraged not to feel ashamed in front of writers with academic qualifications. They had to be led by a so-called popular creator’s instinct. This was supposed to be the guarantee of a good creation. The worker had to be a self-learned man, and through proletcultism he had the chance to be like the intellectuals, even if the intellectuals never had the chance to be like the workers.

The culture of terror was a kind of institutional fear that was widespread in the society immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. This terror became a new order. The slogan of this new cultural form was: all those who are not with us, are against us. The camps, the prisons and the forced labour sites were visible forms of this culture. The result of this was terror, a widespread terror at all the levels of the society.

From amongst all the cultural forms of Communism, the working-class culture proved to have the longest life, although it did not come first in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was created not only due to ideological reasons, but also due to economic grounds. As mentioned above, in 1917 more than 70% of Russia’s popu­lation were peasants. So they had to create workers in order to abide by the principles of Marxism, and to develop an industry capable of satisfying the principles of an ideology whereby class struggle had an important role. In order for this new class to be created, the peasantry was uprooted and transformed into a new working class. Many sites of rural Russia were changed and replaced by industrial zones. Many factories were built and thousands of coal and metal mines were opened. Urban architecture was transformed, being suffused with the well-known box buildings. The structure of the villages was changed, and the Agricultural Cooperatives of Production began to be more and more widespread in the country­side. However, most importantly, the men­ta­lities of the people were transformed. To this transformation had contributed all the three cultural forms mentioned before: Realism Socialist, Proletcultism and the Red Terror. Now, more than ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellites, the traces of the working-class culture are still visible in the entire space of ex-soviet block. Architecture is the physical and the most visible aspect of this culture. The working-class districts still survive, and the famous pragmatism of Socialism is easily recog­nisable in the shapes of these buildings. Nowadays, these residential areas are exotic sites for Western tourists. In most of the cases these quarters look much more disas­trous than in the past. In certain places we can see strange landscapes: half-inhabited, half-abandoned blocks of flats, as the result of the new process of de-industria­lisation. But the most important aspect that is not so much visible as always present is the mentality of the people. As we can remember, the moments that followed the collapse of Communism in the Eastern block were full of tensions and rumours. The tensions, which were kept under pressure during Communist times, were now allowed to erupt, threatening to destroy the fragile equilibrium of the new demo­cracy. Strikes, social movements, street fights, inter-ethnical conflicts were just some of the most important elements of the new democracies. The working class had a very important role here. Especially in the countries with a strong working-class cul­ture, the social movements were the most intensive. In Romania, 1990 was the year of ‘proletarian dictatorship.’ Not only was the working class visible in the most important moments after the December Revolution, but it also dictated, in a manner that had not been possible during Communist times. The new freedom allowed the working class to behave in such a manner as had previously been untenable. And… this working class proved its nature during the most important moments of Post-Communism. It used its liberty allowing itself to be manipulated by the new opportunist leaders who had come to power. The working class elected the crypto-communist leaders at the new elections because… they spoke in the spirit of the working-class culture.

A short economic comparison between the countries of the Eastern block can prove that the most developed countries are those that did not have a huge percentage of workers after the collapse of Communism. Those countries that had ‘the (mis)chance’ of carrying on the grandiose industrial project of transforming nature are nowadays still on their way to transition.

After more than a decade since the collapse of the Communist regime, the working-class culture is still visible inside post-Communist mentalities. Its presence is visible in certain cultural aspects and behaviours such as: the regret for the past, the desire for order (which is a hidden facet of the desire for dictatorship), the lack of civic culture, the fear of change and of the future. In this context, for those people who during Communism constituted the most important part of the working-class culture, returning to the countryside, to the places of origin has become a widespread practice. We are now facing the closure of a cycle: uprooting from the countryside, adapting to the rhythms of industrialism, failing to adapt to the new society, and returning to the countryside. This entire cycle speaks, in fact, about a cultural opposition: the opposi­tion between Traditional Culture and Working-Class Culture. The Marxist form of the Cartesian project was destined to fail. The lack of normality that became the norm both with the Russian society after the Bolshevik Revolution, and with the Eastern Block after World War II, constituted the basis of a new culture. Unfortunately, several generations who were destined to live in such cultures in those times have worked and lived for another century inside an out-dated working-class culture. Some of them have never experienced normality. Only those societies who had the chance of not stumbling across the opposition between Traditional Culture and Working-Class Culture in the twentieth century are now informational societies.

 

 

Bibliography

Ariès, Philippe & George Duby, The History of Private Life, Bucharest: Meri­diane Publishing House, 1997

Aucouturier, Michel, Socialist Realism, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia Publishing House, 2001

Brooks, Jeffrey, Thank you, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton University Press, 1999

Chirot, Daniel, ‘What Happened in Eastern Europe in 1989?’ in Chirot, Daniel (ed.) The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989 Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991

Fadeev, Alexander, The Last of the Udege, Bucharest: Tineretului Publishing House, 1963

Gellner, Ernest, Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and its Rivals, Iaşi: Polirom, 1999

Makarenko, A.S., Learning to Live; Flags on the Battlements, Bucharest: Didactică şi Pedagogică Publishing House, 1959

Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution 1899-1919, London: The Harvill Press, 1990

 

 

Notes