Political Functions of Art in the USSR
The Soviet Union successfully utilized theatre as a means of propaganda to control the public and to change its perceptions of government and its role in life. This success is evident in the shifts in public thinking, and as a result, the shifts in citizens’ perceptions of what art is from the start of the 20th century to its end—namely, a shift from creativity for its own sake to creativity for the state’s sake. I will trace this evolution by discussing background art forms in the Soviet Union and how theatre emerges as a form of propaganda. Then, I shift to agitprop, a form of theatre that characterizes the country’s dramatic history. I will conclude with some effects of agitprop theatre on censorship, a close picture to what Soviet theatre was before, during, and after, as this form lingers in the country.
Although my paper discusses specific instances of theatre in the Soviet Union, it would be unfair not to preface this topic with a relevant discussion of Soviet mass culture. Beginning in the 1920’s, Soviet Russia clearly defined its ideals and beliefs through the media texts that it produced. Howard Woolston’s article “Propaganda in Soviet Russia,” is invaluable in explaining just how saturated Soviet culture was with all forms of ideological control. Woolston does not lead up to the point. He makes it clear that the government has at this early point, full control over the materials that culture disseminates. For example, “Foreign news is strictly censored, and press correspondents can dispatch items only upon approval by the authorities” (32). This censorship will become even more important when I look at the Soviet Union’s representations of itself in relation to other countries. Woolston details another aspect of this culture that the government attends to: museums and exhibits. While one would expect museum viewers to form their own opinions about the art they see, this expectation is not likely. Exhibits are arranged in such ways “to give a visitor the impression that the Revolution was not a sudden eruption, but the inevitable result of expansive social forces” (33). By not making the Revolution appear as “a sudden eruption,” the government indicates that underlying reasons, not mere proletariat dissatisfaction with government, lead to the uprising. Considering this spark to the revolution is important because it lays the foundation for a theatre history that will develop around the government, in fear of the government.
Soviet culture is never under simplistic control: the government always calculates the effects it wants to reap from cultural control. Such calculated effects are evident when Woolston discusses the sounds all across Moscow streets, sounds that do not arise from different people talking or chatting, but sounds that happen because the government projects them. Cities play a “barrage of soviet radio messages” (36) through the air as “a continuous flow of oratory” (36), which indicates that the government again controls another means that people have to gather information about what is happening: conversation and listening. No longer do people expect to gain news from their neighbors. If they do, the information is likely incorrect because the government cannot calculate individual responses, yet; however, the information that citizens come to rely on arises from these speakers situated on street corners. The government calculates an effect from this recitation of news through loudspeakers: people will condition themselves to follow the news no matter what its content expresses (36).
The government’s control certainly did not end with simple communication, it extended to the stage, which indicates that early on, the government wanted to control the means of artistic production because it felt that art had the potential to inspire and to indoctrinate people through its emotional appeals. Mark Zaitsev’s “Soviet Theatre Censorship,” reviews the early 1930’s government’s views on theatre as a mode of art that needs to be controlled, which is why I choose to include it here in my discussion of early theatre censorship in the Soviet Union. Zaitsev establishes the tone with which we can analyze this theatre history early in the article when he cleverly compares the themes that plays have with the themes that the Soviet government has. This parallel establishes a satiric view of the government whose “unofficial themes … [are] censorship and freedom of expression” (119). Zaitsev’s parallel builds two poles—to him, the government censors the content of modes of art that it does not approve, but at the same time, it also favors “freedom of expression.” To understand the complex relationship between censorship and freedom of expression, Zaitsev points to Stalin, under whose rule “censorship became increasingly more restrictive” (120), so restrictive in fact that “the one officially acceptable form of expression, Socialist Realism, left little room for imagination and creativity” (120).
This Socialist Realism aimed to represent the miraculous power of Socialism over Capitalism in part because the only content that theatres could stage was political content. Zaitsev claims that Socialist Realism, deeply rooted in Socialist and Communist philosophy, could “[open] the door to greater experimentation with new forms of theatrical representation” (121), but the new theatrical representation to which he hints would in most cases, be censored. Although theatres had a degree of liberty to choose the content that they staged, they could not move beyond political content. The freedom of expression and the censorship that Zaitsev mentions earlier, now make sense in the context of a government that seems to promote theatre as an art form to enrich its culture, but at the same time, dismisses it if it does not have explicit political messages. In the 1950’s, druzhniki (121) appeared at theatrical performances. These “watchdogs” (121) as Zaitsev terms them, attended performances to make sure that plays did not test political boundaries. Again, a stringent connection between freedom of expression and censorship appears since the government insisted that people express themselves, but also that others be willing to report to the government on whether or not these expressions were radical. The USSR had a faux acceptance of theatrical art as being something that it could project to other countries, for the sake of boasting that they had theaters and a theatrical art established, but Soviet theatre in the first third of the 20th century did not move beyond this façade.
Some artists were daring enough to push the relationship between freedom of expression and censorship. Such artists bypassed censorship in clever ways that defined their artistic personalities. They frequently presented their material at drama festivals that often honored Eastern Bloc countries (123). Although we would expect that these presentations indicated the USSR’s willingness to acknowledge countries over which it had control in ways that made the USSR more human (allowing a creative festival to be dedicated to other countries), these festivals were again a mere pretension to further muck the line between freedom of expression and control. Zaitsev maintains, “it is generally acknowledged that many of the plays coming out of [these festivals] would never have been allowed to be performed if they had been Soviet plays” (123), which advocates that the government had an increased willingness to represent other countries that it had control over as more creative to the effect that the Soviet Union would appear humble, letting a politically weaker, but creatively superior country have its moment of fame before it dismissed it as an inferior because it belonged to the Union.
Artists who participated at the festivals performed plays such as Public Opinion that had explicit ties to government issues, but they performed the plays in unique ways. Public Opinion details the situation after a character cannot be fired because he has a friend in a social position above that of his boss’ (124). The content of such plays was infrequently as interesting as the ways in which directors framed them. To avoid being labeled mischievous and perhaps being jailed, the play “is presented as a dress rehearsal,” a concept familiar to Soviet directors who wanted to bypass repercussions for staging politically scandalous and suggestive plays (124). One director spoke the following to his audience before the play began: “I’m happy to welcome you here today. I want to warn you, though, that you will be watching a rehearsal and not a finished production. As a consequence, I may have to interrupt the performance from time to time. I hope you will bear with me” (127). Zaitsev points out that the director (surprise) never interrupted the rehearsal. Other plays that directors presented in the same fashion infrequently gained critical acclaim for their content; instead, the frame directors used to present them was more interesting because it pulled away from the acceptance that many people had toward the government’s mighty restrictions, and pushed toward an urge to be creative.
Soviet playwrights expressed creativity in a variety of colorful ways. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1928 play The Bedbug makes ancillary references to the government about which Mayakovsky writes—an oppressive, dull collection of individuals; it is the way in which Mayakovsky comments on the government, through allusion and themes (the old versus the new regime) that gain the playwright some acclaim for his drama, but not much. The Bedbug follows Ivan Prisypkin’s life from the period before he marries Elzevir Davidovna Renaissance to the transformation he endures after the two die on their wedding night because of a house fire.
Mayakovsky comments on Socialism and the state of the Soviet Union in the 1930’s through the names he gives his characters. Prisypkin’s soon to be wife, Elzevir and her mother Rosalie’s, last names are “Renaissance”. Through the family’s name, Mayakovsky implies that the Soviet government framed its regime as a time of rebirth, a time of new ideas that would improve citizens’ lives. Unfortunately, this was never true. Though the playwright suggests that certain nobility exists in the Russian proletariat—Prisypkin, Elzevir, and Rosalie are all a part of this class—no nobility can be traced because the government did not encourage people to find their personalities and develop artwork in which they celebrated individuality.
Likewise, the portraits of other working class members of society who Mayakovsky paints are equally fraught with problem. As Prisypkin and Rosalie shop through the street before the wedding, they encounter street vendors who do not have names (35-38). Mayakovsky describes these people based on their titles, based on what they do daily to earn a living. A Man Selling Buttons, a Woman Selling Apples, and A Man Selling Lampshades approach the two shoppers and urge them to purchase their eponymous goods (38). Although the vendors laud their products, their praise is unfounded and ironic once Rosalie realizes that the actual quality of their goods is pitiful and decides: “I shall claim my civic rights and buy my herrings in the Soviet State Co-op!” (38) Instead of supporting the local vendors in her town, Rosalie reasons that she should buy from the State Co-op, a government administration that has the ultimate control to regulate food. The fact that she notices that the quality of food is lower on the street than the quality of food that the government can provide, implies that Mayakovsky wants the audience to craft similar associations about the government surrounding the spectators—while it presents itself as idyllic, (Rosalie wants to get food from somewhere she can trust because she works diligently to earn a living), it really has problems.
Mayakovsky shies away from detailing specific problems that the government has to avoid being censored and being attacked. Instead, he lauds the government almost indiscriminately in ways that an informed audience detects. In Act 2, the socially lowest character, Oleg Bard, tells Prisypkin “You need a world revolution, you must break through into Europe. Once you’ve smashed the Chamberlains, the Poincarés, you will delight the Moulin Rouge and the Pantheon with the beauty of your bodily movements” (45). Oleg’s statement reinforces Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ theory that for Socialism and then Communism to be successful, a worldwide revolution is essential. As he speaks, Oleg’s tone is desperate. He takes every part of his character and places it into this conversation because he sincerely believes that the philosophy will be successful. Furthermore, he believes that if he tells one more person about the glories that everyone will share once Communism governs the world, he will actualize himself into a good person, a good person whom the state can use as an example. It is no coincidence that Oleg is a landowner, someone with power, but someone with power who is willing to admit that he is at fault once the Soviet philosophy appears. Oleg will likely give up his land if we were to follow him in Marx and Engels’ true reasoning. The first step that Oleg takes is to endorse their philosophy by telling it to another man.
Mayakovsky perceives the struggle between those who understand that Communism may not be as idyllic as government leaders and lecturers present it to be. However, his audience does not understand this struggle because the playwright makes it implicit. In her introduction to The Bedbug, Patricia Blake identifies, “Mayakovsky’s first audiences were not ready to recognize his warning. Then, The Bedbug appeared to be dealing with periods in time which did not exist for the literal-minded” (30). In other words, the first audiences to watch the play could not accurately adopt the perspective of what a worldwide revolution would look like, (what the play’s ending foreshadows). This ending, in which Prisypkin has been frozen after his death, has been melted, and has been turned into a bedbug, leaves the audience wondering what exactly Mayakovsky intended it to feel or to understand: if Prisypkin is dead, is the State dead since he embodies and recognizes in others so many of the good ideals of Communist work; does the playwright suggest that people who follow Socialism and Communism reduce themselves to common bugs that haunt others’ lives? Mayakovsky’s play does not answer such questions because it is not realistic—it does not depict life in an accessible way that people can immediately understand. I would argue that Mayakovsky also does not push the audience into enough of a direction to find or to consider such questions on its own. Patricia Blake would support the notion that Mayakovsky intended his play to answer questions about the society in which he produced it: the 1920’s under increasing censorship. Because she believes that he wrote the play in a rush as “he was longing to make enough money to buy a Renault car in Paris and bring it back to Moscow” (29), she concludes that Mayakovsky wanted to write a play that is reflective of its society, but he could not because he did not dedicate enough time to the project. The problem is that she lauds the play one paragraph later as “one of the most devastating satires of Communist society in contemporary literature” (29). Though some may argue that “devastating” implies a floundering, makeshift production, I contend that the way in which the play presents the government identifies the play as complex. The play certainly can “devastate” an audience by appealing to it emotionally, but it does not devastate an audience because it is mediocrity.
However, Mayakovsky’s play is not successful with the initial Moscow audience because it haggles it with Socialist messages that the audience already understands. According to “Soviet Theatre Audiences” by Mikhail Deza and Mervyn Matthews, “Critics recall that theatres everywhere traditionally cater to a small proportion of the public and see no reason why this should not be so in the Soviet Union as well” (716). Of this small proportion, 5.1% have what the article terms “higher” education (721). From this information, it is evident that the composition of the already miniscule audience that attended Mayakovsky’s drama was educated: it did not need the types of reinforcements that The Bedbug presents to make a point that the government is shifting whether the general populous wants it to or not. Furthermore, Mayakovsky’s play, performed in Moscow, saw “Eighty-three percent [of the audience that] had secondary specialized education or more” (721). This audience did not require messages from The Bedbug such as “the future happiness of humanity—or as it is called in popular parlance: socialism” (48-49) to understand Mayakovsky’s drama. The alternative comments that the drama makes about government, “Here’s my advice to you: get yourself some curtains. You can either open them and look out at the street or close them and take your bribes in private. It’s better to work with other people, but it’s more fun to eat your chicken by yourself” (43), would have been better received by the educated audience if the tacit comments were more prominent than appeals to the majority, appeals to the “popular parlance.” In “my advice to you,” Mayakovsky embeds secrecy into government operations. With secrecy comes a sense of fear that the government can shut its metaphorical curtains and continue ruling over the masses without explicitly detailing its intentions. Deza and Matthews also point to the “marked decline in the standards of Soviet drama” (718) of the 1930’s, one year after The Bedbug was produced. In hindsight, the marked decline is one of the results of “agitprop,” a form of theatre where I will venture to next.
Agitprop, a theatrical form that Kevin Brown terms as “effectively appeal[ing] to and indoctrinat[ing] Russia’s lower-class citizens” (5), worked on an agenda. Brown identifies this purpose “to teach the working class directly” (5) through appeals to their standards of living and through appeals to their economic and social situations. Brown points out that the leading Bolsheviks developed agitprop theatre so that they could control culture, and could mass distribute it to Russians (5). Instead of relying on implicit references, agitprop appealed to the masses because its creators diluted it by making it rely on audiences’ simplest reactions, emotional ones. Brown goes as far as to describe the form of theatre as “evok[ing] intense emotional response” (6). This intense response suggests that the content agitprop—agitation propaganda—demonstrated, appealed on some political level to everyone who witnessed it. Brown finds that Erwin Piscator first understood how to evoke intense emotional reactions related to politics (6). Piscator aimed to “demonstrate man’s … relationship to society” (6). Appeals to society would allow audiences to judge themselves and their individual positions against others in the audience, and against others living in the Soviet Union at the time. Piscator finds that these judgments motivated people to act on the easy themes that agitprop presented: government, Capitalism versus Communism, and East versus Western countries. Furthermore, since Piscator understood that a majority of intelligent people would not expose themselves to easy, base propaganda at this level, he created content that was highly visual (7)—content that even illiterate people could understand.
One form of agitprop theatre that the Soviet Union championed was the Living Newspaper. At first, “the practice began when actors read newspapers aloud to a large group of people” (7). Again, illiteracy inspired these actors to read to audiences that could not read for themselves. Soon, the practice evolved into events in which actors not only read the news, but also performed it. They used clowns, cartoon styles, and montage techniques (7) so that they would not bore the audience with frequently redundant news. I would argue that the desperation set up by the government and constant surveillance that it instituted created such a fear that people needed to respond to, people needed to cope with, in some way. They naturally turned to theatre as a mode of self-expression that could alleviate their worries about the future, and aid the population by informing it of current news. No matter how expressive the living newspaper was, its performers still lived with the fear of what the government could do to them if it judged the content they performed as vulgar or debasing. To counter potential negative judgments, people created safe art. They repeated safe topics, the words of their oppressors. Through their repeating, they reinforced these messages in their minds. No true creativity happened above the level of deciding what props the actors would use because these actors were so indoctrinated with fear, that they used theatre as survival, as a method of escape. But even the most dramatic living newspaper performance could not triumph over what came next. When the Bolsheviks realized that they too could use agitprop to spread their cause, they adopted it and they created the Blue Blouse, started by Boris Yuzhanin (7). Named after their uniforms “a blue worker’s blouse and pants,” the group gained international fame and even had 100,000 members during its existence (7).
František Deák’s essay “’Blue Blouse’ (1923-1928)” details one of the group’s most famous skits titled “Industrialization” in which actors flood the playing space—for the Blue Blouse this meant any open space—wearing easily recognizable symbols of Capitalism (a dollar sign on a hat). They built a human pyramid that represented the “finished industrial system” which furthered the Blouse’s theme: “the unfortunate plight of a poor Soviet Citizen whose existence the bureaucrats … refuse to acknowledge because he has somewhere mislaid his indispensible “document” or passport” (36). Again, at times of the greatest disparity, performers were unable to move beyond themes that the government presented and toward more literary themes because their minds were saturated with good versus bad ideals for years. That the Blue Blouse’s performances “lasted for about an hour and a half” (37) is remarkable since it needed to fill the playing spaces with so much pro-government material and not, under any circumstances, accidentally mention that it likely did not believe in the material. It is unlikely that any of the Blue Blouse’s skits did not contain mentions of government rules that were to be presented to other countries’ youths, thus spreading the propaganda’s existence and appeal to a young generation. Instead of warning their audiences about the dangers of Communism, the group regurgitated popular information that the government forced them too (a citizen taking her/his passport or documents along when leaving the house) because the government knew that these themes appealed to mass audiences.
I would like to make a return. Earlier, I discussed museums and exhibitions that the Soviet Union commandeered and rerouted away from historical truth. Images that were edited, galleries that were rearranged all fit into the ideas that the Blue Blouse championed. According to Brown, in a faux gallery like performance, the Blue Blouse cut out faces from a large poster and inserted actors’ faces as they delivered their lines (Deák 38). These actors inserted themselves into artwork, the same artwork they found at government galleries. Performances such as these ones reinforced the authority of the museums and exhibits that the government presided over through its cultural control. Actors in the Blue Blouse became machines, “a perfect and efficient body” (Deák 43), that the government praised because it reinforced its industrial growth. Whereas we expect representations of people as machines to evoke ideas of complex symbolism, these ideas were not the case in the Soviet Union. Symbols that the Blue Blouse presented (a Capitalist top hat, a hammer and sickle) never deviated from their predictable meanings. In essence, Soviet art became predictable to those who created, performed, and digested it, and in one sense, those who created, performed, and digested it were one and the same, the people receiving commands from societal structure.
As the Blue Blouse disappeared, it was replaced by the idea of Socialist Realism, Stalin’s ideal staging of Socialism’s glories. One critic, Bertha Malnick, argues in her essay “The Soviet Theatre, 1957,” how during Stalin’s rule, this realism transitioned. People developed their own notions of what the theatre aimed to accomplish: “Everyone took ‘socialist’ for granted, so much so that it hardly ever cropped up in conversation, but everyone had their own interpretation of ‘realism’, some of them very involved and far reaching; as far as any common denominator could be discerned it was ‘true to life in one way or another’ with, for a moment, emphasis on ‘another’” (247). Malnick captures the return to art for art’s sake—art with no agenda, in her representation of the Soviet theatre between 1938 and 1957. As this theatre transitioned from government control with a governmental agenda, to a more realistic theatre with an individualistic agenda toward the end of Stalin’s censorship, the dramatic arts’ truthfulness increased. In this spirit, people’s loyalties shifted from loyalty to the state for the sole reason that it was required, to a new loyalty to the dramatic arts for their ability to represent life as it is, no longer in the context of a repressive government, but in the context of people reacting to their pasts and motioning toward their futures.
Blake, Patricia. Introduction to The Bedbug. The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre. By Michael Glenny. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. 29-32. Print.
Brown, Kevin. “Agitprop in Soviet Russia.” Constructing the Past 14.1 (2013): 5-8. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2009.
Deák, František. “’Blue Blouse’ (1923-1928).” The Drama Review: TDR 17.1 (1973): 35-46. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Deza, Mikhail and Mervyn Matthews. “Soviet Theater Audiences.” Performing Arts Journal 34.4 (1975): 716-30. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Malnick, Bertha. “The Soviet Theatre, 1957.” Soviet Studies 9.3 (1958): 245-55. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. "The Bedbug." The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. 34-79. Print.
Woolston, Howard. “Propaganda in Soviet Russia.” American Journal of Sociology 38.1 (1932): 32-40. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Zaitsev, Mark. “Soviet Theater.” The Drama Review 19.2 (1975): 119-28. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
