First World War: Bolshevik and artistic revolution in Russia

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-06-02/register/first-world-war-bolshevik-and-artistic-revolution-in-russia-3m9t3d979

Initially dismissed as ‘trivial matters’, the arts soon became a vehicle for political advantage in the new Soviet Union

Michael Tillotson

Soviet soldiers reenact the storming of the Winter Palace ten years to the day after it happened

When one looks at any illustration of the storming of St Petersburg’s Winter Palace in October 1917 — and there are many, varying from those based on the original photographs to more dramatic representations — one might ask: “Where were the artists, ballerinas, poets, sopranos and writers on that historic evening?” The answer is “cheering on the mob”, either actually or in their hearts.
The Bolshevik-led revolution struck Russia in the middle of the so-called Silver Age, in which the artistic avant-garde were producing work in an iconoclastic surge, ridiculing the bourgeois and forecasting a new society of realism and “the people”. Unsurprisingly this phenomenon was seized upon by the Bolsheviks as a public relations vehicle for the propagation of their aims, principles and programmes.

Initially Comrade Lenin dismissed the arts as “trivial matters”, only to be persuaded later of the advantages of them operating in a loose, unwritten coalition with the new politics. Some of the artists, writers especially, were hesitant, fearful of losing their independence — sparse though it had been under the tsars — but the hint of government patronage proved hard to resist in what were clearly going to be turbulent times.
Demonstrations of the new egalitarianism and individualism quickly became commonplace with, for example, orchestras performing without a conductor to indicate the instrumentalists’ freedom of choice. Audience participation in plays performed at open theatres in the city squares immediately gained popular approval, in particular plays staged to represent the changing times, with the audience applauding or jeering as appropriate to the popularity of the characters or ideas they represented.
Opera titles and settings were adjusted to match the mood: Tosca was transferred to revolutionary Paris and retitled Battle for the Commune and Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar was entirely rewritten as — one would never guess — Hammer and Sickle. To bring traditional plays into the context of “the people”, the experimental theatre techniques of the Austrian Max Reinhardt was used, with the princely or bourgeois settings and themes moved to the streets and humble dwellings of the peasantry.

More bizarrely, music for the workers was specially composed using the sounds of their daily environment: the hooters to signal a change of shift, clashes of machinery and electrically generated sounds to fill the gaps and — so it was argued — to suggest modernity of work as well as thought. This caught on well and Shostakovich added factory sounds to his Symphony No 2, subtitled To October, and a new conclusion with factory whistles, indicating the end of the working day.
Alone among the arts, the ballet in Russia was severely affected by the arrival of Bolshevism. This arose for two reasons: storylines of the classical ballet were based on royal or ethereal characters, and many of the dancers and teachers, thinking to read the runes, fled to western Europe, where they were welcomed with open arms. As so much of ballet teaching depended on individual skills and experience, there was no bank of instructional literature to which would-be replacement instructors could turn.
Yet ballet did not die in the fledgling Soviet Union. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar of education, was able to persuade Lenin that the much-reviled “gentry culture” had a useful role to play in the communist state structure. Ballet composers and librettists were encouraged to produce new narratives focused on the new political climate.
Giorgi Balanchivadze — later to gain fame in the US as George Balanchine — and Fyodor Lopukhov, both of whom had remained in Russia despite the initial difficulties for ballet, embraced these opportunities. State theatres were renamed to mirror socialist themes, fending off accusations of being retrogressive by focusing melodramatic presentations on workers and factories and following in due course with earnest portrayals of national culture in the new “modernist” setting.

Russian expressionist painter Wassily KandinskyGETTY IMAGES

The politics of individuals were modified or radicalised through idealism, commercial motive or simply to survive. Those who were already Marxists, such as the painter and architect Vladimir Tatlin, made no pretence. He proclaimed: “To accept or not accept the October Revolution? There was no such question for me. I organically merged into active creative, social and pedagogical life.” While others, such as the successful Expressionist and European-minded Wassily Kandinsky, were cautious about Bolshevism, they nevertheless welcomed the artistic freedom it appeared to promise.
Not all reactions were propitious. Nihilists welcomed Bolshevism for its anticipated destructive power and the futurist poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote, “It’s time for bullets to pepper museums,” singling them out as representative of the old order. A poet of the so-called proletariat culture wrote, seemingly anonymously, to be on the safe side:
“In the name of our tomorrow we shall burn Raphael
Destroy the museums, crush the flowers of Art.”
Contrary to press stories published in London and Paris, Russian artists and writers were not sent off wholesale to Siberia, but museums were acquired by the state for all to see if they wished. The official art market was closed, so sales to raise desperately needed cash were driven underground.
Individual artists behaved variously according to their dedication or private means. Nikolai Myaskovsky, for instance, remained living unostentatiously in Russia, teaching musical composition at the Moscow Conservatoire and becoming known as “the conscience of Russian music”. Shostakovich remained, but out of the limelight in Petrograd, to study and is believed to have privately sought Myaskovsky’s advice when writing his first symphony. In contrast, such dedicated Marxists as Tatlin openly sought every opportunity to introduce obvious and meaningful social and political change in new compositions.
Maxim Gorky (Alexei Maximovich Peshkov), the author of the short, revolutionary The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and other novels on pre-Bolshevik society, actively supported the Marxist Social Democrats in the months leading up to the abdication of Nicholas II. Subsequently he associated himself with Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov’s Bolshevik wing of the party. Later he became disillusioned with the Russian peasant classes, dismissing the myth that they were “sweet and reasonable”. He was a bitter critic of Lenin as an overly ambitious, cruel and power-hungry potentate who brooked no challenge to his authority. He was exiled for many years before and after the revolution, but returned to the Soviet Union in 1932 to die in 1936.
As the years went by the arts became as significant in Russian life as in the days of the tsars, proving themselves immeasurably stronger than the upstart communism.