Socialist realism

• 1. Introduction

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  Socialist realism, also known as socrealism, was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1988. It governed painters, sculptors, novelists, composers, and filmmakers with equal force. Its stated objective was to depict reality in its revolutionary development. Yet no formal guidelines on style or subject matter were ever provided. That combination of rigid mandate and deliberate vagueness left every Soviet artist in permanent uncertainty. How did this doctrine come into being when the country was still new and its artists were arguing over everything? How did it spread beyond the Soviet Union? And what endured, in painting and in memory, after the state that created it finally fell?

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• 2. Before the Doctrine

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  Anatoly Lunacharsky was appointed head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, shortly after the Bolsheviks took control of Russia on the 25th of October 1917. As director of Soviet cultural life, he did not impose a single aesthetic model on artists. Instead, he developed a system of aesthetics grounded in the human body. He believed that the sight of a healthy body, an intelligent face, or a friendly smile was, in his words, essentially life-enhancing. From that conviction, he concluded that art acted directly on the human organism. Depict the perfect person, he reasoned, and you could educate citizens toward becoming perfect Soviets.

  Russian futurists and traditionalists each claimed the right to define what Soviet art should be. The futurists had been making abstract or leftist work before the Bolsheviks arrived. They believed communism required a complete rupture from the past in culture, just as it did in politics. Traditionalists insisted that realistic depictions of everyday life were the only honest path forward.

  Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, limited private commercial enterprise still existed. Both camps could find buyers for their work. By 1928, the Soviet government had enough strength to end private enterprise entirely. Support for fringe groups like the futurists collapsed. The defining characteristics of socialist realism became the norm before the term itself was even coined.

  Ivan Gronsky, chairman of the organizing committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, first used the term in print in Literaturnaya Gazeta. The date was the 23rd of May 1932. The phrasing had been approved in meetings attended by Joseph Stalin himself. Maxim Gorky, already a proponent of literary socialist realism, published a famous article under the same title the following year.

  The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, founded in 1922, had already been moving toward what would become the doctrine. The group documented contemporary life using what it called heroic realism. It carried favor with the Red Army and received sponsorship from influential officials including Leon Trotsky. In 1928, it was renamed the Association of Artists of the Revolution to encompass all Soviet states. The decree of the 23rd of April 1932, disbanded the group. That decree explicitly named it as the nucleus from which the Stalinist Union of Artists would grow.

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• 3. The Congress of 1934

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  In August 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers convened, and Maxim Gorky addressed the assembly. The Writers' Union, Gorky argued, existed not merely to unite artists of the pen. Its purpose was to help writers comprehend their collective strength and merge their creative aims toward the guiding goals of the country's working energies. Stalin's representative Andrei Zhdanov also spoke, endorsing socialist realism explicitly as the official style of Soviet culture.

  Four guidelines for all socialist realist work were established at the congress. A work had to be proletarian: art relevant to workers and understandable to them. It had to be typical: drawn from scenes of everyday life. It had to be realistic in the representational sense. And it had to be partisan: supportive of the aims of the state and the party.

  Partiinost', the concept of party-mindedness, was the first of four key principles the doctrine generated. Ideinost insisted that ideological content matter more than artistic form. Klassovost required that class content be present. Pravdivost demanded truthfulness, as the party defined it. Ideinost was especially significant: it allowed the identification and punishment of formalism, which was any work in which the formal aspects of a piece outweighed its content.

  Social realism was an entirely separate movement, despite the similarity in name. It depicted subjects of social concern and was popularized in the United States during the 1930s. The two movements had nothing to do with each other.

  Alexander Fadeyev was one of the most prominent authors of this period. He was a close personal friend of Stalin and referred to him as one of the greatest humanists the world had ever seen. His most notable works included The Rout and The Young Guard.

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• 4. Images of Utopia

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  Common images in socialist realist work included flowers, sunlight, the body, youth, flight, industry, and new technology. These choices were designed to show the utopianism of communism as a lived reality rather than a distant promise. Art stopped being an aesthetic pleasure and became a function.

  Marxist theoretician Georgi Plekhanov had articulated the philosophical basis for this position. He argued that art could acquire social significance only when it depicted, evoked, or conveyed actions and emotions of significance to society. From that argument followed themes of the beauty of work, the achievements of the collective, and individual effort for the good of the whole.

  During the Stalin period, artists produced numerous heroic portraits of Stalin to serve his cult of personality. All of it was rendered in the most realistic fashion possible. Painters depicted happy, muscular peasants and workers in factories and on collective farms. People who could not be portrayed as wholly good or wholly evil were unusable as characters.

  Stalin called the artists who built this world engineers of souls. The phrase captured the utilitarian logic of the entire movement. Sculptures depicted workers, sentries, and schoolchildren. Paintings showed busy industrial and agricultural scenes. Revolutionary romanticism elevated the common worker, whether in a factory or on a farm, by presenting his life and work as admirable. Its purpose was to show how much the standard of living had improved since the revolution.

  Lenin had described the aim as creating what he called an entirely new type of human being. That figure, the New Soviet Man, was the goal toward which every painting, song, and film was directed.

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• 5. Formalism Under Fire

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  Pravda published an editorial attacking Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, completed in 1932, for its petit-bourgeois jazz influences. Art historian Maria Silina has argued that socialist realism was partly a reaction to the campaign against formalism and naturalism that this editorial helped launch. That campaign ran from 1936 to 1938, led by the Committee on Artistic Affairs. It occurred alongside the Great Purge but was not initiated by a political decree.

  Soviet art critic Osip Beskin had already denounced formalism in a 1933 presentation. He criticized a wide range of artists including David Sterenberg, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Kliun, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Kentulov, and Alexander Tyshler. Others condemned naturalism as overly derivative of Western bourgeois art.

  Silina notes a significant qualification: an artist's style was not necessarily related to whether they were targeted in the Purge. Shostakovich and Evgenii Katsman, both in the crosshairs of formalism critics, remained prominent throughout the Stalinist era. Aleksander Laktionov's work was condemned by critics for its realism; Soviet leadership lauded him anyway. The system's enforcement was fierce but inconsistent.

  Leon Trotsky, Stalin's primary adversary, offered the sharpest outside critique of the doctrine. He regarded socialist realism as an arbitrary construct of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The literary schools, he wrote, were strangled one after the other, and the method of command extended from scientific agriculture to music. Trotsky described official Soviet art as sharing in the fate of official justice. Its purpose, he argued, was to glorify the leader and manufacture a heroic myth. The label socialist realism, he concluded, could only have been invented by a bureaucrat at the head of an arts department.

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• 6. Works Across All Media

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  Maxim Gorky's novel Mother, published in 1906, is generally considered the first socialist realist novel. His pamphlet On Socialist Realism also laid out the fundamental requirements of Soviet art. Other canonical literary works included Fyodor Gladkov's Cement from 1925 and Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered from 1936. Aleksey Tolstoy's epic trilogy The Road to Calvary appeared between 1922 and 1941. Yury Krymov's 1938 novel Tanker Derbent portrayed Soviet merchant seafarers transformed by the Stakhanovite movement.

  Trotsky had argued early on that cinema could be used to supplant the influence of the Orthodox Church in Russia. By the early 1930s, Soviet filmmakers were applying socialist realism directly in their work. Notable films included Chapaev, which showed the role of the people in the history-making process, and Alexander Nevsky, directed by Eisenstein. Hindi cinema also embraced the doctrine: Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar, made in 1946, won the Grand Prize at the 1st Cannes Film Festival. Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land won the International Prize at the 7th Cannes Film Festival in 1953.

  Hanns Eisler composed workers' songs, marches, and ballads including Song of Solidarity, Song of the United Front, and Song of the Comintern. He was also a founder of the revolutionary song form for mass audiences. His larger works included German Symphony and Requiem for Lenin. The mass song became the leading genre of Soviet music, especially during the 1930s, influencing opera, the art song, and film music. Among the most popular were Dunaevsky's Song of the Homeland and Isaakovsky's Katiusha.

  Sculptor Fritz Cremer created monuments commemorating victims of the Nazi regime at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück. His bronze monument at Buchenwald depicted the liberation of the concentration camp by its detainees in April 1945. Each figure in the monument carried symbolic significance within the orthodox communist interpretation of the event. The German Democratic Republic used those sculptures to assert its claim to the anti-fascist legacy of the struggle for freedom.

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• 7. Women in the Frame

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  During the Russian Civil War, from 1917 to 1922, men dominated Soviet propaganda imagery as workers, peasants, and combat heroes. When women appeared in that early poster art, they usually symbolized abstract concepts such as Mother Russia, or served as nurses and victims. The symbolic female figures were depicted as feminine: long dresses, long hair, and sometimes bare breasts. The urban proletariat, characterized by masculinity, physical strength, and dignity, was typically shown as a blacksmith.

  By 1920, artists began producing the first images of women as proletarians. These new figures differed sharply from the symbolic women of the decade before. They mirrored the posture and dignity of male workers, and in the case of blacksmiths, even their supernatural power. In many 1920s paintings, men and women were almost indistinguishable in stature and clothing; the women were often shown in subservient roles, typically as assistants, called rabotnitsa, to the male workers.

  The early period, before 1930, was relatively egalitarian within the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia. Art historian Christina Kiaer has argued that the post-revolutionary shift away from market-based art production benefited female artists' careers. Some of the most prominent women in the revolutionary avant-garde included Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova.

  When Stalin rose to power in 1930, the organization became more hierarchical. It privileged realist oil painting, a field dominated by men, over posters and other mediums where women had primarily worked. Because the government had declared the woman question resolved in 1930, there was little explicit discussion of how women should uniquely be depicted. The New Soviet Woman was shown working in traditionally male occupations: aviation, engineering, tractor-driving, and politics.

  In 1950, women made up 51.8% of the Soviet labor force, compared to just 28.3% in North America. Historian Susan Reid has argued that the cult of personality around male Soviet leaders created a pervasive atmosphere of patriarchy in the art. Male and female workers were often depicted looking up to Lenin and Stalin as paternal figures. The policies of the 1930s meanwhile ended up forcing many women into sole responsibility for childcare, creating what became known as the double burden of childcare and work duties.

  Vera Mukhina's 1937 statue Worker and Kolkhoz Woman made the gender division visible in permanent form. The factory worker was shown as male; the collective farm worker, female. That arrangement reflected the wartime roles the doctrine demanded people fulfill, a division that artists who later outlived the regime would have every reason to examine.

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• 8. After the Doctrine

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  After Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev began to condemn the previous regime's excessive artistic restrictions. In 1956, Khrushchev's Secret Speech openly criticized Stalin's artistic demands and began a policy reversal known as Khrushchev's Thaw. In 1964, Khrushchev was removed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who reintroduced Stalin's ideas and reversed many of Khrushchev's artistic decisions.

  By the early 1980s, the movement had begun to fade regardless. In 1974, a show of unofficial art in a field near Moscow was broken up using a water cannon and bulldozers. That episode, known as the Bulldozer Exhibition, showed how fiercely the state still resisted alternative expression even as the doctrine weakened. Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s unleashed an explosion of interest in alternative art styles. Socialist realism remained the official state art style until 1991.

  In the decade immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, artists represented the socialist realist legacy as a traumatic event. By the following decade, a unique sense of detachment had replaced that trauma. In the 1990s, many Russian artists used socialist realist characteristics in an ironic fashion, including subjects that could not have existed under Soviet ideals.

  In Moscow, the Institute of Russian Realist Art, a three-story museum, preserves 20th-century Russian realist painting. Western observers have generally viewed the art of this period as a totalitarian lie; the museum's collection represents a more recent effort to reclaim it. Outside Russia, today only North Korea, Laos, and, to some extent, Vietnam still formally adhere to these aesthetic principles. In those countries, the guidelines Andrei Zhdanov endorsed in 1934 remain in force.

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