Music
for the Revolution
by Amy Nelson
Introduction
In 1918 Vladimir Lenin offered the writer Maxim Gorky a chilling assessment of the need for violent revolution by paying homage to the power of classical music:
I know nothing which is greater than the Appassionata; I would like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous, superhuman music. I always think with pride—perhaps it is naïve of me—what marvelous things human beings can do! . . . But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. H’m, h’m, our duty is infernally hard!
While this oft-cited quotation provides ample illustration of Lenin’s ruthlessness and willingness to use any means to achieve his party’s revolutionary ends, it also illuminates the complexities of the subject of this book. Lenin’s fear that Beethoven might temper the militancy of the professional revolutionary reflected his regard for the powerful emotional impact of music as well as his appreciation of the sublime beauty of a piano sonata, and, by extension, his regard for the legacy of “bourgeois culture.”
These attitudes would heavily influence the fate of music and musicians in the early Soviet period—in part because they were shared (if not always acknowledged) by musicians and revolutionaries alike. Also telling is the way Lenin juxtaposes the power of music—a force he finds compelling but ineffable—and revolutionary violence, the potential of which he grasps perfectly. Both kinds of power were instrumental in the early Soviet period, although the coercive dimensions of Soviet Communism have received far more attention than the ways in which both musicians and Bolsheviks sought to exploit the emotional impact of music.
By examining the first fifteen years of Soviet rule through the prism of music and the activities of musicians, this book offers a perspective on the contours and fate of the Bolshevik revolution that highlights the complexities of the interactions between musicians, politicians, and ideologies. Certainly Lenin’s Party-state was very willing to “hit them on the head,” and scholars have rightly emphasized the role of repression and censorship in all areas of Soviet artistic and intellectual life. But the development of musical life after 1917 was more complicated than simply a “taming of the arts.”
The development of a distinctly “Soviet” musical culture in the twenties and early thirties was guided in many ways by the imperative for cultural transformation that was implicit in the Bolsheviks’ political revolution. For as a complement to political and economic restructuring the Bolsheviks also embraced a “civilizing mission” intended to nurture new, socialist attitudes and habits as well as cultural forms that would have broad appeal and reflect the new way of life. As in other areas of artistic endeavor, many attempts to fashion a “socialist” musical culture involved efforts to overcome the divide between elite and popular cultures either by democratizing the “high culture” of the prerevolutionary era or by cultivating new forms of artistic expression. In fact, this study shows how reformers’ underlying assumptions and their interactions with their audiences largely determined the fate of these projects.
Although the Bolsheviks consistently displayed their willingness to achieve political and economic objectives with force, persuasion and the accommodation of popular preferences were critical in the battle for the people’s hearts and minds, a battle that Lenin and his followers knew they must win if the revolution was to succeed. Accommodation and concession proved to be especially important where music was concerned because of the peculiar qualities of musical creativity. Like writers and artists, musicians such as Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev indeed felt the Party’s interventions in cultural life and the ravages of censorship. But as recent studies of film, theater, architecture, youth culture, and religion have shown, there were often major contradictions between the Party’s conception of policy and its implementation. The responses of musicians (and their audiences) to the project of formulating a “new” musical culture were extraordinarily complex. Exploring the collaborative means by which musical life developed in the early Soviet period reveals the extent to which Soviet culture represented an amalgam of sometimes divergent, but often overlapping, agendas.
The unique qualities of music and musical creativity would be critically important in determining the future of musical life after 1917. Lenin’s awe for music’s appeal to the emotions and his conviction that this influence could not be countered rationally, but neutralized only with silence, points both to the power of musical expression and to the difficulties of identifying the “content” of music—as opposed to, say, that of literature and the visual arts. It was widely recognized that music did mean something; however, its abstract, nonrepresentational character made that meaning extraordinarily difficult to pin down. In a time when the ideological implications of all artistic forms were subject to fierce debate and intense scrutiny, efforts to identify and create appropriate “music for the revolution” constantly ran up against the intractable difficulties of specifying its content. Musicians, then, were presented with unique challenges and choices.
Music’s “abstractness” also meant that it received much less attention (and intervention) from the authorities than areas of artistic endeavor in which political messages were more transparent. While Lenin called film “our most important art,” and Stalin would designate writers as “engineers of the human soul,” musicians were often castigated for their “backwardness.” Throughout the twenties, Party officials and other cultural militants lamented that music and musical life seemed only superficially changed by the revolution. But the low political priority the Party assigned to music also meant that musicians had considerable latitude in regulating their affairs. Their claims to expertise and authority in matters concerning their art were respected in much the same way that the Party respected scientists’ assertions that only they could understand and regulate their research agendas. This combination of official neglect and respect for professional expertise meant that musicians were more successful than other artistic groups in promoting their own aesthetic platforms and regulating cultural production and consumption. Although most of them would deny it, musicians themselves assumed a prominent role in the “Sovietization” of musical life.
While the early Soviet musical community displayed considerable aesthetic and political diversity, the challenge of building a new musical culture worked itself out at the hands of musicians who shared assumptions about the nature of musical creativity, the elevating potential of art, and the place of popular culture. In the many issues that dominated musical life in the twenties—from debates about the objectives of conservatory training to efforts to change the musical sensibilities of Russia’s masses and campaigns to promote modern music and secure the legacy of the classical tradition—prerevolutionary concerns and dynamics played a prominent role. As Lenin’s musings to Gorky suggest, 1917 was a radical turning point defined by violence, destruction, and visions of a brave new world. But prerevolutionary cultural traditions, creative elites, and political dynamics had a profound impact on that new world order.
The dawn of the twentieth century found the Russian autocracy among the most politically antiquated regimes in Europe. Tsar Nicholas II—a devoted family man with little interest in the craft of governing—ruled from an exaggerated but sincere sense of duty to God, country, and the office for which he had been destined by birth. Though he promoted the economic modernization that would ensure Russia’s position as a great European power, the last tsar rejected initiatives from his advisors and subjects that would have diluted his autocratic authority, calling them “senseless dreams.” State-sponsored industrialization programs in the late nineteenth century, however, stimulated urbanization and the emergence of an industrial working class. Although Russian workers retained economic and familial ties to peasant village communities and the Russian countryside, they also supported the same kinds of socialist and other radical political ideologies embraced by workers in the West. With urban and economic development also came social diversification, as the ranks of professionals and other “middling” orders increased. In the face of the incremental but steady evolution of Russia’s public sphere, the tsar held steadfastly to his suspicion of any form of independent civic organization—which only highlighted the obsolescence of the autocracy and the extent to which the country’s political system stood ever more at odds with the aspirations and interests of its society.
The social challenges and political tensions of late Imperial Russia extended to cultural and artistic expression as well. At the turn of the century, the Russian school of music composition—embodied in the works of the “Mighty Five” (Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, César Cui, Modest Musorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) and Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–93), Russia’s first professional composer of international repute—confronted new influences from the West, particularly the radical modernism of Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg and the musical impressionism of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. Although guardians of specifically “Russian” traditions held the majority of conservatory posts, and were most prominently represented by the aging Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) in St. Petersburg and by Sergei Taneev (1865–1915) in Moscow, the orbit of impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s World of Art (mir iskusstva) circle attracted musicians interested in current trends from the West. In both St. Petersburg and Moscow, “Evenings of Contemporary Music” introduced Russians to modern music from the West and to the compositions of Russia’s own radicals, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).
In poetry and literature, religious and metaphysical perspectives marked the brilliant creativity of what became known as the Silver Age, while iconoclasm and rebellion fueled a stunning burst of innovation in painting and other visual arts. Composers such as Nikolai Roslavets (1881–1944) and Arthur Lourié (Lur’e, 1892–1966) heeded the futurist summons to defy artistic conventions and mock the sensibilities of traditional audiences. At the same time, Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915), a visionary egomaniac entranced by the occult, composed music he hoped would realize the symbolists’ hopes for an art that would not only transform the world, but transcend it. Many painters and poets appropriated musical terms such as “sonata” and “symphony” to describe compositions that were fluid, synthetic, or inscrutably abstract, yet the avant-garde in music was less iconoclastic than in these other arts.
Due in part, perhaps, to the relative conservatism of Russian art music at the turn of the century, Russia’s educated classes remained staunchly devoted to the elite creativity cultivated in the conservatories and concert halls. At the same time, popular music reflected the increasing complexity of Russia’s modernizing society and economy, incorporating foreign as well as indigenous influences.
The emergence of short, rhymed ditties called chastushki accompanied the growth of working-class neighborhoods in the empire’s cities, as did the development of other song genres popular among peddlers, migrant workers, and criminals. The spread of the phonograph and inexpensive sheet music facilitated the dissemination of the “gypsy genre” (tsyganshchina), a kind of melodramatic, often frankly sensual song distantly related to both a more elite old Russian sentimental song called the salon romance and the authentic songs of gypsies. The proliferation of cafes, restaurants, and variety theaters provided additional venues for musical entertainment, as did the arrival of movie houses, where pianists or small instrumental ensembles offered live accompaniment for silent films.
A craze for new Western dance music initially infected Russia’s social elite, who found ragtime, the cakewalk, and the fox-trot liberating alternatives to the formality of ballroom dancing and its traditional music. The new dance mania also meshed with challenges to convention and traditional values: women and youth embraced the rebelliousness and sensuality of the music and the dance. Passion for the erotic and exotic peaked with the arrival of the tango, whose hypnotic, stylized movements prompted scandal and public debate, and were easily adapted to tragic and even criminal narratives in “Apache” dances and “Tangos of Death.”
Traditional peasant culture and music provided inspiration for new kinds of urban entertainment, just as they informed the work of Russia’s musical classicists such as Rimsky-Korsakov and modernists such as Stravinsky. Capitalizing on sentimental stereotypes of the peasantry, national pride, and nostalgia for an idealized, bucolic past, Vasilii Andreev’s (1861–1918) huge balalaika “orchestra” performed lush harmonizations of folk songs and classics for attentive urban audiences, while Mitrofan Piatnitsky’s (1864–1927) song and dance ensemble featured more authentic renditions of traditional songs and epic poems (byliny) as well as laments by actual peasant singers.
If the diversity and vibrancy of Russia’s musical life were fueled by the interests and aspirations of a rapidly changing society, they also reflected the growing tensions between that society and a regime intent on avoiding political reform. These tensions burst into the open in 1905, as the autocracy struggled to manage a humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. Mounting pressure from both an increasingly coherent liberal movement and worker-supported revolutionary groups culminated in revolution after troops guarding the Winter Palace gunned down unarmed demonstrators on what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Faced with widespread rebellion in the countryside, debilitating strikes in the cities, and liberal professionals’ demands for civil and religious liberties, Nicholas II drafted the “October Manifesto” that provided Russia with a rudimentary, if severely circumscribed, constitutional order. Although the tsar retained his designation as autocrat, the establishment of a national legislative body and the nominal commitment to a rule of law served temporarily to appease liberal and other moderate reformers, thus dividing the forces of the revolutionary movement. For the next decade, Russian constitutionalism relied on a tenuous alliance between the crown and conservative elements in parliament, while the tsar’s advisors attempted to deal with economic stagnation and political radicalism in the countryside by repressing rebels and promoting reforms designed to transform the communally-oriented peasantry into freeholding farmers. Naked force also kept the aspirations of the labor movement in check, although repression only enhanced the appeal of insurrectionary political parties—such as the Bolsheviks—to workers.
As would be true later, in the Soviet period, musicians did not take a particularly active role in politics during these chaotic years. Indeed, most felt that the transcendent nature of their creative work divorced them from the political realm. Yet many identified with the reform agenda of the liberal movement, and conservatory professors who chafed under the heavy-handed administration of the Imperial Russian Musical Society lobbied with increasing vehemence for more institutional and professional autonomy. Faculty at both the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories signed open letters denouncing the Bloody Sunday massacre and calling for basic democratic reforms and an easing of censorship. Rimsky-Korsakov was dismissed from his post for endorsing the demands of striking students, and several of his colleagues resigned in protest. He returned only when the conservatories were granted limited autonomy and had chosen two of his star pupils, Aleksandr Glazunov (1865–1936) and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859–1935), as their first elected directors. Steeped in the traditions of Russian classicism and respected by their peers, these men would guide the conservatories through turbulent years of war, revolution, and the transition to Soviet rule. Along with their students, such as Aleksandr Gol’denveizer (1875–1961) and Konstantin Igumnov (1873–1948), they made up the generational cohort that would shape the course of musical life in the twenties.
In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, many musicians devoted themselves to popular music education activities, the most significant of which was the People’s Conservatory organized by Sergei Taneev and other prominent Moscow musicians. Inspired by the model of the Free Music School of the 1860s, the People’s Conservatory offered courses in choral singing and elementary music theory to white-collar employees, factory workers, and university students. Like many popular educational initiatives that emerged in this period, the People’s Conservatory continued a long-standing tradition of the intelligentsia that called on the privileged to repay their debt to society by promoting the education and “enlightenment” (prosveshchenie) of the people (narod). This tradition, as well as distinctive Russian attitudes about the moral imperatives of art, dovetailed both with the reform agenda of the liberal movement, which considered education a vehicle for the democratization of society, and with the broader ethos of “culturalism,” a commitment to the cultural development and cultural unity of the nation. Although activists in the adult education movement condemned the inequities and oppression created by the political system, most did not consider venues such as the People’s Conservatory appropriate arenas for political agitation. Rather, they believed in the power of classical literature and music to improve the individual and transform society as a whole. This commitment to the transformative powers of art would persist across the revolutionary divide, informing a number of agendas affecting music.
The eve of World War I thus found Russian musical society and culture with expanding aesthetic horizons, and grappling with a number of issues that would remain prominent after 1917. These included the tension between advocates of progressive, internationally-oriented modernism and supporters of the classic traditions of the Russian school, as well as concerns about the commercialism, vulgarity, and increasing prominence of urban popular music. Intellectuals, religious officials, revolutionaries, and practitioners of classical music all lamented what they perceived as the degenerative influence of tsyganshchina—the “gypsy genre”—and jazz. Even the “folklorism” promoted by Andreev and Piatnitsky attracted criticism from purists who objected to the “corruption” of pristine folk music and from those who opposed efforts to romanticize the primitiveness of Russian peasant life. Some of these critical voices would be lost in the political upheaval of 1917, but others would find an opportunity to act on their objections in the name of creating a socialist culture. The revolution would also ensure that matters of professional and creative identity, particularly questions of academic freedom and the place of the artist in society, would mark the struggles of the early Soviet period.
Historians disagree about the long-term prospects for the survival and evolution of Russia’s constitutional order in the absence of a multinational armed conflict, but clearly World War I presented an already precariously balanced polity with staggering challenges. Although “war fever” initially minimized the tensions between state and society, the unity between tsar and people and patriotic support for the war quickly dissipated when what had been envisioned as a limited engagement on foreign territory became a struggle for national survival. The tsar’s personal authority eroded under the scandals precipitated by the dissolute Rasputin, whose ability to mitigate the hemophilia of the tsar’s son secured his position as advisor to the royal family. Nicholas’s decision to assume personal command over the floundering war effort and his steadfast reluctance to accept the counsel of well-intentioned economic and social leaders further undermined his tenuous claims to political leadership.
Bread riots in the capital on February 23, 1917, ignited the first spark in a wave of strikes and civil protests that brought down the dynasty eight days later. For the next eight months the Provisional Government struggled to establish itself as a legitimate political authority, address long-standing social and economic grievances, and revive the stalled war effort. Failure on all of these fronts enabled the Bolsheviks to come to power in October 1917 on a deceptively simple platform of “bread, land, and peace.” Delivering on these promises after the October Revolution proved difficult, as Lenin’s government had to focus initially on extricating itself from the war, fending off counterrevolution, and consolidating its authority as the dictatorship of a proletariat not yet large or politically mature enough to govern itself. But behind the rhetoric of class struggle, building socialism, and redistributing wealth stood a vision of a new way of life that required cultural transformation of the broadest kind, a vision for a new consciousness shaped as much by education and technology as by political indoctrination.
Culture—in the anthropological sense as well as in the sense of artistic creativity and higher learning—would be central to this new way of life. But the Bolsheviks’ vision was complex and contested. After an initial period of confusion, the new regime’s attitudes toward the prerevolutionary intelligentsia developed along contradictory lines. They were marked, on the one hand, by the desire to control and eventually replace old elites; on the other, they were tempered by a need for the technical expertise necessary to run a vast uneducated country and an appreciation of the cultural capital represented by “specialists” such as scientists, engineers, and accountants, as well as artists, writers, and musicians. The pragmatism underpinning this tension reflected the magnitude of the larger cultural agenda, which called for the creation of a new “Soviet man.” Although they knew that this would take time, the Bolsheviks firmly believed that the liberating potential of the revolution would only be achieved with the evolution of a new level of consciousness that involved changes in everything from morality, hygiene, and forms of personal address to education, the use of technology, and new modes of artistic expression. Ultimately, music—and musicians—figured more prominently in various components of the revolutionary project than one might suspect.
What follows gives a new inflection to a largely overlooked story. Chapter 1 begins by considering the initial impact of the October Revolution on musical life and musicians’ formative experiences with Soviet power. Despite the turbulence and hardships of the revolution and ensuing Civil War, many musicians embraced the revolution’s challenge to democratize “high culture”—often in the tradition of the prerevolutionary adult education movement, but sometimes through projects that were more utopian or iconoclastic. Like those of other educated elites, musicians’ early interactions with Russia’s new rulers were marked by mutual antipathy and suspicion. However, it quickly became apparent that the Party did not assign the same ideological significance to music that it did to literature, or consider the support of musicians as critical to the national welfare as that of scientists and engineers. This meant that musicians would enjoy more latitude in regulating their affairs and that radical groups would receive less encouragement “from above” than was true in other arenas.
The bulk of this book deals with developments during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1921–28), when official policies of accommodating the old intelligentsia and supporting artistic pluralism accompanied economic programs favoring limited capitalism and the gradual development of socialist modes of production. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the constituencies and agendas of the two groups whose debates in the musical press have most influenced scholarly assessments of early Soviet music: the proponents of “contemporary” music and the champions of “proletarian musical culture.”
Because much of the “modern” music of the early Soviet period was proscribed from the thirties to the late eighties, it has been eagerly rehabilitated in both Russia and the West since the advent of the glasnost’ era. Western observers traditionally have seen the twenties as a time of factional struggle between a noble, but doomed, “avant-garde” and the zealous proponents of “proletarian culture.” Yet the politics of the supporters of contemporary music remain largely unexamined, while the difficulties the modernists encountered in promoting “new” music are often mistakenly blamed on their opponents on the musical Left. These advocates of proletarian musical culture were in fact more diverse and marginalized than their reputation as Party-backed “hacks” and proponents of “vulgarized Marxist aesthetics” suggests.
The exploration of the Left’s efforts to transform popular musical culture in Chapter 4 highlights the difficulties in changing cultural perceptions, such as musical taste, inherent in reformist campaigns and the persistence of prerevolutionary attitudes toward urban popular culture within the rubric of Marxist ideology. The Left’s attempts to overcome the divide between elite and popular music foundered on both an unacknowledged elitism and an inability to offer appealing alternatives for popular songs—including tsyganshchina, which were stigmatized as banal and petit bourgeois. But from the efforts to identify appropriately “Soviet” forms of musical expression emerged the concept of the “mass song”—the catchy, often heroic or patriotic, upbeat tunes such as “Song of the Motherland”—which would become the mainstay of popular musical culture in the thirties.
The bureaucratization of Soviet cultural life is often cited as a primary component of the regime’s efforts to regulate artistic production and consumption; however, little attention has been devoted to the actual working of various administrative agencies. Chapter 5 shows how the evolution of official musical policy depended heavily on the musicians who staffed the agencies charged with the administration of musical institutions and resources. With few exceptions, these individuals were well-respected, middle-aged, professional men such as Aleksandr Gol’denveizer and Lev Tseitlin (1881–1952), who held faculty appointments at one of the conservatories or directed a major performance ensemble in addition to their positions in the government bureaucracy. They rejected efforts to assign ideological significance to musical creativity, but, as in the prerevolutionary period, they felt obligated to make Russia’s cultural heritage, including classical music, accessible to previously disenfranchised groups. Ironically, the archival records of these agencies indicate that musicians who were trying to advance their own aesthetic platforms—and, in most cases, defend the autonomy of their profession and their art—actually assisted in the creation of the official Soviet aesthetic and the regulatory apparatus that enforced it.
The collaborative means by which musicians responded to and sometimes co-opted broader political agendas is similarly in evidence in music education. Chapter 6 examines the intense struggles between faculty, students, and bureaucrats over the objectives of conservatory training and the efforts to democratize access to a type of artistic education that required both talent and lengthy presecondary training. Although cultural radicals saw modest gains in the numbers of workers and peasants who entered the conservatories, efforts to renegotiate the basic mission of the institution and the prestige attached to different kinds of musical specialties were terribly ineffective. As was true before the revolution, most aspiring musicians dreamed of fame as concert pianists or virtuoso violinists, and ability and skill remained far more essential to realizing those dreams than ideology or social origin.
Chapter 7 focuses on the music of 1927. The coincidence of the centennial of Beethoven’s death and the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution marked the coalescence of various trends within the musical community, even as changes in the country’s domestic and international political situation foreshadowed a shift in cultural and economic policies. The polarized critical response to pieces commemorating the 1917 revolution highlighted the ongoing confusion and dissent over what “music for the revolution” should be about, even as the embrace of bourgeois, Germanic Beethoven as the musical patron saint of the proletarian Russian revolution suggested that preferences for traditional aesthetics and “accessibility” would be central to whatever codes were established.
An assessment of the ambiguities of the Cultural Revolution that accompanied Stalin’s forced collectivization of the peasantry and the industrialization drives of 1928–32 concludes the book. As in other areas, the Cultural Revolution in music consisted of officially sponsored attacks on “bourgeois specialists,” crude efforts to theorize all dimensions of artistic endeavor in Marxist terms, and the subordination of all creative agendas to the regime’s demand for popular mobilization in support of the collectivization and industrialization drives. But although it was marked by the same militaristic rhetoric of renewed class struggle seen across the spectrum of artistic and intellectual life in this period, the Cultural Revolution in music proved to be a largely ephemeral affair. As the waves of radicalism receded in the early thirties, a set of musical aesthetics and institutional practices emerged that bore clear debts to the previous decade’s struggles to change musical taste, identify accessible musical forms, and define the place of music and musicians in a socialist society. The musical culture of Stalinism involved far more than official patronage and arbitrary censorship: It reflected many of the agendas and values of the musical community itself.
Chapter 1: Bread, Art, and Soviet Power
Musicians in Revolution and Civil War
—Arthur Lourié
Drums with boathooks from windows dash.
Smash drums and pianos to smithereens,
let there be thunder—
—Vladimir Mayakovsky
By the fall of 1917 the pressures of World War I and political
unrest had thrown much of Russian musical life into disarray.
Concert halls had been converted to military hospitals,
while Sergei Koussevitzky’s (1874–1951) orchestra
folded after more than half of its members were drafted.
Anti-German sentiment led to a virtual ban on performing
Wagner, Beethoven, and other German composers. Alexander
Scriabin, who initially welcomed the war’s potential
for a “spiritual renewal,” died in the first
spring of the conflict, leaving behind an unfinished score
for a musical Mysterium he hoped would usher in the end
of the material world.
Yet on the night of October 25, musical and theatrical performances in Petrograd proceeded without interruption as the Bolsheviks mounted their assault on the tsar’s Winter Palace. In the memoir literature, a certain lore evolved around these events that stressed the apparent remoteness of musical life from the revolutionary upheaval. A decade after the fact, the great bass Feodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) proudly recalled that the shocks of the battleship Aurora’s cannon fire only briefly disrupted his performance of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Narodnyi Dom, while conductor Nikolai Malko (1883–1961) emphasized in his memoirs that not a single performance was cancelled due to the Bolshevik takeover.
These events and the mystique that surrounds them are both telling and misleading. Western historians have often cited the theaters’ uninterrupted routine to accentuate the relative bloodlessness of the Bolshevik coup and to counter the Soviet mythology of the revolution as a mass uprising. Chaliapin’s and Malko’s testimonies are also revealing because they highlight musicians’ perception of the transcendent nature of art, and their insistence that the realm of art is above, if not divorced from, political struggles, even revolutionary ones.
But the memoir lore about October 1917 obscures the complicated, often intense relationship that music and musicians would have with the revolution and its legacy. On the one hand, the development of musical life in the first fifteen years of Soviet rule reflected assumptions about the autonomous nature of musical creativity or its remoteness from everyday life, assumptions held not just by many musicians, but by some of Russia’s new rulers as well. On the other hand, the prerevolutionary intelligentsia’s concern with developing the cultural sensibilities of the nation’s toiling masses as a remedy for “backwardness” would support and even co-opt the Bolsheviks’ evolving agenda for cultural transformation. Where music was concerned, that agenda reflected complex, often contradictory attitudes: The scorn many revolutionaries displayed for the culture of the former ruling elite was balanced by the commitment of others who wanted to make the cultural legacy of the past accessible to the proletariat. The Bolsheviks’ perception of music as a creative form that had few overt political implications combined with an interest in utilizing the emotional appeal of music in general and the mobilizing potential of songs in particular.
Chaliapin’s and Malko’s recollections also gloss over the antipathy the Bolsheviks encountered among educated Russians once they came to power. Although Soviet scholars carefully noted that members of “the progressive artistic intelligentsia” supported the revolution, most musicians, as well as other artists and academics, were at least mistrustful of, if not overtly hostile to, the new Bolshevik regime. During the first years of Soviet rule, many of the nation’s leading musical lights would leave for the West. The émigrés included composers such as the romantic virtuoso Niklolai Medtner (Metner, 1879–1951), the distinguished composer of sacred music Aleksandr Grechaninov (1864–1956), and George Gershwin’s future teacher, Joseph Schillinger (Iosif Shillinger, 1895–1943), as well as a number of younger performers who would have brilliant careers in the West. Among the latter were violinist Jascha Heifetz (1900–1987), pianist Vladimir Horowitz (1903–89), and cellist Gregor Piatagorsky (1903–76), as well as Isai Dobrovein (1891–1953), the pianist whose rendition of the Appassionata prompted Lenin’s musings on the seductive potential of the aesthetic experience. Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff, who already had established international reputations and connections in the West, would make permanent homes abroad where their archly anti-Bolshevik sympathies could be freely vented. Sergei Prokofiev later recalled that Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), the Bolsheviks’ point man for cultural affairs, encouraged him to stay: “You are a revolutionary in music as we are in life. We should work together. But if you want to go to America, I will not stand in your way.” Prokofiev left for the United States in May, 1918, in search of more hospitable conditions for his performance career. He would not become a Soviet citizen until the early thirties.
Most musicians did stay, however, and some who would eventually leave, including Chaliapin and Koussevitzky, initially took an active part in the musical life of the fledgling Soviet state. In these early years, Lenin’s government was preoccupied with the military challenges, economic hardships, and political fallout of the Civil War, which began in May 1918, soon after Russia’s withdrawal from World War I. For nearly three years, the Bolsheviks battled an array of restorationist and anti-Communist forces, including monarchists, foreign interventionists, peasant rebels, and anarchists. With the regime’s survival at stake, cultural matters were a relatively low priority. Where music was concerned, the Bolsheviks’ primary objective was to establish control of the “commanding heights.” This involved nationalizing the conservatories, publishing houses, and theaters, as well as confiscating valuable musical instruments from private collections and aristocrats attempting to flee the country. Lenin’s regime was also intent on vanquishing political opposition. For musicians, as for other educated Russians, the Civil War years witnessed a number of decisive encounters with Soviet authority that determined the dynamics of kto kogo?, a “cursed” question of Russian history that asks, who will beat whom? For musicians the answer would be somewhat equivocal. The Bolsheviks moved quickly to achieve administrative and economic control over musicians and musical life, but had little time or interest in formulating music-related policy itself. As part of an effort to mobilize support for the revolution among Russia’s toiling masses and extend the political revolution to the cultural sphere, the government funded an array of programs administered by the Red Army and the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros, successor to the tsarist Ministry of Education), as well as a vast network of “Proletarian Culture” (Proletkul’t) organizations. These programs offered musicians, writers, and artists employment and the opportunity to continue prerevolutionary activities, albeit under radically different circumstances. In music, as in other areas, a main objective of Narkompros was to cultivate old “specialists” and enlist them in the revolutionary project. With some notable exceptions, in these early years musicians found that they had considerable latitude in their affairs. They not only facilitated but largely defined the terms under which musical institutions made their transition to Soviet power and musical life responded to the revolution.
For most Russians, the years of revolution and civil war were haunted by hunger and plagued by terrible material hardship and suffering. Survival became the first priority as musicians began to formulate their creative responses to the challenges raised by the revolution. A few pursued radical creative agendas in an explicit effort to link artistic and revolutionary iconoclasm. Some tried to enlist music directly in the revolutionary struggle and the effort to win the Civil War. But for most, strong threads of continuity from the prerevolutionary period dominated their creative activities and attitudes toward Soviet power.
Kto Kogo? The Conservatories, the Commissar, and Bread for “Bourgeois” Musicians
While the overthrow of the Provisional Government was achieved with relative ease, the Bolsheviks’ efforts to consolidate political authority met with considerable resistance. For despite widespread and mounting popular dissatisfaction, the Provisional Government had at least enjoyed some claim to political legitimacy. Most educated Russians saw the Bolsheviks as demagogic rabble-rousers. For instance, a history professor’s diary from this period refers to the “gorillas” and “dog deputies” who had usurped the power of the state by force and in defiance of prevailing legal norms. The weeks after the October Revolution were punctuated by waves of strikes and skirmishes between Bolshevik forces and those who opposed their takeover. In Moscow municipal employees went on strike, as did troupes at the state theaters in both capitals. Teachers across the nation refused to work. The universities issued public condemnations of the coup and strident declarations of nonrecognition of the new government. Faculty at the conservatories shared many of the objections articulated by colleagues at other educational institutions and the theaters. But musicians’ initial response to the revolution and the developments at the conservatories in the first months of Soviet power indicate how the experiences of musicians would both overlap with and diverge from those of other artists and intellectuals.
Conservatory faculty responded to the revolution much more cautiously than their colleagues at the universities, initially asserting that the conservatories’ activities were completely separate from the course of daily life and politics. The faculty council at the Petrograd Conservatory resolved that it would “take no position” on the change in government until it became clear what impact developments in “external life” (vneshnaia zhizn’) would have on academic affairs. In Moscow, where the Bolshevik takeover was much more protracted and bloody than in Petrograd, civil unrest closed the conservatory temporarily; two weeks after the revolution, however, the faculty voted to resume classes. On November 25, the day before university professors in Petrograd condemned the Bolshevik takeover as a “calamity,” three professors of the Moscow Conservatory held a Bach concert in the school’s small recital hall.
Since their founding by Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein in the 1860s, the conservatories had been administered by the Russian Musical Society and a board of directors appointed by the imperial court. Throughout the prerevolutionary period faculty had sought both institutional autonomy and recognition of the professional objectives of conservatory training. The latter quest was part of an ongoing effort to dispel widely held perceptions of musicians as entertainers and music education as a pursuit for “amateur” music lovers, in order to legitimize the place of the professional composer and musician in Russian society.
In some ways, the initial gains toward academic self-rule won after the 1905 Revolution appeared to be broadened in the decree nationalizing both conservatories on July 12, 1918. Ratified by the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) and signed by Lenin himself, the decree made the conservatories completely independent of the Russian Musical Society but placed them under the direct administration of Narkompros as Institutions of Higher Education (Vysshye uchebnye zavedeniia [VUZy]). In two important respects the decree represented a positive development for the conservatory faculty. It relieved them from the jurisdiction of the Russian Musical Society, thus implicitly suggesting the possibility of more autonomy, and it clearly indicated that the new government regarded the conservatories as VUZy, supporting musicians’ long-standing efforts to gain recognition as professionals.
But the decree raised alarm as well as anticipation. The most obvious way that “external life” did in fact affect the conservatories was that the Soviet government now held the only purse strings. Like university professors, whose initial dealings with the government had raised anxieties, conservatory faculty noted the Bolsheviks’ professed hostility to “bourgeois” institutions such as universities and worried about their intent to open up higher education to Russia’s “dark” masses. Concerned about the implications of the July 12 decree, a group of conservatory professors headed by Glazunov asked the head of Narkompros, Anatoly Lunacharsky, to clarify the conservatories’ relationship with Soviet power and the extent of Narkompros’s authority over their internal affairs. Lunacharsky’s response reflected both his commitment to accommodating and winning over the artistic intelligentsia and his role as an agent of the new government. The commissar expressed firm support for “complete autonomy” in academic life, emphasizing how highly he valued the expertise of musical “specialists” and the rights of the conservatory faculty to appoint their own director and other teaching staff. Offering a warning as well as reassurance, though, he insisted that, like the universities, the conservatories must recognize the government’s need for some measure of control over educational reform at that pivotal moment. He asserted the Commissariat’s right to “regulate” faculty appointments and participate in the drafting of new charters and curricula.
As institutions of higher education, the conservatories were affected directly by the new government’s next major reform of higher education. In an effort to democratize access to higher education, on August 2 Sovnarkom opened VUZ admissions to anyone age sixteen or over, and abolished all entrance examinations, requirements for secondary diplomas, and tuition. This decree provoked a storm of protest from the universities; the implications of eliminating virtually all entrance requirements for admissions especially alarmed conservatory faculty. A delegation from the Petrograd conservatory appealed to Lunacharsky, who personally drafted a supplementary order allowing the conservatories in Moscow and Petrograd to admit “only talented individuals.” This dispensation nullified the intended impact of the decree, turning a potentially disastrous measure into a boon for the conservatories. Able to maintain admissions standards and freed of the obligation to admit untalented or marginal pupils just because they could afford tuition, the conservatories used the decree to help realize long-standing ambitions to make music education more professional.
Taken together, the decree nationalizing the conservatories and Lunacharsky’s support for admissions based on ability illuminate a key dynamic in the evolving relationship between the conservatories and the state bureaucracy. The conservatories’ concern to protect institutional autonomy and the special interests of musical education often clashed with the new state’s goal of creating a unified, integrated educational system that would meet the needs of postrevolutionary Russia. Though the summer of 1918 would prove to be the high water mark for Communist toleration of “bourgeois” higher education and willingness to consider autonomy for the universities, the musicians in charge of the conservatories would continue to be able to use widely held assumptions about the ways in which music and music education were “exceptional” to maintain more control over their affairs than the universities and other VUZy.
The delicacy with which Lunacharsky facilitated the conservatories’ transition to Soviet rule characterized many of his dealings with musicians and other members of the intelligentsia. Equal parts playwright, literary critic, philosopher, and revolutionary, Lunacharsky was uniquely suited to his post as head of Narkompros. He was married to an actress and had close ties with many luminaries of the artistic world. Before the revolution he had been a main contributor to debates within the Party over “god-building,” an attempt to marry Marxism with religion, siding with his brother-in-law Aleksandr Bogdanov in Bogdanov’s debates with Lenin over the nature of proletarian culture.
Scholars rightly emphasize the role of this self-described “poet of the revolution” as a Party “specialist” rather than a Party leader, as well as the relative weakness of Lunacharsky’s commissariat vis-à-vis other Soviet institutions. Certainly his association with Bogdanov’s “Left Bolshevism” hamstrung whatever leadership aspirations Lunacharsky may have had, and his sensitivity to the interests of artists and intellectuals gave his peers ample ammunition to criticize his overly sympathetic treatment of the intelligentsia. Nonetheless, Lunacharsky did have considerable latitude in overseeing cultural affairs, in part because his artistic and aesthetic preferences largely overlapped with Lenin’s. He shared both Lenin’s unabashed appreciation for Russia’s cultural heritage and his interest in preserving it. And like Lenin he placed education and “raising” the cultural level of the Russian people at the center of his vision for cultural change. Lunacharsky’s authority over music was much less contested than in other spheres, and his influence was thus more profound in that arena. Welcoming the early support of the artistic avant-garde, he encouraged the efforts of radicals such as the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the architect and designer Vladimir Tatlin in hopes that the artistic and political revolutions might fuel each other. But Lunacharsky also proved adept at enlisting the aid of qualified, respected musicians, thus giving them a stake in the new order as well.
As the encounter between Glazunov’s delegation and Lunacharsky suggests, the commissar’s initial efforts to establish working relations with musicians, sensitive as they were in some respects, ran up against suspicion and indifference in generous measure. After failing to enlist Koussevitzky, whose artistic prestige and administrative skills would have been tremendous assets to his fledging arts administration, Lunacharsky turned to Arthur Lourié to head the newly formed music department of Narkompros. Lourié was a twenty-five-year-old composer and self-proclaimed futurist with no administrative experience or broad-based authority in the musical community, whose appointment reflects the fact that initially only artistic radicals were willing to work with Lunacharsky. Long vilified by Soviet scholars, and famous in the West for his associations with the futurists and his prewar experiments with microtones and graphic notation, Lourié was friendly with the acmeist poets Osip Mandel’shtam and Anna Akhmatova and the symbolist Alexander Blok. He shared both Blok’s mysticism and his equation of revolutionary chaos with “the spirit of music,” which initially prompted him to support Bolshevik rule: “You see, this historical process [the revolution] in its entirety was ‘music.’ It was the agitated element, dark and turgid, which cast up on the shores of life that which was hidden in the abyss of its chaos let loose.” Although a contemporary described him as “seemingly exhausted by an excess of culture,” Lourié devoted considerable energy to a number of pet projects, including proposals to replace the conservatories with “musical universities” and the aggressive promotion of his own music. Perhaps provoked by Lourié’s signature outfit—a bright green suit with huge buttons and an enormous turned-down collar—more staid interests in the musical community resisted the young composer’s enthusiasm for radical change and soon seized the opportunity to challenge his authority.
However suspicious they were of Bolshevik motives, many musicians soon joined the efforts to reconstruct musical life that began in the first months following the revolution. Lunacharsky’s commissariat rapidly mushroomed in size and organizational complexity, as did Muzo, the music division, which soon formed departments for general and special education, as well as several subdepartments. From an initial staff of twelve in July 1918, Muzo’s personnel ballooned to 117 in 1919, and to 184 with an additional 600 to 784 persons “in its jurisdiction” (podvedomstvennye) in 1921. The majority of Muzo’s activities were co-coordinated from Moscow, where Narkompros was based after the transfer of the capital from Petrograd in March 1918. A smaller, relatively autonomous division of Muzo continued to operate in Petrograd until May 1921. While the organizational history of Muzo may seem unglamorous, its existence provided musicians with essential resources and opportunities. It enabled them to take an active role in the nationalization, reorganization, and administration of existing institutions and activities, and also provided a forum in which they could pursue creative agendas formed before the revolution. The division’s statute for 1918 claimed responsibility for “organizing, regulating and administrating the musical life of the whole country.” This authority certainly remained more theoretical than actual in many areas; nonetheless, the scope of the division’s activities was impressive.
Muzo oversaw the nationalization of several musical institutions, and established new copyright regulations for music. Although nationalization always involved renaming and frequently entailed restructuring, its continuity, in terms of personnel and activity from prerevolutionary organizations, often was pronounced. Aleksandr Kastal’skii (1856–1926), a distinguished composer of sacred music, was a leading figure in Muzo as well as Proletkul’t. He had directed the Moscow Synodal School since 1910, and remained in charge of the newly organized People’s Choral Academy when it merged with one of the choirs of the former Imperial Chapel. The Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic, which had trained orchestral musicians and actors under the tsars, was reorganized by Muzo and the Commissariat’s theater department, into a VUZ known since 1922 as the State Institute for Theatrical Arts. The new State Music Publishing House was established on the premises of Jurgenson’s Music Publisher, using the inventory of that firm as well as that of Koussevitzky’s Russian Music Press. Koussevitzky’s former business manager and artistic director, Pavel Lamm (1882–1951), an early staff member of Muzo, became the director of the new publishing house.
In some cases, the revolution even provided an opportunity to realize objectives defined in the prerevolutionary period. The veneration of science (nauka) that so obsessed the academic intelligentsia at the turn of the century had preoccupied musicians as well, informing efforts to institutionalize the study of music theory and musicology in Russia. Although practical subjects such as the theory of composition were taught at the conservatories, debates about the definition and methodologies of what was called “musical science” took place in extramural organizations such as the Musical Scientific Society, founded in 1902 under the leadership of Sergei Taneev. The society amassed the first substantial library of musicological work in Russia, and hoped to found a research institution dedicated to the study of musical science.
Before the revolution, research on music theory had proceeded from Taneev’s own study of counterpoint and Boleslav Iavorskii’s (1877–1942) modal analysis. While Taneev’s work looked back to established practice, Iavorskii’s approach emerged, in part, as a response to impressionism and Scriabin’s late style. His theory of “modal rhythm” sought to explain all melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic development in music in terms of the inherent instability of the tritone (the augmented fourth or diminished fifth, e.g. C and F-sharp) and its need to resolve to a more consonant interval (the third or sixth). The dissolution of conventional tonality in late nineteenth-century music, and the possibilities suggested by Scriabin’s use of the “mystic chord” (C, F-sharp, B-flat, E, A, D) as an organizing device, inspired other researchers such as Leonid Sabaneev (1881–1968) and Arsenii Avraamov (1886–1944) to explore the potential for new and expanded tone systems.
Much of this work ceased during World War I, but after Narkompros moved to Moscow in 1918, surviving members of the Musical Scientific Society formed the core of Muzo’s newly-established “academic subsection” (Ak Muzo). It met in the reading room of the old society’s library, and the group’s secretary, Mikhail Ivanov-Boretskii (1874–1936), recalled that Ak Muzo even observed the meeting time of its organizational predecessor. Despite considerable material difficulties, Ak Muzo became a bustling center for research in music theory, acoustics, aesthetics, and ethnomusicology.
Leonid Sabaneev continued to explore the possibilities of what he called “ultrachromaticism,” a nebulously defined fifty-three-step alternative to the twelve-tone scale. In a related field, Nikolai Garbuzov (1880–1956) resumed his research on the acoustic bases of harmony. Meanwhile, the ethnography department attracted the most distinguished ethnomusicologists in the country. When Narkompros was reorganized in 1921, this group was able to create a permanent institutional framework for its activities by reconstituting Ak Muzo as Russia’s first full-fledged institute of musical science, known by the acronym GIMN (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Muzykal’nykh Nauk).
Among the most influential figures in Muzo was Nadezhda Briusova (1881–1951), who headed both the general and special education sections. Sister of the symbolist poet Valerii Briusov and an ardent supporter of the revolution, Briusova had been an active participant in the People’s Conservatory and the prerevolutionary adult education movement. Briusova, who had studied with Iavorskii, now found herself well positioned to influence reforms at the conservatory and in popular music education. She especially wanted to create facilities to train general music teachers and promote popular courses to teach people how to appreciate and respond to classical music. The curriculum and repertoire for these programs relied heavily on Iavorskii’s pedagogical method of “listening to music” (slushanie muzyki), emphasizing choral singing and folk music. By 1920, seven schools of general music education had been established in Moscow and twenty-five in other cities. The premier school of this type in Moscow was named after Taneev in honor of his long service to the cause of popular music education.
In addition to Narkompros programs, musicians took part in a number of popular educational and “enlightenment” programs for workers during the Civil War. Most extensive were the concert programs and choral studios sponsored by the Red Army, the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, and above all, the wide network of “proletarian culture” organizations that emerged in the first weeks after the February Revolution. With significant financial support from the Soviet government, Proletkul’t, as these organizations were called collectively, expanded its activities throughout the Civil War. By the fall of 1920, as many as 400,000 people participated in Proletkul’t theater groups, music studios, artistic workshops, and reading circles across the country. In terms of music, Moscow alone boasted seventeen choral studios as well as a scientific-technical division dedicated to researching a variety of theoretical issues.
Narkompros and Proletkul’t provided a forum for musicians to pursue their scholarly and educational interests, but the practical incentives for working for the Soviet state were often equally compelling. The wages and, more importantly, rations from this kind of employment offered musicians some buffer against the difficult living conditions and food shortages that plagued Civil War Russia in general and social groups identified as “privileged” under the tsarist regime in particular. Although rationing systems during the Civil War were intended to favor those in whose name the revolution had been won, most academics and employees of Narkompros received more generous allocations than others with similar class backgrounds or occupations. Muzo’s rosters indicate that 149 musicians and main coworkers (otvetstvennye sotrudniki) were receiving these “academic” rations in February 1921. Wages and rations were also a critical part of intellectuals’ attraction to Proletkul’t.
Though Lourié later recalled that art took the place of bread in these years, many performers found that their art gave them access to the staples they needed to survive. Chaliapin often insisted that his performance fee be paid in flour and eggs. Pianist Aleksandr Borovskii (1889–1968), who performed for workers and soldiers in the early months of 1918, described the groceries he received as compensation for these recitals as “worth their weight in gold,” and Piatnitsky’s peasant choir would perform in exchange for Red Army rations and transportation to the concert. Even those fortunate enough to receive “academic” rations were still preoccupied with finding enough to eat. In May 1920, an obviously exasperated Ippolitov-Ivanov lamented that he would have to miss the opening ceremonies of the new Tchaikovsky museum in order to obtain ration supplements for the conservatory faculty. “If I don’t attend to this, it will be me instead of the ration that gets eaten,” he declared.
Even for those who “cooperated” with the new government, the Civil War years were marked by inevitable and often humbling conflicts between musicians, who belonged to previously privileged social groups, and a regime committed to vanquishing “bourgeois” opponents in a country without a powerful bourgeoisie. Sheila Fitzpatrick and others have identified the importance of the slippery and mutable nature of social identity to understanding the early Soviet period, when a ruling order intent on evaluating its constituency based on rigid conceptions about social class first engaged a complex society where socioeconomic position was not necessarily a reliable litmus test of loyalty and support.
Explicit defiance of Bolshevik authority was rare among musicians, but in many instances their presumed or actual affiliation with forces hostile to the revolution made them the target of measures intended to demoralize Bolshevism’s “enemies” and redress past injustices. When Nikolai Miaskovskii (1881–1950), who had abandoned his career as a naval officer to be a composer, was treated like a member of the “exploiting classes” and arrested for refusing to shovel snow in 1921, Muzo cancelled a concert in protest. In other cases, association with agencies of Soviet power offered musicians protection from having domiciles and personal property requisitioned, and could even provide access to “treasures” expropriated from others. A graduate of the Corp of Cadets, the music critic and promoter of contemporary music Vladimir Derzhanovskii (1881–1942), was able to keep his spacious five-room apartment (he did have to give one room to his cook) because he worked in both the publication and education sections of Muzo. As head of Muzo’s string quartet, Lev Tseitlin received “life-long” use of a Guarneri violin from the State Ancient String Instrument Collection, a store of rare string instruments confiscated from nobility and émigrés. Chaliapin, who frequently performed for workers and soldiers, marveled at the contradictory experiences of being “bourgeois” on the one hand, which made his wine cellar and silver fair game for requisitioning brigades, and on the other hand a tremendously popular singer, whose fame as an icon of “bourgeois” culture saved him from harsher treatment, opening the doors of even Lev Kamenev and Lenin to his pleas—sometimes successfully.
Music for the Civil War
Like most other Russians, musicians’ primary concerns during the Civil War years were finding food, staying warm, and coming to terms with Soviet power. Along with establishing working relationships with Russia’s new rulers, musicians also had to consider the implications of the revolution for their art. These were by no means self-evident or clearly spelled out. The Bolsheviks came to power with a poorly detailed cultural agenda, and their energies were consumed by the political, military, and economic challenges of the war. As Marxists, they were committed to restructuring the economic foundations of society in favor of the poorest social groups, the workers and peasants. It was understood that customs would also change, and that the culture of the new socialist society would be different from that of its predecessor. But there was no consensus on how that transformation would come about or on the characteristics of the new culture. Debates over the nature of proletarian culture had divided the Bolsheviks before World War I. Bogdanov and other “left” Bolsheviks believed in the transformative power of ideology and creativity, and insisted that the success of the revolution hinged on the proletariat developing its own ideology, literature, and art. Taking a more materialist approach, Lenin regarded culture as the antipode of “backwardness,” something that must be acquired and mastered before a new, genuinely proletarian culture could emerge. Both of these perspectives reappeared after 1917, informing a range of activities and projects intended to bring the revolution to the cultural sphere. The revolutionaries also seized on the mobilizing potential of artistic propaganda, and were unabashed in their convictions that culture and art were valuable weapons in the class struggle.
The imperative for cultural transformation affected musicians as well as other artists, infusing a new political charge into prerevolutionary debates about the trajectory of new music, the nature of popular culture, the value of the classical legacy, and the need for theoretical research. While some musicians tried to carry on their prerevolutionary activities as if nothing had happened, most found themselves caught up at some level in the potentially liberating and democratizing impulses of revolutionary upheaval. Indeed, the most salient images of cultural life during the Civil War include a “frenzy of cultural iconoclasm” as well as “joyous, mass celebrations of the overthrow of the old order.” Amidst the frenzy and the joy was an even stronger urge to democratize music and the arts and thus break down barriers between educated Russians and the common people. The revolution inspired musicians and other creative intellectuals to act on long-standing visions of a unified culture, signaling the beginning of a quest for an inclusive art that would breach the divide between elite and popular forms.
The mushrooming of popular enlightenment programs in this period was fueled both by the sometimes overlapping but often contradictory objectives of Bolshevik initiatives and by the agendas of the reform-minded intelligentsia. While much of the inclination toward utopianism and iconoclasm would spend itself relatively quickly, the diversity and ambiguity that emerged from musicians’ initial efforts to respond to the revolution and from the debates about building “proletarian” culture would continue to inform many of their activities and debates into the twenties.
Proletkul’t is often remembered as a hotbed of iconoclasm and revolutionary experimentation because many of its activists embraced Bogdanov’s dreams of a unique proletarian culture and his conviction that proletarian consciousness must be cultivated in cultural organizations that operated independently from the political sphere. Scholarship on Soviet music has also emphasized both the amateur and utopian qualities of Proletkul’t’s broad range of musical activities and the influence of Bogdanov’s ideas.
But closer inspection reveals a more complex picture of Proletkul’t’s purview. There was considerable overlap in personnel between Muzo Narkompros, Proletkul’t studios, and other organizations. For example, Briusova, Kastal’skii, the composer Reinhold Gliere (1874–1956), and many others worked for both Narkompros and Proletkul’t. More importantly, even those committed to creating a distinctly proletarian culture found it difficult to proceed without expert help. To stimulate the emergence of this new culture Proletkul’t relied heavily on the expertise and participation of artists and intellectuals whose own agendas and beliefs about cultural change were quite diverse.
Some contributions to proletarian culture did emphasize workers’ creativity and the revolutionary struggle. Proponents of what has been called “revolutionary romanticism” encouraged artistic creativity by, for, and about workers, drawing on the images and experiences of modern industrial life and the revolution. Efforts to use music as a mobilizing device to further the revolutionary cause were particularly pronounced in the musical activities in the Tambov Proletkul’t. In a stunning gesture of putting new wine into old skins Dmitrii Vasil’ev-Buglai (1888–1956) used members of a former church choir as the foundation for a ninety-voice Proletkul’t chorus that toured the front lines agitating for the Bolshevik cause. A graduate of the Moscow Synodal School, Vasil’ev-Buglai used the melodic conventions of liturgical music and traditional folk songs for the agitational and antireligious songs and skits that made up his choir’s repertoire.
In Petrograd, the Latvian composer Ianis Ozolin’ gave “revolutionary hymns” a central place in the repertoire of the seventy-voice choir he directed. Using the texts of popular Proletkul’t poems, such as Vladimir Kirillov’s May Day (Pervyi Mai) and Aleksandr Pomorskii’s The Workers’ Palace (Rabochii dvorets), these hymns portrayed a future of grandeur and prosperity built from the rubble of oppression:
On the dark graves,
From the roadbed of the Past,
From the laughter and tears of exhausted hearts,—
We, the proud ones will build, we, the proud ones will build,
We will build a Workers’ Palace!
Kirillov anticipated that these songs were but the first manifestations of a new musical culture: “soon a symphony of labor will ring out, in which the voices of machines, sirens and motors will join in one chorus with the voices of victorious workers.”
A second approach to creating proletarian culture promoted avant-garde efforts to break completely with the bourgeois art of the past and find new forms and methods of artistic expression. The possibility of effecting a radical break in cultural forms informed many Proletkul’t activities, but was nowhere more apparent than in the theoretical and applied experiments of the theorist Arsenii Avraamov. A graduate of the Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society, Avraamov had been an active participant in both the People’s Conservatory and the prerevolutionary debates on chromaticism and the theoretical implications of Scriabin’s late style. His work with folk music from the North Caucasus and his assessment of post-romantic Western art music led him to investigate alternatives to the traditional twelve-tone tempered scale. The political message of the revolution resonated strongly with his music theories. In 1920, Avraamov reportedly asked Narkompros to confiscate and demolish all pianos as a necessary first step in destroying bourgeois music and the twelve-tone tempered scale. Although this summons went unanswered, he continued to explore alternatives to conventional tone systems during the Civil War. In the technical section of the Moscow Proletkul’t’s music division, he worked on developing a 17-step tone system with Nikolai Roslavets, and collaborated with Grigorii Liubimov (1882–1934) to develop new tunings for traditional folk instruments and the accordion.
Certainly the most striking of Avraamov’s projects was his organization of “symphonies of factory whistles.” Inspired by the poetry of Aleksei Gastev, who heard the “song of the future” in the morning calls of city factory whistles, these ambitious experiments exemplified the veneration for technology and the desire to marry it with art that marked many creative endeavors of leftist artists. Avraamov seized on the whistles, horns, and sirens of the modern city as a potential “orchestra” for a new form of mass music. Rejecting the spatial and technical limitations of the “chamber music” of the past, he identified factory whistles as the ideal medium for transforming an entire city into an auditorium. After unsuccessful efforts in Petrograd (1918) and Nizhnyi (1919), Avraamov oversaw a spectacular “multimedia” celebration of the fifth anniversary of the revolution in the Baku harbor on November 7, 1922. The “symphony” used the sirens and whistles of navy ships and steamers, as well as dockside shunting engines, a “choir” of bus and car horns, and a machine gun battery, to evoke the alarm, struggle, and victory of 1917. Cannon blasts and flag directions from a strategically placed signal tower co-coordinated renditions of The Warsaw Song (Varshavianka), The Internationale, and The Marseillaise by these “instruments,” a two-hundred-piece band and choir, and a large “whistle main” (magistral’) situated on the deck of a torpedo boat (see fig. 1). The magistral’ was Avraamov’s own creation—a portable “organ register” of whistles, each individually controlled, but working from a common source of steam.
Avraamov’s “industrial” iconoclasm and the agitational songs of Vasil’ev-Buglai seem emblematic of an era of revolutionary change, but they did not typify the main thrust of musical activities during the Civil War years. Most of the musical programs sponsored by Proletkul’t and Narkompros were marked by a preservationist, culturalist ethos consistent with prerevolutionary efforts by educated Russians to use music as a means of developing the aesthetic sensibilities and “raising” the cultural level of the Russian people. Longings for a unified culture that was constructed and imposed from above inspired a range of activities reformers themselves described as kul’turtregerstvo (“bringing culture”). The hope that art could overcome divisions within Russian society figured prominently in Muzo’s declaration of its main tasks: “to break down the walls between professional musicians and the people” and to “join the masses . . . who are pining for music in the depths of their soul.”
Yet many Communists active in Proletkul’t and the cultural organizations of the Red Army objected to kul’turtregerstvo (and its Russified variant, kul’turnichestvo) as the ill-conceived project of bourgeois intellectuals who wanted only to bring the treasures of elite culture to uneducated workers and peasants without also engaging in political agitation. Continuing a critique formulated in the prerevolutionary adult education movement, militant activists opposed “abstract enlightenment activity” and “culture for culture’s sake” as the remnants of Liberal and Populist agendas that denied the need for education in the class struggle. Tensions between proponents of “education,” “enlightenment,” and “agitation” would be a critical issue in the reorganization of Narkompros and the creation of Glavpolitprosvet in 1920, a new state agency charged specifically with political enlightenment work. Criticism of kul’turtregerstvo by musicians, however, was fairly weak. During the first years of Bolshevik rule the notion of “bringing culture” informed many agendas and cut across other political and aesthetic divisions.
The peasant folk song, the traditions of Western and Russian art music, and training in choral singing occupied a central place in most Narkompros programs. Veterans of the People’s Conservatory, such as Nadezhda Briusova and Aleksandr Kastal’skii, used folk songs as the basic repertoire not only for choral training, but for music education as a whole. Kastal’skii maintained that the folk song’s “melodic freshness of musical thought” and organic connection to the “people” (narod) would help workers understand the rudiments of rhythmic and melodic development. Likewise, the lecture-concert program developed by Sergei Evseev’s (1894–1956) chamber ensemble for Red Army audiences was called “Russian Folk Life and its Reflection in Song.”
In a similar vein, Grigorii Liubimov, a veteran of the revolutionary underground and former pupil of Koussevitzky, had begun promoting the domra, a long-necked lute beloved by minstrels in medieval Russia, in conjunction with his activities in workers’ education before the revolution. He considered the four-stringed domra to have superior tone quality and range to the modernized balalaikas and three-stringed domras popularized by Vasilii Andreev. As the head of the folk music section of the Moscow Proletkul’t, Liubimov promoted “his” domras, which were tuned like the bowed stringed instruments of the classical orchestra but were much easier to play, as ideal vehicles for disseminating music among the masses.
Activists like Liubimov, Briusova, and Kastal’skii considered an appreciation of folk music an ideal foundation on which to develop people’s musical sensibilities. From this base, they would then proceed to “more complex” examples of Russian and Western “cultured” (kul’turnaia) music. Liubimov hoped that gaining proficiency on his domras would make it easier for workers to learn to play “serious” instruments like the violin. A commitment to teaching workers to appreciate the cultural heritage of the prerevolutionary elite marked many other musical activities of the Moscow Proletkul’t. The approved concert repertoire for workers’ clubs featured compositions by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, the German Romantics, Mikhail Glinka, and Aleksandr Dargomyzhskii, as well as Russian folk songs. Piano lessons and lectures on music history were popular components of a wide array of programs, as was instruction on the domra and other folk instruments. While some efforts to cultivate an appreciation for classical music were almost offensively naive, such as a brochure by Lourié describing an orchestra as “gatherings where lots of musicians play different instruments amicably,” this approach was not the norm. Lunacharsky, who instituted weekly “people’s concerts” in Petrograd, exemplified a more typical orientation by insisting that the programs for these events evolve not from “poor” to “good” musical examples, but from “the beautiful but simple to the more beautiful and complex.”
Musicians’ efforts to make classical music more accessible took many forms. During the Civil War, concert-lectures, which had strong antecedents in the prerevolutionary period, were the most ubiquitous method of kul’turtregerstvo. The spoken introductions that preceded these musical performances allowed the speaker to tell audiences how they should listen and respond to the music they were about to hear. The concert-lecture format was used extensively by Proletkul’t, Narkompros, and a myriad of official and semiofficial musical ensembles that performed for untutored and unconventional audiences. Some of these presentations, such as the one titled “Spring: How Freedom Began in the Life of Humanity,” reflected musicians’ perceptions of the liberating, creative potential of the revolution. Others, including those sponsored by the Petrograd Proletkul’t with titles like “Beethoven and French Music” and “Russian Composers before Glinka,” offered workers a more straightforward introduction to the classical musical tradition in Russia and Western Europe. Given the ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in musical interpretation, the concert-lecture would become a standard feature of musical life in the early Soviet period because it offered a rare, but potentially significant, opportunity to tell audiences what the music they were about to hear “meant.”
Underpinning the agenda of kul’turtregerstvo, with its emphasis on traditional folk songs and classical music, was a deep-seated hostility to popular urban music and cultural forms intellectuals scorned as “bourgeois.” Most musicians felt that bringing “culture” to the people involved the active promotion of certain kinds of music over others. In particular, they objected to most urban popular music, especially tsyganshchina and the music of the variety stage. A singer at the Bol’shoi Theater insisted that workers needed “good” music and “real” concerts, rather than “those mixed divertissements where the classics were performed alternately with the accordion.” In the spring of 1920, the concert section of Muzo tried to secure a “monopoly” on concerts in Moscow as a way to eliminate the “hackwork” of these “variety” concerts. Liubimov railed against the petit-bourgeois (meshchanskie) songs and the “potpourris” from popular operas in the balalaika repertoire disseminated by Vasilii Andreev. Other Proletkul’t activists shared Liubimov’s conviction that it was their duty to select and cultivate only the truly “healthy” elements of the musical legacy and the current musical culture. At the first Proletkul’t conference in September 1918, Boris Krasin insisted that to help the proletariat “master the musical achievements of humanity” workers should be introduced to the “best” examples of musical creativity from the past, as well as the Russian folk song. But at the same time a struggle must be launched against the influence of musical “surrogates,” such as the “anti-artistic music of restaurants, cabarets, gypsy music, and so on.” In this campaign against truly decadent “bourgeois” music, Krasin saw himself as the guardian and protector of the proletariat, whose undeveloped musical tastes were vulnerable to exploitation. In a critique that foreshadowed one main issue in debates in the twenties he even found the “revolutionary music” of the Petrograd Proletkul’t suspect, complaining that “[w]riters of revolutionary songs too often write revolutionary words to the most banal tunes.”
Other bearers of culture worried that artistic modernism also threatened to corrupt the masses. Weeks after the October Revolution, Kastal’skii asked the government to preserve and promote folk art in order to protect “the people from modernist and futurist distortions of artistic taste.” He championed traditional folk songs as the foundation of proletarian musical culture because they were more accessible to “the toiling masses” than the “modish chromatic delicacies” served up by “our exhausted artistic epicures.”
As Lynn Mally has suggested, the conflicting strategies and approaches to developing “proletarian culture” pursued in Proletkul’t studios were a source both of dissent among the movement’s organizers and of Proletkul’t’s popularity with workers. The variety of work pursued in the music studios was remarkable, defying simple categorization, even for the work of certain individuals. For example, the “modern,” “industrial” iconoclasm of Avraamov was anchored in a deep and sophisticated appreciation for traditional folk music. His research with Liubimov on retuning the domra fostered at the same time the development of new means of musical expression and the cultivation of an instrument inextricably bound to the antiquated, or “feudal,” social and economic structures of the peasantry. Nor were the “revolutionary romantics” in Petrograd purists. The same organization that promoted “revolutionary hymns” and strolling choirs as the true expression of workers’ creativity also sponsored concert-lecture series to train working-class audiences to appreciate the elite musical culture of the past.
The contradictions within and between various visions of cultural change, as well as the new state’s reluctance to sweep away the old culture in its quest for a new one, go far in explaining the eclecticism, somewhat chaotic improvisation, and utilization of particularly resonant examples from the musical legacy of the past that characterized many efforts to address the revolution with music during the Civil War. Transgressing and redefining spatial hierarchies were central not only to visions of revolutionary theater and mass spectacle, but also to efforts to democratize classical music. This involved bringing the masses to previously sacred “temples” such as the concert halls in Moscow and Petrograd, and even the Hall of Arms in the Winter Palace, where a concert commemorating the first anniversary of the revolution included Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, a revolutionary hymn composed by Chaliapin, and Lourié’s Our March (Nash Marsh)—a spoken declamation of Mayakovsky’s poem with band accompaniment. But extraordinary efforts also went into bringing music to the masses with concerts in working-class neighborhoods, army barracks, riding schools, and cafeterias. Following Mayakovsky’s poetic summons and Avraamov’s wishes, many pianos were requisitioned from their owners and dragged “out onto the streets,” where they were loaded up onto a cart carrying a singer, a pianist, and perhaps more instrumentalists. Rather than being smashed as a step toward destroying bourgeois music, the newly mobile pianos helped bring it to workers and soldiers.
Unlike the concert in the Winter Palace, the repertoire for most programs relied heavily on classics from the Russian and European repertoire. In contrast to the visual arts, where the revolution inspired a genuine flood of creativity, few original musical works appeared during the Civil War. Musical offerings to audiences of this period were incredibly diverse, but from the first days of Soviet power, Beethoven’s and Mozart’s music was identified with the spirit of the revolution. Beethoven’s works were staples on programs for the musical celebrations and popular concerts organized by Narkompros, the Moscow Soviet, the Commissariat of War, and various Trade Union organizations. And the exultant refrains of the Ode to Joy and the heroic passion of the Third and Fifth Symphonies elicited enthusiastic responses from listeners of all social backgrounds.
While Bolshevik hostility to organized religion made sacred and liturgical music politically suspect, religious music not tied explicitly to the Orthodox church provided the solemnity and ritual mystique needed to legitimize the new regime. Beginning with the May Day festivities of 1918, Mozart’s Requiem became de rigueur in commemorations honoring revolutionary martyrs. The piece made an “indelible” impression on the deputies of the Petrograd Soviet who listened raptly to its performance in Party headquarters on the first