Engineers of Human Souls

Oh, the horrors of decadent bourgeois art! For a while after the October 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks encouraged a certain amount of experimentation in what a literature and art of the proletariat would be. By 1932, Stalin was firm that all art needed to serve the Party with the decree On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations. The focus on the "little man" shifted to a focus on the "hero of labor" and the glory of production. Socialist realism became the official term used to describe the art movement.

An artistic and literary front was necessary to produce edifying works, to show positive heroes fighting the Communist cause against gross capitalists, the (surprise, surprise) negative characters. The idealization of production was necessary to explain the fierce building of an industrialist infrastructure required for socialism to succeed. The agrarian country was not prepared for the new socialist society that depended on the industrial age of the 19th century for its success. Tyrannical labor requirements were instituted so that communism could eventually be put into effect. Art and literature needed not to question or undermine these efforts but support them. And artists were expected to support it...or disappear.

Trotsky had warned that Lenin's measures–including Article 1 of the Party's statutes (1907) which permitted iron discipline by the Party, dictatorial power for the Central Committee, and permitted a small Bureau to take over the Party's powers–would end in a dictatorship by the Chairman of the Central Committee. Lenin claimed these reforms were necessary to prepare for the revolution. He did take power. Stalin did after him. And art was required to present the historically concrete character of Socialist reality in order to contribute to "the ideological transformation and the education of workers in the spirit of Socialism", in the words of Andrei Zhadanov in 1934, who had been made the Party Secretary.

The avant-garde curiosity of the first years of the Revolution was suppressed in favor of disciplined support of the Party. Some of the works of Socialist Realism are done by talented artists whose scope is curtailed by the requirements of idealogues. Stalin's death in 1953 began to loosen the binds, but that time when art was required to help engineer human souls is a good reminder of how superficial art becomes when it serves a declared purpose.

Multiple references used but largely Fernand Braudel's A History of Civilizations.