- 15/05/2025
The communist cultural model is about overcoming the past to make way for the building of a new civilization. Culture was never to be an end in itself, but it would exist solely to serve the communist agenda. Explore the many conflicts this ideology presented in places with a long history of myriad arts, from architecture to poetry. Follow the fascinating trajectories of artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and numerous writers.
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00:00Usually, I begin by setting a scene, trying to reconstruct or evoke a more or less distant
00:25time and place, but this time will be different.
00:27Here is no reconstruction, but actual personal memory.
00:32I want to share a scene from my own past, from one of my two visits to the vanished Soviet
00:37Union, which really stayed with me.
00:41We're in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, which at present has just celebrated its 700th
00:46birthday as a city.
00:48But in this scene, it's the summer of 1978, and Lithuania is part of the Soviet Union,
00:55as it was grabbed by Stalin.
00:57Now, Leonid Brezhnev is presiding over the Soviet superpower.
01:03Our family was given permission to visit from the United States, where I was born.
01:08In the 1970s, longer visits like the one we were able to make were quite rare, and they
01:14tended to be severely circumscribed according to the templates of Intourist, the government
01:20tourist agency that managed such contacts.
01:24While my father and mother visited with my father's fellow mathematicians at the university,
01:30my brother and I were taken around town to see the sights, and to hear and smell unfamiliar
01:37things.
01:38We watched a Polish film, we ate street food from Central Asia, we smelled the harsh tobacco
01:44and the diesel fumes of heavy trucks rumbling through the streets.
01:48I was in seventh grade, and wide-eyed in trying to understand what we saw all around us.
01:55One visit was to a place unlike any I had ever been in, seen, or heard of growing up in Chicago.
02:02My brother and I were taken to the Museum of Atheism in Vilnius.
02:08It was housed in the once beautiful Baroque Church of St. Casimir in the heart of downtown,
02:15part of the Old City.
02:16It was built in 1618 by the Jesuits and dedicated to the Holy Prince, Casimir.
02:23Its towers are among the tallest structures in downtown, and the golden crown of its central
02:30lantern cupola is very notable on the skyline.
02:34After World War II, the church was confiscated by the Soviet state and closed.
02:40Its interior was torn out, and it was turned into a grain storage warehouse.
02:45Then, in the 1960s, it was transformed into a museum of atheism.
02:51There were, in fact, numbers of these in the cities of the Soviet Union.
02:55I had no idea what to expect.
02:58Going inside actually yielded only a few impressions.
03:02There was that great space of the inside of the church, and then exhibits including some
03:08folklore carvings of saints brought in from the countryside, some displays with texts,
03:14and one engraving, I recall, showing a picture of a monk presiding over the torture of a heretic
03:21as part of the Spanish Inquisition.
03:23The impression all of this left was anticlimactic.
03:27Clearly, depicting unbelief in a compelling way was not easy to do in museum exhibit form.
03:34Then, because the still air inside what had been a sanctuary was warm on this summer day,
03:41I took off my windbreaker and folded it neatly over my arm as I continued to stroll about the space,
03:49as I would have done back in Chicago at a museum, unaware that there was a cultural taboo against
03:55carrying a jacket on an arm in Europe.
03:58At this point, with a loud hiss of reproof, an elderly lady curator leapt up to me and started to berate me.
04:06This behavior was improper.
04:08You must wear your coat, not carry it, I was told.
04:12Otherwise, you should have checked it in the cloakroom.
04:15Shocked, I silently once again put on my jacket and kept it on until we left.
04:21I had just been chastised inside a desecrated house of worship
04:26for not showing the respect that was required inside the Museum of Atheism.
04:31This lecture concerns communism and culture.
04:36In my visits to the Soviet Union, I caught glimpses of a distinctive communist cultural model,
04:42one that would have a worldwide impact on thought, art, and literature.
04:47Communist creation was anticipatory, politically engaged, and public or collective.
04:55It was about overcoming the past to pave the way for a new man and a new woman,
04:59and to show the way to the promised bright future, building a new civilization.
05:05But this opened questions.
05:07Was all past experience to be erased?
05:11Were there elements from the past that would or could be redeemed
05:15as having anticipated the communist present and future?
05:19Here, I want to trace how communist artists and cultural thinkers were bound by shared assumptions,
05:26whether they were active in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe or in capitalist Western Europe or the Americas.
05:34What united them was the firm belief that the creation of culture was not an end in itself.
05:41Rather, culture was a means to create the new man and new woman of communism,
05:47who would be the ultimate creation, the ultimate human self-creation.
05:52In the historical record, communists and Marxist thinkers pondered questions of culture a lot.
06:00A first question, obviously, is, what is culture?
06:04We use the word in varied ways, and its meanings can range from high art all the way to the broadest
06:11anthropological sense of culture, meaning any aspect of a structured way of life with values, meanings, and symbols.
06:18All these levels of meaning were involved, but here a Marxist frame comes into play.
06:25Marx proposed that society comprised two parts—the base, or material economic realities of a society,
06:33and then the superstructure—all those ideas and relations built on top of the base.
06:41Culture belonged to the superstructure, but it was also transformed by material facts.
06:46In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels asked,
06:51Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions—in one word,
07:00man's consciousness—changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence,
07:06in his social relations, and in his social life?
07:09What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character
07:17in proportion as material production has changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas
07:24of its ruling class." End quote.
07:28Further, Marx and Engels proclaimed,
07:31In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present. In communist society, the present dominates the past.
07:39And they added,
07:41The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations.
07:46No wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
07:52After Marx, debate continued to rage over precisely how the relations worked between the economic base
08:01and the superstructure of ideas and culture and values.
08:06Sophisticated theorists reminded that the relation of economics to culture is not so simple or mechanical.
08:14For Marx, however, on the other side of the inevitable final revolution lay the prize of total human liberation.
08:23When everyone would be freed from necessity, a new culture would become possible, necessary,
08:30inevitable, as humanity itself was reformed. In any event, all culture and art had political implications.
08:38They were not preserves of the apolitical. And any ideal of art for art's sake was to be rejected,
08:46along with a romantic cult of individual genius. What future communist culture would look like
08:53was the object of speculation, until the question became real in the fall of 1917. In the first heady years
09:03of the Bolshevik experiment, debate raged over the culture which the new worker state should cultivate.
09:11Radicals in the 1920s prolet cult movement aimed to hurry into being new forms of culture that would
09:19not be bourgeois. Going them one better, the radical poet Vladimir Mayakovsky suggested that museums should
09:27just be blown up as old junk, totally useless. Lenin proved skeptical, stressing the solidification of
09:35political power first. But he agreed that a cultural revolution would be needed to move the state to full
09:42socialism. Trotsky, for his part, did indulge in speculation about the new man and woman of the new
09:50civilization. Trotsky declared in 1923 that man is by no means a finished or harmonious being. Up to this
10:00point, humans had evolved not according to a plan, but haphazardly. Only now would communists address,
10:08quote, the question of how to educate and regulate, of how to improve and complete the physical and
10:15spiritual construction of man, end quote. Trotsky defined the goal thus, to produce a new, improved
10:24version of man. That is the future task of communism. Humans would design themselves. They themselves were the
10:33raw material for the future, a higher biologic type, or Superman, as Trotsky put it. After 1929,
10:42as Stalin solidified his rule, he also set the cultural agenda. Stalin urged that writers and other
10:50artists, too, by implication, should be engineers of human souls. Of course, the formulation of souls
10:58here rang a note that was decidedly out of step with atheism. But again, the core idea was that a new
11:04civilization could fashion itself, with humans equated to machines, the new man as the ultimate product.
11:14Stalinism also endorsed other formulas and rules for the new official culture. The units of the Soviet
11:21Union were to be, as the formula went, national in form, socialist in content, converging on and
11:28assimilating to the vanguard role of the Russians. The official art style of Stalinism was defined in
11:361934, introduced by writer Maxim Gorky at the first Congress of Soviet writers. It was called
11:45socialist realism. Its subject was reality as it evolved toward its historical destination of socialism.
11:53So, it's important to note, this was not realism meant to depict gritty and unsatisfactory present
12:00realities, as most of us understand realism, but instead to show the transformation of those realities
12:07into the ideal. Historian Richard King concludes that, quote, socialist realism is a profoundly,
12:15even perversely optimistic way of presenting the world. It creates certainty from doubt and order from
12:22chaos. It shows abundance in times of shortage. It offers a vision of unity and shared purpose,
12:29overcoming social unrest, end quote. The call for such official Stalinist art produced countless
12:37idealized depictions of workers and peasants striding toward the bright dawn of tomorrow.
12:44Statues and buildings were designed specifically to dwarf the individual to be imposing and grand.
12:51They could prove quite appealing in the West when juxtaposed with the miseries of the Great
12:58depression and unemployment of that time period. This style, often called totalitarian art,
13:04spread to other communist countries, such as the New People's Republic of China.
13:10The mandatory style, of course, provoked jokes, like this one from the Soviet Union.
13:16What's the difference between impressionist, expressionist, and socialist realist art?
13:22And the answer is, impressionists depict what they see, expressionists show what they feel,
13:29and socialist realist artists depict what they hear they are ordered to depict by the authorities.
13:37A command economy was matched by command art. Under Stalin, earlier experimentation was shelved,
13:45replaced by quite conservative styles of architecture and design. Because Stalin privileged
13:51Russian culture, the Russian classics of literature were rehabilitated, appropriated,
13:58but selectively. So Dostoevsky, for instance, was not in favor. True artists, who were the natural
14:06rebels of any society, inevitably chafed at these restrictions. With dark humor, the poet Ossip Mandelstam
14:13famously declared that in the whole world, only the Soviet Union truly gives poetry its proper worth,
14:22because this is where most are killed over it. Inevitably, such free thinking and speech led to
14:29Mandelstam's death in Stalin's prison camps. After Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev's
14:37This de-Stalinization initiative from 1956, what was called Khrushchev's Thaw,
14:42ushered in some relaxation. But it always remained tenuous and ambiguous. In his restless proposals for
14:50reforms, Khrushchev urged a return to basics, the fundamentals of Lenin, and encouraged glasnost,
14:57translated as openness or transparency, that later became a Gorbachev slogan. Breaking with the bombastic
15:04official art of Stalinist wedding cake structures, Khrushchev declaimed against such earlier architectural
15:11excess. This seemed to open the way once again for modern experimental art. But Khrushchev then
15:19also slammed modern art. In a famous obscene confrontation at an exhibit in 1962, Khrushchev
15:27inspected modern art and declared it was shit. The sculptor, Ernst Nezvesny, dared to contradict him
15:35and warned him that his ignorance was showing. Nezvesny would always remember Khrushchev as the
15:40most uncultured man he had ever met. Later, Khrushchev regretted these outbursts of his and wanted to
15:47apologize to Nezvesny. When Khrushchev died in 1971 remarkably, his family commissioned to create
15:55his tombstone none other than Nezvesny. And the monument is a bold image split between black and
16:01white, showing the essential disjuncture in Khrushchev's own complex character. And Khrushchev
16:08was a man of contradictions. Even amidst his thaw, he endorsed a renewed campaign against religion.
16:16Older religious traditions were to make way for the construction of the new man.
16:21The dissident Andrei Siniavsky, in his brilliant anthropological satire entitled Soviet Civilization,
16:29declared that the idea of the new man is the cornerstone of Soviet civilization.
16:37A novel Homo Sovieticus was to evolve in tandem with the perfection of communism
16:43as a new and final stage of human history. We recall that in 1961, the Soviet Party program
16:52had boldly promised that full communism would be built by 1981. At the same 22nd Congress of the
17:00Soviet Communist Party, the program also announced a new Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,
17:07with 12 commandments for both party members and Komsomol Youth League members. Communism in these
17:15rules was declared to be the most perfect ethical system, making all earlier ones obsolete. The very
17:23first command was devotion to the communist cause, love towards the socialist motherland, and to
17:30socialist countries. Other demands followed, including friendship, fraternal relations with other
17:37socialist peoples, hard work, and collectivism. Activism was the communist's obligation, and every
17:45activist was to be a living example. Ethics was not based on revelation or tradition, but on social
17:53usefulness and social benefit, the communist morality under construction had to be reflected in art and
18:01culture. The pressures of state control of art and culture were keenly felt in communist Hungary,
18:09especially by the dissident thinker Miklos Horasti. He had been born in Jerusalem in 1945, but his parents
18:17returned to Hungary after the war to be part of building the new society there.
18:23Horasti's contrariness and free ways steered him into conflict with the government. His friend,
18:30the author George Conrad, described him as, quote, a civil rights activist, anarchist, militant poet,
18:38clown, agitator, a dissident who mocks himself. So, rebelling against the strictures of the system,
18:47Horasti wrote an amazing reflection or manifesto entitled The Velvet Prison.
18:53Subtitled, Artists Under State Socialism. It is an extended meditation on censorship,
19:00the aesthetics of being censored, and what becoming complicit in self-censorship does
19:07to a creator of culture. To state the obvious, this was not allowed publication in Hungary,
19:12so a manuscript was smuggled out to France, where it was published in 1983. I very much recommend
19:20seeking out a copy of this book, which is a masterpiece of dark satire. Horasti argues that
19:27under a system like that in his country of Hungary, dissent has become impossible because a new culture
19:34has been pioneered there, a regime of directed thought. Artists have been domesticated, turned
19:41into bureaucrats and functionaries of culture, and they cannot break out of the symbiosis between
19:48themselves and the state. The new civilization that has emerged is light years away from either artistic
19:56freedom or outright repression. Heavy-handed censorship is increasingly replaced by internalized
20:04control, self-censorship. Horasti addresses also the mixing of old and new in communist culture.
20:12Rebellious, anti-authoritarian art is co-opted, and then domesticated by the state,
20:19and turned to its uses in a paradox of tradition. The ultimate masterwork is to be nothing other than
20:26the planned society, with state culture or directed culture dominant. Art is nationalized, regulated,
20:36regimented, administered, subordinated to politics, and guaranteed. And the only price for all this
20:44is the autonomy of the artist, and art for art's sake. Moreover, this is accomplished not by brute force,
20:52but by material incentives. As Horasti concludes, sticks are exchanged for carrots. He even cites a
21:00Hungarian joke that if the Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn had lived in Hungary, he would have been appointed
21:07president of the writers' union, given time. As Horasti puts it, censorship becomes culture itself,
21:16because the state has been internalized by all artists, who have become social planners as well.
21:24Horasti explains, when the culture of socialist planning has matured, it realizes that it came into this world
21:32to be society's ruler. Progress is God in a civilization created for its sake.
21:40By the end of this extraordinary book, Horasti has demonstrated that state culture's grip is so
21:47comprehensive that dissent is impossible, so that a book like his own is actually impossible. And there's
21:56the punchline. In spite of this, his criticism still exists in book form. Horasti later explained that
22:04I intended the very existence of this book to be a denial of its own deliberate exaggerations. What
22:12he called this pessimistic book of his actually offered hope by its being a contradiction of the official line.
22:20But what of communism and culture beyond the sphere of the Soviet Union or its satellites or states like China?
22:29In non-communist countries, instead of being state-sponsored and official, communist culture
22:35presented itself as a radical opposition to the status quo. Among artists and intellectuals,
22:41its appeal proved vast. It would take a separate lecture course to discuss all those, from Pablo Neruda
22:49to Georg Lukács, who committed themselves to its vision. Others became disillusioned or simply
22:56drifted away from earlier commitments. Here, we can only mention a few fascinating and varied cases.
23:03In Mexico, the painter, sculptor, and muralist Diego Rivera followed a complicated trajectory. In 1922,
23:13when he joined the Mexican Communist Party, he was already earning attention for the distinctive,
23:19bold style of his public art and mural paintings. In 1927, Rivera was invited to the Soviet Union
23:28for a visit that ended up lasting months. He was celebrated there. The poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky,
23:34praised his murals as the world's very first communist frescoes. In Moscow, as he worked on commissions,
23:43Rivera found himself entangled in fierce debates then taking place on the future of communist culture.
23:51Instead of falling back on older forms, as some urged, Rivera favored a new symbolic
23:57and stylistic language, which would become, as he said, quote, a weapon of exceptional strength
24:04in the hands of the communists, end quote. But then, depressed by the weather, poor health,
24:10and disillusioned by all this artistic infighting, Rivera suddenly departed the Soviet Union
24:16in May of 1928, returning to Mexico. In 1929, he broke with the Mexican Communist Party,
24:23expelled due to his ties with Trotsky. Later, he would offer Trotsky refuge when he came to Mexico
24:30as an exile. Rivera acquired global fame. He was even invited to paint a mural at New York's Rockefeller
24:38Center in 1933, and then disinvited, or rather fired, after he added a portrait of Lenin to what was supposed
24:47to be a celebration of big business. Through his earlier membership in the party, Rivera met the
24:54painter Frida Kahlo. They married in 1929, divorced in 1939 after a tempestuous decade marked by infidelities,
25:03and then remarried the next year. In her last years, plagued by deteriorating health, Kahlo still avowed that,
25:11I have a great restlessness about my paintings, mainly because I want to make it useful to the
25:17revolutionary communist movement. Until now, I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self.
25:25I must struggle with all my strengths to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do
25:31also benefits the revolution, the only reason to live. Kahlo died in 1954. That year, Rivera rejoined the
25:42Mexican Communist Party after Stalin passed from the scene. To both of them, an enduring commitment to
25:48communism was a vital loyalty. Marxism was similarly central for the British writer Edward Upward, who lived
25:57from 1903 to 2009. He won fame of a sort as Britain's longest living writer, active over eight decades.
26:07He was a friend of writers Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. But his greatest engagement was with
26:14the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he joined in 1934. And his wife, likewise, was a member.
26:20In 1937, Upward drafted a manifesto called Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature. In his
26:30words, quote, no book written at the present time can be good unless it is written from a Marxist or
26:37near-Marxist view, end quote. Truly good literature would be true to life, but would also present,
26:45quote, the real forces at work beneath the surface of life, end quote, depicting future conditions and,
26:53quote, both the decadence of present-day society and the inevitability of revolution, end quote.
27:01Upward's credo was one of fundamental political commitment in art and in daily life.
27:08Ultimately, however, Upward and his wife both left the Communist Party in 1948,
27:15when they grew convinced that it had ceased to truly be revolutionary and radical.
27:21Among all the artists who avowed communism, none was more famous than the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
27:29Admiring the role of French Communists in the resistance,
27:32Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944 and never left it.
27:40In a sensational avowal in October 1944 that was indeed published around the world,
27:46Picasso declared, quote,
27:49My membership of the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, my whole work.
27:57I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality, I was with it all along.
28:05Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world,
28:11to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier, end quote.
28:19He said that his exile was over, as now he was finally at home in the party.
28:25Picasso lent his famous name to Communist campaigns, and his peace dove image became a ubiquitous symbol,
28:33even as Picasso's style was in fact criticized by comrades who preferred realism.
28:40To this very day, scholars differ on the depth and nature of Picasso's political commitment.
28:47Later in life, Picasso is said to have told his dealer,
28:50Of special importance to evolving ideas of culture was the Italian Communist Party leader
29:13and theorist Antonio Gramsci. Born in 1891, Gramsci had joined the rising communist movement
29:22and became its leader as Mussolini's fascists came to power.
29:26In 1926, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned, suffering ever worse health. He died at the age of 46 in 1937.
29:35While in jail, Gramsci read, pondered, and drafted his so-called prison notebooks. In the 1970s,
29:45long after his death, these works became tremendously popular and turned him into what some have called
29:52the patron saint of Euro-communism, which sought an independent course for Western communists.
29:58Gramsci introduced a conceptual vocabulary that diverged from many versions of classical Marxism,
30:05but he saw himself as elaborating, not revising or changing.
30:11Gramsci saw political culture as a battleground for social change. Hegemony was a special term for
30:19control of the cultural terrain. Cultural hegemony was much more than merely a superstructure
30:27determined by an economic base. Gramsci highlighted the role of what he called organic intellectuals,
30:35those who formed the ideas and expressions of the class they represented. Of course,
30:40this celebration of intellectuals was highly appealing to intellectuals. Just as important
30:46as violent revolution were cultural struggles led by Gramsci's organic intellectuals. How would Marx
30:54and Engels or Lenin have responded to these shifts in emphasis? An added complexity in discussions
31:03of Gramsci is that his prison writings, due to the censorship that was imposed on them, had to be
31:09written in a veiled or euphemistic language to hide the import of his ideas. Thus, when he was jotting his
31:17insights about Marxism, he called Marxism the philosophy of praxis, while communism was described with the
31:25code word, the regulated society. So the results today is tremendous scope for debate about Gramsci's
31:33precise intended meanings in his writings. With the rise of Euro communism, the Italian Communist Party
31:41enjoyed unique successes in Western Europe, winning a third of Italian voters at its peak, and participating
31:48in local governments and building a culture of its own. Among those in this milieu was the famous
31:55children's author Gianni Rodari, best known for his 1951 Adventures of Cipollino, about an onion boy who
32:04leads vegetables in a revolt against the oppressive rule of Prince Lemon and his henchman Signor Tomato.
32:13But the most powerful evocation of this time and place came in a novel entitled The Communist by Guido
32:21Morselli. Morselli was not a communist himself, rather the son of a company executive. But his novel evoked the
32:29interior life of the main character, an earnest parliamentary delegate of the party named Walter
32:36Faranini in 1958. Faranini finds himself immobilized between his desire to improve worksite safety of
32:47laborers and the view of his party that communists, quote, do not take part in the life of the parliament,
32:54they observe and remain outside, end quote, awaiting the coming systemic collapse.
33:01He believes in Marx as humanity's bible, a guide for all mankind, and observes that the Communist Party
33:09was only formally a party. In reality, it was a church called to found the reign of collectivism.
33:16All the same, Faranini's disillusionment grows, especially when his duties force him to take part
33:23in expelling a firebrand, a young comrade for alleged deviationism. When Morselli submitted his novel
33:31to a press, it was reviewed and rejected by the famed writer Italo Calvino. Calvino had been in the
33:39party himself until 1957. In his youth, Calvino recalled that communism was not only about their, quote,
33:48political aspirations. It was also the fusion of these with our cultural and literary aspirations,
33:55end quote. In his rejection note, Calvino remarked that the world of Italian communism was too well
34:02known to be invented as the subject of a political novel, a genre that he believed was just impossible.
34:09Only after Morselli's despair and suicide in 1973 were his novels acknowledged as masterpieces.
34:19The Communist was only published in 1976 and recently became available in English in an excellent
34:26translation. It's a remarkable evocation of a distinctive time and place. In many eras and
34:34locations, the hopes vested by communists in a new culture for a new civilization would prove durable.
34:42How would such hopes fare when contrasted with the realities of everyday life?
34:47And that is the subject of our next lecture.
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