Passage from Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937),
Chapter 7 “Family, Youth and Culture”
Spiritual creativeness demands freedom. The very purpose of communism
is to subject nature to technique and technique to plan, and compel the
raw material to give unstintingly everything to man that he needs. Far
more than that, its highest goal is to free finally and once for all the
creative forces of mankind from all pressure, limitation and
humiliating dependence. Personal relations, science and art will not
know any externally imposed “plan”, nor even any shadow of compulsion.
To what degree spiritual creativeness shall be individual or collective
will depend entirely upon its creators.
A transitional regime is a different thing. The dictatorship reflects
the past barbarism and not the future culture. It necessarily lays down
severe limitations upon all forms of activity, including spiritual
creation. The programme of the revolution from the very beginning regarded
these limitations as a temporary evil, and assumed the obligation, in
proportion as the new regime was consolidated, to remove one after the
other all restrictions upon freedom. In any case, and in the hottest
years of the civil war, it was clear to the leaders of the revolution
that the government could, guided by political considerations, place
limitations upon creative freedom, but in no case pretend to the role of
commander in the sphere of science, literature and art. Although he had
rather “conservative” personal tastes in art, Lenin remained
politically extremely cautious in artistic questions, eagerly confessing
his incompetence. The patronising of all kinds of modernism by
Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Art and Education, was often
embarrassing to Lenin. But he confined himself to ironical remarks in
private conversations, and remained remote from the idea of converting
his literary tastes into law. In 1924, on the threshold of the new
period, the author of this book thus formulated the relation of the
state to the various artistic groups and tendencies: “while holding over
them all the categorical criterion, for the revolution or against the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination.”
While the dictatorship had a seething mass-basis and a prospect of
world revolution, it had no fear of experiments, searchings, the
struggle of schools, for it understood that only in this way could a new
cultural epoch be prepared. The popular masses were still quivering in
every fibre, and were thinking aloud for the first time in a thousand
years. All the best youthful forces of art were touched to the quick.
During those first years, rich in hope and daring, there were created
not only the most complete models of socialist legislation, but also the
best productions of revolutionary literature. To the same times belong,
it is worth remarking, the creation of those excellent Soviet films
which, in spite of a poverty of technical means, caught the imagination
of the whole world with the freshness and vigour of their approach to
reality.
In the process of struggle against the party Opposition, the literary
schools were strangled one after the other. It was not only a question
of literature, either. The process of extermination took place in all
ideological spheres, and it took place more decisively since it was more
than half unconscious. The present ruling stratum considers itself
called not only to control spiritual creation politically, but also to
prescribe its roads of development. The method of command-without-appeal
extends in like measure to the concentration camps, to scientific
agriculture and to music. The central organ of the party prints
anonymous directive editorials, having the character of military orders,
in architecture, literature, dramatic art, the ballet, to say nothing
of philosophy, natural science and history.
The bureaucracy superstitiously fears whatever does not serve it
directly, as well as whatever it does not understand. When it demands
some connection between natural science and production, this is on a
large scale right; but when it commands that scientific investigators
set themselves goals only of immediate practical importance, this
threatens to seal up the most precious sources of invention, including
practical discoveries, for these most often arise on unforeseen roads.
Taught by bitter experience, the natural scientists, mathematicians,
philologists, military theoreticians, avoid all broad generalisations
out of fear lest some “red professor”, usually an ignorant careerist,
threateningly pull up on them with some quotation dragged in by the hair
from Lenin, or even from Stalin. To defend one’s own thought in such
circumstances, or one’s scientific dignity, means in all probability to
bring down repressions upon one’s head.
But it is infinitely worse in the sphere of the social sciences.
Economists, historians, even statisticians, to say nothing of
journalists, are concerned above all things not to fall, even obliquely,
into contradiction with the momentary zigzag of the official course.
About Soviet economy, or domestic or foreign policy, one cannot write at
all except after covering his rear and flanks with banalities from the
speeches of the “leader”, and having assumed in advance the task of
demonstrating that everything is going exactly as it should go and even
better. Although this 100 per cent conformism frees one from everyday
unpleasantnesses, it entails the heaviest of punishments: sterility. ...
No less ruinous is the effect of the “totalitarian” regime upon
artistic literature. The struggle of tendencies and schools has been
replaced by interpretation of the will of the leaders. There has been
created for all groups a general compulsory organisation, a kind of
concentration camp of artistic literature. Mediocre but “right-thinking”
storytellers like Serafimovich or Gladkov are inaugurated as classics.
Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are
pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of
quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find
their material in the remote past, or become silent. Honest and talented
books appear as though accidentally, bursting out from somewhere under
the counter, and have the character of artistic contraband.
The life of Soviet art is a kind of martyrology. After the editorial orders in Pravda against “formalism”, there began an epidemic of humiliating
recantations by writers, artists, stage directors and even opera
singers. One after another, they renounced their own past sins,
refraining, however – in case of further emergencies – from any
clear-cut definition of the nature of this “formalism.” In the long run,
the authorities were compelled by a new order to put an end to a too
copious flow of recantations. Literary estimates are transformed within a
few weeks, textbooks made over, streets renamed, statues brought
forward, as a result of a few eulogistic remarks of Stalin about the
poet Mayakovsky. The impressions made by the new opera upon high-up
auditors are immediately converted into a musical directive for
composers. The Secretary of the Communist Youth said at a conference of
writers: “The suggestions of Comrade Stalin are a law for everybody,”
and the whole audience applauded, although some doubtless burned with
shame. As though to complete the mockery of literature, Stalin, who does
not know how to compose a Russian phrase correctly, is declared a
classic in the matter of style. There is something deeply tragic in this
Byzantinism and police rule, notwithstanding the involuntary comedy of
certain of its manifestations.
The official formula reads: Culture should be socialist in content,
national in form. As to the content of a socialist culture, however,
only certain more or less happy guesses are possible. Nobody can grow
that culture upon an inadequate economic foundation. Art is far less
capable than science of anticipating the future. In any case, such
prescriptions as, “portray the construction of the future,” “indicate
the road to socialism,” “make over mankind,” give little more to the
creative imagination than does the price list of a hardware store, or a
railroad timetable.
The national form of an art is identical with its universal accessibility. “What is not wanted by the people,” Pravda dictates to the artists, “cannot have aesthetic significance.” That old
Narodnik formula, rejecting the task of artistically educating the
masses, takes on a still more reactionary character when the right to
decide what art the people want and what they don’t want remains in the
hands of the bureaucracy. It prints books according to its own choice.
It sells them also by compulsion, offering no choice to the reader. In
the last analysis the whole affair comes down in its eyes to taking care
that art assimilates its interests, and finds such forms for them as
will make the bureaucracy attractive to the popular masses.
In vain! No literature can fulfill that task. The leaders themselves
are compelled to acknowledge that “neither the first nor the second
five-year plan has yet given us a new literary wave which can rise above
the first wave born in October.” That is very mildly said. In reality,
in spite of individual exceptions, the epoch of the Thermidor will go
into the history of artistic creation pre-eminently as an epoch of
mediocrities, laureates and toadies.