Abstract: This article showcases the creative, controversial, and unexpected ways that the post-Stalin cultural front navigated a reimagined cultural policy that made it responsible for increasing agricultural production with virtually no guidance on how to do so. First, it shows that many cultural workers adopted a trial-and-error approach to find successful strategies to boost agricultural output, leading them to develop what were, in effect, agricultural training initiatives. Second, while time spent out in the fields came at the expense of the tasks that fit their actual job titles, cultural workers attempted to leverage the state’s agricultural prerogative to advocate for themselves and their local institutions. Third, the state’s shift in cultural policy opened up opportunities for successful collective farms to undertake cultural development in a way that had not been previously possible. This article takes as a case study a mutually beneficial relationship between cultural officials and kolkhozniks on one such farm in northern Kazakhstan to show how cultural construction thrived despite contradictory ideological mandates and a lack of material resources. Deprived of the purported benefits of the cultural “Thaw” of these years, cultural workers outside of the urban centers demonstrated that Soviet culture was not something that was crafted in Moscow and deposited across the countryside. As they navigated rapidly changing political and ideological conditions, these workers shaped and asserted their own new conceptions and understandings of Soviet culture and ideology and how to build socialism from within the cultural sphere.
Rebecca Adeline Johnston (Sun,) studied this question.