Everything about Socialist Realism totally explained
Socialist realism is a
teleologically-oriented style of
realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of
socialism and
communism. Although related, it shouldn't be confused with
social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern.
In the Soviet Union
Socialist realism was the officially approved type of art in the
Soviet Union for nearly sixty years. Communist doctrine decreed that all material goods and means of production belonged to the community as a whole. This included means of producing art, which were also seen as powerful propaganda tools. During the
October Revolution of 1917, the
Bolsheviks established an institution called
Proletkult (the Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations) which sought to put all arts into the service of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
In the early years of the Soviet Union, Russian and Soviet artists embraced a wide variety of art forms under the auspices of Proletkult. Revolutionary politics and radical non-traditional art forms were seen as complementary. In art,
constructivism flourished. In
poetry, the nontraditional and the
avant-garde were often praised.
This, however, aroused criticism from elements in the Communist party, who rejected modern styles such as
impressionism and
cubism, since these movements existed before the revolution and hence were associated with "decadent bourgeois art." Socialist realism was thus to some extent a reaction against the adoption of these "decadent" styles. Also, it was thought that the non-representative forms of art were not understood by the proletariat and thus couldn't be used by the state for propaganda.
Socialist realism became state policy in 1932 when
Stalin promulgated the decree "On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations". The
Union of Soviet Writers was founded to control the output of authors, and the new policy was rubber-stamped at the Congress of Socialist Writers in 1934. It was enforced ruthlessly in all spheres of artistic endeavour. Artists who strayed from the official line were severely punished – many were sent to the
Gulag labour camps in
Siberia and elsewhere.
The restrictions were loosened somewhat after Stalin's death in 1953 but the state still kept a tight rein on personal artistic expression. This caused many artists to choose to go into exile, for example the
Odessa Group from the city of that name. Independent-minded artists that remained continued to feel the hostility of the state. In 1974, for instance, a show of unofficial art in a field near Moscow was broken up, and the artworks destroyed with a water cannon and bulldozers (see
Bulldozer Exhibition).
Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of
glasnost and
perestroika facilitated an explosion of interest in alternative art styles in the late 1980s, but socialist realism remained in limited force as the official state art style until as late as 1991. It wasn't until after the
fall of the Soviet Union that artists were finally freed from state censorship.
In other states
The Soviet Union exported socialist realism to virtually all of the other Communist countries, although the degree to which it was enforced there varied somewhat from country to country. It became the predominant art form across the Communist world for nearly fifty years.
The doctrine of socialist realism in other Soviet-controlled new
People's Republics, was legally enforced from 1949 to 1956. It involved all domains of visual and literary arts, though its most spectacular achievements were made in the field of
architecture, considered a key weapon in the creation of a new
social order, intended to help spread the communist doctrine by influencing citizens' consciousness as well as their outlook on life. During this massive undertaking, a crucial role fell to architects perceived not as merely engineers creating streets and edifices, but rather as "
Engineers of the human soul". The general theme, extending beyond simple aesthetics into an urban design, was meant to express grandiose ideas and arouse feelings of stability, persistence and political power.
Today, arguably the only countries still focused on these aesthetic principles are
North Korea,
Laos, and to some extent
Vietnam. The
People's Republic of China occasionally reverts to socialist realism for specific purposes, such as idealised propaganda posters to promote the
Chinese space program. Socialist realism had little mainstream impact in the non-Communist world, where it was widely seen as a totalitarian means of imposing state control on artists.
Roots
The political aspect of socialist realism was, in some respects, a continuation of pre-Soviet state policy.
Censorship and attempts to control the content of art didn't begin with the Soviets, but were a long-running feature of Russian life. The
Tsarist government also appreciated the potentially disruptive effect of art and required all books to be cleared by the censor. Writers and artists in 19th century
Imperial Russia became quite skilled at evading censorship by making their points without spelling it out in so many words. However, Soviet censors were not so easily evaded.
Socialist realism had its roots in
neoclassicism and the traditions of realism in
Russian literature of the 19th century that described the life of simple people. It was exemplified by the aesthetic philosophy of
Maxim Gorki. The work of the
Peredvizhniki ("Wanderers," a Russian
realist movement of the late 19th / early 20th centuries),
Jacques-Louis David and
Ilya Yefimovich Repin were notable influences.
Socialist Realism was a product of the Soviet system. Whereas in market societies professional artists earned their living selling to, or being commissioned by rich individuals or the Church, in Soviet society not only was the market suppressed, there were few if any individuals able to patronise the arts and only one institution - the State itself. Hence artists became state employees. As such the State set the parameters for what it employed them to do.
What was expected of the artist was that s/he be formally qualified and to reach a standard of competence. However, whilst this rewarded basic competency, it didn't provide an incentive to excel, resulting in a stultification similar to that in other spheres of Soviet society.
The State, after the Congress of 1934, laid down four rules for what became known as "Socialist Realism"-
That the work be;
1. Proletarian- art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.
2. Typical- scenes of every day life of the people.
3. Realistic - in the representational sense.
4. Partisan - supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.
Even so, many of the art works glorifying
Stalin and other leaders are hardly in keeping with these ideals and the charge that art be understandable to the whole people negated the Western notion of the
avant garde (despite the Bolsheviks casting themselves as a political "vanguard")and discouraged experimental approaches. The realism achieved was often technically very good and similar to many Western works intended as magazine illustration or bookjackets, rather than High Art. The partisan quality tends to attract the most criticism, in that it often predominated to the exclusion of the other tenets, so that paintings of peasants feasting after bumper harvests was neither real nor typical of the lot of many of those depicted, especially in the
Ukrainian Famine.
Characteristics
Socialist realism held that successful art depicts and glorifies the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress. The Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934 stated that socialist realism
» is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.
Its purpose was to elevate the common worker, whether factory or agricultural, by presenting his life, work, and recreation as admirable. In other words, its goal was to educate the people in the goals and meaning of Communism. The ultimate aim was to create what Lenin called "an entirely new type of human being":
New Soviet Man. Stalin described the practitioners of socialist realism as "engineers of souls".
The "realism" part is important. Soviet art at this time aimed to depict the worker as he truly was, carrying his tools. In a sense, the movement mirrors the course of American and Western art, where the everyday human being became the subject of the novel, the play, poetry, and art. The proletariat was at the center of communist ideals; hence, his life was a worthy subject for study. This was an important shift away from the aristocratic art produced under the Russian
tsars of previous centuries, but had much in common with the late-19th century fashion for depicting the social life of the common people.
Compared to the eclectic variety of 20th century Western art, socialist realism often resulted in a fairly bland and predictable range of artistic products (indeed, Western critics wryly described the principles of socialist realism as "girl meets tractor"). Painters would depict happy, muscular peasants and workers in factories and collective farms; during the Stalin period, they also produced numerous heroic portraits of the dictator to serve his
cult of personality. Industrial and agricultural landscapes were popular subjects, glorifying the achievements of the Soviet economy. Novelists were expected to produce uplifting stories in a manner consistent with the Marxist doctrine of
dialectical materialism. Composers were to produce rousing, vivid music that reflected the life and struggles of the proletariat.
Socialist realism thus demanded close adherence to party doctrine, and has often been criticized as detrimental to the creation of true, unfettered art – or as being little more than a means to censor artistic expression.
Czesław Miłosz, writing in the introduction to Sinyavsky's
On Socialist Realism, describes the products of socialist realism as "inferior", ascribing this as necessarily proceeding from the limited view of reality permitted to creative artists.
Not all Marxists accepted the necessity of socialist realism. Its establishment as state doctrine in the 1930s had rather more to do with internal Communist Party politics than classic Marxist imperatives. The
Hungarian Marxist essayist
Georg Lukács criticized the rigidity of socialist realism, proposing his own "critical realism" as an alternative. However, such critical voices were a rarity until the 1980s.
Notable works and artists
Maxim Gorky's novel
Mother is usually considered to have been the first work of socialist realism. Gorky was also a major factor in the school's rapid rise, and his pamphlet,
On Socialist Realism, essentially lays out the needs of Soviet art. Other important works of literature include
Fyodor Gladkov's
Cement (1925) and
Mikhail Sholokhov's two volume epic,
And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) and
The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1940).
The painter
Aleksandr Deineka provides a notable example for his expressionist and patriotic scenes of the
Second World War, collective farms, and sports.
Yuri Pimenov,
Boris Ioganson and
Geli Korzev have also been described as "unappreciated masters of twentieth-century realism". Another well-known practitioner was
Fyodor Pavlovich Reshetnikov.
Consequences
Socialist realism's rigid precepts and enforcement inevitably caused great damage to the freedom of Soviet artists to express themselves. Many artists and authors found their works censored, ignored, or rejected.
Mikhail Bulgakov, for instance, was forced to write his masterwork,
The Master and Margarita, in secret, despite earlier successes such as
White Guard.
Sergey Prokofiev found himself essentially unable to compose
music during this period.
The political doctrine behind socialist realism also underlay the pervasive censorship of Communist societies. Apart from obvious political considerations that saw works such as those of
George Orwell being banned, access to foreign art and literature was also restricted on aesthetic grounds. Bourgeois art and all forms of experimentalism and formalism were denounced as decadent, degenerate and pessimistic, and therefore anti-Communist in principle. The works of
James Joyce were particularly harshly condemned. The net effect was that it wasn't until the 1980s that the general public in the Communist countries were able to freely access many works of Western art and literature. Many then joined Western observers in denouncing socialist realism as mere
propaganda.
The
Sots Art paintings of
Komar and Melamid can be viewed as a
parody of socialist realism.
Gallery
Click on each image for more details. An asterisk indicates that more information is available.
Architecture
Image:Zaryadye.jpg|Unrealized project of Eighth Sister in Moscow
Image:Palackultury.jpg|Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw
Image:Russia-Moscow-VDNH-3.jpg|All-Soviet Exhibition Centre in Moscow
Image:IMG 7961.jpg|Railway station, Petrozavodsk
Image:Palace_of_culture_Rostselmash_Rostov_on_Don.jpg|Palace of cultures, Rostov on Don
Image:Nowahuta.jpg|Centre of Nowa Huta
Image:Ostrov nad ohri 1744.JPG|Centre of new part of Ostrov town in the west of Czech Republic
Image:Krasnoyarsk Marx 132.jpg|House in the centre of Krasnoyarsk
Sculpture
Image:Kiev_rodina_mat_2001_07_11.jpg|Kiev's monumental statue of the Mother Motherland. (See Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Kiev)
Image:Socrealizm.jpg|Soc-Realist allegories surrounding the Palace of Culture and Science
Image:Waw-soviet-military-cemetery-relief.jpg|A relief from the Soviet military cemetery in Warsaw showing workers greeting victorious soldiers.
Image:KudrinskayaSquareHighriseStatue Moscow.hires.jpg|A figure of a worker over the main entrance to the skyscraper on Rebellions Square in Moscow
Image:Mutter Heimat.jpg|The 85-meter-tall statue of Mother Motherland crowns the Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd
Image:Kolkhoznitsa.jpg|Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture in Moscow (1935-37)
Image:Zaliasis Tiltas Statues.JPG|The construction and industry statue on the Green Bridge, Vilnius; it's one of the few remaining in its original place in Lithuania.
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