Figure 7.2 Vasily Vereshchagin, An Allegory of the 1871 War. 1871 (oil on canvas). Source: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Human misery rarely appear in Levitan’s works; indeed his paintings seldom include human figures at all. The power of his compositions rather lies in the deeply felt love for the Russian countryside. A shy and retiring man, Levitan became friends with writer Anton Chekhov at whose house in the Crimea he died.
Another aspect of Russian painting of the later nineteenth century was exoticism, best exemplified in the central Asian canvases of Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904). In his twenties the young artist did military service in Turkestan, and then traveled to India and Tibet, all the time gathering sketches and material for future paintings. He accompanied the Russian army during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 and was seriously wounded. He became the most famous Russian painter of battles, but his pacificist tendencies were always clear. His early work The Apotheosis of War (1871) shows an enormous pyramid of skulls in a vast wasteland being picked clean by flocks of birds. A later painting, Defeat: Service for the Dead, based on what the artist had experienced during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, depicts a lone military officer and an Orthodox priest, apparently saying a prayer, in a vast field. Only upon careful inspection of the painting does one notice that the field is a vast graveyard full of the corpses of fallen soldiers over whom the priest pronounces a funeral prayer.
Vereshchagin’s paintings from central Asia did much to acquaint Russians with this newly acquired part of the empire. He produced paintings showing the magnificent if decaying buildings of Samarkand, like the Tomb of Timur (1869) and portraits of the exotic-looking beturbaned inhabitants of central Asia. The governor general of Turkestan, Konstantin Kaufman, was impressed enough by the young artist that he allowed him to travel freely throughout the territory, which had only a few years earlier been incorporated into the Russian Empire. Vereshchagins “Turkestan Series” of over 200 drawings and paintings was later exhibited in Moscow and St Petersburg to tens of thousands of viewers.23
Technological breakthroughs in preserving visual images threatened traditional forms of art in the later nineteenth century. Most important among these new technologies were the photograph and the moving picture. The photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944) was a pioneer in both portrait and landscape photography and even developed a technique to add color to photographs, creating astonishingly lifelike images. Starting in 1907, Prokudin-Gorsky spent eight years traveling around the empire (in a specially equipped railway carriage paid for by Nicholas II) documenting the diverse landscapes and peoples of the empire.24
The first moving pictures in Russia were shown as curiosities in music halls, shops, cabarets, and nightclubs, but by 1908 there were several movie theaters in St Petersburg and other Russian cities. Initially risque farces seem to have predominated, at least to judge by titles like The Female Samson, Help Me Fasten this Corset! i and The Mother-in-Law in the Haremi all from the period 1908-14. But soon audiences tired of moving pictures as a curiosity and demanded better developed plots and more elaborate productions. Since films in this period were all silent (i. e., without the spoken word; they were always accompanied by music supplied by live musicians in the theater), the products of the German and French film industries could easily be imported to Russia. Russian studios produced some 400 movies in the years before World War I, and these competed for audience interest with titles from France, Scandinavia, and even America. Foreign-made films dominated, with about 80 percent of Russia’s domestic market before the war. But there were also Russian feature films like a film version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades that competed with adventure stories like The Scalped Corpse. The box-office blockbuster, however, was a film version of the notorious novel The Keys to Happiness. Film was also turned to documentary usage; for example for the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Some of the early pre-1917 footage was incorporated into the late Soviet feature by Stanislav Govorukhin, Tak zhit’ nelzya (1990; roughly “No Way to Live”), which suggested that life for most Russians in 1914 was better than in the late 1980s.25
Culture could also be used to express patriotic ideals. This tendency became particularly pronounced during World War I all over Europe. Moviegoers could take in the semipornographic Wilhelm in the Sultan’s Haremi which mocked the German Kaiser and his ally the Ottoman Sultan. Entertainments featuring heroic episodes from Russian history, folk songs, and balalaika bands were organized to benefit the wounded and other victims of war. Posters mocked the enemy, showed atrocities committed by the Germans, and showed Russian victories. Even more personal than posters were postcards, a relatively new form of communication. During the war, it has been estimated, millions of postcards were printed up and sent. These illustrated a variety of military and patriotic themes: Cossack horsemen decapitating a German soldier (“Happy New Year - A Successful Blow!”), a large hairy beast wearing the distinctive German helmet, benevolent Russian nurses, or a Russian peasant soldier shooting down the German eagle. Patriotic art was also featured in a new use for posters: those urging citizens to buy war bonds. One of the most famous, by Leonid Pasternak (the poet’s father), showed a weary soldier mopping his brow with the caption “Aid to War Victims.” The development of poster art as a means of education and propaganda during the war would be further employed by the communists after 1917.26
Bolshevik Revolution in Culture
Coming to power in late 1917, the Bolsheviks had very definite ideas about culture. Following Marxist teachings, they were convinced that culture was part of “superstructure” that grew up heavily influenced by the “substructure” of the economic realities of a given time and place. Thus imperial Russia’s cultural scene would have to differ sharply from that of the new communist Russia. Culture was to belong to all citizens, not just to an elite, and it was one of the communists’ jobs to spread that culture. At the same time culture was a tool to change social and political attitudes, to show people how to live, and to spread communist ideology. Culture was not something neutral for the communists: it was either good or bad. There was an inherent elitism in their program to lift cultural standards (one could even say “to improve the masses’ cultural taste”), but it was also a democratic impulse, wanting the best of culture for the entire population, not just for a small and privileged segment of it.
While it was only in 1920 that the party set up a “Department of Agitation and Propaganda” from which the word agitprop was derived, the phenomenon of using culture to propagate the Bolshevik message had been used nearly from the start. For example, during the Civil War the communists had issued brightly colored posters urging peasants to support them, spreading the idea that a victory for the Whites would mean renewed slavery under the landowners. Other posters with texts in a number of languages but impressive primarily in their visual aspect, showed the communists as the friend of the Ukrainian peasant (against the Polish landlord) and respecting Muslim peoples and their cultures.27 Most impressive of all, Agitprop trains visited the countryside, bringing striking images on posters (designed to be understood by the illiterate), motion pictures, and live plays. Agitprop trains often had their own printing presses so they could print up and leave behind posters. The communists also set up agitpunkty - “agitation points” - at major railroad stations. Here people could come and read newspapers, hear lectures, and watch moving pictures. At a chaotic time when travelers could be stranded for hours and even days, the agitpunkty were effective at spreading among ordinary people the ideas and aspirations of the communists.
The press was also used as a tool of revolution. In the days after the October revolution the presses of many bourgeois newspapers were simply seized. With an extreme shortage of paper due to wartime conditions, the communists also denied paper shipments to any journal or newspaper they thought might be hostile. By autumn 1918, the non-Bolshevik press had ceased to exist; henceforth the party would guide the editorial stance of all publications. Numerous newspapers aimed at different readerships: for city dwellers, peasants, women, teachers, the military, and so on. But during the Civil War, the harsh economic conditions and lack of paper meant that many newspapers consisted of a single or two sheets, and these were not published every day. Then there was the problem of distribution: throughout the early years and also well into the 1920s local party leaders complained that they were not receiving adequate numbers of journals and newspapers. Compared with the pre-revolutionary press, Soviet papers were dull and poorly produced. No longer could one find stories about murders and scandals, the stuff of boulevard journalism before 1917. Now readers had to be content with higher-minded material about the achievements of socialism, discussion of world politics, and the occasional criticism of local or national leaders (usually in the context of their arrest).
The Bolsheviks developed the poster into a serious art form, combining images, text, and striking design. Many of the early posters were designed to be easily understandable even without reading the text. One early poster showed a peasant man blindfolded, about to walk over a cliff. The legend read, “The illiterate is like a blind man; failure and misfortune await him everywhere.” The fat, leering capitalist in a tuxedo needed no explanation (though for the literate a text further explained the nature of capitalism). Radiant suns over schools or peasant women symbolized the great strides made under communism. Famous poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky contributed to posters urging citizens to join shock brigades. Other posters showed the economic strides made in a year, introduced citizens to the members of the Communist Party leadership, or produced in graphic form the decisions of party congresses.28
While images played an important role in spreading the communist message, from the first the party dedicated itself to eradicating illiteracy. As Lenin had said, “The illiterate person stands outside of politics,” which the communists found an intolerable situation. Thus spreading literacy was a primary goal of communist rule. It is estimated that in 1918 about two-thirds of urban workers could read and write, but in the countryside and among women, literacy rates were much lower; among some nationalities, like Chechens, literacy was extremely rare.
The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) saw as its primary goal full literacy throughout the country, not just for Russians but for all nationalities. The liquidation of illiteracy was to be carried out on a number of levels. Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife and an educational activist, called for a network of likpunkty (liquidation [of literacy] points), small schools open to all who wanted to learn their letters. But in the chaotic Civil War years, results were mixed or worse. Only with the consolidation of communist power in late 1919 and 1920 did the anti-illiteracy campaign really get off the ground. A decree of December 26, 1919, declared that in order to allow “the entire population of the Republic to participate consciously in the political life of the country” a number of Soviet institutions, from the Red Army to the Komsomol (young communists’ league) to the Zhenotdel (women’s department) and of course including the Narkompros would all work together to eliminate illiteracy. The decree required citizens from 8 to 50 years of age who could not read or write to attend literacy courses, but also freed them from work two hours daily for this purpose. Literate citizens could be “drafted” to serve as literacy teachers. Most strikingly the degree made refusing to study or to teach a criminal offense.29
The Soviet rulers also tried to make it worthwhile to be literate by producing a wide variety of reading materials from the classics, to simplified explanations of the basics of Marxism, to works of popular science. But it would not be until the late 1920s that production of reading matter would catch up with the pre-1914 levels, mainly because of the dire economic situation of the USSR in its first years. There was also the problem of what to print. Surveys showed that most readers wanted light material, adventures, and novels, not political tomes or classics like Pushkin. To some extent a compromise was reached with the “red detective story” like Mess-Mend: Or a Yankee in Petrograd (1923-5) featuring black magic (used by the American bad guys), decadent capitalism, a proletarian revolution in America, and of course memorable stock characters like “Laurie Lane” and “taciturn Ned.” The communists’ admiration for science was used in the science-fiction genre, and historical novels also made their appearance (often lionizing anti-tsarists rebels of the past like Stenka Razin and Bolotnikov. Unfortunately the near collapse of the economy during the Civil War and financial stringency during NEP meant that printed material was in short supply and the communist authorities favored political tracts over entertainment.30
World History
