John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

It was vital that Bolshevik propaganda reach all areas controlled by Sovnarcom. To this end the government used “Agit-Trains”, also known as “mobile posters” because the sides of the carriages were decorated with agitational pictures and slogans, to distribute not just posters but films and political literature. In August 1918 the first Agit-Train, called “The Mobile Military Front-Line Literary Train Named after V.I. Lenin”, left Moscow to travel to Kazan and through the Volga regions then held by the Czech Legion. Other trains followed, equipped with their own library, printing presses, and small cinemas.

The trains were a success and they were added to by the Red Star agitational ship which plied the Volga and Kama rivers during 1919 (how it came by its name is not recorded, but is it fanciful to imagine it was after Bogdanov’s utopian SF novel?). On one of its trips in summer 1919 it was accompanied by Krupskaya and Molotov. During the civil war the Bolsheviks’ agitational trains and ships visited all the regions of Soviet Russia, spent 659 days in the field and made contact with 2.8 million citizens at 775 different locations. 23

The only medium that outstripped the poster as a vivid and immediate means of conveying Bolshevik propaganda was film, most especially the bold cinematic experiments of Sergei Eisenstein, a pioneer of modernist film technique whose Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October 1917 (1927) were a major influence on German Expressionist film and Citizen Kane . Trotsky early grasped the importance of cinema to the creation of a revolutionary culture. “The cinema is a great competitor not only of the tavern but also of the church”, he wrote in his essay “Vodka, the Church and the Cinema” in 1923. “Here is an instrument which we must secure at all costs!” 24The art of the revolutionary poster, the Rosta Windows, the agitational flyer and the political film thrived between 1917 and 1930. Artists like Apsit, Mayakovsky and Eisenstein did not need to be dragooned into producing propaganda because they believed in the dream and vision of the Soviet state. Their propaganda was art. But what of those artists who thought and felt differently?

In “Party Organisation and Party Literature” (1905) Lenin had foretold their fate. In this neglected essay, the germ of authoritarian control of culture is already present. Lenin considered that “All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature. Every newspaper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganising its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another, be integrated into one party organisation or another”. After asking “What is the principle of party literature?”, he answered:

It is not simply that, for the socialist proletariat, literature cannot be a means of enriching individuals or groups: it cannot, in fact, be an individual undertaking, independent of the common cause of the proletariat. Down with non-partisan writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become part of the common cause of the proletariat, a cog and a screw of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism set in motion by the politically conscious vanguard of the entire working class. 25

This was intended only for party literature. But what if, after the revolution, a one-party system was established in which the party was inextricable from the state? It was a small step from Lenin’s strictures on party literature to Sovnarcom’s Commission for Newspaper Supervision, set up in 1922 to implement guidelines on what newspapers could and could not publish. At the same time, in the spirit of Lenin’s condemnation of non-partisan writers and literary supermen, the Commission to Monitor the Private Book Market, chaired by the head of AgitProp A.S. Bubnov, established a system in which every article in every book published by non-party publishers was scrutinised and categorised to ensure it was not “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary”. Many publishers were then rated as “Menshevik” or “Kadet”. After that, their days were numbered.

Trotsky, although far more sensitive to modern art and literature than Lenin, still believed that the ultimate arbiter in cultural matters had to be the party. He allowed some latitude. “The methods of Marxism are not those of art”, he explained in Literature and Revolution :

The party leads the proletariat but not the processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and commandingly. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are domains, finally, in which it only orientates itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called on to command.

Yet he asserted that only art the party considered supportive of the revolution could be tolerated. “Our policy in art, during a transitional period”, he wrote,

can and must be to assist the various groups or schools of art which have come over to the revolution to grasp correctly its historical meaning and to allow them complete freedom of self-determination in the field of art, once the categorical standard of being for or against the revolution has been placed before them. 26

The experience of artists and intellectuals who never met the standard, or were judged insufficiently zealous in abiding by it, was very different from those that did. Especially vulnerable were those members of the Russian intelligentsia who rejected materialism, positivism and atheism, most prominently the idealist philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Semyon Frank, the theologian Sergei Bulgakov, and liberals such as Peter Struve. From 1905 Berdyaev had built an international reputation by fusing an idiosyncratic Christian socialism with philosophical idealism and a strong personal spirituality. After October 1917 Berdyaev, Frank, Struve and others formed the League of Russian Culture, a group of moderate liberals and conservatives who opposed the entire project of the Bolshevik Revolution.

After October Struve went into illegal opposition and then exile. Berdyaev returned to purely academic work. In 1918 he produced The Philosophy of Inequality , which discarded any vestige of ethical socialism for a pessimistic attack on all materialist and rationalist thought. He labeled the revolution a “great experiment” which “intensifies all the basic problems of social philosophy”. 27He wished to rejuvenate elitist individualism based on a Nietzschean “aristocracy of the spirit” and a rejection of mass culture. He claimed his philosophy was based on personal freedom, but it appeared to value the freedom of the exceptional individual more than that of ordinary people. Berdyaev could not publish his work in Soviet Russia, although he continued to hold his position at Moscow University until he was expelled from the country in 1922.

Lunacharsky maintained a relatively tolerant attitude towards the universities, even though many academics were either members of the Kadet Party or sympathetic to them. After October the Academy of Sciences, the Union of Engineers, the Teachers Unions and the Academics Union all passed resolutions condemning the insurrection and calling for a Constituent Assembly. Some faculties in cities near the front line of the Civil War, such as at Kazan and Perm Universities, defected en masse to the White forces (the entire faculty of Warsaw University, which had relocated to Rostov-on-Don, retreated with the White Army in 1920 to set itself up in Constantinople). Academics in cities like Petrograd and Moscow did not have these options. Despite the Civil War, non-Bolshevik academics such as the non-aligned Bogdanov, the Mensheviks Sukhanov and Gorev, and the anarchist Grossman-Roschin, were allowed to teach and lecture well into the 1920s. 28

One reason for this was that Nakompros wanted to provide courses in Marxism to working-class students, and if it excluded liberal or Menshevik academics from doing so there would be hardly anyone left to teach them. During the Civil War, Nakompros tried to reorganise the old history, law and philology schools in to “Social Science Schools”, in which academics graduating from a new Communist Academy would apply Marxist methodology to a wide range of social and cultural subjects. It was not until 1921 that Nakompros imposed a University Constitution on higher education, which gave the Commissariat the right to appoint the Rector and governing body. Even then it was selective in how it used its powers. It was well aware that most academics were covertly hostile to it, although there was a definite difference of approach between the arts and the sciences.