The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia

When Lenin asked, Who will beat whom? (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in name of proletariat to wrest hegemony from intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between proletarian Communists and bourgeois intelligentsia? Or was it, as intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by ruling Communist Party on eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of foremost historians of Soviet Union chronicles fierce battle on the cultural front from October Revolution through Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays-two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here-which illuminate key arenas of prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as Cultural Revolution, formation of new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and new consumerism of 1930s. Closely examining cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of struggle's final outcome in which intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in formative history of Soviet Union and dynamic relationship between culture and politics.