Grigorii Riazhskii, Chairwoman of the kolkhoz, 1932

The Philosophical Dictionary published in 1975 by the Political Literature Press in Moscow (editor: M. Rosental) offers the following definition for the artistic genre known as socialist realism: “An artistic method, whose essence is a historically true and concrete reflection of reality, captured in its revolutionary development… A new stage in the artistic growth of humankind. The essence of socialist realism: the truth of life as expressed in artistic images bespeaking a communist worldview.” To this essential definition one may add a concise historical one: the principles underlying this genre were defined and pronounced as binding at the first conference of Soviet writers, which took place in Moscow in 1934; it has since become associated with the notorious secretary of the party’s central committee, Andrei Zhdanov, who was responsible for executing Stalin’s cultural policies.

Even during its apogee (and all the more so today), socialist realism was viewed by the free-opinionated as an inferior genre, which reduces art to the level of vulgar propaganda. Why? The Philosophical Dictionary gladly answers this question, making clear that socialist realism is “a powerful tool for providing people with a communist education.” Above all, socialist realism fulfills a didactic role rather than providing mere entertainment, and as such does away with the term “leisure.” The substitution of ideological values for aesthetic ones naturally leads to a complete politicization of artmaking. Yet unlike traditional political art – such as the protest art that successfully served the Bolsheviks prior to the 1917 revolution – socialist realist art served to disseminate the values of those in power.

Socialist realism is based on distortion rather than on outright lying; at times, moreover, the distorting mirror may reflect the naked truth. It is for this reason that so many socialist realist artworks constitute important historical testimonies concerning the period in which they came into being.

Such art, moreover, strives towards a revolutionary transformation of the human worldview: just as dialectic materialism’s role is to analyze objective reality (as understood by the Marxists), so the principles of Marxism-Leninism in art serve to analyze a fictitious reality. One may even claim that socialist realism transforms creative inspiration into a science: “A historically true and concrete reflection of reality … which enables artists to examine the historical nature of the described phenomena and to properly reflect… not only the present and the past, but also the currents of future social developments.” If artists use the scientific tools offered by socialist realism, according to this statement, they will be able to predict the future. In this manner, Soviet artmaking was transformed into a branch of futurology, which one could describe either as a science or as a form of deception – based on the implicit guideline that life be depicted not as it is, but as it is “supposed” to be.

Vladimirskii, Future Engineer, 1930s

Does socialist realism thus amount to nothing more than a falsehood? The sworn enemies of political art will answer with an adamant “yes.” Popular wisdom, by contrast, treated this berated genre more gently, as is illustrated by the following joke: “There was once a lame king, who was also blind in one eye. This king ordered a painter to paint his portrait, and the painter depicted him as lame and blind in one eye. The king was furious, and ordered him to be executed. And so Realism was born. He called in another painter, who depicted him standing upright on both legs, with two seeing eyes. The king was angered by this distortion of reality, and ordered him to be executed. And so Impressionism was born. He called in a third painter, who painted the king sitting on his horse in profile, so that his lame leg and blind eye remained invisible. The king was satisfied, and ordered the painter to be appropriately rewarded. And so Socialist Realism was born.” Socialist realism is based on distortion rather than on outright lying; at times, moreover, the distorting mirror may reflect the naked truth. It is for this reason that so many socialist realist artworks constitute important historical testimonies concerning the period in which they came into being. A simple method for discovering the truth they embody is a straightforward process of inverting every factual or value-related statement; a more sophisticated method revolves around a thorough examination of these artworks, which involves cracking their ideological armor. The total suffocation of artistic freedom (the Philosophical Dictionary promises artists total freedom in choosing their style, and silently glosses over the question of content) caused socialist realist artists to develop a kind of outright cynicism. The classical examples of socialist realist art are ludicrous by any artistic or aesthetic measure (or ideological measure, one must add, even though the ideological dimension has a threatening aspect.). Indeed, it is hard to believe that they were created innocently; any intelligent viewer inevitably concludes that this twisting of the basic rules of good taste must amount to an intentional form of ridicule, a parody masquerading as the original – what eventually came to be described as “gesturing rudely inside one’s pocket.” Indeed, socialist realism did more to defame the Bolshevik regime than all the Sovietology treatises that slandered it in the West.

Vladimirskii, Roses for Stalin, 1949

From the safe distance of time, I shall now try to play devil’s advocate. First of all, I must counter the dismissive assertion that socialist realism amounts to a diversion from Russian art’s natural course of development, since it seemingly lacks any historical basis. This argument commits the same sin committed by this genre’s inventors: it attributes political traits to an artistic genre (albeit a supposedly artificial one), and thus effaces any possibility of finding artistic value in socialist realist works. In this manner, one may similarly discount the art scene that flourished in Samarkand in the early 15^th century, since it blossomed under the murderous tyranny of Timur-Leng. As a genre that has been in existence for several decades and which has undergone a series of developments, socialist realism cannot be regarded as a merely political phenomenon; its real artistic and historical roots must be examined. The birth of socialist realism was heralded not by Stalin, who had no real understanding of art, but rather by his greatest enemies – Trotskii and Lunacharskii – who were well-educated and sophisticated. Lunacharskii, who was put in charge of Soviet artistic life in the 1920s as the people’s commissar of the arts, was himself a respected playwright and literary critic. Defined by the Philosophical Dictionary as “a natural heir to the most celebrated realist traditions of the past,” socialist realism surely has roots that go deeper than the key literary event of 1934. Zhdanov’s decisive assertion that realism is the preferred artistic genre (an assertion that could be successfully fused with the Marxist principle according to which an analysis of the human condition must be based on existing reality employing the tools of reason) follows directly upon the spirit of conservative, bourgeois pre-revolutionary criticism, which angrily attacked the demonstrative formalism of the Russian avant-garde during the “Silver Age.” This criticism was itself based on the subversive literary realism that had developed during the 19^th century in the masterpieces of Tolstoy, Leskov, Garshin, Turgenev and Chekhov. This was a period during which writers were charged with redeeming the world, and literary and cultural criticism also served as an implicit form of public and political criticism. It is thus impossible to discount the reciprocal relations between Russian formalism and socialist realism – two entirely opposed yet historically adjacent streams of Russian art.

Socialist realism’s artistic contribution may be divided into two parts: works that have real artistic value despite their socialist realist style, and works whose real artistic value is due to their socialist realist style.

Indeed, socialist realism – which champions content and only content – was in its warped way a natural reaction to the feverish pursuit of literary form – a pursuit that was characteristic of the Russian avant-garde in general, and of “left-wing” Futurism and Imaginism in particular. It thus becomes apparent that the genre embodying the moral values of the new revolutionary world amounted to little more than a re-embodiment of respectable Russian conservatism.

Alexander Laktionov, To the New Apartment, 1952

All this said, it is difficult to avoid the rather despondent conclusion that the secondary, aesthetic power of socialist realism is not as ephemeral as its primary political power. Socialist realism’s artistic contribution may be divided into two parts: works that have real artistic value despite their socialist realist style, and works whose real artistic value is due to their socialist realist style. The first category does not concern us here, since it comprises the entire Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, ranging from the poet Mayakovskii to the directors Eisenstein, Vertov and Dovzhenko and to the founder of political photomontage, the Latvian Gustavs Klucis. Brecht, the most important German name in the history of modern theater, is also part of this list, as are somewhat less famous writers such as the French Louis Aragon, the Cuban Nicholas Guillen and the Jewish Alexander Pen. I shall now turn to focus on the second category, which is seemingly impossible: socialist realism that is good by its very definition as such.

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What makes a work of art good? Excluding a profound philosophical debate on this subject, the best general answer that applies, one should hope, to every case is: honesty and talent. In the context of the current discussion, honesty means the faith that art has the power to change reality in accordance with a given ideological paradigm. Since propaganda art must appeal to the masses, this ideological paradigm is naturally simplistic and uncomplicated (this argument touches upon the important distinction between “complicated” and “complex”). The role of such art is to provide the masses with a binary world view, which positions “us” against our “enemies.” Themes concerning the war against past enemies (literary and cinematic epics about the revolution and the Civil War, or about present and future dangers (”world imperialism” and its various derivatives), play a major role in Soviet socialist realism. In addition, many “internal enemies” required the socialist realist hero to go into battle, so that he could strengthen his character and spirit in the course of his quest for the luminous peaks of truth and justice. At a certain point, however, the inventory of enemies available to socialist realist artists simply ran out. With nothing better to feed upon, they turned inwards to examine the human soul, or in the very least focused their attention on the struggle against natural forces (”Virgin Soil Upturned” by Sholokhov, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).

Vera Mukhina, The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, Stalinist period

Only a talented artist could possibly create socialist realist heroes without entirely sacrificing the human depth of the figures on the altar of moral preaching. Such a feat required an elusive magic formula, just like creation itself.

The hero is thus an exemplary new socialist man, an endlessly recurring archetype: “The communist aesthetic ideal is given expression in socialist realist art by means of a new type of positive hero – a laborer struggling to forge a communist society” (Philosophical Dictionary). We thus arrive at socialist realism’s most original contribution to humankind, which amounts to a revolutionary innovation in the art of drama: the conflict between the good and the better. Free or semi-free artists who sought to endow their art with meaningful depth stayed away from the Manichean contrast between “good” and “bad” by endowing all those involved in the dramatic conflict with various negative characteristics typical of humans. The socialist realists, by contrast, endowed their heroes with positive and super-positive characteristics that overshadowed negative or dubious personality traits.

This is the point at which talent enters into the game: only a talented artist could possibly create socialist realist heroes without entirely sacrificing the human depth of the figures on the altar of moral preaching.  Such a feat required an elusive magic formula, just like creation itself. It is for this reason that there exist so few socialist realist works of the second type, which have remained with us over the decades.

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“Socialist realism is based on the following principle: if transforming reality becomes impossible, then it is the perception of reality that must be transformed. ” The Cossacks of Kuban” amounts to changing the perception of the failing kolkhoz.” Yurii Borev, The Twentieth Century in Tales and Jokes, Kharkov, 1996

The Cossacks of Kuban, film poster, 1949

In 1949, the Soviet filmmaker Ivan Pyriev filmed “The Cossacks of Kuban.” This movie, one of the first color films in the Soviet Union, was released one year later, and immediately gained incredible popularity. In 1968, it was restored using new technological means, and was also reedited for the period following the demise of the cult of personality: the portraits of Stalin in the background of every scene were removed or retouched, and several scenes that were no longer politically appropriate were cut. To this day, traces of the editing process are clearly visible in the middle of several scenes in Pyriev’s film, which is repeatedly screened even in our post-Soviet era.

The period during which “The Cossacks of Kuban” was created was one of both optimism and distress. Four year after the end of World War II, the Soviet economy still lay in shambles (with the exception of the heavy industry, of course). Alternating draughts and heavy winter frosts put entire kolkhozes and cities in danger of real hunger. From a cultural perspective, this was the “Iron Age” of Russian art, whose repression by means of socialist realism was vigorously renewed for fear that civil allegiance would be undermined by the purifying victory over fascism and the Red Army’s presence in Europe. Under these circumstances, the masses were in need of an entertaining vision that would replace their bread of affliction with a hope that happiness was already on the horizon. “The Cossacks of Kuban” was the perfect answer to this human (rather than ideological) need, and it is thus a true masterpiece: characterized by innocent honesty, it is perhaps the quintessential example of an excellent artwork forged out of socialist realist materials.

Pyriev’s film belongs to the genre known as lyric or romantic comedy, even though it could also be defined as a musical comedy – thanks to the wonderful songs written for it by one of the most important socialist realist poets, Mikhail Isakovskii. Its narrative revolves around two parallel love stories – one between two workers in two competing kolkhozes, the other between the chairmen of those two same kolkhozes. When the happy farmers and workers gather at the annual agricultural fair, which is overflowing with produce (the film was shot on the richest kolkhoz in southern Russia, and the Soviet Ministry of Culture also made a generous contribution), these love interests resurge and threaten to undermine the healthy socialist relations between the two kolkhozes. Several dramatic conflicts unfold simultaneously: between the kolkhozes themselves, between the lovers, and between the two love stories: the young Dasha, who is in love with Nikolai from the neighboring kolkhoz, is the best worker on her own kolkhoz. Its chairman, Gordei Voron, is unwilling to give her up for the sake of the competing kolkhoz and of his secret love object, Galina Ermolayevna Peresvetova. Only a tormented love confession made by the latter (after he has already despaired of her love) rights all wrongs. The movie ends with a convoy of cars driving through the abundant fields of Kuban. When the two newly married couples emerge from the vehicles, we understand that the two kolkhozes have united, to everyone’s great joy. And they lived happily ever after.

Yurii Lyubimov, who later founded the famous Theater on the Taganka. Years afterwards, he recounted that in the midst of filming “The Cossacks of Kuban,” he was approached by an old woman from one of the surrounding hunger stricken kolkhozes, who asked him what the film was about. When he told her, somewhat embarrassed, it was about her own life, the life of a kolkhoz, she scolded him for lying

There are no outright enemies here. Only once, in conversation with Nikolai, does Dasha speak of the hardships of war and trials of nature suffered by her and her comrades at the kolkhoz, earning the “hero of the socialist labor” medal. With glistening eyes, she tells him of her trip to Moscow, the city of lights. This, then, is the unique socialist realist conflict between the good and the better: the role of “the good” is fulfilled by Voron: he is a handsome Cossack in charge of a flourishing kolkhoz, and has plenty of decorations of his own. Yet he is easily angered and impatient (this is an age-old dramatic-psychological trick, which conceals a “heart of gold” under a tough appearance), and is oblivious of the emotions experienced by his rival-lover, Galina Ermolayevna. She, by contrast, is the height of perfection. In the words of one of the workers on her kolkhoz, “Oh, how good our chairwoman is! How good!” This love story, which remains unrealized until the very end of the film, creates a psychological drama that parallels the dramatic unfolding of the film itself, as its protagonists undergo a journey of self-discovery and education. Indeed, this is one of the great features of “The Cossacks of Kuban.”

From a visual perspective, this is a stunningly produced film. Colorful mass scenes are combined with lyrical and intimate ones, and the songs that accompany the film gained an independent life of their own, and even became part of folklore: “Just as you were / still you are / eagle of the steppes, carousing Cossack,” Galina Ermolayevna sings the film’s most famous song in her tremulous voice to her lover Voron as he gallops away on his horse. The plot is accelerated and somewhat complicated thanks to the action of several secondary figures, who devise various ruses in the style of Renaissance comedy in order to bring the lovers together. One of these characters was played by Yurii Lyubimov, who later founded the famous Theater on the Taganka. Years afterwards, he recounted that in the midst of filming “The Cossacks of Kuban,” he was approached by an old woman from one of the surrounding hunger stricken kolkhozes, who asked him what the film was about. When he told her, somewhat embarrassed, it was about her own life, the life of a kolkhoz, she scolded him for lying: so fantastic was the distance between life on a kolkhoz in the late 1940s and the colorful utopia of happiness in “The Cossacks of Kuban.”

Monument commemorating the 40th anniversary of the victory over Germany in World War II, Riga, 1985

Unlike socialist realist literature or cinema, which presume a certain degree of active interest on the part of the audience, socialist realist sculpture and architecture require a passive audience.

Any visitor to Riga who leaves the Latvian capital’s old city and crosses the Stone Bridge leading to Victory Boulevard on the opposite bank of the Daugava river, will come upon a unique sculptural vision rising on the horizon: the monument commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the victory over Germany in World War II. This sculpture, which was erected in 1985, is located at the center of Victory Park, and is a central visual milestone on this bank of the river, at the heart of the surrounding urban fabric.

Unlike socialist realist literature or cinema, which presume a certain degree of active interest on the part of the audience, socialist realist sculpture and architecture require a passive audience. As public acts of artistic coercion, they celebrate a limited range of emotions and values, and are usually nothing more than pompous and solemn constructions. Indeed, this form of public art is an additional tool of ideological oppression common under the regimes that promoted socialist realism, and its stone and metal represent the rigidity of a regime based on ideological tyranny.

The relationship of such art to the surrounding built environment is thus usually violent and even destructive. One such quintessential example is the string of high-rises built at the heart of Moscow towards the end of Stalin’s rule, and which led to the effacement of countless streets and small houses that contributed to the unique appearance of the old Moscow. The Stalinist zeal to transform the human environment extended even to the natural world: the creation of the largest water reservoir in the world, the Rybinsk reservoir, required submerging the ancient Russian city Mologa; similarly, the project of channeling water to the deserts of Uzbekistan destroyed the Aral Sea. This series of ecological and architectural disasters, which have yet to be overturned, are a lasting legacy of the Soviet regime. In this context, the victory monument in Riga, a city severely damaged by the socialist realist building project, is a positive surprise. For many years, the area in which Victory Park was created was an “unexploited” tract of land at the center of the city; local leaders were anxious to use its grassy soil to commemorate the socialist transformation of the capital of Soviet Latvia. The construction of a victory monument in this particular spot, moreover, had a certain historical logic: in February 1946, key Nazi functionaries in the Eastern Baltics were executed at this site. The establishment of this memorial required determining both the visual and aesthetic appearance of the sculpture itself, and its relation to the surrounding urban environment.

The memorial has few aesthetically pleasing qualities: two sculptural groups representing the imprisoned homeland and the liberating Red Army flank a cluster of marble columns, which form a pentagonal star (it was popularly nicknamed “the thermometer”). Before the project was approved by the various artistic and ideological committees, it was subject to the examination of the censor: the original model contained a female figure representing the motherland and holding an infant in her arms; the infant, however, was removed for fear of the image’s religious associations (which might have solicited some sympathy from the public). To this day, the motherland stands with empty hands.

The question of the sculpture’s relationship to its environment, by contrast, was optimally resolved. Since the monument is located at the center of the park, there was no need to destroy vast built-up areas in order to clear a space for it. Moreover, the surrounding area has remained devoted to leisure and recreational activities and to public gatherings (at present, it is used for pro-communist and pro-Russian demonstrations against the Latvian government; the memorial’s status as the last monument created in Latvia by the Soviet regime undoubtedly imbues this site with a unique political flavor). The tall columns visible from a distance form a successful perspectival arrangement, especially when seen from the direction of the Stone Bridge: the viewer descending from the bridge to Victory Boulevard perceives the monument straight ahead, centered between the two rows of houses lining the boulevard, as if crowning the perspectival thrust of this large traffic artery. Those walking down the boulevard towards the monument thus symbolically reenact the long journey undertaken by the Red Army en route to the hoped-for act of liberation.

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“Why are you laughing, reader? What is all this unbridled laughter about, I’m asking you? Do you know what it smells of? … You won’t reply?! Well then, we will have to solicit an answer by different measures!” From a parody on the socialist realist novel of the obscure writer Vsevolod Kochetov, “What Do You Want?”, by S. Smirnov

Riga's central train station, an example of socialist realist architecture

The Red Latvian Riflemen Museum at the entrance to the old city of Riga