From Peasants to Professionals: The Socialist-Realist Transformation of a Russian Folk Choir

The curtain opens. So many people [in the audience]! They throw enormous bouquets of flowers on the stage.... The excitement went from the audience to the stage, and from the performers to the audience.... A perspiring, dusty Red Army soldier ran up with a bright, large bouquet, approached the stage, and gave it to V. Klodnina [a soloist]. "Who asked that soldier," said the unit's commissar to Zakharov, "to run to the stage, to find the brightest, very best flowers, in order to bring them to the choir? It is the great folk [narodnaia] love of song." ¹

In 1936, a few months after the concert described above, the Soviet Union's best known -- and possibly most beloved -- Russian folk choir, the Piatnitskii Choir, became a professional group. This was a milestone in the long history of the ensemble, which began as a group of unlettered peasants and went on to become the Soviet Union's first State Folk Choir in 1940. Professional status signified that the choir had successfully negotiated the shifting ground of Soviet arts policy in the early 1930s. In the course of doing so, the ensemble was transformed in terms of its internal organization, its repertoire, and the style in which its members learned music and sang. In many ways, this transformation mirrored broader changes in Soviet society brought on by the dislocations of the first two five-year plans. Just as Soviet society was wrenched from its older roots, the folk choir evolved into a modern arts institution, albeit with peasant trappings. As Soviet society became more urban and industrial, popular rustic songs for a mass market replaced the choir's traditional, local songs. Just as the benefits of industrialization came with a price, the choir's success had ambiguous aspects that were not universally welcomed by all choir members. As the ensemble adopted professional standards, certain links to the choir's authentic peasant past were severed. Nevertheless, the choir still represented this past in the minds of the populace, with whom peasant motifs continued to resonate. Ultimately, professionalization in some sense tamed peasant artistic expression while simultaneously elevating its domesticated form to the status of officially sanctioned art. This newly designated art form presented a positive image of Soviet society completely in accordance with the ideal of socialist realism, and the choir itself stands as an example both of the socialist-realist success story and of the contradictions inherent in socialist realism.

Peasant Singers

The early history of the Piatnitskii Choir was well publicized in the years after it became a state choir. ² The choir came into existence in February 1911, when singer and folk music collector Mitrofan Efimovich Piatnitskii brought three groups of central Russian peasant singers to Moscow, where they performed two concerts. ³ These first concerts by Piatnitskii's peasants were an outgrowth of his ethnographic fieldwork. Piatnitskii had devoted the preceding decade to traveling through central Russia, meeting village singers and collecting their songs, first by notation, and after 1910 with wax recordings. Like ethnographers of his day, Piatnitskii sought to collect for posterity what remained of the traditions of village life that were quickly disappearing in the face of modernization. Yet Piatnitskii went beyond many of these scholars, in that he was not collecting for anthropologic reasons alone. He strongly believed in the aesthetic and artistic value of the music he was collecting. This he proved with his concerts in Moscow, which were met with both critical praise and enthusiasm from the audience. ⁴

The early choir consisted of peasants from Piatnitskii's native village of Aleksandrovskii in Voronezh province, peasants from the village of Usman', and former peasants from Riazan', Tula, and Smolensk provinces who were working at the time in Moscow factories. ⁵ The choir won positive...