The Soviet Cinema: 1930·1938
PART II
Dwight Macdonald
Stalin Invents Socialist Realism
As the Five-Year Plan approached its final year, the strain became
intolerable. The industrial workers were on subsistence wages. Forced col–
kctivization, jammed through under high pressure, was about to produce
the terrible famine of 1932-3. The dictatorship of RAPP and the censor–
ship were spreading a vast sterility throughout art and letters. Alarmed,
Jle bureaucracy began to relax the pressure. In December of 1931, an official
decree criticized ultra-leftist tendencies in the cinema. And on April 23,
1932, the Central Committee decreed (1) the liquidation of RAPP, (2) the
formation in its stead of a broad united front organization to embrace "all
writers supporting the platform of Soviet power and willing to take part in
the work of Socialist construction." (3) A similar reorganization to be car–
ried out in other branches of art."S2 The decree further stated that RAPP's
ideology "has already become too narrow and is cramping the scope of
serious artistic creativen9s" and that RAPP "is in danger of becoming[!]
an instrument for cultiVating cliqueism ... and for the alienation of impor–
tant groups of writers and artists who sympathize with Socialism.
"33
This
was all very true, and had been equally true ever since Stalin in 1928 placed
the dictatorial knout in RAPP's grasp.
The Stalin line, in politics .or in esthetics, seems to have two unfailing
characteristics: (1) when it changes, it does not merely shift direction; it
reverses itself;
(2)
it always goes to extremes. It was not long, therefore,
before a new dogma arose, a new revelation, to question which was heresy.
This was partly a reaction against the old line: the 'fellow-travelers' whom
RAPP had rapped, now rapped the RAPPists.
t
But it was more than that.
It
was a whole new esthetic, the very own creation of the Stalin clique.
~ne
story is that it was christened during an interview -which a delegation
of writers had with Stalin late in 1932. "The writers promised the 'Leader
of the Peoples' not to make any formalistic experiments, but to hold on high
the flag of realism. 'Say rather, of socialist realism,' said Stalin ...
" 35
It
is difficult to discover precisely what he meant. The official definitions are:
"critical assimilation of the art of past centuries" and "a culture that is
t
The process had Stalin's blessing, of course. Stalin's classic tactic is to use one
tendency to destroy another, and then to behead his executioner. Thus he used the
Kino-Eye group to weaken the prestige of the Eisenstein-Pudovkin school and to line
up the cinema 100 percent behind the Five Year Plan Then, when the plan was
finished and the great directors well bridled, Stalin threw his tools on the scrap heap.
Vertov, Shub, Kaufman and the other Kino-Eye adherents have long since been cast
into outer darkness as 'formalistic:
34
35
