Thanks to the cooperation between the famous academician and political scientist Volodymyr Tismanianu and Radu Shtern, university professor, art historian and curator, the book was conceived two years ago Communism and culture. Introduction the purpose of which was to analyze in a sequence of eight studies, declared without exhaustive statements, the complex dynamics of relations between communism and culture. That is, how various communist leaders, from Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev and, tangentially, Gorbachev in the Soviet Union to Mao in China and Che Guevara in Cuba or Georgiou-Deja and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, understood how to instrumentalize humanist culture. , artists and intellectuals, all in order to build the concept of a new man. One central part of all that communist mythology meant.

Based on what was understood in space Marxist teaching from the point of view of culture, interpreted and embodied in practice in different ways since the time of Lenin and Stalin, experiencing what happened after 1945 in the so-called satellite countries of Eastern Europe, in China, Korea or Cuba, as in France and Italy , where powerful Communist parties operated under Soviet subsidies, carrying out the teachings and orders of Moscow, despite the fact that there were enough differences between leaders Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti, respectively, all the way to Nicolae Ceausescu or Mikhail Gorbachev. We find about the latter in a book translated into Romanian by Marius Stan and published in 2023 by Ancient courtyard just a few cursory notes and a short subsection titled Publicity. But even so, we can conclude that at some point it goes beyond magical, generous concepts glasnost and perestroikaNor did Gorbachev accept liberalization unconditionally or completely. Not even releasing the novels of Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn into circulation until he resolutely banned them.

It is often said that Lenin lived a certain part of his life in Switzerland. That he often visited the famous Cabaret Voltaire. But did this mean that, having arrived in Moscow and taken the reins of power, Lenin would show himself as an enlightened thinker regarding culture, freedom of creativity and the conscience of artists and intelligentsia? Not almost. Section Communism and culture undeniably demonstrates that Lenin perceived culture as nothing more and nothing less than a practical tool in the acceleration of a new society and in the construction of a concept A new person which red thread will run through the entire existence of communism. According to Lenin, there could be only one culture shaped by the global Marxist concept. Hence, his relationship with his name is far from tender Proletic cult or with the avant-garde, in which he had little understanding. “Lenin,” the authors of the book write, “rejected avant-garde experimentalism as something absurd.” Ulyanov left culture in the hands of his wife, and the famous Krupskaya banned Plato, Nietzsche and even Tolstoy, calling them harmful for the education of young people.

Lenin openly spoke against iconoclast artists and asked artists to adapt to the tastes of the masses. Writers, artists, architects, directors, actors were forced to submit to new orders (He who is not with us is against us, Lenin dictated), and the aforementioned section of the volume provides a consistent number of examples of this. Of course, at some point the much more understanding Trotsky came up with the concept fellow travelersis also subject to numerous criticisms.

The most consistent and, I dare say, even though it is a scholarly book, the most exciting section of the book is the section devoted to Stalinist cultures. With humor of all kinds invalidhis, with the Great Terror and the destruction of the cult of personality, with the bloody year of 1937, with phone calls that unexpectedly, sometimes even at night, to artists and writers (the one that Pasternak received after the arrest of Mandelstam, called, an episode based on the novel by Ismail Kadare), with a sharp rejection of the avant-garde and everything that means formalism, with murderous socialist realism, which, as Camus well noted in a famous speech, was not only realism, but the falsification and political instrumentalization of reality, with the ban and persecution of Bulgakov or Meyerhold, with the annexation of conscience and the works of Gorky for a price (and the price was high), with the training that Shostakovich underwent, the removal of Trotsky and the omnipotence of Zhdanov, with the history of the subway, a fake work of art, the visit of which has become absolutely mandatory for all important guests from abroad, who had to be bought and turned into Soviet propagandists. The Guide’s attitude contrasts with his destructiveness Return from the USSR and Feuchtwanger.

The pages devoted to the production of some myths to order are read with maximum interest. As in Pavlik Moruzov, immortalized in the film Einstein, in Pavel Korchagin, from whom the communist Bildungsroman was born This is how steel was hardenedZoya Kosmodemichna and Fadeev’s novel Young Guard. Which also had its fair share of criticism and rewrites. It’s a normal thing, because all this time, and even further, it was monitored by censorship.

by the way Communism and culture. introduction it also includes a fascinating chapter exploring the relationship between censorship and self-censorship. How do we know, for example, that at one time even the famous Maya Plisetska came under censorship. The book also includes numerous examples that make reading even more exciting.

What happened in culture after Stalin’s death? What happened after the famous Secret report Khrushchev, from the 20th Congress of the CPSU? How wonderful, how truly it was Meltdown? Why was it allowed, with Khrushchev’s direct intervention, to publish in New World amazing One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and why the same publication refused to print excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago? _Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro