What is cultural revolution?

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 181-201

  David Fox, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649531839     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.651999065     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Lewis Siegelbaum, "Building Stalinism 1929-1941," in Russia: A History, ed. Gregory Freeze (Oxford, 1997), 304-6.
2. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York, 1998), 209.
3. One historian, for example, discusses Bogdanov's "theory of proletarian cultural revolution" without a single Bogdanovian usage of the category itself. See Gabriele Gorzka, "Proletarian Cultural Revolution: The Conception of Aleksandr A. Bogdanov," Sbornik: Study Group on the Russian Revolution, no. 9 (1983): 67-82.
4. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 1994), 464.
5. S. N. Eisenstadt, "The Cultural Programme of Modernity and Democracy: Some Tensions and Problems," in Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman, ed. Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe (London, 1996), 25-41.
6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Editor's Introduction," and "Cultural Revolution as Class War," in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931, ed. Fitzpatnck (Bloomington, 1978), 1-40, esp. 2, 8-12.
7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-32," Journal of Contemporary History 9 (January 1974): 36-37. I refer to this period as the Great Break (velikii perelom), because this term can encompass the collectivization and industrialization drives, because it was used at the time by Stalin, and because it has become standard in Russia.
8. John Biggart, "Bukharin's Theory of Cultural Revolution," in The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, ed. A. Kemp-Welch (Oxford, 1992): 131-58.
9. See especially Gabriele Gorzka, A. Bogdanov und der russische Proletkult: Theorie und Praxis einer sozialistischer Kulturrevolution (Frankfurt, 1980), esp. 15-16;
10. and Richard Lorenz, ed. , Proletarische Kulturrevolution in Sowjetrussland (1917-1921) (Munich, 1969).
11. Gernot Erler, "Die Leninische Kulturrevolution und die NEP," in Kultur und Kulturrevolution in der Sowjetunion, ed. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte (Berlin, 1978): 33-45;
12. Carmen Claudin-Urondo, Lénine et la révolution culturelle (Paris, 1975);
13. Maurice Meisner, "Iconoclasm and Cultural Revolution in China and Russia," in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, ed. Abbott Gleason et al. (Bloomington, 1985), 279-93.
14. Stefan Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur: Menschenbilder und kulturelle Praxis in Sowjetrussland zwischen Oktoberrevolution und Stalinismus (Cologne, 1996), 21, 23-24, 25, 45-46.
15. The reference is to Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middle-Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, England, 1976).
16. Plaggenborg, Revolutionskultur, 352.
17. See also Jochen Hellbeck, "Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries from the Stalin Era" (Ph. D. diss. , Columbia University, 1998), esp. 27-28;
18. Anna Krylova, "In Their Own Words? Soviet Autobiographies of Women Writers," in Russian Women Writers, ed. Adele Barker and Jehanne Gheith (Cambridge, England, forthcoming 1999);
19. and Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 1997), esp. 46.
20. William G. Rosenberg, "Editor's Introduction," in Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, ed. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor, 1984), 18-19, 22-24.
21. David Joravsky, "The Construction of the Stalinist Psyche," in Cultural Revolution, 107-8. Reading those lines over a decade ago started me along the path that led to the present article.
22. Joravsky, "Cultural Revolution and the Fortress Mentality," in Bolshevik Culture, 95-96.
23. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995), ix.
24. "Sovremennoe polozenie i zadachi partii: Platforma, vyrabotannaia grappoi bol'shevikov," in Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, ed. N. S. Antonova and N. V. Drozdova (Moscow, 1995), 2:37-61.
25. The libertarian alternative of Vperedism was most forcefully advocated by Zenovia Sochor in Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, 1981).
26. The roots of totalitarianism are emphasized, for example, by John Eric Morot, "Alexander Bogdanov, Vpered, and the Role of the Intelligentsia in the Workers' Movement," Russian Review 49 (July 1990): 242-48.
27. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (Ithaca, 1997): 26-37.
28. Iutta Sherrer (Jutta Scherrer), "Otnoshenie mezhdu intelligentsiei i rabochimi na primere partiinykh shkol na Kapri i v Bolon'e," and E. Svift (Anthony Swift), "Rabochii teatr i 'proletarskaia kul'tura' v predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii, 1905-1917," both in Rabochie i intelligentsiia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii, ed. S. I. Potolov et al. (St. Petersburg, 1997), 542-48, and 174, 181, respectively.
29. The above is drawn especially from Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985).
30. On links to the Vperedist platform in the formulation of Proletkul't's mission see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley, 1990), 43, passim.
31. P. M. Kerzhentsev, Kul'tura i sovetskaia vlast' (Moscow, 1919), 3-20;
32. idem, K novoi kul'ture (Petrograd, 1921), 5-6;
33. "Ot redaktsii," Proletarskaia kul'tura, no. 3 (August 1918): 35-36;
34. Valer'ian Polianskii, "Pod znamia 'Proletkul'ta,'" ibid, no. 1 (July 1918): 3-4.
35. Sputnik politrabotnika (Moscow, 1919), 87-92, 99-100;
36. Kratkii ocherk kul'turno-politicheskoi raboty v Krasnoi Armii za 1918 god (Moscow, 1919), 1-5, 8.
37. Desiatyi s''ezd Rossiiskoi kommunisticheskoi partit: Stenograficheskii otchet (8-16 maria 1921 g. ) (Moscow, 1921), 87.
38. "Protokol zasedaniia Politicheskogo Biuro Ts. K. ot 9 oktiabria 1920 goda," Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii, Moscow, f. 17, op. 3, d. 113, l. 1.
39. Claudin-Urondo, Lénine et la révolution culturelle, 27-31.
40. V. I. Lenin, "Nabrosok rezoliutsii o proletarskoi kul'ture," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed. (Moscow, 1963), 41:462.
41. Gernot Erler and Claus D. Kering, "Kulturrevolution," Sowjetsystem und Demokratische Gesellschaft: Eine Vergleichende Enzyklopädie (Frieberg, 1969), 1160.
42. I. Arkhinicheev, "Na putiakh kul'turnoi revoliutsii," Bol'shevik (30 September 1925): 60-74.
43. N. K. Krupskaia, Na putiakh kul'turnoi revoliutsii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 8-16.
44. On the interpretation of nonvenereal syphilis in Russian medical and intelligentsia culture see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 165-211.
45. On contemporary scientific and venereological interest in Buriat Mongolia see Susan Gross Solomon, "The Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition to Buriat Mongolia, 1928: Scientific Research on National Minorities," Slavic Review 52 (Summer 1993): 204-32.
46. On byt and meshchanskie values see the scattered yet suggestive remarks in Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
47. On the gendering of byt see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 185-91.
48. G. Lelevich, "Proletarskaia literatura i bytovaia revoliutsiia," Oktiabr', 1925, no. 1:141-46.
49. Lev Davydovich Trotskii, "Voprosy byta," in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1927), 21:3-58, 462-70.
50. O. D. Kameneva, "K uluchsheniiu byta rabochikh," in V pomoshch' kul'trabote v rabochem stolovoi, ed. Kameneva (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), 3-6.
51. While the importance of notions of kul'turnost 'has long been recognized in the discussion of the "Great Retreat" of the 1930s and after (Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste," in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia [Ithaca, 1992], 216-37), its significance for the 1920s has been far less explored.
52. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1993), 254,280;
53. Kathy Transchel, "Under the Influence: Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1900-1932" (Ph. D. diss. , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1996), 251, passim.
54. I. Luppol, "Problema kul'tury v postanovke Lenina," Pechat' i revoliutsiia, no. 5-6 (June-September 1925): 18;
55. "Problema kul'tura . . . Okonchanie," ibid. no. 7 (October-November 1925): 26.
56. "Postanovlenie Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) 'O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury. ' 18 iiunia 1925 g," in "Schast'e literatury": Gosudarstvo i pisateli 1925-1938, ed. D. L. Babichenko (Moscow, 1997), 17.
57. Leopol'd Averbakh, "O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi literatury," Oktiabr', 1925, no. 9:126-27;
58. Leopol'd Averbakh, "O proletarskoi kul'ture, 'napostovskoi putanitse,' i bol'shevistskikh aksiomakh," Bol'shevik (31 March 1926): 101-14.
59. Kerzhentsev openly defined cultural revolution as "a straggle against bourgeois culture and its holdovers" and the "creation of proletarian culture" ("Ob oshibke tt. Trotskogo, Voronskogo i dr. ," Oktiabr', 1925, no. 1:115-16).
60. N. Bukharin, "Za uporiadochenie byta molodezhi," in Komsomol'skii byt (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), 99.
61. Luppol, "Problema kul'tury," no. 5-6:3;
62. A. Deborin, "Marksizm i kul'tura," Revoliutsiia i kul'tura (15 November 1927): 8-9.
63. In the same vein see "Ot redaktsii," ibid. , 5;
64. and E. Pashukanis, "Zametki o kul'ture i politike," ibid. (15 December 1927): 13-17.
65. The mid-1920s engagement with the cultural followed two other developments: the treatment of "culture" as a form of class ideology in Bogdanov's Proletkul't and a more general spread of "ethnographic" or "anthropological" understandings of culture in Russia after the turn of the century (Neuberger, Hooliganism, 10-11).
66. On Bogdanov and the Proletkul't see Mally, Culture of the Future, 8-9, 29-30, passim.
67. This Interpretation of cultural policy and the inner revolution of NEP is fully developed in my Revolution of the Mind. Contrast it to Fitzpatrick's influential article, "The Soft Line on Culture and Its Enemies," in The Cultural Front, 91-114.
68. For a significant study in the last area see Daniel Todes, "Pavlov and the Bolsheviks," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17:3 (1995): 379-418.
69. Clark, Petersburg, 143-47.
70. Naiman, Sex in Public, esp. 148-80.
71. Vl. Kuz'min, "Pis'mo o novom byte," Komsomol'skit byt (Moscow- Leningrad, 1927), 319-21;
72. Ippolit, "Komsomol'skii byt kak on est' (Obzor literatury)," Pechat'i revoliutsii, no. 4 (June-July 1927): 122;
73. Politicheskoe vospitanie Komsomola (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925), 18.
74. F. W. , "Voprosy vospitatel'noi raboty," Sverdlovets, no. 5-6 (March-April 1923): 42.
75. See especially the invaluable collection, M. A. Makarevich, ed. , Partiinaia etika: Dokumenty i materialy diskussii 20-x godov (Moscow, 1989).
76. The Agitprop conference is discussed by Fitzpatrick in "Cultural Revolution as Class War," 10;
77. and idem, "Cultural Revolution in Russia," 41-42.
78. For the immediate influence of its formulations see A. Maletskii, "Problema kul'turnoi revoliutsii v programme Kominterna," Revoliutsiia i kul'tura (15 October 1928): 9.
79. F. F. Perchenok, "Akademiia nauk na 'velikom perelome,'" Zven'ia, vyp. 1 (Moscow, 1990), 232-33.
80. See, for example, Ibeen-Shrait, "Studencheskie kommuny," Krasnyi student, no. 8-9 (20-21) (August-September 1924): 44-45;
81. "Ustav kommuny im. M. N. Liadova," Sverdlov Communist University, 4 October 1926, Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv obshchestvennykh dvizhenii goroda Moskvy, f. 459, op. 1, d. 27, l. 87-95;
82. and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994), 50.
83. The most significant study of the communal movement remains in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 205-22.
84. Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia i kul'trabota soiuzov: Po programme raionnoi (uezdnoi) profshkoly (Moscow, 1929), 5-8;
85. Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia i zadachi teatra Proletkul'ta (Moscow, 1929), 5-7, 9;
86. A. Vishnevskii, "O kul'turnoi revoliutsii," Revoliutsiia i kul'tura (31 June 1930): 11-12.
87. S. Pis'mennyi, "O nekotorykh osnovnykh momentakh kul'turnoi revoliutsii v natsrespublikakh Srednei Azii," Revoliutsiia i kul'tura, no. 10 (1928): 11-20;
88. I. Arkhincheev, "Na putiakh kul'turnoi revoliutsii," Bol'shevik (15 June 1928): 58-70.
89. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994), 198-204, 219-46.
90. For a particularly striking if idiosyncratic example see Jochen Hellbeck, "Care for the Self in the Time of Terror: Alexander Aginofenov's Diary of 1937" (Paper presented at the Maryland Workshop in Russian Studies, College Park, MD, 1998).
91. Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 220.
92. Jan Gross, Revolution from Abroad: Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988), 230, 115-22.