Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 23

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In his work ‘Stalin: The Enduring Legacy’ Kerry Bolton highlights the cultural policy of the USSR under Stalin and Zhadanov:

“Andrei Zhadanov, the primary theoretician on culture in Stalinist Russia, was an inveterate opponent of ‘formalism’ and modernism in the arts. ‘Socialist realism’, as Soviet culture was termed from 1932, was formulated that year by Maxim Gorky, head of the Union of Soviet writers. It was heroic, folkish and organic. The individual artist was the conveyor of the folk-soul, in contrast to the art of Western decline, dismissively described in the USSR as ‘bourgeoisie formalism’.”

“While in the West the extreme left and its wealthy patrons championed various forms of modernism, in the USSR they were marginalized at best, resulting in the suicide for example of the Russian ‘Constructivist’ Mayakovsky. The revitalisation of Russian-Soviet art received its primary impetus in 1946 with the launching of Zhadanovschina.”

“The classical composers from the Czarist era, such as Tchaikovsky, Glinka and Borodin, were revived, after being sidelined in the early years of Bolshevism in favour of modernism, as were great non-Russian composers such as Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert…Modernists who had been feted in the early days of Bolshevism, such as the playwright, Nikolai Erdman, were relegated to irrelevance by the 1930’s. Jazz and the Associated types of dancing were condemned as bourgeoisie degeneracy.”

“Zhadanov’s speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) intended primarily to lay the foundations of Soviet music, represents one of the most cogent recent attempts to define culture…the Zhadanov speech should rank alongside T.S. Elliot’s Notes Towards a Definintion of Culture as a seminal conservative statement on culture.”

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We do not understand democracy in its bourgeois meaning--of babbling, lack of discipline, anarchy. We understand democracy as the active participation of the citizens in formulating and implementing the Party's policy.

Nicolae Ceausescu