The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (review)

The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement. By Neil Edmunds. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000. [407 p. ISBN 0-8204-5318-8. $57.95 (pbk.).]

Neil Edmunds's book begins with the following epigraph from Lenin:

Art belongs to the people. It must have its deepest roots in the broad mass of the workers. It must be rooted in and grow with their feelings, thoughts, and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. (p. 11)

Every Soviet child knew these lines by heart, since they were displayed on the walls of every school and college. As one such child, I was immediately struck by the curious omission here of a crucial sentence from the standard quotation, a sentence that is of great relevance to the present volume: "It [i.e. art] should be understood and loved by them [i.e. the masses]." The entire quotation, including the omitted sentence, appears only in the memoirs of Clara Zetkin. (Her German original reads: "Sie muss von diesen verstanden und geliebt werden" ["Erinnerungen an Lenin," in Ausgewählte Reden und Schriften, vol. 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1960), 88-160, at 97]). In Zetkin's German and my English, the sentence is ambiguous: is the onus on the artist or the masses? That is, should the masses strive to comprehend the work of (worthy) artists, or should artists strive to make their work comprehensible to the masses? No Lenin scholar should be troubled by the ambiguity, for Lenin always upheld the value of the greatest bourgeois art of the past, and he looked forward to a time when the masses could be sufficiently educated to understand it; this view was also in harmony with Anatoly Lunacharsky's arts policies and Leon Trotsky's theorizing, as Lenin knew. The Russian translation should read "ono dolzhno bït' ponyato massami," but unfortunately, the customary Soviet translation rendered the last two words as "ponyatno massam," thereby disambiguating the sentence in the wrong direction: the onus is placed on the artist to create art that is simple and familiar enough for the masses to understand. Lenin wished only to reject deliberately hermetic art intended for the appreciation of a narrow coterie, but his Stalinist interpreters made him posthumously reject the kind of art that he had always considered valuable. It was not until the perestroika period that anyone troubled to check the familiar Russian version against Zetkin's original; the result was a great surprise to all those who learned the quotation in their youth, but the misleading translation was, of course, historically significant in its own right: it had been a central plank of Socialist Realist doctrine and was readily wielded by Stalin's bureaucracy against Soviet artists who displayed too much originality for their own good.

During the 1920s, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) wanted to produce music that would be immediately understood and loved by the masses, but this music was intended as a healthy "revolutionary" substitute for the sentimental songs those masses already understood and loved; instead, RAPM had in mind a bland conflation of sanitized folk songs and revolutionary marches. The masses, for the most part, successfully resisted such impositions and continued to sing whatever they pleased; open conflict with the masses would have been an embarrassment, so RAPM-ites preferred to terrorize their "high-art" colleagues into mute submission, a strategy that helped them ascend through the ranks of the state bureaucracy. Stalin permitted such activities for a time, but after RAPM had seen off its competitors, it too was forced to disband in 1932 as Stalin began to rid himself of organizations that had their roots in the period prior to his rule. But this was no purge, and the same ex-RAPM personnel soon reappeared to police the new Socialist Realist policy, which was in fact significantly more generous than RAPM in its definition of what was "comprehensible" to the masses. Today, the memory of the proletarian music movement is a handful of slogans, an abundance of...