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English version
| Leonidas Donskis: Soviet Culture and the Collapse of Soviet Modernization |
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| Soviet culture revolved around the ambition of a nation of workers to create a new individual and an alternative civilization to the West – this endeavor failed, but left many unanswered questions in its wake.
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What was Soviet culture? Was it the same Russian culture, only ideologized to the extreme and transformed into a totalitarian project, or was it a completely new type of culture, erasing both history and traditions, and incompatible with anything that had existed prior to it? Perhaps it was simply an imperial culture seasoned with added radicalism due to Russia’s path to modernization and totalitarian order, or was it a new destructive neologism, eliminating first of all Russia, and then all the other nations and cultures that had fallen to its sphere of influence?
There is no one, clear answer to these questions. If Soviet culture was indeed completely incompatible with the traditions of Russian and European culture, the question arises, why did the Soviets then still show no tolerance for the truly revolutionary proletarian cultural movement, which, had it only been allowed to gain momentum, would have simply wiped out all of the literature of the Russian golden and silver ages, not to mention the classics and canon of the West.
Something similar to the absolute triumph of proletarian-cultural logic occurred during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when the old Confucian Chinese civilization and its cultural traditions were wiped away, like paint from a canvas, all in the name of revolutionary modernization. Later, the same Confucian cultural logic that had been pushed out the back door by the Communists, came back in through the window and legitimized the Communist Party as the new managerial class, but that is another story.
Vladimir Lenin’s and Anatoly Lunacharsky’s tirades about the Soviet person, absorbing the very best that humanity has created, and adding to this cultural golden fund Soviet ideals of incomparable value testifies to the compromise which this, seemingly lethal, heroism and death-worshipping culture has made, in respect to the classics and the Western canon. It suffices to recall Lenin’s open admiration for Leo Tolstoy’s novels, Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas, and the comparison of Tolstoy with a rock and the belief that there is nothing of greater beauty than Beethoven’s Appassionata.
If we compare these classical tastes and orientation towards the ideas of artists and philosopher-modernists of Western Europe, such as Theodor W. Adorno’s evaluation of Beethoven’s music as the aestheticization of the bourgeois world, and the reconciliation of that world with, to use Adorno’s term, his affirmation, then Lenin in reality appears not as the great leader of the October Revolution and creator of the workers’ nation, but rather, as a small-league bourgeoisie, a stranger to real radicalism, change on a world-wide scale and the spirit of creative experimentation.
In other words, this attempt by Lenin and other more highly-educated Bolsheviks to reconcile totalitarianism and the cultural canon was most likely what the Nazis called cultural-Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus), that is, the lack of radicalism and heroism when renouncing vital values and worshipping brute force. While this phenomenon was not only evidence of the parasitic effect of Soviet totalitarianism at the cost of European traditions, and its inability to provide any suitable antithesis, at the same time, it did save the Hermitage and other art galleries and libraries from physical destruction.
Stalin, with his aesthetic tastes and evaluation of artworks, in no way reminds us of a leftist modernist (there were also right-leaning modernists – let us not forget the Italian Fascist artists). During the Second World War he was forced to rely on Sergey Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky to mobilize feelings of Russian patriotism, not to mention Eisenstein’s other film Ivan the Terrible, where Stalin undoubtedly recognized himself, symbolically incorporated into the tradition of Russian political might and the state’s history.
After Lenin’s open renouncement of Tsarist Russia’s imperial patriotism, such sentiments expressed by Stalin appear at the very least strange, and can be evaluated as a covert return to traditions about the might of the old regime. This can also be likened to Stalin’s predilection for nightly listenings to the arias of famous Ukrainian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky, and other well-known opera singers of the time.
So what was Soviet culture after all, which was meant to create the new Soviet person? A feeling for history and reality must first of all be lost, to determinedly state it was the sister of authentic modernism, even less so, avant-garde. Wonderful Russian modernism, which had no equal at the time in Europe, apart from French and Viennese modernism, was literally murdered by the Bolsheviks. The emigration of Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall and Rothko and their transformation into Western artists not only had the effect of saving their artworks (perhaps also their lives), but also shows what Russia may have become in a modern cultural context, had it not been subjected to a social and political catastrophe.
Soviet culture was a strange amalgam of propaganda, revolutionary rhetoric, socialist realism, the remains of classical and modern Russian culture, allegorical art and writing between the lines, that is, Aesopian language, in which, as described by Milan Kundera, political and ideological kitsch co-existed alongside talented artists and grandiose cultural expression.
If the strangest feature of Soviet culture had to be identified, I would undoubtedly have to mention the following parallel yet non-converging realities: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Soviet propaganda kitch film-studio productions and mass culture at one pole, and geniuses, such as Andrey Tarkovsky or Sergey Parajanov, at the other; Mikhail Shatrov’s hopeless revolutionary plays about Lenin at one end of the spectrum, and at the other, Georgian theatre director Robert Sturua, who innovatively brought Shakespeare’s tragedies to the stage, and who on the occasion of its Moscow premiere, had to listen to a fraught Shatrov defend his own authored play. The existence of these parallel realities, allegedly representing the same Soviet culture, is in fact its greatest paradox.
A factured and continually reasserting identity, always producing something different to what existed before, was typical among many participants in the Soviet project – at one stage the continuity of great Russian culture and traditions was highlighted, concurrent with the advance of the new, that is, Soviet, whose cultural character was incompatible with the old monarchial Russian life, the oppression of other nations, etc... Indeed, it remains unclear, what held Soviet culture, if it ever existed, together. Was it the forcible and ideological “alliance of nations,” or expressions of the sometimes authentic multi-national Soviet Empire’s internationalism? When Russian film master Grigory Kozintsev created his immortal television versions of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970), he consciously invited actors from the Baltic countries, allowing them to speak Russian with an accent without dubbing voiceovers. To add, both films were filmed by the great Lithuanian cinematographer, Jonas Gricius.
Are these mere coincidences? Perhaps the Russian master simply needed Western characters? Or maybe no – instead it may have been his conscious desire to raise the status of his colleagues from other nations to take on the roles about which the cultural representatives of his own nation could only dream of. Or is it more the becoming of the Baltic nations as the Other in the consciousness and imagination of Russians? Baltic country actors, appeared as Westerners, but were the same as the rest. In fact, sometimes there was no love lost for the greater fatherland (even more specifically, they were lost between a state of odi et amo and tortured by a love-hate ambivalence), but all the same, they were not strangers. Perhaps this is the root of the painful question directed towards Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians, often asked by simple Russians: why do you dislike us so? More so, perhaps this is the origin of the most chauvinistic of today’s Russian political groupings’ hate for the small Baltic countries, founded on the belief that they betrayed the great nation’s geopolitical interests and rejected its historical friendship?
Of course, the memorable role of the Lithuanian film actor Donatas Banionis in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Solaris, as well as the impressive ensemble of Baltic cinema masters in Grigory Kozintsev’s films reach the greatest heights of Russian culture, and are not a typical case of Soviet culture. In Soviet films meant for mass consumption, actors from Lithuania and the other two Baltic countries were more often assigned to take on the roles of Nazi Germany’s officers, or American CIA agents (in other words, historical and ideological enemies).
It is no wonder that the recent Estonian documentary film The Fritzes and the Blondes reveals an interesting phenomenon – the continual assignment of Nazi roles to Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian actors eventually allowed the regime to project the image of the Baltic countries as being enemies and fascists. This provocative Estonian film has already received a strong reaction in Estonia, but has undoubtedly raised a problem worthy of analysis in post-colonial studies.
So, Soviet culture has a mix of everything – the grandeur and universalism of Russian culture not extinguished during Soviet times, authentic internationalism (which appears to have vanished from contemporary Russian culture), as well as combative, yet fruitless propaganda, artworks of little value, caricatures of high art, and a deformed black and white social optical image of the world. One thing raises no doubts – this culture did not produce anything close to a new person. Just as it never became an effective alternative to the West.
Soviet modernization (just like the no more or no less terrible and brutal Chinese modernization) created modernity without freedom, or, paraphrasing the catch-cry of the 1960’s generation after Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw policy, modernity without a human face. George Orwell’s prophecy had come true, that all totalitarian revolutions are destined to become the longest road leading from one form of oppression and exploitation to the next. Or a transformation from one form of capitalism to another that is even more savage.
Yet the most beautiful aspect of Soviet culture were the everyday cares, objects, nostalgia and memories that survived and were fiercely defended in the films, plays and books from Russia and other nations (just as Winston Smith found in Orwell’s 1984). Eldar Riazanov, Georgy Danelia, Mark Zakharov and their warm, humanistic films were nothing else than evidence of the longing for modernity with a human face. Most likely the same could be said about the great moments of Lithuanian culture from the Soviet period.
Leonidas Donskis is Professor and Dean of Vytautas Magnus University School of Political Science and Diplomacy
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Mountains
cannot be surmounted except by winding
paths.
Goethe |
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