Politekonomiia sotsrealizma, and: Political Economy of Socialist Realism, and: Political Economy of Socialist Realism, and: Der Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im Stalinismus 1928-1941, and: Sovetskaia prazdnichnaia kul´tura v provintsii: Prostranstvo, simvoly, istoricheskie mify (1917-1927) (review)

As one might expect in the era of the "cultural turn," Soviet civilization has been the subject of intensive research and reflection for the last 30 years. It has long since outstripped the Revolution as a topic of scholarly investigation. The only topic in political history of comparable weight in the literature is the Terror; I will not attempt a quantitative comparison here, though I suspect culture would win. We may still set our students questions on whether Stalin betrayed Leninism, but as a profession we are more interested in how Sovietness communicated itself through the key media at its disposal: print, visual culture, film, spectacle. We know there was not much bread to be had in interwar Russia or much justice-but what about the circuses?

Analysis of Stalin-era culture presents at least two general challenges. The first is the problem of origins. Given that the creators of Soviet culture were ambivalent, confused, or obfuscatory about the provenance of their civilization, how can we determine the precise blend of tradition and innovation that they achieved? The conservative, neo-classical elements in Stalinist iconography are clear enough, but in that case how are we so unfailingly able to identify these icons as "Soviet"? We know that the motifs of proletarian industrialism and militant modernism suffered discursive demotion in the early 1930s, but they evidently left a mark of some kind.

The second pressing question is how we should interpret this culture. Given that the ideological rationale for all public expression in the Soviet Union is so palpable, what mileage is there in formal analysis? Are there interpretive loop-holes in a culture whose aim was to abolish ambiguity? To put it more crudely, is there anything interesting to be said about a culture whose meaning and purpose-the creation of socialist myths-is so blindingly obvious?

The pioneering early studies of the ethos of Soviet culture came from within literary studies, though their analytical quarry was not "culture" as such but rather "Socialist Realism." Some basic parameters were set by a careful study of Bolshevik pronouncements on literature, starting with Lenin's "Party Organization and Party Literature" (1905) and ending with the speeches by Andrei Zhdanov and Maksim Gor´kii at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.¹ Deeper insights into the cultural and ideological background of the later aesthetic doctrine were drawn from the literary debates and polemics of the 1920s and early 1930s.² The most far-reaching early attempt to trace the cultural and intellectual roots of Socialist Realism came in 1958 with Rufus W. Mathewson's The Positive Hero in Russian Literature. Mathewson drew a line of descent back from the "leather men" of Soviet fiction to the "positive heroes" craved by the utilitarian radical critics of the mid-19th century.³

Since the late 1970s, however, discussion of Stalinist culture has become more ambitious in a number of ways. First, the interpretive tools applied to Socialist Realism have become more varied and more sophisticated. Mathewson's splendid survey still operated within the frame of reference of the official tradition: Chernyshevskii begat Gor´kii, and so on. But in due course researchers would take Soviet culture out of this narrative and put it under the lens of literary and cultural theory.

The underground writer...