Proletkult (), a portmanteau of the Russian words "proletarskaya kultura" (proletarian culture), was an experimental Soviet artistic institution that arose in conjunction with the Russian Revolution of 1917. This organization, a federation of local cultural societies and avant-garde artists, was most prominent in the visual, literary, and dramatic fields. Proletkult aspired to radically modify existing artistic forms by creating a new, revolutionary working-class aesthetic, which drew its inspiration from the construction of modern industrial society in agrarian Russia.
Although funded by the People's Commissariat for Education of Soviet Russia, the Proletkult organization sought autonomy from state control, a demand which brought it into conflict with the Communist Party hierarchy and the Soviet state bureaucracy. Some top party leaders, such as Lenin, sought to concentrate state funding and retain it from such artistic endeavors. He and others also saw in Proletkult a concentration of bourgeois intellectuals and potential political oppositionists.
At its peak in 1920, Proletkult had 84,000 members actively enrolled in about 300 local studios, clubs, and factory groups, with an additional 500,000 members participating in its activities on a more casual basis.
History Factional background
The earliest roots of the Proletarian Culture movement, better known as Proletkult, are found in the aftermath of the failed 1905–1907 Revolution against Nicholas II of Russia.Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990; pg. 3. The censorship apparatus of the Tsarist regime had stumbled briefly during the upheaval, broadening horizons, but the revolution had ultimately failed, resulting in dissatisfaction and second-guessing, even within Bolshevik Party ranks.
In the aftermath of the Tsar's reassertion of authority a radical political tendency known as the "Left Bolsheviks" emerged, stating their case in opposition to party leader Lenin.Mally, Culture of the Future, pg. 4. This group, which included philosophers Alexander Bogdanov and Anatoly Lunacharsky and writer Maxim Gorky, argued that the intelligentsia-dominated Bolsheviks must begin following more inclusive tactics and working to develop more working class political activists to assume leadership roles in the next round of anti-Tsarist revolution.
Among the Left Bolsheviks, Anatoly Lunacharsky in particular had been intrigued with the possibility of making use of art as a means to inspire revolutionary political action.Mally, Culture of the Future, pp. 4-5. In addition, together with the celebrated Gorky, Lunacharsky hoped to found a "human religion" around the idea of socialism, motivating individuals to serve a greater good outside of their own narrow self-interests.Mally, Culture of the Future, pg. 5.
Working along similar lines simultaneously was Lunacharsky's brother-in-law Bogdanov, who even in 1904 had published a weighty philosophical tome called Empiriomonism which attempted to integrate the ideas of non-Marxist thinkers Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius into the socialist edifice. (Lunacharsky had studied under Avenarius in Zurich and was responsible for introducing Bogdanov to his ideas.) Bogdanov believed that the socialist society of the future would require forging a fundamentally new perspective of the role of science, ethics, and art with respect to the individual and the state.
Together all these ideas of Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, and their co-thinkers came to be known in the language of the day as "god-building" (bogostroitel'stvo).
These ideas did not exist in a vacuum; there was a political component as well. During the period between the failure of the 1905 revolution and the outbreak of World War I, Alexander Bogdanov stood as the chief rival to Lenin for leadership of the Bolshevik party.Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986; pg. 34.
To the intellectually rigid Lenin, Bogdanov was not only a political rival, but also a positive threat to the ideology of Marxism. Lenin saw Bogdanov and the "god-building" movement with which he was associated as purveyors of a reborn philosophical idealism that stood in diametrical opposition to the fundamental materialist foundation of Marxism. So disturbed was Lenin that he spent much of 1908 combing more than 200 books to pen a thick polemical volume in reply — Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy.For Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, see: V.I. Lenin, Collected Works: Volume 14. Abraham Fineberg, trans. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962; pp. 17-361. Details of Lenin's writing process may be found in the same volume, page 366, footnote 11.
Lenin ultimately emerged triumphant in the struggle for hegemony of the Bolshevik faction. Relations between them in Western European exile remained tense. During the first decade of the 20th Century Bogdanov wrote two works of utopian science fiction about socialist societies on Mars, both of which were rejected by Lenin as attempts to smuggle "Machist idealism" into the radical movement.Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, pp. 169-170. The second of these, a book called Engineer Menni (1913), was pronounced by Lenin to be "so vague that neither a worker nor a stupid editor at Pravda [a rival publication] could understand it."Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, pg. 170. In 1913 Bogdanov, a student of the Taylor system of factory work-flow rationalization, published a massive work on the topic, General Organizational Science, which Lenin liked no better.
The pair went their separate ways, with Bogdanov dropping out of radical politics at the end of 1913, returning home with his wife to Moscow.Williams, The Other Bolsheviks, pg. 171. He would later be reinvigorated by the course of events to become a leading figure in the Moscow Proletkult organization — a fact which emphasizes the tension between that organization and state authorities.Lynn Mally argues that this traditional emphasis on Alexander Bogdanov as the "best known leader" of Proletkult helps obscure the fact that Proletkult's ongoing battle for "autonomy" (samostoiatel'nost') was in essence a fight with the state bureaucracy rather than the Communist Party, per se. See: Mally, Culture of the Future, pp. 37-38.
Birth of Proletkult
Preliminary conference
Following the abdication of the Tsar and the success of the February Revolution of 1917, the October Revolution ousted the Russian Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky and brought the Bolsheviks to power, which subsequently let to the Russian Civil War.
The radical intelligentsia of Russia was mobilized by these events. Anatoly Lunacharsky, who had briefly broken with Lenin and the Bolshevik Party to become a newspaper correspondent in France and Italy, returned to Russia in May 1917 and rejoined the party in August.Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970; pg. 310. Following the October Revolution, Lunacharsky was appointed Commissar of Education of the new government.
Lunacharsky's factional ally, Alexander Bogdanov, remained sharply critical of Lenin and his political tactics and never rejoined the Communist Party, however.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pg. 295. Instead he served at the front as a doctor during World War I, returning home to Moscow in 1917 and becoming involved there as a founder of the Proletarian Culture organization, Proletkult.
The aim of unifying the cultural and educational activities of the Russian labour movements first occurred at the Agitation Collegium of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet which met on 19 July 1917 with 120 participants. It was attended by many different currents, and when the Menshevik Dementiev suggested that the meeting just be confined to public lectures and that the Bolsheviks should be excluded, but this was soundly rejected. Consequently, the Central Council of Factory Committees was instructed to work with the Petrograd Soviet to organise a second conference of "proletarian cultural-educational organizations" to bring them together in a centralized organization.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pg. 89. A first conference of these groups was held in Petrograd from October 16 to 19, 1917 (O.S.). The conclave was called by Lunacharsky in his role as head of the Cultural-Educational Commission of the Petrograd Bolshevik organization and was attended by 208 delegates representing Petrograd trade unions, factory committees, army and youth groups, city and regional dumas, as well as the Petrograd Committee of the Bolshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pp. 89-90.
This October 1917 conference elected a Central Committee of Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations of Petrograd which included among its members Lunacharsky, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, talented young journalist Larisa Reisner, and a long-time Vpered associate of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky named Fedor Kalinin, among others.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pg. 90. Also playing a key role was the future Chairman of the Organising Bureau of the National Proletkult, Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, another former member of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky's émigré political group.Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, pg. 306. Many of these would be catapulted into leading roles in the People's Commissariat of Education following the Bolshevik seizure of power which followed less than two weeks later.
After the Bolshevik seizure of state power
The October Revolution led to a marked increase in the number of new cultural organizations and informal groups.Mally, Culture of the Future, pg. 33. Clubs and cultural societies sprung up affiliated with newly empowered factories, unions, cooperatives, and workers' and soldiers' councils, in addition to similar groups attached to more formal institutions such as the Red Army, the Communist Party, and its youth section. The new government of Soviet Russia was quick to understand that these rapidly proliferating clubs and societies offered a potentially powerful vehicle for the spread of the radical political, economic, and social theories it favored.
The chief cultural authority of the Soviet state was its People's Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), a bureaucratic apparatus which quickly came to include no fewer than 17 different departments.Mally, Culture of the Future, pp. 33-34. Headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky, this organization sought to expand adult literacy and to establish a broad and balanced general school curricula, in opposition to pressure from the trade unions and the Supreme Council of National Economy, which sought to give preference to vocational education.Mally, Culture of the Future, pg. 35. The as-yet loosely organized Proletkult movement emerged as another potential competitor to the primacy of Narkompros.
This confusing welter of competing institutions and organizations was by no means unique to the cultural field, as historian Lynn Mally has noted: