667. To M. N. POKROVSKY

Written in August, not later than 20, 1920 · First published in 1945 in Lenin Miscellany XXXV. Printed from the original. · page 419

Comrade Pokrovsky

1) What is the legal status of Proletcult?^[1]

2) What is the nature of its leading centre and 3) by whom was it appointed?

4) How is it financed by the People’s Commissariat for Education?

5) Anything else of importance about the position, role and results of the work of Proletcult.

Lenin

Notes

[1] Proletcult—a cultural and educational organisation which arose in September 1917 as an independent workers’ organisation. Its leadership was in the hands of A. A. Bogdanov and his supporters. After the October Revolution, Proletcult continued to uphold its “independence”, thus setting itself in opposition to the Soviet state. In consequence, Proletcult was infiltrated by bourgeois intellectuals who began to exert a decisive influence on it. Its members actually denied the importance of the cultural heritage, wanted to shut themselves off from the tasks of cultural and educational work among the masses, and tried to create a special “proletarian culture” by “laboratory methods”, in isolation from life. In a draft resolution “On Proletarian Culture” (see present edition, Vol. 31, pp. 316-17) and in a number of other works, Lenin trenchantly criticised the erroneous principles of Proletcult. In the early 1920s its organisations began to decline and in 1932 it ceased to exist.