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This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's activities from the spring of 1938 to the winter of 1939, a period that witnessed the loss of his ability to travel abroad, the arrest (at the height of the Stalinist purges) of his mentor Vsevolod Meyerhold, his embrace of the aesthetic of Socialist Realism in his opera Semyon Kotko, and his composition of a cantata in honor of Stalin's sixtieth birthday for Soviet Radio (the signing of the Molotov-Rippentrop non-aggression pact in 1939 necessitated a rewriting of the libretto of Semyon Kotko). Beyond these conformist works, the chapter also discusses Prokofiev's unknown music for athletic display.

This chapter establishes how the writer Maxim Gorky's return to the Soviet Union from European exile in 1928 to become a chief architect of Stalinist culture was a watershed in the history of the Soviet reception of foreign visitors. Making a tour around the USSR modeled on those of foreign visitors, Gorky made a distinct contribution to the rise of Socialist Realism, both in the sense of the dominant aesthetic doctrine and as a key mode of Stalin-era ideology as a whole. With his visit to the Solovetskii Camp of Special Designation (SLON, or Solovki), the model camp of the nascent GULAG, it also established new norms for the depiction of forced labor as humane reeducation. The chapter probes a range of previously unknown links among Gorky's famous visit to Solovki, his patronage of the Stalin era's dominant pedagogue, Anton Makarenko, and his ties to the head of the secret police, Genrikh Iagoda. The chapter examines in detail how these links affected the history of some of the most internationally celebrated Soviet destinations for foreign visitors: the secret police-sponsored communes for creating “new people” out of juvenile delinquents, chief among them the OGPU/NKVD Children's Labor Commune at Bolshevo.

This chapter provides a fresh perspective on the musical world of Stalinist East Germany, and argues that the vibrant soundscape was marked by the hopes and desires of both composers and the audience as well as by directives from cultural officials. Beginning with a brief discussion of expectations for musical compositions under Socialist Realism, it explores the rich array of music festivals in the post-war period, from prominent events in Berlin to those organized in smaller towns and the countryside. Concluding with an examination of Estradenkonzerte, or stage revues, the chapter asserts that the soundscape of the GDR was a negotiated project that helped to create a new socialist identity.

This chapter examines the aspects of political romanticism. It focuses on the 1948 campaign centered on the biological theories of Lysenko, Ol'ga Lepeshinskaia, Gevorg Bosh'ian, and others that were revealed in science fiction novels, plays, films, and popular science literature. The chapter explores romanticism as a component from the very beginning of Socialist Realism, which proclaimed “life in its revolutionary development” as its object. It explains how Socialist Realism absorbed revolutionary romanticism and transformed it into state romanticism, which assumed its definitive shape in the late-Stalinist era. It also highlights the materialization of Socialist Realism into phantasms and agronomic miracles produced by the magical science of the “people's academician,” Trofi m Lysenko.

A central theme of narrative prose and dramatic theater remained the conflict between an individual and society, increasingly specified as the clash of a man or woman with ongoing historical destruction. Prose and drama, like poetry, tested the formation of new subjectivities in response to historical catastrophe. Alongside the manifestations of Socialist Realism and its derivatives, the century-long evolution of the utopian/dystopian is traced. Attention is paid to the aesthetics of the grotesque and to the poetics of skaz, to an emerging trend of existentialist narrative and the flourishing women’s prose. Also important is the quasi-fictional mode best described as “in-between prose.” The continuous exploration of identity through changing literary genres, including resurgent modernist forms, runs through the diverse case studies.

This book concludes with a discussion of issues of listening in the Stalin Prize Committee (KSP) and how the Stalin Prize can illuminate the concept or practice of Socialist Realism in music. Instead of looking at the small-scale details of the KSP's decision-making process, it considers the published lists of prize-winning composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Myaskovsky. It argues that, as the case of visual arts implies, it is possible to viably speak of a Socialist Realist core of works that elicited the fullest consensus as canonical examples of Socialist Realism. It also cites the early 1950s as the period whereby both the Stalin Prize and the entire project of Socialist Realism lost their momentum.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Red Army as a symbol of power was supported in many other arenas so as to counteract the rival influence of the United States on Central Europe. The Soviet Union brought new urgency to these efforts from 1948, with music—and culture more broadly—providing a case for Russia’s attractiveness and superiority with respect to the West. This chapter discusses the nature and scope of Soviet influence in the Central European music world through the examples of East Germany and Poland, and through the prism of the music and persona of Sergei Prokofiev. After his return to the USSR in 1936, Prokofiev, along with Shostakovich, became associated with the very definition of what made music Soviet and thus worthy of emulation. And even more than Shostakovich, Prokofiev and his music functioned as powerful but malleable symbols that could be appropriated by all Soviet actors for their own ends.

The years 1937–53 are generally thought of as stagnant ones for Soviet concert repertoire. This view, however, is predicated on a number of assumptions: first, that the drop in Western modernism in the schedules and its replacement by Soviet works had a stultifying effect on concert life; second, that the era of Socialist Realism was damagingly insular; and third, that cultural exchange ceased and Soviet composers lost touch with what was being composed in the West. This chapter challenges all those assumptions by analysing concert schedules of this period, presenting evidence of semi-formal/informal cultural exchange and considering the notion that Socialist Realism was not an isolated trend but part of a large-scale shift in European and American art whose importance has been side-lined in a still dominant cultural narrative of technical progress and complexity.

This chapter examines the history of Russian comics or komiks under the Soviet regime, breaking it down into three main phases: the Revolutionary Era (1917–1934), Socialist Realism (1934 to mid-1980s), and the rise of the Non-Conformists (1960s–1980s). It also looks at the work of comics artists of the diaspora, namely the “Whites” who fled the Red Communists during and after the Russian Revolution. It considers how the Bolsheviks, led initially by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, sought to transform what they saw as backward Russian society into a modern industrialized state grounded on Marxist principles. It discusses the impact of the seventy-year Soviet domination of Russia under the Communists on the development of comics as an art form. It also describes the use of the poster or plakat in Soviet propaganda, the Russian Telegraph Agency’s (ROSTA) employment of “ROSTA satirical windows” as a communications device which fully exploited the sequential language of comics, and the rise of caricature and satirical journals in Russia. Finally, it assesses the state of Russian comics after World War II.

The contrasting fates of Prokofiev’s last three symphonies vividly illustrate the problematic status of the symphony during the Stalinist period, because of its inherent difficulty in satisfying a key tenet of Socialist Realist aesthetics: that all art should communicate ideological engagement. While t Fifth Symphony (1944) was immediately acclaimed as a major contribution to Soviet symphonism, the Sixth (1945–47) was roundly condemned during the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign of 1948; and although the Seventh (1951–52) won official approval, it was widely regarded as an artistic failure resulting from enforced compromise. That music critics tended to focus primarily on the putative ideological content of abstract instrumental works, and to downplay suggestions of foreign influence, often led them to advance highly questionable interpretations of the music’s import. This chapter draws on a range of contemporary music criticism and archival materials, which have clouded objective perception of both the Soviet symphony and Prokofiev’s later instrumental works.

Opening with a survey of the challenges to understanding the term modernism and the particular complications of German culture’s negotiation with modernization, this chapter goes on to identify how modernism and antimodernism came to define a Cold War conflict between Socialist Realism and Western tolerance for experimentation. In histories of the visual and performing arts, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and the Bauhaus came to represent the primary casualties of National Socialism that needed to be rescued from oblivion. This made it difficult to acknowledge the evidence pointing to modern aspects of Nazi society, encouraging scholars instead to go to great lengths to portray an aesthetic nazification focused almost exclusively on stamping out modernism, especially in art history and musicology. Film, theater, and dance studies concentrated less on antimodernism and more on the Nazis’ overall devaluation of arts and media, relegating Nazi-era products to categories of mere propaganda and kitsch. For much of the Cold War period, presumptions about Nazi antimodernism were only slowly and cautiously challenged, with many questions remaining unanswered about the striking similarities one could observe between “Nazi arts” and parallels in other societies, including Western democracies.

Joseph Stalin helped Soviet society become a stable, albeit very tense, structure. Since Stalin rose to power, the Soviet system developed largely independent of Marxian sociology. Economic forces depended on the state as the prime mover of history, instead of shaping the basic form and development of society. The Stalin regime insisted that its new ideology was the only correct interpretation of Marxism and denounced all other versions as being representative of counterrevolutionary treachery. Until 1929, intellectuals in Soviet Russia enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. In social policy under the New Economic Policy, the Communist Party remained committed to the ideals of the revolution. However, Stalin's dictatorship and counterrevolution radically transformed Soviet cultural and intellectual life. The imposition of extreme Marxism had devastating effects on various fields, from literature and the arts to history, psychology, education, religion, and law. Stalin adopted a new official line for literature called Socialist Realism. Absolute economic determinism in part characterized the kind of historical thought imposed by Mikhail Pokrovsky in the name of the party.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Chinese avant-garde. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Chinese avant-garde fought hard against the dominant power of Mao Zedong’s socialist ideology and, in particular, Socialist Realism. As a style and aesthetic method, Socialist Realism perfectly exemplifies “art as an institution,” and this “institution” had oppressed Chinese artists for decades. It is in this context that art curator Gao Minglu defines the avant-garde ’85 Movement as an “anti-traditional and anti-authoritative” movement, in which the artwork was never considered for its commercial or artistic value but was a “spiritual vehicle” to engage the public and society.

Chapter 4 addresses the aftermath of the Great Break known as the period of High Stalinism. This period was marked by the tempering of the apocalyptic pace of the Great Break, which we analyse in terms of the three negative inflections of its rationality. Firstly, the period was marked by a series of policy reversals that have come to be known as the Great Retreat: the rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary Russian history, the shift towards a pro-natalist family policy, the reaffirmation of hierarchy and discipline in schools and factories, the revival of conspicuous consumption, etc. Secondly, the aftermath of the Great Break was marked by the introduction of the official artistic canon, known as socialist realism, which authorised the representation of Soviet reality ‘in its revolutionary development’, as if socialism were already attained. Finally, the mid-1930s were the period of the gradual unleashing of the Great Terror that peaked in 1937-1938. While the violence of the Great Break was subordinated to the positive biopolitical project of constructing socialism, the Terror of the 1930s had no positive content: rather than exemplify the forcing of ideal into the real, the compromise with it or its derealization, the Terror was pure negation of the real and marked the transformation of biopolitics into thanatopolitics.

This chapter examines various musical genres that lie outside highbrow art music within the context of the Stalin Prize. Socialist Realism was often envisioned as a way for higher and lower varieties of art to meet on an equal footing. High art would descend from its ivory tower, while the folk and the popular art would be raised and ennobled. Their meeting in the middle would result in that highly prized ‘music for the people’. This chapter considers ‘high’ vs. ‘low’ art by focusing on the Stalin Prize lists. It also discusses the attitudes of the Stalin Prize Committee toward popular songs with hints of operetta and toward operetta itself. Finally, it describes ‘light classical’ music as well as hybrids between popular and classical music.

Prokofiev was both a voracious reader and a compulsive writer—of letters, diaries, an extensive autobiography, and even of poems and short stories. His interest in text, and in particular in its dramatic impact, determined that, for almost all his operas, he was his own librettist. This allowed him not only control of all compositional elements but also realized his preference for setting passages of non-rhyming prose in a declamatory style, which he believed to be more realistic and dramatically effective. Nevertheless, upon his return to the Soviet Union, Prokofiev found that this approach to text sources was seldom compatible with the demands of Socialist Realism. The chapter explores his reliance on collaborators more familiar than he was with Soviet aesthetics, and it focuses, in particular, on his collaboration with his second wife, Mira Mendelson on the opera War and Peace, with reference to their manuscript notebooks.

This chapter describes the effectiveness of politico-ideological transformations that is assured by the accessibility of propaganda. It talks about the “popular spirit” as a key category of Socialist Realism, which produces the image of the people as the Stalinist Regime wanted to see them. It also describes the popular spirit as a key characteristic of Socialist Realism that gained a new momentum in 1948 during the campaign against “formalism” in music. The chapter investigates the “realistic trend in music” that Andrei Zhdanov fought for in relation to extreme pragmatism and realism as the regime's aesthetic strategy for articulating the intentions of the masses. It assesses the Realästhetik campaign that focused on the popular spirit theme in music, theater, cinema, and literature.

This chapter explores the 1946 criticism of Sergei Eisenstein's and Vsevolod Pudovkin's films about Ivan the Terrible and Admiral Nakhimov. It investigates how Eisenstein's and Pudovkin's films defined the status of Russia's most important director named Mikheil Chiaureli, who directed “Admiral Ushakov” in 1953. The chapter emphasizes how historicism had to become part of Soviet aesthetic doctrine, part of the system of flexible, dialectically contradirectional principles of Socialist Realism, and to become a hybrid of “the truth of life” and “revolutionary romanticism.” It discusses the historicism of Leninist teaching as a scientific conceptualization of actual historical reality based on a correlation of man with history. It also explains Socialist Historicism, which is the artistic conception of life from the standpoint of the Communist ideal that facilitates a vivid reproduction of life in its historical perspective and historical retrospection.

This chapter discusses the Stalin Prize history of Dmitry Shostakovich, who won in 1950 and 1952. It begins with an analysis of the debate in the Stalin Prize Committee over Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, first in 1944 and again in 1945, and how the work tested the boundaries of musical Socialist Realism. It then turns to Shostakovich's two other works that were considered prize material: the Second String Quartet and the Piano Trio No. 2. It also examines the Ninth Symphony and the Third Quartet, along with Song of the Forests and The Fall of Berlin for which Shostakovich received the Stalin Prize in 1950. Finally, it looks at the Ten Poems on texts by revolutionary poets, op. 88, which ostensibly continued along Shostakovich's ‘realist’ path.