Nicolas Nabokoy
RUSSIAN MUSIC AFTER THE PURGE
The resumption--or, as they say in the Soviet Union, the
"activation"--of the campaign against "decadent bourgeois culture"
started immediately after the end of the last war. At the time, its
main protagonist was one of the secretaries of the Central Committee
of the Party, member of the Politburo, the late comrade Zhdanov.
The order of events was as follows: first came the statement in the
summer of 1946 concerning the need to clean up the repertory of
the Soviet theaters. Next on the 20th of September, 1946, Zhdanov
made a speech in which he attacked all those writers in the Soviet
Union who were in some way connected with pre-revolutionary
trends. In it he said, quoting Gorky, that the period between 1907
and 1917 was "the most degrading, decadent, and shameful period
in the history of Russian literature," and, "in general, in the history
of the Russian intelligentsia." "This," declared comrade Zhdanov,
"was the period which was dominated by decaying Western influences
and Western movements, such as the symbolists, imagists, impression–
ists, and decadent writers of all kinds who renounced their ties to
the people, promulgated the principle of
art
for art's sake, and
preached intentional lack of ideology in literature, thus covering up
their own ideological and moral decay. In short, they were trying to
conceal, by pretty forms, a total lack of content."
Zhdanov's whole speech re-stated the 1937 thesis that "formalism"
is the vice of European culture, and that under formalism are grouped
all those writers and poets who do not either represent the so-called
"classical tradition" of Russian literature, or do not collaborate in
the socialistic construction of the Soviet Union. Those who do are,
eo ipso,
socialist realists.
On February 10, 1948, came the decree of the Central Com-
