“How accurate is it to say that Soviet government restrictions on artistic and cultural expression remained unchanged in the years 1917–85?”

Question 1

“How accurate is it to say that Soviet government restrictions on artistic and cultural expression remained unchanged in the years 1917–85?” Styles which were permissible

Answer 1

• Lenin and Trotsky believed that art could be used to inspire people to support the new government. In 1920, this led to the establishment of the Department of Agitation Propaganda (agitprop), a department within the Communist Party. Agitprop was often produced by avant-garde artists working for the government.
• Russian artists associated with the avant-garde collaborated with the government to make posters, sculptures and paintings to encourage support for the new regime. El Lissitzky, a graphic designer and photographer, created the poster ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’ in 1918. The poster uses geometric shapes to represent the Red Army and the White Army.
• Like many Communists, Stalin was suspicious of the avant-garde and experimental techniques.
  He also criticised abstract art and non-narrative films arguing that ordinary Soviet citizens could not understand them.
• Socialist Realism proved hard to define, Ivan Kulik, President of the Union of Soviet Writers, argued that Socialist Realism had two qualities: It contained a ‘true reflection of reality’ It aimed to ‘participate in the building of socialism’.
• In painting, this came to mean art that was realistic, in the sense that pictures looked a lot like photographs, and socialist in the sense that they were paintings of factory construction or workers producing raw materials.

Question 2

“How accurate is it to say that Soviet government restrictions on artistic and cultural expression remained unchanged in the years 1917–85?” How it was restricted/punished(Western)

Answer 2

• Under Stalin, art was produced in a similar way to other goods. Artists were set targets for the number of paintings or sculptures they were required to produce and sent to factories or collective farms to record what they saw.
• Beginning in 1936, avant-garde artists who were unable or unwilling to adapt to the new policy were forced out of their positions, and often sent to the gulag, as part of Stalin’s Great Purges.
• The Soviet Government Went to great lengths to restrict access to the 1959 American National Exhibition which promoted American beauty standards and fashion. Part of the campaign was contrasting cadent Capri pants with soviet Knee length skirts.
• The government continued to try to combat the Western influence of fashion. However, during the 1970s trade with the West increased, so Soviet cinemas showed films from the US pue Western Europe that effectively showcased Western fashion.
• During the 1970s and early 1980s the government was still concerned about Western styles. Therefore Soviet magazines continued to ridicule Western ways of dressing and teachers were expected to discourage Western styles at school. Sometimes official attempts to discourage new fashions backfired. For example, the comedy film An Office Romance (1977) ridiculed a fashionable young female secretary for her love of ‘provocative’ clothes. Nonetheless audiences identified with the secretary rather than her conservative poorly dressed boss.

Question 3

“How accurate is it to say that Soviet government restrictions on artistic and cultural expression remained unchanged in the years 1917–85?” Anti-Soviet works

Answer 3

• There was a small amount of room in Soviet art in the 1930s to dissent from Stalin’s artistic vision. One way of doing this was to celebrate the achievements of Lenin rather than Stalin. The world famous Soviet filmmaker, Dziga vertov did this in his 1934 trilogy Three Songs about Lenin.
• Khrushchev’s ‘thaws’ did not allow all Soviet artists to publish their work through official government-owned publishing houses. Therefore, from the late 1950s, writers produced `‘samizdat (self-published) magazines and books Alexander Ginzburg is the best-known figure in the underground samizdat movement.
• The new post-Khrushchev leadership were extremely concerned about Khrushchev’s ‘cultural liberalism’, which they believed was undermining faith in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in early 1965 they commissioned a KGB report which stated that there were 1292 anti-Soviet authors who had written almost 10,000 anti-Soviet documents. In order to send a clear message that the thaw was over, the new leadership ordered the arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and of Daniel, two authors who had been allowed considerable freedom under Khrushchev.

Question 4

“How accurate is it to say that Soviet government restrictions on artistic and cultural expression remained unchanged in the years 1917–85?” How art was used

Answer 4

• Lenin and Trotsky believed that art could be used to inspire people to support the new government. In 1920, this led to the establishment of the Department of Agitation Propaganda (agitprop), a department within the Communist Party. The agitprop departments that were formed in 1920 built on propaganda work that had been going on since the revolution.
• Under Khrushchev there was a significant change in Soviet propaganda. During Stalin’s rule, Soviet people had been depicted as heroic and, in a conventional sense, beautiful, Soviet farms and factories had been depicted as modern, efficient and harmonious. However, after 1954 this changed. Increasingly, propaganda posters poked fun at Soviet people.
• The new posters attempted to challenge non-conformity through ‘popular oversight’. Posters presented non-conformist citizens as comically bald, fat or lazy. ‘The Lazy Bureaucrat (1961) shows a plump man sitting at a disorganised desk. The posters were designed to encourage ‘popular oversight’. Good citizens were encouraged to intervene with helpful moral advice.
• The poster ‘When two girls met’ (1963) tells the moral tale of how a good working-class upbringing leads to a disciplined child, whereas the children of indulgent intellectual parents grow up to be lazy, selfish and obsessed with fashion.