The Cultural Front : : Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia / / Sheila Fitzpatrick.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Fitzpatrick, Sheila,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©1992
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in Soviet history and society
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.)

When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom?In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor.The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Spelling -- Glossary -- CHAPTER 1. Introduction: On Power and Culture -- CHAPTER 2. The Bolsheviks' Dilemma: The Class Issue in Party Politics and Culture -- CHAPTER 3. Professors and Soviet Power -- CHAPTER 4. Sex and Revolution -- CHAPTER 5. The Soft Line on Culture and Its Enemies -- CHAPTER 6. Cultural Revolution as Class War -- CHAPTER 7. Stalin and the Making of a New Elite -- CHAPTER 8. The Lady Macbeth Affair: Shostakovich and the Soviet Puritans -- CHAPTER 9. Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste -- CHAPTER 10. Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin -- Index