Skip to content

Art culture and the Russian Revolution Spectre of Communism Podcast

Spectre Of Communism · 2024-03-26

Core Argument

The central thesis of this episode is that the Russian Revolution unleashed an unprecedented flowering of artistic creativity, and that the Bolsheviks — far from being philistine authoritarians who reduced art to crude propaganda — actively defended artistic freedom against both bourgeois slander and sectarian leftist pressures. The argument is structured as a polemic against two related slanders: first, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks imposed a narrow, propagandistic straitjacket on culture; second, that they were simply uninterested in art and culture, preoccupied only with economics and politics. The episode insists that the revolutionary transformation of society was understood by the Bolsheviks as inseparable from the cultural elevation of the masses, and that the artistic explosion of the post-1917 period — in theatre, cinema, graphic design, typography, architecture and music — was both a product and a proof of this understanding.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on several key Marxist positions on art and culture, most explicitly articulated through the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. The episode grounds itself in the classical Marxist position that art is not a mere superstructural reflection of economic relations, but a domain with its own internal laws and developmental logic. The critique of Proletkult — the mass organisation that sought to create a "proletarian culture" ex nihilo by discarding all pre-revolutionary art as bourgeois — is the episode's central theoretical battleground. Here the argument follows Trotsky's Literature and Revolution closely: the working class, in taking power, must first master the highest achievements of bourgeois culture before it can transcend them. The proletariat is not a permanent class but a transitional one; the goal is not "proletarian culture" but the abolition of class society altogether, at which point culture becomes simply human culture on an immensely higher level.

The episode also implicitly draws on Lenin's What Is To Be Done? — itself named after a Chernyshevsky novel — to argue that the revolutionary party must take culture seriously as part of the political education of the working class. The concept of "conquering culture" is presented not as an act of suppression but of elevation: opening the doors of the Moscow Art Theatre to peasants who had never seen a play, sending agit-prop trains into the countryside to bring cinema to people who had never encountered moving images.

Conjunctural Relevance

The episode connects the cultural policy of the Russian Revolution to the contemporary crisis of culture under capitalism. It points specifically to:

  • The market's degradation of art: the endless cycle of cookie-cutter superhero blockbusters, the triteness of contemporary cinema and literature, the general sense that culture is in a rut imposed by market imperatives.
  • Austerity and the arts: cuts to Arts Council budgets in Britain, the slashing of arts and literature classes in state schools, the systematic devaluation of cultural education.
  • The rise of AI-generated "art": mentioned as a further symptom of capital's war on genuine creative expression.

The episode positions the Bolshevik experience as a living alternative to this decay — not a nostalgic museum piece, but a demonstration that another relationship between revolution and culture is possible. The implicit political argument is that the working class cannot simply fight for higher wages and better housing; it must also fight for a world worth living in, and art is an irreducible part of that struggle.

Where the Argument Continues

The episode deliberately leaves open several threads:

  • The general crisis of culture under capitalism: the hosts explicitly say this could be the subject of a future episode.
  • The Stalinist degeneration of culture: the episode contrasts the artistic freedom of the early revolutionary period with the "socialist realism" imposed under Stalin, but does not develop a full analysis of how the bureaucratic counter-revolution produced this cultural stultification.
  • The contemporary struggles of artists: the episode gestures toward the difficulties faced by artists under capitalism but does not explore them in depth.

The argument continues in Nelson Juan's lead-off from the Revolution Festival (referenced in the episode), his article on Stanislavski in the In Defence of Marxism magazine, and the broader IMT/RCI corpus of cultural reviews — including the review of Joyce's Dubliners and the forthcoming article on Faust. The episode is part of a Lenin series, suggesting that future instalments will develop the political and philosophical dimensions of Lenin's thought further.

Connections

  • Trotsky, Literature and Revolution: the theoretical backbone of the episode's critique of Proletkult and its defence of artistic freedom.
  • Lenin, What Is To Be Done?: the naming of the pamphlet after Chernyshevsky's novel is used to demonstrate Lenin's deep engagement with literature.
  • Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: referenced in connection with the philosophical dispute with Bogdanov, the leader of Proletkult.
  • Stanislavski, My Life in Art: the source of the extended quotation about the peasant who became a devoted theatre-goer after the revolution.
  • Eisenstein's films: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October: Ten Days That Shook the World — the foundational texts of Soviet montage theory.
  • Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera: the pioneering documentary film that exemplifies the experimental energy of the period.
  • El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge: the defining visual image of the revolution, used to argue that political content strengthens rather than debases art.
  • Shostakovich: mentioned as a pianist in Meyerhold's theatre, connecting the musical avant-garde to the broader revolutionary cultural constellation.

Key Quotes

  1. "A truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of leading and even less of commanding art either before or after the conquest of power. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself." — Trotsky, quoted by Nelson Juan.

  2. "The doors of our theatre opened exclusively for poor people. Our performances were free to all who received their tickets from factories and institutions where we sent them, and we met face to face right after the issuance of the decree with spectators altogether new to us, many of whom — perhaps the majority — knew nothing not only of our theatre but of any theatre." — Stanislavski, My Life in Art.

  3. "Our government did not force us to dye ourselves red and pretend to be something we were not." — Stanislavski, on the Bolsheviks' cultural policy.

  4. "The artistic and the political intentions of an artwork like this in fact align. The political content, the propaganda content of this actually strengthens the artwork if you consider what it was that was taking place and what it was that the Red Army and the Bolsheviks and people like El Lissitzky were fighting to defend."

  5. "Art is fundamentally about communication, it's about expression, and art shows us — and the best art that has been produced shows us — that life can be something more than what it is."