Ugly Underbelly of Culture Wars

Twenties in Soviet Russia was an extremely creative period -- most of the Soviet classics, from stunning films to to equally inventive fiction were created then; it was also a time of culture wars, however. Brutal ones. And very reminiscent of today's situation.

So Bolsheviks won. Time to rejoice and start building socialism. But then the turf wars started. In a culture that had very few real proletarians in the top echelons of political, let alone cultural power, it was the war between the center and periphery mostly. There were members of the old Russian intelligentsia who made Revolution: Lenins, and Lunacharskies, and Bogdanovs and Plekhanovs. And there was the new guard -- from the outskirts of empire, mostly Jews. Again, children of well to do merchants, or pharmacists, or writers. Somehow, they ended up being associated with Trotsky. So these two groups, that have very little to do with workers, began to argue on behalf of these workers, accusing each other for being a fake: either "fellow travelers" or left wing deviators.

So the radical left, the main characters among them were Averbach, Rodov, Lelevich and so on formed -- what an irony -- the Union of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), and launched their attacks on more centrist intellectuals: Polonsky, Vorovsky, or writers like Bulgakov, Zamiatin, Kaverin and so on. The attacks were brutal, leading to firing, refusal to publish and so on. At certain moment even the ultra radical Mayakovsky became too bourgeois and decadent for RAPP; they accused him of failing to acquire a proletarian outlook. Why were these critics capable of obtaining it, nobody asked, let alone proletarians themselves, who were deemed too dumb and uneducated to participate in the discussions conducted on their behalf. Suffice it to say, that these endless attacks of RAPP clearly contributed to Maykovsky's suicide.

As these too groups: gentry Russian intelligentsia vs. Jewish provincial intelligentsia were blaming each other for failing to represents proletarians, life went on... without proletarians, of course. Radicals were compiling the lists of statues to be destroyed, books to be banned, streets to rename, while the centrists were mostly on defensive, trying to save "the culture." Very few among both groups spend time actually educating or enlightening the workers. For a simple reason that you are not supposed to educate proletariat --which already knows it all -- into the mysteries of decaying bourgeois culture.

Of course, the denouement of the whole story is even more sad. Most of the "fellow travelers" either committed suicides, emigrated, went into "internal emigration" or became regular drunks, like Olesha or even Fadeev. Not to be outdone, most of the RAPP people were shot in 1937 as "Trotskyists." Particularly sad is the plight of one Lelevich. Born in 1901 he was shot in 1937, followed by his very young son, was shot in 1939, and his poet father, shot in 1937.

Frankly, there is some poetic justice when obnoxious harassers, abusers, and self-righteous freaks are harassed, but it also makes one pretty sad. And particularly sad on behalf of the workers, many of whom ended up working in Gulag as Ivan Denisovich, waiting for another intelligentsia writer like Solzhenitsyn to tell the world about their sufferings.