66 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

Russian Studies in History, vol. 42, no. 2, Fall 2003, pp. 66–96.
© 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–1983/2003 $9.50 + 0.00.

VALENTINA G. LEBEDEVA

Totalitarian and Mass Elements in

Soviet Culture of the 1930s

Every word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has

lived its socially charged life. All words and forms are populated
by intentions.
—Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse on the Novel”a

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s Russian scholarship finally
accepted that mass culture existed not only in bourgeois society
but also in socialist society, which unquestionably represented a
step in the right direction relative to previously held ideas. Even
so, the extent of direction and repression in our culture has been
exaggerated, while totalitarian and mass culture have been equated.1
Refuting the view that the cultural process in Stalinist Russia was
unique requires a genuinely “archeological” approach to the en-
tire cultural complex of the period. This work has already begun,
and the earliest research findings indicate that beneath the “smooth
coiffure” of totalitarian culture, despite everything, many cultural
worlds remained intact, and there existed a zone in which a mass
esthetic consciousness spontaneously took shape.

English translation © 2003 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2000
“Klio,” “Nestor” Publishers, and the author. “Totalitarnoe i massovoe v sovetskoi
kul’ture 30-kh gg.,” Klio: zhurnal dlia uchenykh, 2000, no. 1 (10), pp. 152–62.
Valentina Genrikhovna Lebedeva, Candidate of History, is associate profes-
sor and dean of humanities at the Academy of Forestry in St. Petersburg.
Notes renumbered for this edition.—Ed.
66
 FALL 2003 67

To write about the totalitarian, official culture of the Soviet Union

in the 1930s is immeasurably easier than to write about mass cul-
ture in the same period, since the former stretches “as far as the
eye can see.” The archives and museums, periodicals and litera-
ture, cinema and visual agitprop, the language and official “cer-
emonial” are replete with it. It dominates to the point where one
begins to wonder if any other kind of culture even existed. When
culture occupies an overly “level playing field,” this is always a
sure sign of violence wrought by the authorities on the life of the
spirit. Alexander Herzen, in My Past and Thoughts [Byloe i dumy],
wrote of Russia under Nicholas I: “The pestilential streak, run-
ning from 1825 to 1855, will soon be cordoned off . . . and future
generations will often come to a standstill in bewilderment before
a waste land rammed smooth, seeking the lost channels of thought
that were never interrupted.”b The 1930s in the USSR represented
another such historical period, a time when the text of the age
cannot be entirely trusted, when the truth must be sought behind
the text, when the need arises for a dialogue with the age and an
“empathetic response” to it.
Official culture could not fill the entire cultural space, no mat-
ter how hard it tried. Many people understood that even at the
time: “Even if one allows that communism, as an effort to orga-
nize life on earth in the best possible way, is a good thing, does it
represent the only good thing, does it represent all the good things,
does it include in itself, does it define, all the other good things
and strengths: of art, of science, of religion, and of thought? Does
it include, exclude, or exist on an equal footing?” Marina Tsvetaeva
mused. She insisted that, even in a best-case scenario, commu-
nism is only “one of the motive forces of modern times. . . . It is
not the chief among the motive forces of spiritual life, which is
neither an adjunct nor an annex.”2
Totalitarianism made the most of the sustaining support of the
people (a discovery of democracy). It leaned on the enthusiasm of
the masses and in their name repressed countless “enemies of the
people.” At the same time, it did not trust the masses. It tirelessly
fostered a special kind of “art for the masses” and was suspicious
68 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

of the “customized” nature of elite culture. Even in the Stalinist

period, however, Soviet majority culture persisted in being ex-
tremely heterogeneous. Art for the masses, the art of the masses,
and mass art interwove and interacted within it. But these con-
cepts must be differentiated. The first was defined by the authori-
ties, which dispensed from on high recommendations on the entire
system of cultural management. This direction was the most sus-
ceptible to totalitarianization. The second direction, being the sec-
tor of popular culture, was by nature significantly less susceptible
to control, although there was more than enough “pseudo-folksy”
fakery to go around.3 And in the struggle to regiment the third
sector of majority culture many of its genres and subgenres were
destroyed, and the repertoire was placed under the most stringent
control possible.
Fashioning an integral picture of Soviet culture from sources is
a complicated business, since many of these accounts are no more
than fragments of a poorly coordinated mosaic. The Soviet press
of the 1930s makes a unique impression on an outside observer.
“There were resolutions, reports, decrees. . . . It was a boring read,”
is how the singer Aleksandr Vertinskii remembered it. “No sensa-
tional events. People were building, bustling about; the work was
going swimmingly.” The émigré publications Poslednie novosti
and Vozrozhdenie were filing “their own sensational reports about
Soviet Russia: executions by firing squad, hunger, revolts in the
army, and so on.” Meanwhile the citizens of that paradoxical coun-
try, stopping off in Berlin music stores on their way home from an
overseas assignment, were buying up “the complete Vertinskii re-
cordings,”4 which apparently responded to some vital need of con-
temporary Soviet man. What place did mass culture occupy in a
world so full of creation and repression? To answer that question,
it is important first to compare the basic traits of totalitarian and
mass culture [Table 1].
Having compared the characteristics of these two subcultures,
we can conclude that mass culture, although it shares totalitarian
culture’s object of influence, is different in nature, content, and
functions. Culture can be fully valuable only when it reflects the
 FALL 2003 69

[Table 1]

A Comparative Description of Totalitarian and Mass Culture

[Characteristic] Totalitarian culture Mass culture

1. Vectors of aspires toward radical has no “demiurgic”

movement re-creation of space,
society, and man
2. Link between stops at nothing to confine
organized and liberated revolutionary
spontaneous spontaneity in rigid
official framework and
is itself rigidly organized
and hierarchical
3. Chief motivation fills official requisitions
in compliance with the
directives of authority
4. Scope gigantomaniac in its
goals, plans, projects,
and structures
5. Genre system “high” genres dominate:
in art epic; social drama;
historical film; thematically
compendious paintings;
busts and portraits of
Party and government
figures; opera and ballet.
In fine art, architecture
has a special place
6. Attitude toward the adamant repudiation of
body and intimacy the human body except
as an instrument of work
and defense
Source: The description of totalitarian culture is based on N. Khrenov, “Sotsial’no-
psikhologicheskie aspekty gosudarstvennoi kul’tury 30-kh godov,” in Stranitsy
otechestvennoi khudozhestvennoi kul’tury. 30-e gody (Moscow, 1995), p. 55.
tasks, being firmly in
arrière-garde
is intrinsically incapable
of coercion, open
and dialogic as a
matter of principle, and
sensitive to state of
collective unconscious
satisfies public demand,
which it perceives
intuitively
proportionate to real
people and to a speci-
fic country and age
“low” genres dominate:
melodrama; operetta;
comedy; circus; vaude-
ville; dance music (jazz,
foxtrot); “cruel” ballads
of unhappy love;
“underworld” songs;
and the maudlin
“orphan’s” song
close attention to
sensuality and relations
between the sexes;
more interest in private
than in social life

entire sphere of human experience. Totalitarian culture, limited as

it was, could not do that; but mass culture had its own niche in this
system. Therein lies the key that unlocks the secret of the authorities’
and official culture’s dislike for the creators and heroes of mass
70 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

culture. Mass culture was so indispensable, though, that totalitar-

ian culture was driven to attempt to mimic it.
The job of restoring the picture of mass culture under totalitari-
anism is complicated by the specific nature of mass culture, a phe-
nomenon that in most instances occupies a narrow span of
time—the here and now. The reasons for its charm may be under-
stood and the secrets of its idols’ success revealed only if one en-
ters into the socio-psychological atmosphere of its time. Unlike
the chefs d’oeuvre of high culture, which (if their reputation was
not made in their own time) “like fine wines come into their own
one day,” mass culture, as a specific reflection of its own age, takes
its leave and never returns.

The factors that molded mass culture in the 1930s

Totalitarianism, with its system of injunctions and prohibitions,

was only one of the factors that made Soviet mass culture of the
1930s so unique. Of far greater significance, perhaps, was the na-
ture of Russia’s historical path over several preceding centuries
and global development trends in the culture of industrialized so-
ciety. The country was experiencing another period of accelerated
modernization, another “constriction” (compression) of history,
and going through certain critical civilizational processes in his-
torically shorter periods than the West had known. The 1920s and
the 1930s saw the continuation of a cultural and educational phase
that had begun late in Russia, at the end of the nineteenth century.
The age of cultural enlightenment in Europe extended over sev-
eral centuries, from the seventeenth to the twentieth. Meanwhile,
although universal elementary education had been introduced dur-
ing the 1870s and the 1880s in the developed West, that challenge
was not even on the agenda in tsarist Russia. In fact, the transition
to universal compulsory elementary education occurred here only
under the Soviets, in the 1930s. As a result, in 1939, the end of the
period under consideration, 90 percent of the urban population
had only an elementary education. As the 1930s drew to a close,
two-thirds of the rural population was still illiterate.5 Therefore,
 FALL 2003 71

on the one hand, an ambitious intent to shape the “new man” would
inevitably conflict with genuine popular culture. On the other, this
low cultural baseline gave mass culture its distinctive quality.
The baseline acted as a “censor,” hampering the social dissemi-
nation of more refined forms of art and literature. Culture’s new
audience created pressures that changed not only the degree of
complexity in texts but even their size. At about this time, Viktor
Shklovskii [1893–1984; a leader of Russian Formalism in the
1920s, a novelist, and a highly influential literary theorist—Trans.]
noted that the novel—the great literary form—was in crisis.6 It
was too complex for a reader who had barely learned his ABCs.
Mastery of the printed word is a lengthy process, and in the 1930s
Soviet society was merely setting out on the path to such mastery.
Viewed in this context, many traits of mass culture become easier
to comprehend. Poor vocabularies determined the language of
periodicals and the lexical ineffectiveness of many amateur poets,
writers, and worker and peasant correspondents. The infusion of
written and spoken language with “bureaucratic” turns of phrase
was a characteristic cultural trait of the age. “Officialese” was rife,
even in personal correspondence, as might be expected in a soci-
ety that learned its letters from newspapers and ideological
“copybooks.” In terms of level of education and general culture,
there was little to distinguish “men of power” from the “governed.”
The plethora of decrees, resolutions, and instructions on any and
every subject (all written in the same “rough-hewn” language) was
a natural outcome of society’s mass transition to the written word.
Lurking behind this irrepressible bout of official “logorrhea” was
the sheer exultation that came with the knowledge that the people
had scaled the “wall of hieroglyphics,” and it was now possible to
communicate with them in writing. Another natural development
in a barely literate society was the battle that was joined in the
1930s to cleanse the language of foreign words. This campaign
reflected not only the patriotism of a society rapidly developing a
“trench mentality” but also the aspiration to make the culture’s
texts comprehensible to the majority.
The ideological incompatibility between totalitarian and mass
72 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

culture turned the latter into the eternal—unloved and persecuted—

stepdaughter of the Soviet period. Under such circumstances, even
when the movement of cultural items was restricted and free compe-
tition abolished, mass culture—which is by nature market-oriented—
found channels along which it could “flow.” The practical skills of
oral communication in a society that only yesterday had had no
expertise in the written language aided the dissemination of items
that, lacking official approval, could not move along official chan-
nels. For instance, the whole country knew the Klavdiia Shul’zhenko
songbook and sang it, even though it was not until 1939 (fifteen
years after her debut) that the songstress made her first recording.
The speed at which the products of mass culture spread was stag-
gering. The way was blocked neither by the censorship nor by
boundaries between states. As an émigré in Germany in 1930, Alek-
sandr Vertinskii wrote the arietta “Madame, the Leaves Are Al-
ready Falling” [Madam, uzhe padaiut list’ia]. The very next year
Ilf and Petrov, with their astonishing feel for the times, placed a line
from Vertinskii’s song into the mouth of their irresistible anti-hero—
a true sign that this émigré work was common knowledge. “The
entire land of Soviets” was dancing to Vertinskii’s tango “Magno-
lia” [Magnoliia] (“in banana-lemon Singapore”). Another example
is the song “My Masha and I by the Samovar” [U samovara ia i
moia Masha], which originated in Russian émigré circles in Po-
land and quickly became popular in the USSR, although it was
hounded the length and breadth of the country for its “vulgarity.”
The skills of oral transmission preserved in mass culture the un-
published Apukhtin, with his “Cornflowers, All Cornflowers” [Va-
sil’ki, vse vasil’ki], “gypsy” romances, “underworld” songs that
far predated the Revolution, and so forth.
The proximity of folklore to mass culture was a striking feature
of culture in this period. The skills and models of oral culture aided
popular singers in shaping a repertoire that answered to mass tastes.
The songs of Leonid Utesov, which often repackaged the texts and
melodies of obscure authors, were enormously successful. Utesov
had an unerring feel for styles, forms, lexicon, and emphases that
would have mass appeal, elements obedient to the laws of folk
 FALL 2003 73

culture (the diametrical opposite of official culture). The masses

were producing a low-urban, prison-camp folklore, far outside the
control of any repertoire committee, while Utesov, in creating his
little masterpieces, imparted a high level of professionalism to this
anonymous creative effort. Boris Groys, who has spent much time
considering the extent to which Soviet culture became totalitar-
ian, notes this internal independence: “These people were mani-
festly no more adherents of ideological dogma than they were
adherents of the dogma of Christianity.”
The accelerated urbanization of the USSR, which proceeded at
a pace far greater than in the West, had a particular impact on the
development of mass culture in the 1930s. The dynamics of urban
population growth in the USSR are impressive: 29 million in 1917;
21 million in 1918–19; over 22 million in late 1922; 26 million in
1926; 29 million in 1928; 47 million in 1937; and 65 million in 1940.
In the shortest possible historical span, the urban sector of the gen-
eral population grew from 18 percent (1926) to 32 percent (1939),7
which means that the urban population almost doubled in less than
fifteen years. Nikolai Berdiaev has defined civilization as a natu-
ral historical striving toward the “global city.” But here in the 1930s,
urbanization proceeded at such an unnaturally high rate of speed
that it caused acute problems in everyday life and in culture. The
space of traditional culture was shrinking like shagreen leather,
while the social base of mass culture expanded. At the same time,
the preconditions for the broad dissemination of the consumerist
cultural model (a global process) based on “socialist” relations
were maturing apace.
To a significant extent, the mass culture of the first, 1930s So-
viet generation developed on the fringe, maintaining its links with
traditional culture, and this juxtaposition had some curious re-
sults. Unlike the official culture, mass culture was imbued with
sensuality but contained no overt eroticism, far less pornography.
Fascination with the erotic was, rather, a hallmark of elite culture
(an example being Sergei Eisenstein’s erotic sketches, which were
widely circulated in select venues). The chastity of mass culture
reflected mass thinking and indicated that the prohibitions of tra-
74 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

ditional culture, a “shame culture,” had lost none of their power.

The heights of sensual frankness were represented in it by “cruel”
romance ballads, voluptuous “mermaid” designs on tacky carpets,
“sweet couples” (cavaliers with hair impeccably parted and cow-
eyed beauties), and primitive, hand-painted picture postcards:
“Love me as I love you,” “Off with a ‘hi!’—Back with a reply.”
This entire “video track” of chapbook culture had successfully
survived decades of struggle with its philistine counterpart.

The unity of the affective backdrop and mass culture

in the 1930s

In his study of the semiotics of mass culture, Roland Barthes noted

that every age has its own affective backdrop. The USSR’s unique
backdrop in the 1930s took shape under the impact of sociocul-
tural change, a tense social atmosphere, and the masses’ fresh take
on historical and cultural events. But mass culture, characteristi-
cally enough, ran the psychological gamut of the age. During the
rapid urbanization, the “folkloric” audience, in its new urban cul-
tural milieu, attracted the knowledgeable attention of cultural pro-
fessionals, who eagerly exploited the immediacy of its reactions,
the liveliness and emotionality of its perceptions. It was only to be
expected that in those years a new Soviet mass cultural phenom-
enon would appear and gain a wide currency. This phenomenon
was the “sensational spectacle,” with its large and wildly enthusi-
astic fan base. This category included not only the circus, soccer
matches, and horse races but also movies, vaudeville, and even
chess tournaments. Observing the growing role of mass spectacles
in Soviet leisure activities, Anatolii Mariengof [1897–1962, Im-
agist poet, playwright, and close friend of Eisenstein—Trans.],
only half in jest, surmised that “when all is said and done, soccer
will carry the day against Stanislavsky and Meyerhold.”8 The spec-
tacle apparently emerged so suddenly and appeared so colorful
against the backdrop of an increasingly regimented culture that
Mikhail Zubakin, musing on all that it represented, suggested to
Vladimir Piast that he write “A Theory of the Sensational Spec-
 FALL 2003 75

tacle” [Teoriia sensatsionnogo zrelishcha], a work that he felt would

make an important contribution to cultural studies.9 It is a pity that
nothing of the sort was ever written.
The socio-psychological atmosphere was growing denser by the
day. The public mood was sharply affected by the instability of a
social situation in which those who had been on “our” side only
yesterday were “enemies” today, and cries of “Hosanna” and “Cru-
cify him”—directed at the same people—alternated with distaste-
ful regularity. Before the eyes of millions, something was always
being renamed, rewritten, or reinterpreted: whole sections were
removed from textbooks, whole pages excised from reference books
and dictionaries, and thousands of documents pulled from archives
and destroyed. Guidelines that had been both valuable and man-
datory only yesterday were rescinded. Something was always be-
ing rebuilt, planned, then halted halfway to completion.
It was difficult to preserve one’s psychological equilibrium and
the integrity and harmony of one’s inner world amid the incom-
prehensible and unpredictable world outside. A not unimportant
role in this—a “therapeutic” role with a charitable approach to the
mass mindset—fell to mass culture, with its ability to respond flex-
ibly to the state of the collective unconscious. Its answer to the
wishes of the silent majority was its apolitical stance, the distance
it maintained from the games being played by the authorities—its
perpendicular, as it were, line of development (in relation to offi-
cial culture), from Shul’zhenko’s vocal “grotesqueries” and Ute-
sov’s “underworld” cycle (with its free and easy criminality) to
the fad—reappearing in perfectly ordinary unified labor schools—
for sophomoric albums containing the poems of Igor’ Severianin,
which were making the rounds no one knew how, and for prom-
ises of “love until death.”
Among the factors that weighed on public opinion was the in-
creasing militarization of life and the search for enemies in every
nook and cranny. Mass culture’s response to this full court press
was fully in line with public wishes. In a country that had experi-
enced a boom in phonograph sales against a background of mass
repression and preparations for war, the record companies re-
76 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

sponded with releases that explored exclusively global themes—

which were exactly in line with mass expectations. So striking
was the contrast between this and the newspapers that it is as if the
two were being produced in different periods. Those who were in
charge of organizing the cultural sector that served the private
yearnings of Soviet people soon developed the necessary “reflexes”
that allowed them to separate the official from the unofficial. Pri-
vate life developed its own relationship with politics.
For most people, independence from one’s own time is a pipe
dream. It proved extremely difficult to remain indifferent to the
mass ideological campaigns, especially since the most heavy-hitting
campaigns could at times exert an unprecedented pull. As Shklov-
skii put it, “the interbreeding of the artistic form with the extra-
literary series is effected by explosions, by quanta.” But even here
official culture and mass culture responded to the political requi-
sition each in its own way. In 1932, for instance, the country was
blanketed with instructions on how to defend itself against chemi-
cal warfare, and Soviet art was obliged to react appropriately to
that hot topic. A directive went out, requiring the artistic commu-
nity “to reflect the country’s defense capability, the link between
front and rear, and the tasks of the Society to Assist Defense and
Aviation and Chemical Construction in the USSR [a network of
paramilitary training clubs—Trans.]. The Leningrad Music Hall
responded with a cheery musical comedy entitled Presumed Dead
[Uslovno ubityi]. Success was certain, if the show’s credits were
anything to go by: it was penned by Vsevolod Voevodin and Evgenii
Ryss; its forty musical numbers were written by Dmitrii
Shostakovich; Nikolai Akimov did the designs; the music director
was Isaak Dunaevskii; and [Leonid] Utesov and [Klavdia]
Shul’zhenko were the leads.10 Yet the performance, which was wildly
popular with audiences, met with a frigid reception from the Rabochii
i teatr reviewer, who called it “a serious ideological failure” and
“hackwork.” Many more such instances could be cited of specific
mass culture reactions to a political stimulus. For instance, official
culture reacted to the Spanish Civil War with a series of essays
and reports filed by its best journalists from the theater of opera-
 FALL 2003 77

tions. The unofficial culture’s contribution was the nationwide

popularity of Shul’zhenko’s song “Chelita.”
A significant element in the affective backdrop of the age was
fear, although awareness of the constant, unseen presence of fear in
Soviet life was slow to develop. In 1931 Aleksandr Afinogenov’s
Fear [Strakh] was doing well on stages across the country (though it
did not stay in the repertoire long). Its point was that fear was grow-
ing stronger with every passing year. Its hero, a biology professor
named Borodin, delivers a remarkable monologue on the subject:
“The dairymaid is afraid of the confiscation of her cows, the peasant
of forced collectivization, the Soviet worker of uninterrupted purges,
the Party worker of accusations of deviation, the scientist of ideal-
ism. We live in an age of great fear. . . . Fear stalks us. . . . We are all
rabbits facing a boa constrictor.”11 Fear can be a dehumanizing force
if nothing can be found to counteract it, and life under its heavy load
is hard and sometimes intolerable. But mass culture provided a salu-
tary remedy against fear. It contained none of the horror films, black
comedies, or bloody thrillers that were currently flourishing in safe
and secure America. Given the historical context, it is no accident
that a particular place in Soviet mass spectacles belonged to com-
edy—clowning in the circus, in films, in variety shows, and so forth.
As contemporary studies of the everyday culture of Soviet people in
those years attest, the most oft-quoted lines came not from the Marx-
ist-Leninist classics but from Ilf and Petrov’s Golden Calf [Zolotoi
telenok]. This is hardly a coincidence. At about that time, in Rabelais
and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin was pondering culture’s media-
tional function, as a specific means of employing the carnival mecha-
nism to eliminate social contradictions. He wrote that the second
world, the second life, of the carnival is characterized by freedom
from and the resolution of all (rank-related, hierarchical, sacral) con-
tradictions. Carnival laughter frees up and removes all that is denied
permission to exist in official life. The spontaneity of the carnival is
the antithesis of the hierarchical life.12 This mediational function is
usually realized in the comedic folk culture, but in the rapidly self-
marginalizing Soviet world, it was to a significant extent assumed
by mass culture.
78 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

Ideology and the box office in 1930s mass culture

At the height of the New Economic Policy [NEP, 1921–27] pe-

riod, the theatrical celebrity Konstantin Tverskoi offered a pithy
definition of one of the most acute problems faced by early Soviet
culture: “One has to convince oneself yet again that, as things cur-
rently stand, ideology and the box office are still on opposing blades
of the scissors.”13 When the NEP with its polystructuralism and
polyphony in matters economic and cultural was abolished, the
situation became even more difficult. The enforced ouster of their
competitors placed the organizers of official culture in an awk-
ward position: without having the necessary skills, they now had
to satisfy the entire spectrum of the public’s cultural needs. The
state, preoccupied with defense and industrialization, had no de-
sire to take up “charity work” (the ideological upkeep of “ortho-
dox” but unprofitable institutions and groups). Furthermore, it was
counting on the cultural sphere as a source of income. This prob-
lem received a significant amount of attention at national and Party
colloquia on literature, the theater, and the cinema held in the lat-
ter half of the 1920s. Thus, in an address to a colloquium on the
cinema, Stanislav Kosior [1889–1939, high-ranking Party mem-
ber and considered one of Stalin’s righthand men until arrested
and shot—Trans.] voiced Stalin’s directive: “The cinema must
become a business that not only pays its own way but is also ca-
pable of providing revenue for the government.” So cinematogra-
phers “received orders for children’s movies, light and comic
genres, and satirical, entertaining films,”14 obviously targeted at
box-office success.
The combining of ideology and the box office was definitely
not a simple task, for several reasons. It assumed a shifting of
emphases in official cultural policy, a reconceptualization within that
policy of the place and intended purpose of recreation. This demanded
not only the involvement of talented writers and performers but
also a sound knowledge of the mass audience and of the peculiari-
ties of its artistic perception, tastes, and requirements and a will-
ingness to make concessions to them. In the early 1930s, the tool
 FALL 2003 79

that might have achieved this was no longer available: sociology,

psychology, and psychoanalysis had been branded “false science”
and shut down, together with their research centers, which had
engaged in wide-ranging empirical sociological studies in the
1920s. Moreover, any reliance on the “box office” demanded the
development of, and support for, a commercial mindset, which, in
a state that was becoming totalitarian and in which all market chan-
nels were being consistently squeezed shut, patently conflicted
with overall systemic tendencies. But perhaps the most compli-
cated aspect of closing the blades of the “ideology/box office”
scissors was the need to combine the uncombinable. Complex
doctrinal texts, simplified into copybook maxims, were imposed
from above, while box-office success is spontaneous, unpredict-
able, and virtually immune to planning. Independent minds ironi-
cally observed these attempts to mix oil and water, and the results
of one such “heretical” analysis were made public in a most unex-
pected way given the unique conditions of the Stalinist period. In
1934–35 Mikhail Bakhtin was writing a literary study with the
innocuously academic title of “Discourse on the Novel.” Examin-
ing the novel as a historical literary form, he drew the following
comparison between “authoritative discourse” and “internally per-
suasive discourse”:

[T]he authoritative word (religious, political, moral, the word of a fa-

ther, of adults and of teachers, etc.) . . . does not know internal persua-
siveness . . . [and] the . . . internally persuasive word . . . is denied all
privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even
acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly
norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code. . . . The authorita-
tive word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it
binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us
internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. . . . It
enters the artistic context as an alien body . . . the context around it
dies, words dry up.15

The policy of the power structure with regard to mass culture

throughout the 1930s accommodated the coexistence of, and at
80 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

times bitter conflict between, two tendencies: (a) forcible

ideologization by authoritarian methods; and (b) a striving to rec-
oncile ideology and the box office, accompanied by concessions to
“philistine” tastes. The former was predominant in the early 1930s,
the latter in the latter half of the 1930s, when the systemic compro-
mise of the power structure with the man in the street came to in-
clude mimicry, which substantially simplified the regime’s position.
The 1930s began in 1929, which history not coincidentally
knows as “the year of the great turning point.” Many of the plans
made at the colloquia on literary and artistic matters now seemed
inordinately liberal and out of step with the “current moment.”
The gradual move toward mobilization swept through not only
politics and the economy but the cultural sphere as well. Litera-
ture, the theater, the cinema, the plays performed in night clubs
were declared “specific forms of ideology.” The foremost slogans
of those years speak volumes: “For a Magnitostroi of Art!”
[Magnitostroi, built in 1932, is a massive steelworks that was con-
sidered a showpiece of the First Five-Year Plan—Trans.]; “For the
Social Prophylaxis of the Repertoire!”; “For Class Vigilance on
the Front of Literature and Art!”; “Liquidate the Non-Party Cin-
ema!”; “Do Battle with Time-Servers and Hacks!” The struggle
for ideological victory was being waged not only in the space of
elite culture but also, and possibly to an even greater extent, in the
space of mass culture.
Although by the beginning of the 1930s, the term “censorship”
had been, to all intents and purposes, excluded from the official
lexicon, having been replaced by gentler and less offensive syn-
onyms, this did not change the essence of what was happening.
“Repertoire planning,” for example, was expected to put an end to
“thematic arbitrariness—I write what I feel like writing” and es-
tablish in its place a different principle: “I write what needs to be
written.” In 1929 the Chief Repertoire Committee published its
Repertoire Directory [Repertuarnyi ukazatel’], a sort of Table of
Ranks for literature and art, which used sociopolitical criteria to
divide up the diverse body of works into the “pure” and the “im-
pure,” into “ours,” “partially ours,” and “not ours.”
 FALL 2003 81

Under the letter A in the Directory were listed the most ideo-
logically acceptable works; under B, entirely acceptable works;
under C, works displaying insufficient ideological consistency and
vague ideological precepts; and under D, agitational materials for
political campaigns. There was also a roster of banned works.
There, in the splendid company of Mikhail Bulgakov (whose Days
of the Turbins [Dni Turbinykh], The Crimson Island [Bagrovyi
ostrov], Zoia’s Apartment [Zoikina kvartira], and Flight [Beg] were
on the list of forbidden plays), a ban was laid on features that
traditionally fell within the ambit of mass culture: “tawdriness
(cheap sensationalism, adultery, the bohemian life, ‘high society,’
court cases); banality (the idealization of ‘sanctity,’ the philistine
family, physical comfort, the enslavement of women, private prop-
erty, etc.); decadence and psychopathology; pornography and sexu-
ality; and the cultivation of tawdry effeteness.”16 In no time at all,
this and other measures had successfully “done away with” nu-
merous subgenres of mass culture: yellow journalism with its sen-
sations, scandals, and shrill exposés; trashy novels; “decadent”
verse; cabaret; and a lot more that had made it safely through the
Revolution, the Civil War, and the Komsomol’s anti-philistine ex-
ercises. The baton of intellectual hatred for vulgar, philistine cul-
ture had been taken up by Bolshevik power, and under Stalin the
transition from irate words to consistent action was complete. Thus
were swept clean the avenues whereby the “new man” was to be
molded.
In addition to whole genres and directions of mass culture that
were eradicated in this struggle, repressive sanctions were applied
against those of its creators and transmitters who “did not care to
bend” in the right direction. At about that time, Mikhail Zoshchenko
was speaking of his mental “defect”: “I do not know how to think
in political slogans.” Many of the stars of mass culture, with their
awareness of how organically unsuited the “authoritative discourse”
was to their creative work and their audience, proved to be equally
“defective.” How unbearably bland the everyday culture of Soviet
people would have become had it been possible to eradicate mass
culture and replace it with surrogates from its totalitarian counter-
82 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

part! Fortunately, though, totalitarianization had its limits, and those

limits were defined, on the one hand, by the extent to which a
given cultural direction depended on the government (and, conse-
quently, on governmental dictates) and, on the other, by the spe-
cifics of the genre itself and the extent to which it needed mass
demand to flourish. If we were to attempt a “totalitarianization
scale” for culture, at the top of the curve would be the theater
(along with the periodical press and the radio), with its unwieldy
execution and its state financing. While the Repertoire Committee
was dispensing the necessary repertoire from on high, social orga-
nizations (the trade unions and the Komsomol) were ensuring that
the public had the chance to see ideologically “useful” shows: “Of
the 1931 season’s fourteen million spectators, 85 percent were there
on cultural outings or to see a special-purpose show,” a columnist
for Rabochii i teatr reported with profound satisfaction.17
The spread of radio throughout the country also proceeded un-
der the state’s unblinking eye. Beginning in 1933, everyone who
owned a radio receiver had to register it with an official agency.
Since there was a set fee per “speaker,” regardless of how many, or
which, hours of the day it was actually switched on, this provided, as
it were, carte blanche to saturate the airwaves with quasi-official
programming. But conditions actually differed substantially depend-
ing on the radio’s location. While the loudspeakers (and what a term
that is!) installed on the streets and in the squares could broadcast
anything without reference to listener tastes, in gardens and parks of
culture and relaxation the administration could easily lose its audi-
ence if it made inappropriate use of a compulsory range of program-
ming. And at home anyone was at liberty to turn off a program that
he was not enjoying at any time and thereby distance himself from
the ideological assault, if it became too much. There was one other
aspect of the spread of radio: with the rapid development of radio’s
fan base (another sign of the times), the country’s frontiers be-
came permeable. Here was yet another channel of independent
relay, including for the novelties of foreign mass culture. Cap-
tured by a crystal receiver, stamped onto purloined X-ray film,
and sold “under the counter” (another telling neologism of the
 FALL 2003 83

age), they included jazz, foxtrots, tangos, and Vertinskii’s ditties.

Private consumption of the fine arts was even freer of state regu-
lation. While public exhibitions were meticulously screened in
terms of “the tasks of the period of reconstruction,” in the private
sphere the client’s taste reigned supreme. As one critic empha-
sized: “Vulgarity, conformism, and outmoded tastes are supported
by the self-centered acquisitiveness of some and the artistic ob-
tuseness of others.” The wealthier and better educated took their
orders to a professional artist; and the rest found what they were
looking for in the markets, where chapbook art continued to flour-
ish on oilcloth rugs.
The art form that kept its relative independence from total con-
trol the longest was vaudeville. There were several reasons for
this. Vaudeville, being scattered across thousands of concert stages,
presented a more complex monitoring challenge than literature,
the theater, or the cinema. Furthermore, thanks to its focus on the
box office, it provided the state with a good source of income. In
fact, ranking Party and state officials may have had a vested inter-
est in preserving vaudeville’s relative freedom from ideological
pressure. A Party membership card and an important government
post did not render those who possessed them immune to “banal”
recreational predilections. Even so, the knell finally tolled for the
freedom of the variety theater’s repertoire, because vaudeville oc-
cupied too important a place in the system of mass leisure activi-
ties (the trade union clubs alone, of which there were 3,200 in the
USSR, had an annual seating capacity of 40–50 million).
The early 1930s brought a coordinated effort to subdue even
the spontaneity of the variety stage. The first step was to foist on it
a “renewed and thoroughly ideologized” repertoire that by the
admission of the censors themselves constituted “a most malicious
parody of the ideological essence.” A person attending a concert
to unwind became a live target for ideology. The official reper-
toire policy came into constant conflict with consumer desires.
“In October an artist is issued ten numbers that he is ‘permitted to
perform,’ while at the club he is told ‘Perform anything you like
except the October repertoire, and we’ll take the responsibility. . . .
84 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

There’s nothing really wrong with the number; it’s just not com-
mercial.’”18 In the early 1930s vaudeville was declared “the last
bastion of the private sector in the arena of the theater and public
spectacles”; and attempts were made to “statize” it because of the
“low artistic goals of vaudevillians, which are defined by the so-
cial imperative of the working-class consumer.”19 Much in the va-
riety theater did not sit well with the authorities: the dancing, the
music, the passion for romantic ballads. The dancing was bad be-
cause it “had arisen on the causeway of a major capitalist city, in
the convulsive, breathless gaiety of a nightclub, and brought with
it high-strung, syncopated rhythms, weary, mechanical eroticism,
and the somnambulistic movements of an automaton.” Alien, too,
were the esthetics of the vaudeville style—“urban, individualis-
tically bohemian, and stamped with the capitalistic fetishizing
of the object.” The Soviet variety theater could not simply ac-
cept “the unhealthy eroticism propagated by bohemian ‘tangos
of death’ and other guignols that rely on the titillation of the
nerves and an understanding of the body as a pliant and soulless
machine.”20
Light music, too, stood in need of serious work, in the opinion
of its official connoisseurs in government circles: “In Leningrad
there are up to three hundred composers who write basically for
the variety theater; and of every hundred pieces they produce, sixty
are garbage.” A full inquiry into the compositions produced in
Leningrad revealed that “evidently a significant number of com-
posers would like to wait in the bushes while the fight is on.” Their
crime was that they, “propagators of the ‘light genre,’ had be-
smirched the shelves of sheet-music stores, the repertoire of the
variety clubs and the outlying working-class districts with the neo-
philistine (somewhat improved by the addition of “Shaft No. 8”
[Shakhta No. 8], “Little Bricks” [Kirpichiki], and “All Night Toss-
ing and Turning, for My Tractor I’m Yearning” [Vsiu noch’ ia ne
spala, o traktore mechtala]), with foxtrots and similar dregs of a
Western tavern.”
Several steps were taken to bring order to the vaudeville stage.
It was placed under the aegis of the Central Directorate of State
 FALL 2003 85

Circuses [CDSC], and commissions were set up in the regions to

select suitable productions. In Leningrad, after two and a half
months of work, about 70 percent of the “vaudevillians” who au-
ditioned had been approved to perform. But, since many authors
and performers did not present themselves for audition, the CDSC
was finding itself desperately short of “qualified workers.” Mean-
while, the word went out to all the club managers to boycott “moon-
lighters.” In the Leningrad variety theater, 1932 was headlined by
the slogan of a campaign against moonlighting and “hucksters”
(underground entrepreneurs). But these were the ones who, at their
own risk and steering clear of the Repertoire Committee and other
agencies of control, were satisfying mass demand—and lining their
pockets nicely, into the bargain—although there was no end to the
names they were called from the orator’s podium and in the press:
“the knights of easy pickings,” “the musketeers of temporization,”
“the alchemists of hackwork.”
These shady entrepreneurs were persecuted not for their “anti-
Soviet behavior,” a crime of which already no one would have
dared be guilty, but for their “orientation toward unprincipled en-
tertainment, toward belly laughs at the most complex problems
. . . for their axiomatic vulgarity, for their focus on the man in the
street.” The Leningrad branch of the Chief Directorate for Artistic
Affairs set up an interdepartmental committee to campaign against
private enterprise in the theater. This committee—together with
the oblast prosecutor’s office, the trade union council, and the rep-
ertoire committee—was responsible for arranging “show trials”
for “wreckers of art” (to use the parlance of the day). In early 1932
Ancharov-Mutovkin, a private entrepreneur and former manager
of the Down with Illiteracy Society’s theater, was sentenced to
two years’ imprisonment for contriving to “evade Soviet censor-
ship” by staging forbidden repertoire pieces (The Peasant Girl
[Krest’ianka] and Engineers [Inzhenery]), for putting on shows
that were not included in the official plan, and for keeping money
off the books. Battle had been joined with the “boisterous
gypsyism,” “heart-rending romances,” and other such offshoots of
mass culture on the variety stage.
86 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

De-Westernizing the “most mass art of all”

One of the core differences between mass culture in the 1930s and
in the preceding decade was that in the 1930s Soviet cinema was
definitively freed from its dependence on the West in both produc-
tion and distribution. Because in the 1920s all movie film had come
from abroad, two film factories were included in the “iron list” of
518 factories to be brought online in the early 1930s that repre-
sented socialism’s key construction projects. At the same time,
western “cine-pulp” (another characteristic term of the day!) was
being consistently and rapidly ousted from Soviet movie screens.
In the 1920s such material had constituted 75–85 percent of the
movies in general release.21 This was both because most distribu-
tion was in private hands and because of the fierce competition
among domestic movie studios (Goskino, Proletkino in Leningrad,
Mezhrabprom-Rus’, PUR, Georgia’s Goskinoprom, and VUFKU
[Vseukrainskoe fotokinoupravlenie; the All-Ukraine Photo and
Cinema Directorate—Trans.]), which would rather allow “en-
emies” from abroad into their movie theaters than provide screen
time to domestic competitors.22
What had proven impossible in Russia under the NEP was achieved
in one fell swoop in the USSR under Stalin, thanks to the introduction
of a state cinema monopoly. The policy of de-Westernization was
one manifestation of the general tendency toward economic self-
sufficiency in the 1930s. There were other motivations, however,
not least concern about the damage that an alien ideology and es-
thetic could wreak on the emerging Soviet mentality, by promot-
ing individualism and the Western lifestyle and demonstrating
consumerist blessings that could not be had in the USSR. Also
meaningful was that Western mass culture, especially its cinema,
was developing under the auspices of psychoanalysis (as applied
to the market), which by then was no longer operative in the USSR.
The shutdown had been motivated by the radical incompatibility
between Freudianism and the general trends involved in the shap-
ing of the “new,” collective man: “The psychological theories that
are particularly widespread in American scientific circles . . . are
 FALL 2003 87

essentially nothing more than rummaging around in petty senti-

ments, a pretentious sort of psychoanalysis that is not far distant
from all-consuming egocentrism.”23 In this socio-centric society,
self-analysis, even when performed in the framework of “mass
culture,” was unreservedly condemned. The mass Soviet cinema
output of the 1930s takes us aback today with its superficial opti-
mism and its disregard for the subtleties of the individual psyche.
But could it have been any different?
Moreover, tirelessly patronizing toward those under its sway,
the totalitarian state feared that Western movies could traumatize
the mass mind. Many participants in the international scholarly
conferences on the cinema that were held in those years spoke
with alarm about the surge in onscreen aggression and immoral-
ity. “In Germany, Professor Hauck reviewed 259 contemporary
films and found them to contain 97 murders, 50 divorces, 19 cases
of pandering, 22 women drawn into prostitution, and 48 suicides.
The leading characters in those films included 176 thieves, 25 pros-
titutes, 36 drunkards, and hordes of policemen, detectives, and
scoundrels ‘of all trades.’ The screen was experiencing a veritable
‘epidemic of death’: The Cliff of Death, The Minaret of Death,
The Bay of Death, On Pain of Death, and so on.” Yet simulta-
neously several conferees were expressing concern that a film with
no poignancy and no entertainment value would be nothing more
than a well-mannered “good little movie” for which no one had
any use.24 Around then, in fact, Carl Jung was finding that horror
films performed one of mass culture’s important psychological
functions: “The cinema, . . . like the detective story, makes it pos-
sible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and
desire that must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.”25
Be that as it may, in the 1930s Soviet movie audiences were deci-
sively segregated from the “noxious” influence of Western cin-
ema. But there was one more, entirely prosaic reason for this
accelerated de-Westernization—namely, that foreign films had to
be paid for in hard currency, of which there was none, since it was
all being spent to meet the needs of industry and defense.
The Western cinema’s departure was so sudden and swift, and
88 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

so little consideration had been given to its consequences, that it

stripped the Soviet distribution circuit of whole classes of movies
to which, for understandable (ideological) reasons, the domestic
studios had, for the time being, been paying minimal attention.
Such audience favorites as melodramas, adventure films, detec-
tive stories, police procedurals, and comedies simply disappeared.
That was when the need to give proper consideration to mass tastes
really made itself felt. The old films that were hauled out of stor-
age and tossed onto the screen did not fix the problem. The need to
plug the gaps that had suddenly appeared, combined with the de-
parture of an adept rival, set the scene for the light cinematic genre
to thrive here. Since the limitations imposed by the Repertoire
Directory explicitly banned several of the light subgenres (see
above), it is no surprise that the musical comedy became the “new”
Soviet cinema’s flagship form as it sought to meet the tastes of the
“man in the street” halfway. The strained and emotionally fraught
affective backdrop of the age was another factor that motivated
movie makers to look for innovative approaches in musical comedy.
The intransigent modern critics of totalitarianism are inclined
to see in the flourishing of comedy (The Jolly Fellows [Veselye
rebiata] was released in 1934, the year of Sergei Kirov’s murder,
which was followed by wholesale repression) the doleful insensi-
tivity of “Soviet man,” who could go right on having fun while
people were being shot all around him. This position strikes us as
ill-substantiated. The key to the secret of the flourishing of musical
comedy movies in the 1930s is not only the rather weighty circum-
stances laid out above but also certain global idiosyncrasies of
development in the cinema and the mass media in those years.
The first talking picture was released in the United States in
1928, and shortly thereafter the age of the talkies also began in the
USSR. The first tentative steps on this path were taken by A Start
in Life [Putevka v zhizn’] (1931), but the real revelation of the
possibilities of sound came only with The Jolly Fellows (1934). At
the dawn of the talkies, oddly enough, art theorists were predict-
ing that the use of sound in the cinema would result in the world’s
opera classics being adapted en masse for the screen and that the
 FALL 2003 89

Great Mute [the silent cinema—Trans.], having found its voice,

would thereby make its contribution to the precipitous cultural
ascent of the masses. In reality, though, that was not what hap-
pened at all, for mastery of the possibilities of the cinema’s new
language began with the creation of items not of elite culture but
of its mass counterpart. In fact, in the 1930s all the world’s film-
making countries were experiencing a genuine boom in the popu-
larity of musicals, comedies, and operettas, this being yet more
proof, if proof were needed, of a “law” that applies to all revolu-
tions in communication—namely, that each new medium of com-
munication assumes acceptance on a mass scale and focuses, in its
quest for commercial success, on the tastes of the majority. The
refocusing on more refined tastes always comes later.
Once it had learned to speak and to sing, the Great Mute not
only began making new demands on the director’s and the actor’s
craft but also introduced substantial modifications into the hierar-
chy of cinematic genres. The musical became a firm cinematic
favorite. But Soviet art scholars were not prepared for this turn of
events, and the West’s first experiments in this direction met with
a great deal of criticism. The screen operetta was dismissed as a
sign “of the degeneration of bourgeois cinematography” and as
“the thousand and first reiteration of the hackneyed Viennese op-
eretta, mongrel of the bourgeois stage.”26 So, for specifically So-
viet reasons, the first Soviet musical comedy had a hard time of it.
The People’s Commissariat of Education determined that “due to
insufficient ideological content,” The Jolly Fellows should be kept
out of movie houses. Maxim Gorky came to its rescue by helping
arrange a private screening for the Politburo, where Stalin’s reaction—
“It’s as if I’d been on vacation!”—settled its fate.27
The movie’s creators reveled in the unfolding possibilities of
sound. In addition to Utesov’s splendid jazz music, sound erupts
everywhere, with singing, whistling, roaring, bellowing, and yell-
ing. Everything brims with youthful, “barbaric” energy and life.
This masterpiece won a prize at the 1935 International Film Festi-
val in Venice. The success that this and other screen musicals en-
joyed with mass audiences owes no small debt to extensive past
90 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

experience with “sensational spectacles,” since these movies were

frequently nothing more than spectacles brought to the screen. For
instance, Under the Big Top [Pod kupolom tsirka]—a music-hall
spectacle based on a play by Ilf, Petrov, and Valentin Kataev—was
transformed into the screen comedy Circus [Tsirk]; and Utesov’s
jazzy stage production The Music Store [Muzykal’nyi magazin]
(1931–32), with its amusing “March of the Cows” [Korovii marsh],
was immortalized as The Jolly Fellows.
Among the factors that brought no small measure of success to
the new genre was the Soviet movie makers’ adoption of Holly-
wood techniques. For all that the mass culture of the USSR was
the vehicle of national socio-psychological and cultural priorities,
it still kept abreast of global trends in mass cultural development.
Indeed, a Soviet delegation visited California in 1935, with the
express intent of studying the Hollywood experience and adapting
that experience to Russian conditions. The delegation was headed
by Boris Shumiatskii, one of Stalin’s friends from his pre-
revolutionary days, and comprised some of the USSR’s most fa-
mous movie people—Fridrikh Ermler and Vladimir Nil’sen,
Grigorii Aleksandrov and Liubov’ Orlova, Sergei Eisenstein and
Eduard Tisse, among others. What they saw at the “dream fac-
tory” made such a huge impression that it sparked several plans to
create a Soviet Hollywood (in the Crimea, by the Sea of Azov,
etc.). But in the latter half of the 1930s, after the arrest of a num-
ber of movie people, the idea was permanently shelved.
The 1930s was a period during which the national myths of
mass culture were shaped. While American mass culture was de-
veloping under the impact of Freudianism and the Great American
Dream, its Soviet counterpart was reflecting the national mindset
and the idiosyncrasies of the domestic chronotope. It would be
misguided to exaggerate the influence that totalitarianism exerted
on it, since in many respects it developed in anti-totalitarian direc-
tions. The Jolly Fellows, The Swineherd Girl and the Shepherd
[Svinarka i pastukh, released in the United States as They Met in
Moscow], Volga, Volga, and The Bright Path [Svetlyi put’] were as
much cult movies for audiences here as Gone with the Wind was
 FALL 2003 91

for American audiences, both being exemplars of the “national

cinema.” The challenge that Soviet mass art faced in the 1930s
was to tell not of the generation of revolutionaries but of those
who were building a “new world.” It was only natural that the
Soviet cinema would soon have its own Cinderella and show her
“making good.” In this image was reflected a mass dream that
exactly paralleled its American counterpart—the dream of the as-
cending elevator. American mass art extolled the loners who win
out over circumstance and praised the “successful” (self-made)
man as “the way a person should be”; while Soviet mass art—in
step with a national mentality deeply rooted in history—praised
the hero who does great deeds not only for himself but for others.
In step with the West, the USSR was creating its own roster of
stock national characters, even as the Soviet cinema—the art with
more mass appeal than any other—was “going Hollywood.” A
Soviet “star system” developed, and those stars made out tremen-
dously well, garnering lucrative roles, a “star’s” lifestyle, trips abroad,
and villas in the Moscow suburbs (the first of which were built for the
creators of The Jolly Fellows). The stars of the Soviet cinema were
also arbiters of consumer fashion. Thus, de-Westernization—the
ouster of Western movies from the USSR—proceeded in step with
a comprehensive utilization of the American experience that did
no visible harm to the “selfhood” of Soviet movie production.
In the movie business, as in other spheres, the state’s ideologi-
cal and economic interests clashed sharply, and a compromise had
to be found. Commercial state considerations quite often proved
more powerful than the fear of damaging “the purity of the faith,”
and this was especially true in the latter half of the 1930s, when
the regime made increasingly frequent concessions to the man in the
street, in a de facto acknowledgment of the division of culture into
official and private variants. When a serious shortage occurred of
imported raw shellac for phonograph records, the discs of Utesov
and Shul’zhenko, whom the authorities could barely tolerate, found
their way onto a list of especially popular recordings that could be
obtained in exchange for a certain number of old or broken records
handed in for recycling. Although officialdom did not care for jazz
92 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

(considering it the music of the “fat cats”), gold or jewels could

always be traded for the latest jazz releases in the hard-currency
stores. They could then be bootlegged and distributed, since that
was merely a matter of having the appropriate equipment.
Although there was no legal international cultural market, the
exchange with foreign mass culture continued regardless, through
the good offices of sailors on international routes, diplomats, rank-
ing Party and state officials on overseas trips, theater and movie
stars, and other categories of citizens who had the occasion to cross
frontiers. Complete isolation from global processes in mass cul-
ture was therefore never achieved. But since the many impedi-
ments kept the exchange from being either systematic or uniform,
certain elements were extracted from the flood of Western mass
culture and became incredibly fashionable. The entire country fol-
lowed Europe, for instance, into the craze for owlish eyeglass
frames. The misalignments and absurdities that entered the exchange
seemed cartoonish at times, and what resulted was an incongruous
cultural hybrid. There were the advertisements for special “motor-
ing dresses” in foreign fashion magazines, for instance—and this in
a country where for most women the ownership of even one dress
was a great achievement and where, among a few thousand motor
vehicles, the entire passenger car fleet numbered in the hundreds.

Mass culture is a complicated psycho-cultural complex and the

mass arts are only one of its reflective surfaces. It is an objective
indicator of the state of a society: its prejudices, expectations, re-
quirements, public opinion, typical forms of conduct and reaction,
cultural stereotypes, and actual value system. It reveals the educa-
tional and cultural reef on which many speculative plans and
projects run ashore. People on the barricades of history and people
in their everyday setting are two different entities—a truth that it
has taken the power structure many years to grasp. Human life has
always resisted the dictates of politics and ideology and gone its
own way, forcing even the biggest of Soviet big shots to adapt to it.
Radical changes were taking place in the Soviet social structure
in the 1930s, and the country was going through an accelerated
 FALL 2003 93

urbanization accompanied by important cultural changes. The

USSR was a melting pot of fringe elements because of voluntary
and forced resettlement, socialism’s top-priority construction
projects, and mass migration from one end of this huge land to the
other. Consequently, the political and ideological circumstances
under which the Soviet Union became involved in the process (be-
gun in the United States and continued in Europe) of shaping a
mass society—a society with an urban lifestyle, urban value sys-
tems, personal interactions and forms of leisure, and with differ-
ent links between traditional and mass culture—differed from those
that obtained in the West. These changes may not have been no-
ticed while everyone was busy extolling the special path that the
USSR was taking, but there was no way to avoid the consequences
of that process forever.
In the Soviet Union, as in the West, the nature of the 1930s was
established in 1929, a year that led to greater government interfer-
ence in various spheres of public life and increased reliance on the
“elementary values” and conservative tendencies of the mass mind.
Even under those circumstances, the totalitarian state’s axiomati-
cally anti-market inclinations eventually capitulated to mass de-
mand, in everyday life and in culture. In that period, despite the
authoritarianism of the power structure, culture continued the de-
mocratization it had begun in the nineteenth century, as “the
masses” familiarized themselves with the previously unknown
spheres of belles lettres, the circus, museums, the theater, the cin-
ema, the variety theater, and the mass song.
Awareness of the special role played by culture’s recreational
function in an industrial society, comprehension of the specific
ethos of “art for relaxation and pleasure,” came hard to the higher
echelons of Soviet power. The acknowledgment that the majority
was entitled to be a “private” consumer of art marked a return to
common sense from revolutionary insanity and lifeless schemat-
ics. This was a difficult admission to make, not only because of
the ideological or political “blinders” that prevented adequate as-
sessment of much in modern life but also because, in theory, the
issue of “mass culture” and its place in the cultural system was a
94 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

novelty to Bolshevism (and Stalinism). Since different ideas about

culture as a “noetic,” creative, formational force claimed by soci-
ety as its own have been dominant here for over two hundred years,
the acknowledgment itself can without exaggeration be called an
epochal event, especially since Soviet power, with its projective
aims of shaping the “new man,” saw itself as the heir to that na-
tional spiritual tradition. Russian social thought had discovered
mass culture before the turn of the nineteenth century, and émigré
thinkers continued studying it as part of their systems analysis of
modern industrial civilization. Soviet culture was managed by
people from a different world, a parallel world far away from the
questing of the Silver Age. The surmounting of traditional men-
tal stereotypes in the USSR, the acceptance of the idea that cul-
ture can have many functions and of the need to shift the emphasis
in cultural policy, and the separation of the respective spheres of
influence of ideology and everyday culture finally led to a com-
promise with the man in the street, to a discovery of the opportu-
nities available to develop the Soviet variant of a “consumer
society.”
Although always considered “second-rate,” mass culture was
hugely important in early Soviet society, and it underwent signifi-
cant changes in the first two decades of Soviet power. While the
culture of the NEP period (a specific variant of mass culture) was
permeated with prewar nostalgia, the mass culture of the first So-
viet generation was entirely different in both content and focus.
The misalignments of official culture in the 1920s did nothing to
satisfy the emotional hunger for the lyricism that had been avail-
able in NEP culture, but the 1930s saw lyricism making a long-
awaited comeback all along the “front” of the arts. The Armored
Trains, the Battleships, the Cements [references, respectively, to
the 1922 Vsevolod Ivanov novel, the 1929 Eisenstein film, and the
1925 Fedor Gladkov novel—Trans.] were abandoned in a momen-
tous transition to the “light genre” and to an interest in the lyrical
mass song that remains unsurpassed to this day. The mass culture
of the 1930s is frequently accused of not being “true to life,” but
that is the function of high culture, not of mass culture. In a soci-
 FALL 2003 95

ety undergoing the painful process of aggressive secularization,

and by dint of historical accident, mass culture inherited religion’s
consolatory function. The situation in which culture found itself
in the 1930s was tragic in that—because of the limited develop-
ment available to traditional culture, the privations imposed on
elite culture, and the damage done to the natural hierarchy of sub-
cultures—the prominence of mass culture in the cultural system
was positively unseemly. But there had been a time, around the
turn of the century, when it had been lost to sight in the shadows of
the spiritual renaissance of the Silver Age.

Notes
1. P. Karpinskii, Inogo ne dano (Moscow, 1988), pp. 662–63.
2. M. Tsvetaeva, “Poet i vremia,” in her Ob iskusstve (Moscow, 1991), p. 68.
3. V. Bakhtin, “Narod i vlast’,” Neva, 1996, no. 1; V. Lepin, “Istreblenie
fol’klora i ekologiia,” Iskusstvo Leningrada, 1991, no. 7, p. 5.
4. A. Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu: stikhi i pesni. Rasskazy, zarisovki,
razmyshleniia. Pis’ma (Moscow, 1991).
5. L. Gordon and E. Klopov, Znanie-sila, 1988, no. 4, pp. 23, 24.
6. V. Shklovskii, “Zhurnal kak literaturnaia forma,” in Gamburgskii schet:
stat’i, vospominaniia, esse (Moscow, 1990), p. 38.
7. Gordon and Klopov, Znanie-sila, 1988, no.4, pp. 23, 24.
8. A. Mariengof, Bessmertnaia trilogiia (Moscow, 1998), p. 323.
9. M. Zubakin, “V. Piastu. Pis’mo ot 16 iiuliia 1931 g.—Pis’ma Giperboreia,”
Sotsium, 1995, no. 4 (47), p. 68.
10. G. Skorokhodov, Klavdiia Shul’zhenko: sud’ba aktrisy. Sud’ba pesen
(Moscow, 1974), p. 29.
11. D. Granin, “Strakh,” Neva, 1997, no. 3, p. 135.
12. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul’tura sredne-
vekov’ia i Renessansa (Moscow, 1965), pp. 5–15.
13. K. Tverskoi, Rabochii i teatr, 1925, no. 28 (43).
14. Rabochii i teatr, n.d., no. 29 (200), p. 13.
15. M. Bakhtin, “Slovo o romane,” in Voprosy literatury i estetika (Moscow,
1975). [Emphasis and textual order as in Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” p.
342—Trans.]
16. “Deiatel’nost’ Repertkoma,” Sovetskii teatr, 1928, nos. 26-7, p. 479.
17. Rabochii i teatr, 1931, no. 23.
18. “Stranichka estradnika,” Rabochii i teatr, 1928, no. 40 (211), p. 11.
19. “Problema ogosudarstavleniia estrady,” Rabochii i teatr, 1930, nos. 58–
59, p. 1.
20. I. Sollertinskii, “Problema estradnogo tantsa,” Rabochii i teatr, 1930, nos.
58–59.
96 RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY

21. M. Zhabskii, “Vesternizatsiia kinematografa: opyt i uroki istorii,” Sotsis

[Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia], 1996, no. 2, p. 28.
22. A. Mashirov, “Tragediia ‘velikogo nemogo,’ ” Rabochii i teatr, 1926, no.
19 (86), p. 5.
23. “V polose raspada,” Rabochii i teatr, 1932, no. 28, p. 3.
24. I. Ch., “Psikhopatologiia i kinematograf,” Rabochii i teatr, 1926, no. 10
(77), p. 18.
25. K. Iung [Carl Jung], “Problemy dushi sovremennogo cheloveka,” in
Arkhetip i simvol (Moscow, 1991), p. 221. [The quotation here is adapted from
“The Spiritual Problems of Modern Man,”in C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search
of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1933), p. 219—Trans.]
26. B. Broderson, “Operetta na ekrane,” Rabochii i teatr, 1932, no. 3, p. 11.
27. E. Gremov, “Na strazhe imperskogo iskusstva,” in Stranitsy istorii sovetskoi
kul’tury. 30-e gody (Moscow, 1998).

Translator’s notes
a. Russian title “Slovo o romane.” Quoted from Mikhail Bakhtin, “Dis-
course in the Novel,” in his The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), p. 293.
b. Quoted from The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, trans. Constance Garnett,
rev. Humphrey Higgens (New York: Knopf, 1968), vol. 2, p. 415.

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