Lenin's art and culture

Proletkult

• Aim was to define a unique proletarian culture that would inform and inspire revolutionary Russian Society
• This was to be a collective culture where the 'I' of bourgeois culture would give way to 'we'
• By 1920 there were around 84,000 members working in over 300 studios
• It was an independent organisation - free of communist control
• Flourished from 1917-1920 which was an achievement in the context of the civil war
• Lenin was suspicious of the organisation
• Lenin had it's regional and central offices shut down during 1921 and 1922
• The national congress of proletkult voted and voluntarily merged with the commissariat of education
• Dissenting artists who wanted to stay independent were criticised in the Soviet press

Painting and Sculpture

• Artists associated with the avant-garde collaborated with the government to make posters, sculptures and paintings to encourage support for the regime
• El Litsizky, a graphic designer and photographer created the poster 'beat the whites with the red wedge' in 1918 one of the most famous experimental posters of the civil war
• The poster also inspired sculpture in which a red wedge splits a block of white stone. The sculpture was unveiled in Moscow in October 1918 to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution
• 'Beat the whites with the red wedge' was one of over 100 agitprop posters produced during the civil war
• The Russian Telegraph agency (ROSTA) worked with artists to produce posters that were displayed in shop windows or on the side of agit prop trains

Revolutionary cinema

• Lenin believed that cinema was the most important art form of the 20th century and argued that it should be used to inspire support for the government

Dziga Vertov

• He rejected the Hollywood style, including the use of scripts, sets and actors
• He preferred to make 'cinema of fact'
• He used mirror, sped up film, ran film backwards and used montages to achieve experimental effects
• His most famous film 'A man with movie camera' (1929) was filmed in some of the Soviet Unions biggest cities and tells the story of a day in the life of a soviet city
• The Soviet newspaper Pravda described them as 'insane', 'puzzling' and 'laughable'

Art under the NEP

• From 1918 to late 1920 Lenin was preoccupied with winning the war so there was relatively loose control of arts
• During this period Proletkult and Avant-varde artists flourished
• As the civil war came to an end Lenin started to enforce greater control of artistic expression
• Artists were forced to change their style and artistic institutions were attacked and in some cases closed
• E.g. Malevich sent his most radical paintings to Germany in 1927 and adopted a more conventional style at the end of his life
• The Petrograd institute of Artistic culture was forced to close in 1926 following a campaign against avant grade art in Pravda

Foreign Fashions

• From the mid-1920s the government was critical of the influence of American fashion and music on young people
• Fashion from the USA, particularly clothes associated with the flapper style and jazz were extremely popular with young people in the soviet cities
• Party leaders claimed that the new fashion and the rhythmic new music encouraged sexual promiscuity and drunkenness
• They were also concerned that young people would rather dance than attend lectures on revolutionary politics
• From the mid-1920s Communist party bosses were using OGPU to break up parties where jazz was played