Abstract
The article draws attention to the exceptional importance of the concept of culture in the development of early Soviet models of governance. It proposes an analysis of party cadres’ conceptualization of culture that provided the basis for the creation of the state monopoly on cultural production of the young Soviet regime in the early 1920s. Particular attention is given to Lenin’s differentiation between “bureaucratic” and “cultural” motivations to labour that, after the October Revolution of 1917, allowed to substantiate the shift in the point of view on socialism from a political to a cultural one. The building of the new Soviet statehood required a moderate depoliticization, the renunciation of the radical revolutionary rhetoric of class struggle in internal policy and the reinterpretation of class, social and cultural contradictions. Attention is drawn to the importance of cultural debates for the creation of the unique Soviet mechanism of governance that separated the principal ideological role of the party from the operative administration of the state machinery. At the centre of the analysis there will be no “theories” of culture or doctrinal diversity of Marxist-Leninist approaches but there will be the modes of culture’s problematization within the sphere that was defined by Michel Foucault as gouvernementalité. A group of specific texts is analyzed, in which governmental rationality and problematization of cultural policy were directly presented. This refers to verbatim reports and party congresses’ materials.
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Notes
Fitzpatrick employs the term “cultural revolution” as an expressive label for the specific episode in Soviet history, whereas the very phrase is loaded with the meaning of class war (David-Fox 1999a: 183).
Needless to say, in academic circles such categorial synonymy seemed unacceptable. But it was not uncommon in the environment of party theorists. For example, Alexander Bogdanov, a notable party figure and the founder of the general theory of organisations, calls culture an “ideological complement” or simply ideology. [Bogdanov 2003: 200].
From here on, the index number of a congress will be marked by a Roman number in square brackets, while the page of a corresponding edition will be marked by an Arabic numeral.
The Manifesto interpreted law as “the will of the ruling class proclaimed as the law” (Marx and Engels 1975: 443).
In such a way, at the Xth Congress, Mikoyan proposed a somewhat risky statement that “Azerbaijan is more cultural that Russian provinces,” which was confronted by Stalin who retorted that it can be said only about Baku that was “built over by the efforts of Nobel, Whishaw and others” [X: 215].
Thus the Ministry of Culture, colossal in its scale, established in 1953, was more than once subject to subdivision: in 1954—the Ministry of Higher Education branched out, in 1959—the State Professional and Technical Education Committee; and later in the period (1960–1974) when Yekaterina Furtseva was the head of the Ministry, a series of new subdivisions followed. That mirrored the reorganisations taking place within the party machineries.
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The article is prepared under the auspices of the HSE Fundamental Researches Program-project 2013 “State Policy and Ideology in the Sphere of Culture” at the Laboratory of Socio-Cultural Research in the Centre for Fundamental Researches at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Moscow).
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Khestanov, R. The role of culture in early Soviet models of governance. Stud East Eur Thought 66, 123–138 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9206-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-014-9206-1