THE FEAST The revolution is a feast. A barbaric feast in which desires for possession and destruction are mixed. The new must be built, and there can be no delays and no compulsion. It is a feast of all or nothing: "What is the objective? To remake everything from the beginning. To make everything new; so that our lying, dirty, dull, ugly life becomes just, clean, gay and beautiful. When ideas such as these, hidden since time began in the hearts of men, in the popular soul, destroy the chains that were paralysing them and hurl themselves into a furious torrent, breaking the dykes, saving what remains of the banks, that is what is called revolution. "(Blok).
At the dawn of the revolution the Bolshevik Party declared through its People's Commissar Lunacharsky: "Obviously the state has no intention of imposing revolutionary ideas or tastes by force on the artists. Such violence would only produce a bogus revolutionary art, for the first quality of true art lies in the sincerity of the artist." He categorically stated: "All creative individuals and groups should be allowed to develop freely." Thus it becomes clear that the intellectual movements did not suffer from the revolution. On the contrary, movements such as the Linguistic Circle of Moscow, the Futurists and the adherents of Proletkult benefited from new. facilities and liberties.
The freedom given to the artistic movements did not prevent the Bolsheviks from expressing their opinions. Those of Lenin concerning the Proletkult are particularly interesting, for they reveal a whole series of problems. Lunacharsky reports in the following terms what Lenin thought of this cultural movement: "There are quite strong divergences between him and me concerning the Proletkult. One day he criticised me very severely. I must say that Vladimir litch did not all deny the importance of the workers' circles, or of the writers and painters who are emerging from the proletariat. But he was afraid that these organisations would tend to concentrate on the creation of a proletarian science, of a general proletarian culture. Lenin thought that this was, first, completely untimely and beyond their forces; second, that these premature inventions would draw the workers away from study, from acquiring what was already known about science or culture; finally he was afraid, not without reason, that some political deviation might appear in the Proletkult. He was hostile for example to the considerable role A. Bogdanov was playing. In some ways the Proletkult was the logical culmination of A. Bogdanov's idealist theories, against which Lenin had fought between 1905 and 1917. The worship of the proletariat Proletkult easily reverses itself into "cult of the proletariat") is perceptible in some of the writings of Lunacharsky. Lenin attacked the content of the Proletkult in these terms: "Away with the invention of a proletarian culture. What we need is the development of the best models, traditions and results of the existing culture from the point of view of the Marxist conception of the world and of the conceptions of the conditions of life and struggle of the proletariat at the time of its dictatorship." But by continuing to use the phrase "proletarian culture", Lenin shows that he is not aware of the ideology implied in the expression itself. Trotsky is more clear-sighted when he says: "The opponents of proletarian culture maintained that the dictatorship of the proletariat is quite definitely transitional; that the proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie, does not intend to dominate for a long historical period." The phrase "proletarian culture" is part of a theoretical system which would involve the eternalisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say of the State.
CONSTRUCTION These criticisms of certain artistic and cultural movements certainly did not mean that the Feast was interrupted. The Bolsheviks destroyed the bourgeois school: "The old school, the official school which you did not like, which you hated and which had not contacts with you, no longer exists." First of •all, they abolished the diplomas, those barriers which in fact endorsed nothing more than social differences. They also abolished a sterile and restrictive institution: the Academy. At the same time they allocated all artistic and educational activities to Lunacharsky's Commissariat, which was given a considerable a "democratically run social and educational commune, a prefiguration of the future classless Republic". In this school the "principle of satisfying all the children's needs by the children themselves" was to be applied. The Russian teachers actively collaborated in creating this new type of school, and recommended that: "the free school should really be free; and it would be free only if it was independent both from bourgeois and from proletarian politics... It should be a school for free and creative human beings." Two official declarations published in 1918 expressed the same general view. Confident in the creativity and natural goodness of children, the educators wanted to have the young generation go through the whole experience of humanity. This gigantic optimism was shared by Krupskaia, Lunacharsky and also by Lenin, who wrote to a scientific populariser: "This is good work! This is an example of the way to educate the ignorant Russian, by beginning at the beginning, and teaching him not a half-science, but science " The structure of the Russian school was to allow, not a half-baked ingurgitation of knowledge, but a "creation" of knowledge.
DEGENERATION In the feasts of the Middle Ages, the clown and the bishop changed places, but for only one day; the next day everything was the same as before. What if, in Russia after 1917, everything was to be the same as before... that followed from the war made the rebuilding of the country necessary. Slowly the Bolshevik Party had taken over the levers of the state. The proletarian dictatorship turned out to be the dictatorship of a party. Yet the task that the Bolsheviks had set themselves to was to turn each worker into the leader of his own revolution: "We have to raise systematically the level of popular culture in order progressively to bring everyone into the common task of government." Cultural backwardness was all the more disturbing as the peasants, now owners of their land, were ecoming a political force which could be use by the counter-revolutionaries. The gap between the vanguard and the peasant masses constituted the weak point of the Russian revolution. Profiting by this weakness, a layer of civil servants could monopolise the key posts of the State apparatus and give birth to an oppressive bureaucracy. From the beginning of the soviet era, the Bolsheviks were preoccupied by this question. For them it was of course the result of "an insufficient culture of the masses, the ignorance and timidity of the backward elements in the towns and especially in the country."
Thus, it was as a result of this practical situation that the Soviet authorities appealed to the intellectuals and the artists. Their tasks were propaganda, political agitation and the education of the masses. Lenin proposed to paint revolutionary slogans on buildings, fences and all places generally used for posters." Art imposed on the artists. In 1908 when the a question of Gorki working for Proletar made clear to Lunacharsky: "If he is occ with important and serious work, and thi would suffer from being interrupted for for the paper, for journalism, it would b foolish and criminal to disturb and distra him!" But after 1917 journalism was no a trifle; its role was considerable. Painter poets became journalists, and waged the ideological and economic battle; Maiako worked on Rosta (the predecessor of Tas urged his colleagues to do likewise, in or inform the workers of the state of the campaign. Some poets, like Essenine, did participate in the work of reconstruction were perhaps regretting the Feast.
The Soviet schools also suffered from consequences of the political and econo situation. Considerable financial efforts made for them, and the number of prim schools increased from 52,274 in 1917/ 62,238 in 1918/19. Through the school masses acquired culture and thus were to able to govern the country and develop productive forces: "Thus, all the produc science and art which were created thro the exploitation of the working class, ar back, return gradually to their real own Lenin, addressing the Presidium of the Conference of the Proletarian Organisat Education and Culture (17th Septembe stated: "The workers have not yet suffi understood, and they are often far too t the question of pushing the workers to over the state for themselves. Fight for comrades! The proletarian organisations education and culture must contribute t But Russian industrial backwardness the Bolsheviks to adopt highly specialis methods of work (Taylorism). It was Le had this policy adopted. He wrote in 19 -The Republic must, at all costs, make the most precious conquests of science technology. We will be able to achieve S only to the extent that we succeed in co the power of the soviets and the soviet of administration with the latest progre capitalism. We must organise the study teaching of Taylor's system in Russia. Session of the Executive Central Comm April 29th, 1918, Lenin's line met with opposition on this point, but still trium His line ran counter to much of the edu system being elaborated in the schools. introduction of these politics in the sch illusion of their becoming immediately communist micro-society vanished: "Du period of the dictatorship of the proleta that is to say during the period when co are being created which will make the c realisation of communism possible, the must be not only a means for propagatir communist principles in general, but als means for the proletariat to spread its educative moral influence." In spite of e thing Lenin attempted to combine the introduction of these school policies an Taylorism with the principle of the scho communist micro-society, and with the the total man. In some notes on Nadejd. Krupskaia's thesis, he said, "We should carpenters... who will know their job we will be able to become skilled workers, have been trained for that, but do it in s way that they will have a broad general and possess a minimum of basic knowle number of sciences...He should be a con he should have access to different skills techniques." The social situation in Rus forced a modification and bending of th principles worked out in the enthusiasm victory. Socialism had to be built slowly the Party must safeguard the interests of people.
END OF THE STORY The Bolshevik Party engaged the Revolu a slippery slope of contradictions which forced it into very dangerous tactics. Th tactics mean that the Party dominates e thing, in particular the schools, and thro schools culture. When the Party degene Culture was reduced to being only the p obverse of bourgeois culture, for acader substitute socialist realism. Original tales were denounced as "formalist". In 1925 Essenine became the first in a line of po committed suicide. In 1926 his exampl followed by Andre M. Sobol, poet and p commissar.
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