In honour of the seventieth anniversary of the death of Andrei Zhdanov (26 February 1896 to 31 August 1948), one of the great Bolshevik leaders and outstanding Marxist-Leninist, a great working-class theoretician and an expert in the field of art, literature and music).
31 August 2018 marks seventy years since the Soviet people lost the great Marxist-Leninist statesman and Bolshevik propagandist Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov was a close comrade in arms of JV Stalin. Along with Maxim Gorky he helped to lay the foundations for Socialist Realism; he served on the Central Committee, headed its Secretariat, replaced Kirov as Leningrad party chief and guided the city through the Siege of Leningrad. After the war, in the years leading up to his untimely death, he led an ideological assault on bourgeois deviationists. We take this opportunity to pay homage by way of a brief biography of this extraordinary servant of the proletariat.
Early years
Andrei Zhdanov was born 26 February 1896 in Mariupol, Ukraine, the youngest child of the family and the only boy, having three sisters. His father and grandfather had reputedly been priests and theologians, though Zhdanov rejected religion and embraced Marxism. His father died when he was young, and the family, having moved from Mariupol to Tver, sent Zhdanov to a secondary school for his education. It was whilst at school that Zhdanov first made contact with revolutionary groups opposed to the Tsar, and he was active in the distribution of revolutionary literature for the Bolsheviks along with Pyotr Pospelov (a fellow student and future editor of Pravda) and A F Gorkin (who was elected a member of the central committee of the CPSU(b) at the 18th Congress in 1939). In 1915, having enrolled at the Moscow College of Agriculture, Andrei Zhdanov was called up to undertake military service as an officer. Despatched to Georgia he completed his training and took up his post in the 10th Company of the 139th Reserve Regiment in Shadrinsk.
After the February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government, under pressure from the masses, decreed that Soldiers Councils were to be legally set up in the former Tsarist Army. Zhdanov was one of many future Bolsheviks to enter into these Soldiers Committees and he became a Deputy. With the Bolshevik October Revolution Zhdanov found himself a regional commissar for agriculture implementing the Soviet decree on land which read in part:
“(1) Landed proprietorship is abolished forthwith without any compensation.
“(2) The landed estates, as also all crown, monastery, and church lands, with all their livestock, implements, buildings and everything pertaining thereto, shall be placed at the disposal of the volost land committees and the uyezd Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly.
“(3) All damage to confiscated property, which henceforth belongs to the whole people, is proclaimed a grave crime to be punished by the revolutionary courts. The uyezd Soviets of Peasants’ Deputies shall take all necessary measures to assure the observance of the strictest order during the confiscation of the landed estates, to determine the size of estates, and the particular estates subject to confiscation, to draw up exact inventories of all property confiscated and to protect in the strictest revolutionary way all agricultural enterprises transferred to the people, with all buildings, implements , livestock, stocks of produce, etc.”
In such circumstances Zhdanov found himself engaged in the distribution of land amongst the peasants and the war on the landowners. This activity was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War, and in particular the uprising of the Czech Corps (a unit of the Tsarist army which gathered together PoWs prepared to fight the Austro-Hungarian empire). The Urals and Siberia were an important battlefield in the Civil War, and Zhdanov lived through this period of Soviet history rubbing shoulders with legendary heroes of the Civil War.
With the defeat of the White armies Zhdanov’s party career took him from Tver to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) and he became an effective Bolshevik propagandist. The memoirs of a Soviet border guard named Arykin reportedly remember Zhdanov thus “He had a gift of winning people’s hearts. You couldn’t help liking him… he was a great propagandist”. His effectiveness as a propagandist and his abilities as a great Marxist-Leninist saw Zhdanov on the right side of all the controversies of the early period of Soviet rule. By 1934 Zhdanov was brought to Moscow as a Secretary of the Central Committee.
Writers Congress – proletarian ethics
Zhdanov had a close friendship with Maxim Gorky with whom he arranged and presided over the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Gorky would later write to the Bolshevik Shcherbakov that socialist realism was “a method and technique of literary creativity and… the aesthetics and ethics of Soviet art”. Socialist Realism truly announced its arrival at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in both the speech made by Maxim Gorky and the address of AA Zhdanov. The name of Andrei Zhdanov will be forever associated with the flowering of socialist art and culture, with the promotion of a revolutionary literature and a form of literary critique placed as a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. In his talk entitled ‘Soviet Literature – the richest in ideas, the most advanced literature’, Zhdanov said:
“Your congress is convening at a time when under the leadership of the Communist Party, under the guiding genius of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin, the socialist system has finally and irrevocably triumphed in our country. Consistently advancing from one stage to the next, from victory to victory, from the inferno of the Civil War to the period of restoration and from the period of restoration to the socialist reconstruction of the entire national economy, our Party has led the country to victory over the capitalist elements, ousting them from all spheres of economic life…
“At the Seventeenth Congress of our Party, Comrade Stalin gave a masterful, unsurpassed analysis of our victories and of the factors conditioning them, of our position at the present time and of the programme for further work in completing the building of a classless socialist society. Comrade Stalin gave an exhaustive analysis of the backward sectors in our work and of the difficulties which our Party and, under its leadership, the million-strong masses of the working class and collective farm peasantry, are waging a tireless, day-to-day struggle to overcome…
“Comrade Stalin laid bare the very roots of our difficulties and shortcomings. They result from the fact that our practical organisational work does not come up to the level which is required by the political line of the Party, to the demands with which the carrying out of the Second Five Year plan confronts us. That is why the Seventeenth Party Congress set us the urgent task of raising our organisational work to the level of those tremendous political tasks with which we are faced. Under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, the Party is organising the masses for a struggle for the final liquidation of capitalist elements, for overcoming the survivals of capitalism in economic life and in the consciousness of people, for completing the technical reconstruction of the national economy. Overcoming the survivals of capitalism in the consciousness of people means fighting against all relics of bourgeois influence over the proletariat, against laxity, against loafing, against idling, against petty-bourgeois dissoluteness and individualism, against an attitude of graft and dishonesty towards public property.
“We have in our hands a sure weapon for the overcoming of all difficulties that stand on our way. This weapon is the great and invincible doctrine of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, embodied in life by our Party and Soviets…
“The key to the success of Soviet literature is to be sought for in the success of socialist construction. Its growth is an expression of the successes and achievements of our socialist system. Our literature is the youngest of all literatures of all peoples and countries. And at the same time it is the richest in ideas, the most advanced and the most revolutionary literature. Never before has there been a literature which has organised the toilers and oppressed for the struggle to abolish once and for all every kind of exploitation and the yoke of wage slavery. Never before has there been a literature which has based the subject matter of its works on the life of the working class and peasantry and their fight for socialism. Nowhere, in no country in the world, has there been a literature which has defended and upheld the principle of equal rights for the toilers of all nations, the principle of equal rights for women. There is not, there cannot be in bourgeois countries a literature which consistently smashes every kind of obscurantism, every kind of mysticism, priesthood and superstition, as our literature is doing. [Emphasis added throughout].
“Only Soviet literature, which is of one flesh and blood with socialist construction, could become, and has indeed become, such a literature–so rich in ideas, so advanced and revolutionary.
“Soviet authors have already created not a few outstanding works, which correctly and truthfully depict the life of our Soviet country. Already there are several names of which we can be justly proud. Under the leadership of the Party, with the thoughtful and daily guidance of the Central Committee and the untiring support and help of Comrade Stalin, a whole army of Soviet writers has rallied around the Soviet power and the Party. And in the light of our Soviet literature’s successes, we see standing out in yet sharper relief the full contrast between our system, the system of victorious socialism – and the system of dying, mouldering capitalism.
“Of what can the bourgeois author write, of what can he dream, what source of inspiration can he find, whence can he borrow this inspiration, if the worker in capitalist countries is uncertain of the morrow, if he does not know whether he will have work the next day, if the peasant does not know whether he will work on his plot of ground tomorrow or whether his life will be ruined by the capitalist crisis, if the brain worker has no work today and does not know whether he will receive any tomorrow?
“What can the bourgeois author write about, what source of inspiration can there be for him, when the world is being precipitated once more – if not today, then tomorrow – into the abyss of a new imperialist war?
“The present state of bourgeois literature is such that it is no longer able to create great works of art. The decadence and disintegration of bourgeois literature, resulting from the collapse and decay of the capitalist system, represent a characteristic trait, a characteristic peculiarity of the state of bourgeois culture and bourgeois literature at the present time. Gone, never to return, are the times when bourgeois literature, reflecting the victory of the bourgeois system over feudalism, was able to create great works of the period when capitalism was flourishing. Everything now is growing stunted – themes, talents, authors, heroes.
“In deathly terror of the proletarian revolution, fascism is wreaking its vengeance on civilization, turning people back to the most hideous and savage periods of human history, burning on the bonfire and barbarously destroying the works of humanity’s best minds.
“Characteristic of the decadence and decay of bourgeois culture are the orgies of mysticism and superstition, the passion for pornography. The ‘illustrious persons’ of bourgeois literature – of that bourgeois literature which has sold its pen to capital – are now thieves, police sleuths, prostitutes, hooligans.
“All this is characteristic of that section of literature which is trying to conceal the decay of the bourgeois system, which is vainly trying to prove that nothing has happened, that all is well in the ‘state of Denmark,’ that there is nothing rotten as yet in the system of capitalism. Those representatives of bourgeois literature who feel the state of things more acutely are absorbed in pessimism, doubt in the morrow, eulogy of darkness, extolment of pessimism as the theory and practice of art. And only a small section – the most honest and far-sighted writers – are trying to find a way out along other paths, in other directions, to link their destiny with the proletariat and its revolutionary struggle.
“The proletariat of capitalist countries is already forging the army of its writers, of its artists – the revolutionary writers whose representatives we are glad to welcome here today at the first Congress of Soviet Writers. The detachment of revolutionary writers in capitalist countries is not large as yet, but it is growing and will continue to grow every day, as the class struggle becomes more intense, as the forces of the world proletarian revolution grow stronger.
“We firmly believe that these few dozens of foreign comrades who are here today represent the nucleus, the core of a mighty army of proletarian writers which will be created by the world proletarian revolution in capitalist countries.
“That is how matters stand in capitalist countries. Not so with us. Our Soviet writer derives the material for his works of art, his subject-matter, images, artistic language and speech, from the life and experience of the men and women of Dnieprostroy, of Magnitostroy. Our writer draws his material from the heroic epic of the Chelyuskin expedition, from the experience of our collective farms, from the creative action that is seething in all corners of our country.
“In our country the main heroes of works of literature are the active builders of a new life—working men and women, men and women collective farmers, Party members, business managers, engineers, members of the Young Communist League, Pioneers. Such are the chief types and the chief heroes of our Soviet literature. Our literature is impregnated with enthusiasm and the spirit of heroic deeds. It is optimistic, but not optimistic in accordance with any ‘inward,’ animal instinct. It is optimistic in essence, because it is the literature of the rising class of the proletariat, the only progressive and advanced class. Our Soviet literature is strong by virtue of the fact that it is serving a new cause – the cause of socialist construction.
“Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What duties does the title confer upon you?
“In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but to depict reality in its revolutionary development.
“In addition to this, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remoulding and education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism. This method in belles lettres and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.
“Our Soviet literature is not afraid of the charge of being ‘tendentious’. Yes, Soviet literature is tendentious, for in an epoch of class struggle there is not and cannot be a literature which is not class literature, not tendentious, or is allegedly non-political.
“And I think that every one of our Soviet writers can say to any dull-witted bourgeois, to any philistine, to any bourgeois writer who may talk about our literature being tendentious: ‘Yes, our Soviet literature is tendentious, and we are proud of this fact, because the aim of our tendency is to liberate the toilers, to free all mankind from the yoke of capitalist slavery.’
“To be an engineer of human souls means standing with both feet firmly planted on the basis of real life. And this in its turn denotes a rupture with romanticism of the old type, which depicted a non-existent life and non-existent heroes, leading the reader away from the antagonisms and oppression of real life into a world of the impossible, into a world of utopian dreams. Our literature, which stands with both feet firmly planted on a materialist basis, cannot be hostile to romanticism, but it must be a romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism. We say that socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet belles lettres and literary criticism, and this presupposes that revolutionary romanticism should enter into literary creation as a component part, for the whole life of our Party, the whole life of the working class and its struggle consist in a combination of the most stern and sober practical work with a supreme spirit of heroic deeds and magnificent future prospects. Our Party has always been strong by virtue of the fact that it has united and continues to unite a thoroughly business-like and practical spirit with broad vision, with a constant urge forward, with a struggle for the building of communist society. Soviet literature should be able to portray our heroes; it should be able to glimpse our tomorrow. This will be no utopian dream, for our tomorrow is already being prepared for today by dint of conscious planned work.
“One cannot be an engineer of human souls without knowing the technique of literary work, and it must be noted that the technique of the writer’s work possesses a large number of specific peculiarities.
“You have many different types of weapons. Soviet literature has every opportunity of employing these types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and methods of literary creation) in their diversity and fullness, selecting all the best that has been created in this sphere by all previous epochs. From this point of view, the mastery of the technique of writing, the critical assimilation of the literary heritage of all epochs represents a task which you must fulfil without fail, if you wish to become engineers of human souls.
“Comrades, the proletariat, just as in other provinces of material and spiritual culture, is the sole heir of all that is best in the treasury of world literature. The bourgeoisie has squandered its literary heritage; it is our duty to gather it up carefully, to study it and, having critically assimilated it, to advance further.
“To be engineers of human souls means to fight actively for the culture of language, for quality of production. Our literature does not as yet come up to the requirements of our era. The weaknesses of our literature are a reflection of the fact that people’s consciousness lags behind economic life – a defect from which even our writers are not, of course, free. That is why untiring work directed towards self-education and towards improving their ideological equipment in the spirit of socialism represents an indispensable condition without which Soviet writers cannot remould the mentality of their readers and thereby become engineers of human souls.
“We require a high mastery of artistic production; and in this connection it is impossible to overrate the help that Maxim Gorky is rendering the Party and the proletariat in the struggle for quality in literature, for the culture of language.
“And so our Soviet writers have all the conditions necessary for them to produce works which will be, as we say, consonant with our era, works from which the people of our times can learn and which will be the pride of future generations.
“All the necessary conditions have been created to enable Soviet literature to produce works answering to the requirements of the masses, who have grown in culture. Only our literature has the chance to be so closely connected with the readers, with the whole life of the working population, as is the case in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The present congress is in itself peculiarly significant. The preparations for the congress were conducted not only by the writers but by the whole country together with them. In the course of these preparations one could clearly see the love and attention with which Soviet writers are surrounded by the Party, the workers and the collective farm peasantry, the consideration and at the same time the exacting demands which characterise the attitude of our working class and collective farmers to Soviet writers. Only in our country is such enhanced importance given to literature and to writers.
“Organise the work of your congress and that of the Union of Soviet Writers in the future in such a way that the creative work of our writers may conform to the victories that socialism has won.
“Create works of high attainment, of high ideological and artistic content.
“Actively help to remould the mentality of people in the spirit of socialism.
“Be in the front ranks of those who are fighting for a classless socialist society.”
Zhdanov and the History of the CPSU(b)
In 1934, in a letter to the editorial board of the Proletarskaya Revolutsia, JV Stalin wrote a piece exposing the fraudulent statements being made by concealed Trotskyists against Leninism. A fierce battle was raging in the Soviet press concerning the history of Leninism and the Bolshevik Party. Stalin declared “it is not the business of the editorial board of ‘Proletarskaya Revolutsia’ to facilitate the smuggling activities of such ‘historians’ by providing them with a forum for discussion.
“The task of the editorial board is, in my opinion, to raise the questions concerning the history of Bolshevism to the proper level, to put the study of the history of our Party on scientific, Bolshevik lines, and to concentrate attention against the Trotskyist and all other falsifiers of the history of our Party, systematically tearing off their masks.
“That is all the more necessary since even some of our historians – I am speaking of historians without quotation marks, of Bolshevik historians of our Party – are not free from mistakes which bring grist to the mill of the Slutskys and Voloseviches.”
Leninist party leaders like Lavrentiy Beria, Maxim Gorky, Viacheslav Molotov, Klim Voroshilov, Sergey Kirov, JV Stalin and A Zhdanov began work on a number of texts which set the record straight and put the study of the history of the Bolshevik party upon proper Bolshevik lines. These studies were removed from the Soviet Union, rewritten and defamed at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union by Khrushchev, Mikoyan and other revisionists. Such works include Lavrentiy Beria’s On the history of the Bolshevik Organisations of Transcaucasia, and The History of the Civil War in the USSR. First among them is the History of the CPSU(b) – Short Course.
Andrei Zhdanov, as head of propaganda in the central committee was instrumental in the writing and publishing of the these documents, and, under the leadership of Zhdanov and Stalin, the central committee passed an important resolution in 1939 entitled ‘On the Organisation of Party Propaganda in Connection with the Publication of the History of the CPSU(B) – Short Course’. It declared:
“The publication of the ‘History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) – Short Course’ is an outstanding event in the ideological life of the Bolshevik Party. With its appearance, the Party has acquired a new and powerful ideological weapon of Bolshevism, an encyclopaedia of fundamental knowledge in the realm of Marxism-Leninism. The short course is a scientific history of bolshevism. It sets forth and generalises the tremendous experiences of the communist party, an experience unequalled by that of any other party in the world…
“… In the compilation of the ‘History of the CPSU(B) – Short Course’, the Central Committee set itself the aim of removing the harmful gap which in the sphere of propaganda has arisen in recent years between Marxism and Leninism and which has resulted in the teaching of Leninism as an independent doctrine separated from Marxism, from dialectical and historical materialism, and from the history of the Party, the fact being forgotten that Leninism arose and developed on the basis of Marxism, that Marxism is the foundation of Leninism, and that without a knowledge of this foundation , Leninism cannot be understood.
“In the compilation of the ‘History of the CPSU(B) – Short Course’, the Central Committee set itself the aim of providing a guide to the theory and history of the CPSU(B) which would reunite into one whole the artificially separated component parts of the integral doctrine of Marxism-Leninism – dialectical and historical materialism and Leninism – and in which historical materialism and the policy of the Party would be connected; a guide which would demonstrate the indissoluble unity, integrity and continuity of the doctrine of Marx and Lenin, the unity of Marxism-Leninism, and which would give an account of the new contributions which Lenin and his disciples made to Marxist theory by generalising the new experience of the class struggle of the proletariat in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions…
“… Unlike certain of the old textbooks, whose account of the history of the CPSU(B) was primarily centred around historical personages, and the purpose of which was to educate our forces by the example of personages and their biographies, the ‘Short Course’ bases its account of the history of the Party on an exposition of the fundamental ideas of Marxism-Leninism and seeks to educate Party members primarily in the ideas of Marxism-Leninism…
“… Wide currency has been acquired by perversions of the Marxist-Leninist view on the character of wars in the present epoch, the failure to understand the difference between just and unjust wars, and by the false idea that the Bolsheviks are a kind of ‘pacifists’.
“In historical science, anti-Marxist perversions and vulgarisations were until quite latterly connected with the so-called Pokrovsky ‘school,’ which interpreted historical facts in a perverted way, treated them, in defiance of historical materialism, from the standpoint of the present day, and not from the standpoint of the conditions in which the historical events took place, and thus distorted historical truth…
“… The CC of the CPBSU(B) proceeded from the premise that unless our Party members have a knowledge of the theory of Marxism-Leninism, unless they master Bolshevism and make good their deficiencies in the realm of theory, they will be severely handicapped, for in order that they may properly guide all branches of Socialist construction, those practically engaged in the work must master the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist theory and be able to guide themselves by theory in the solution of practical problems.
“It is a mistake to think that only a narrow circle of people can master theory. Marxist-Leninist theory can be mastered by anybody. Today, with a Soviet system and with the victory of Socialism in the USSR, unlimited opportunities have been created enabling our leading cadres to successfully master Marxist-Leninist theory and to study the history of the Party and the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. To master the theory of Marxism-Leninism one has only to desire to do so, and to display persistence and firmness of will in the achievement of this aim. If such sciences as physics, chemistry and biology can be successfully mastered, there is not the slightest ground to doubt that the science of Marxism-Leninism can be fully mastered.”
Siege of Leningrad
Space does not permit us here to go into the details of Zhdanov’s transfer to Leningrad, let alone his outstanding role in the Winter War with Finland and the various party and state tasks he fulfilled in connection with the preparations made by the USSR for the war with Hitlerite Germany. Suffice it to say by way of an explanation that Zhdanov was moved from Moscow to Leningrad following the murder of Sergei Kirov by the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre.
When war with Germany broke out in 1941 the Soviet Union benefited from the 150km buffer which separated Leningrad from the territories occupied after the war with Finland. This buffer was sufficient to prevent the German military machine from occupying Leningrad, as was their main aim, but it did not prevent the cutting off of Leningrad from the rest of the USSR by land and the beginning of the awful 872-day siege of the city. From then on the only routes out were by air or across the Lagoda Lake.
Having received more than a quarter of a million Soviet refugees fleeing Operation Barbarossa which began in June 1941, the Leningrad authorities under Zhdanov managed to evacuate in total about 700,000 people into the rear of the USSR. Artillery bombardments of the city by the Germans prevented the further evacuation of civilians that year (although another 500,000 eventually escaped) and by September the city was encircled. In his ‘Directive No. 1601’ Hitler ordered that "St. Petersburg must be erased from the face of the Earth", "we have no interest in saving lives of civilian population."
In such conditions, Andrei Zhdanov played a leading role in the struggle for survival, and in the eventual liberation of the city. Even during the worst of the siege Leningrad continued to produce 25% of major armaments and as a leading industrial centre was producing radio transmitters and artillery. A great many heroic deeds could be recounted if space permitted us, and an article next year will mark the 75th Anniversary of the Siege of Leningrad, but we shall limit ourselves here to mentioning briefly just a few typical examples of the ingenuity of the Soviet people under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. For instance, when the city was cut off by land, the Soviet Red Army opened up a crossing across Lake Lagoda. By November of that year, more than 350 sleighs made up the first caravan across the ice, a route never before undertaken in the history of the city which had properly begun in 1703! Such a feat was made possible by work undertaken by Soviet meteorologists on the snow and ice of the Lake, a study initiated by Zhdanov and carried out with the assistance of the Baltic fleet.
Barges brought food and bread, but the icy winter soon left Leningrad without heating and water. With the city frozen and faced with only a month’s supply of bread, Andrei Zhdanov gathered together the city bakers and other leading civil and military figures. The city required 100,000 tonnes of flour a month to bake enough bread to feed the starving population, yet there was no water, such was the extent of the ice. Vladimir Tributs, the Baltic Navy Admiral attended the meeting called by Zhdanov. A plan was formulated to use the pumps of two submarines stranded in the frozen ice in an attempt to pump water from the very depths of the river where it was not frozen. The plan was successful and it is said the first bread was baked within five hours of this meeting. Such are just a glimpse of the obstacles which the Soviet people, guided by the Bolshevik party, were able to overcome.
The struggle for proletarian culture and Soviet art
Although he took on many important state and party functions, the struggles waged by Andrei Zhdanov after 1945 leaves us with classic texts of Marxism-Leninism dealing with philosophical questions, developing the Soviet arts and literature and by way of criticism of both music and bourgeois influences in Soviet literature.
In his speech on Soviet music at a meeting of the central committee he clearly outlines the communist attitude to the arts, an attitude at odds with the r-r-r-revolutionary teachings of those who desired to throw out the rich cultural heritage left to socialist society by the preceding epochs which were based upon exploitation. Let these words be read by many of those young people who today, under the banner of ‘cultural Marxism’ call on us to ‘do away’ with science and reason in the name of ‘dialectics’ and ‘accepting of material reality’, or in other words, the acceptance of prevailing bourgeois morality, bourgeois culture, bourgeois decadence.
In the words of Zhdanov, “We Bolsheviks do not reject the cultural heritage. On the contrary, we are critically assimilating the cultural heritage of all nations and all times in order to choose from it all that can inspire the working people of Soviet society to great exploits in labour, science and culture. We must help the people in this. If you do not set yourself this task, if you do not throw yourself heart and soul into its realisation, devoting to it all your ardour and creative enthusiasm, you will not be performing your historic role…
“…At one time, you remember, elementary and secondary schools went in for the ‘laboratory brigade’ method and the ‘Dalton plan’, which reduced the role of the teacher in the schools to a minimum and gave each pupil the right to set the theme of classwork at the beginning of each lesson. On arriving in the classroom, the teacher would ask the pupils ‘What shall we study today?’ The pupils would reply: ‘Tell us about the Arctic,’ ’Tell us about the Antarctic’ ‘Tell us about Chapayev,’ ‘Tell us about Dneprostroi.’ The teacher had to follow the lead of these demands. This was called the ’laboratory brigade method,’ but actually it amounted to turning the organisation of schooling completely topsy-turvy. The pupils became the directing force, and the teacher followed their lead. Once we had ‘loose-leaf textbooks’, and the five point system of marks was abandoned. All these things were novelties, but I ask you, did these novelties stand for progress?
“The Party cancelled all these ‘novelties,’ as you know. Why? Because these ‘novelties,’ in form very ‘leftish,’ were in actual fact extremely reactionary and made for the nullification of the school…
“…Or take this example. An Academy of Fine Arts was organised not so long ago. Painting is your sister, one of the muses. At one time, as you know, bourgeois influences were very strong in painting. They cropped up time and again under the most ‘leftist’ flags, giving themselves such tags as futurism, cubism, modernism; ‘stagnant academism’ was ‘overthrown,’ and novelty proclaimed. This novelty expressed itself in insane carryings on, as for instance, when a girl was depicted with one head on forty legs, with one eye turned towards us, and the other towards Arzamas.
“How did all this end? In the complete crash of the ‘new trend.’ The Party fully restored the significance of the classical heritage of Repin, Briullov, Vereshchagin, Vasnetsov and Surikov. Did we do right in reinstating the treasures of classical painting, and routing the liquidators of painting?
“Would not the continued existence of the like ‘schools’ have meant the nullification of painting? Did the Central Committee act ‘conservatively,’ was it under the influence of ‘traditionalism,’ of ‘epigonism’ and so on, when it defended the classical heritage in painting? This is sheer nonsense!
“With regard to naturalistic distortions. It was made clear here that the natural, healthy standards of music have been increasingly discarded. Elements of crude naturalism are being used more and more in our music. Here is what Serov wrote ninety years ago, in warning against preoccupation with crude naturalism:
"’In nature there is a sea of sound of the most divers kind and quality, but all these sounds, known as noise, thunder, roaring, splitting, splashing, rumbling, droning, pealing, howling, creaking, whistling, murmuring, whispering, rustling, hissing, rippling, and so on, and others not denoted in speech … all these sounds either do not form the material of the musical tongue; or, if they are incorporated in it at all, it is only as exceptions (the ringing of bells, copper cymbals, musical triangles – the sound of drums, timbrels, etc.). The proper material of music is sound of a special quality….’
“Is it not true, is it not correct that the sound of cymbals and drums should be the exception in musical composition and not the rule?! Is it not clear that not even natural sound ought to be incorporated in musical compositions?! And yet how much inexcusable indulgence in vulgar naturalism unquestionably betokening retrogression, we find among us!
“It must be frankly stated that quite a few works by modern composers are so saturated with naturalistic sounds that they make one think of a drilling machine if you will pardon the unaesthetic comparison, or of a musical murder van. You have got to realise that they are simply impossible to listen to!
“…With this music we begin to pass beyond the confines of the rational, beyond the confines not only of normal human emotions but also of normal human reason. True there are fashionable theories nowadays which assert that the pathological state of man is something of a higher state, and that the schizophrenic and the paranoiac can in their hallucinations reach spiritual heights, such as the ordinary man can never reach in the normal state. These ‘theories’ are not accidental, of course. They are very characteristic of the epoch of decay and decomposition of bourgeois culture. But let us leave all these ‘refinements’ to the insane. Let us demand that our composers give us normal, human music”.
On the literary front Andrei Zhdanov ridiculed those Soviet writers who had so dismally failed to assimilate the lessons of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, who acted as purveyors of bourgeois influence amongst the Soviet people and pointed to all that was rotten and dying away in Soviet society, ignoring that which was good, that which was noble, and that which should be made to flourish. One such writer, still in print in the west, was Mikhail Zoshchenko. In 1945 Zvezda (a Leningrad journal) published his ‘Adventures of a Monkey’, a short story. After this Zhdanov went on to read this story in full which we are excluding here for its sheer length, banality and reactionary essence. The Central Committee of the Communist Party criticised Zvezda for publishing this story, and here are the reasons for this criticisms, in the words of Zhdanov:
“It is clear from the Central Committee’s decision that ‘Zvezda’s worst mistake has been that of allowing the writings of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova to appear in its pages. It is, I think, hardly necessary for me to instance Zoshchenko’s ‘work’ ‘The Adventures of a Monkey’. You have certainly all read it and know it better than I do. The point of this ‘work’ of Zoshchenko’s is that in it he portrays Soviet people as lazy, unattractive, stupid and crude. He is in no way concerned with their labour, their efforts, their heroism, their high social and moral qualities. He never so much as mentions these. He chooses, like the cheap philistine he is, to scratch about in life’s basenesses and pettinesses. This is no accident. It is intrinsic in all cheap philistine writers, of whom Zoshchenko is one. Gorky often used to speak of this; you will remember how, at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, he stigmatised the so-called literati who can see no further than the soot on the kitchen range and in the boiler room.
“’The Adventures of a Monkey’ is not a thing apart from the general run of Zoshchenko’s stories. It is merely as the most vivid expression of all the negative qualities in his ‘literary work’ that it has attracted the critics’ attention. Since he returned to Leningrad after the evacuation, he has, we know, written several things demonstrating his inability to find anything positive whatever in the life of Soviet people or any positive character among them. He is in the habit of jeering at Soviet life, ways and people, as he does in ‘The Adventures of a Monkey’, and of concealing his jeers behind a mask of empty-headed entertainment and pointless humour.
“If you take the trouble to read his ‘Adventures of a Monkey’ more closely you will find that he makes the monkey act as a supreme judge of our social customs, a dictator of morality to Soviet people. The monkey is depicted as an intelligent creature capable of assessing human behaviour. The writer deliberately caricatures the life of Soviet people as unattractive and cheap, so as to have the monkey pass the judgment, filthy, poisonous and anti-Soviet as it is, that living in the zoo is better than being at liberty, that you can draw your breath more freely in a cage than among Soviet people.
“Is it possible to fall morally and politically lower than this? How can the people of Leningrad tolerate such rubbish and vulgarity in the pages of their journals?
“The Leningraders in charge of ‘Zvezda’ must indeed be lacking in vigilance if a ‘work’ of this sort is offered to the journal’s Soviet readers, if it is found possible to publish works steeped in the venom of bestial enmity towards the Soviet order. Only the scum of the literary world could write such ‘works’, and only the blind, the apolitical could allow them to appear.
“Zoshchenko’s story is said to have gone the rounds of Leningrad’s variety halls. The leadership of educational work in Leningrad must have fallen to a low level indeed for such a thing to be possible.
“Zoshchenko has managed to find a niche for himself in the pages of an important Leningrad journal and to popularise his loathsome ‘moral lessons’ there. And yet ‘Zvezda’ is a journal purporting to educate our young people. Is that a task to be coped with by a journal that has taken a low un-Soviet writer like Zoshchenko to its heart? Is ‘Zvezda’s editorial board unaware of what he is?
“It is not so long ago – early 1944, in fact – that ‘Bolshevik’ published an article sharply critical of Zoshchenko’s book ‘Before Sunrise’, which was written at the height of the Soviet people’s war of liberation against the German invaders. In this book Zoshchenko turns his low, cheap little self inside out, and delights to exhibit himself to the public gaze; indeed, he does it with gusto, crying: See what an oaf I am!
“It would be hard to find in our literature anything more revolting than the ‘lesson’ Zoshchenko teaches in this book, ‘Before Sunrise’, where he portrays himself and others as lewd and repulsive beasts with neither shame nor conscience. Such was the ‘lesson’ he offered Soviet readers when our people were shedding their blood in an unprecedentedly bitter war, when the life of the Soviet state hung by a thread, when the Soviet people were making countless sacrifices to defeat the Germans. Far in the rear, entrenched in Alma-Ata, Zoshchenko was doing nothing to help. Bolshevik publicly castigated him, and rightly, as a low slanderer having no place in Soviet literature.
“But he snapped his fingers at public opinion. Less than two years later, friend Zoshchenko struts back to Leningrad and starts making free use of the pages of the Leningrad journals. Not only ‘Zvezda’ but ‘Leningrad’, too, welcomed his stories. Variety concert halls were rapidly made available. Moreover, he was allowed to occupy a leading position in the Leningrad section of the Union of Soviet Writers and to play an active part in the literary affairs of Leningrad.
“What grounds have you for letting him roam at will through the parks and gardens of Leningrad literature? Why have Leningrad’s active Party workers and the Leningrad Writers’ Union allowed such shameful things to occur?
“Zoshchenko’s thoroughly rotten and corrupt social, political and literary attitude does not result from any recent transformation. There is nothing accidental about his latest ‘works’. They are simply the continuation of his literary ‘legacy’ dating from the twenties.
“Who was he in the past? He was one of the organisers of the literary group known as the Serapion Brothers. And when the Serapion Brothers group was formed, what was he like socially and politically? Let me turn to ‘Literaturniye Zapiski’ (3, 1922) where the founders of this group expounded their creed. This journal contains, among other things, Zoshchenko’s credo, in an article entitled ‘About Myself and a Few Other Things’. Quite unashamed, he publicly exposes himself and states his political and literary ‘views’ with the utmost frankness. Listen to what he says:
“’…It is very difficult to be a writer, on the whole. Take this business of ideology… Writers are expected to have an ideology nowadays… What a bore! How can I have any ‘definite ideology’, tell me, when no Party really attracts me? From the Party members’ point of view I am not a man of principle. What of it? For my part, I may say: I am not a Communist, nor a Socialist-Revolutionary, nor a Monarchist, but merely a Russian and a politically amoral one, at that…. Honest to God, I don’t know to this day what Party, well, Guchkov… say, belongs to. Heaven knows what party he’s in; I know he isn’t a Bolshevik, but whether he’s a Socialist-Revolutionary or a Cadet I neither know nor care.’ And so on and so forth.
“What do you make of that sort of ‘ideology’? Twenty-five years have passed since Zoshchenko published this ‘confession’ of his. Has he changed since? Not so that you would notice it. Not only has he neither learned anything nor changed in any way in the last two and a half decades, but with cynical frankness he continues, on the contrary, to remain the apostle of empty-headedness and cheapness, a literary slum-rat, unprincipled and conscienceless. That is to say, now as then he cares nothing for Soviet ways, now as then he has no place in Soviet literature and opposes it.
“If he has nevertheless become something approaching a literary star in Leningrad, if his praises are sung on Leningrad’s Parnassus, we can but marvel at the lack of principle, of strictness, of discrimination, in the people who paved the way for him and applauded him.
“Allow me to instance one more illustration of what the Serapion Brothers, so-called, were like. In the same issue of ‘Literaturniye Zapiski’ (3. 1922) another Serapionist, Lev Lunts, also tried to expound the ideological basis of the harmful trend represented by the Serapion Brothers, which is alien to the spirit of Soviet literature. Lunts wrote:
“’We gathered together at a time of great political and revolutionary tension. ‘He who is not with us is against us’, we were told on all hands. ‘Who are you with, Serapion Brothers’, we were asked, ‘with the Communists or against them, for the revolution or against it?’ And so, who are we with, Serapion Brothers? We are with the hermit Serapion. Officialdom has ruled Russian literature too long and too painfully. We do not want utilitarianism. We do not write for propaganda purposes. Art is real, like life itself, and like life it exists because it must, without purpose or meaning.’
“Such was the role allotted to art by the Serapion Brothers, depriving it of all ideological content or social significance; they proclaimed the non-ideological nature of art, demanding art for art’s sake, without purpose or meaning. This is nothing but a plea for philistinism, superficiality and lack of political belief.
“What conclusion does this lead to? Zoshchenko does not like Soviet ways: so what would you advise us to do? Adapt ourselves to him? It is not for us to change our tastes. It is not for us to alter our life and our order to suit him. Let him change; and if he will not, let him get out of Soviet literature, in which there can be no place for meaningless, cheap, empty-headed works.
“This was the Central Committee’s starting point in adopting its decisions on ‘Zvezda’ and ‘Leningrad’.
“I will now turn to the literary ‘work’ of Anna Akhmatova. Her works have been appearing in the Leningrad journals recently as an example of ‘increased output’. This is as surprising and unnatural as it would be if someone were to start issuing new editions of the works of Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav, Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, Zinaida Hippius, Fyodor Sologub, Zinovyeva-Annibal, and so on and so forth; that is, of all the writers whom our advanced public and literary circles have always considered to be representatives of reactionary obscurantism and perfidy in art and politics.
“Gorky once said that the ten years from 1907 to 1917 might well be called the most shameful, the most barren decade in the history of Russian intellectuals; in this decade, after the 1905 Revolution, a great many of the intellectuals spurned the revolution and slid down into a morass of pornography and reactionary mysticism, screening their perfidy with the ‘pretty’ phrase: ‘I too have burned all I revered and have revered what I burned.’
“It was during these ten years that there appeared such perfidious works as Ropshin’s ‘The Pale Horse’ and the writings of Vinnichenko and other deserters from the camp of revolution to that of reaction, hastening to dethrone the lofty ideals that the best and most progressive representatives of Russian society were fighting for. It was then that there rose to the surface Symbolists, Imagists and decadents of every shape and hue, disowning the people and proclaiming the thesis of ‘Art for Art’s sake’, preaching the meaninglessness of literature and screening their ideological and moral corruption behind a pursuit of beauty of form without content. All of them were united in their brutish fear of the coming workers’ revolution. Suffice it to recall that one of the most notable ‘theoreticians’ in these reactionary literary movements was Merezhkovsky, who called the coming workers’ revolution ‘the approaching rabble’ and greeted the October revolution with bestial malice.
“Anna Akhmatova is one of the representatives of this idea-less reactionary morass in literature. She belongs to the ‘Acmeist’ literary group, who in their day emerged from the ranks of the Symbolists and she is one of the standard bearers of the meaningless, empty-headed, aristocratic-salon school of poetry, which has no place whatever in Soviet literature. The Acmeists represented an extremely individualistic trend in art. They preached ‘Art for Art’s sake’, ‘Beauty for Beauty’s sake’, and had no wish to know anything about the people and the people’s needs and interests, or about social life.
“This was a bourgeois-aristocratic trend in literature, appearing at a time when the days of the bourgeoisie and of the aristocracy were numbered, when the poets and theoreticians of the ruling classes were trying to hide from harsh reality in the mists and clouds of religious mysticism, in paltry personal experiences and in absorption in their own petty souls, The Acmeists, like the symbolists, decadents and other representatives of the disintegrating bourgeois-aristocratic ideology, were preachers of defeatism, pessimism and faith in a hereafter.
“Akhmatova’s subject-matter is individualistic to the core. The range of her poetry is sadly limited; it is the poetry of a spoilt woman-aristocrat, frenziedly vacillating between boudoir and chapel. Her main emphasis is on erotic love-themes interwoven with notes of sadness, longing, death, mysticism, fatality. A sense of fatality (quite comprehensible in a dying group), the dismal tones of a deathbed hopelessness, mystical experiences shot with eroticism, make up Akhmatova’s spiritual world; she is a left-over from the world of the old aristocracy now irrevocably past and gone, the world of ‘Catherine’s good old days’. It would be hard to say whether she is a nun or a fallen woman; better perhaps say she is a bit of each, her desires and her prayers intertwined.
“’But I vow by the garden of angels,
By the miraculous icon I vow,
I vow by the child of our passion…’
– from Anno Domini, by Anna Akhmatova.
“Such is Akhmatova, with her petty, narrow personal life, her paltry experiences, and her religiously mystical eroticism.
“Her poetry is far removed from the people. It is the poetry of the ten thousand members of the elite society of the old aristocratic Russia. whose hour has long since struck and left them with nothing to do but sigh for ‘the good old days’, for the country estates of Catherine’s time, with their avenues of ancient lime trees, their fountains, their statues, their arches, their greenhouses, summer-houses and crumbling coats of arms, for aristocratic St. Petersburg, for Tsarskoye Selo, for the railway station in Pavlovsk, and for other relics of the nobility’s culture. All of these have vanished into the irredeemable past. The few representatives of this culture, so foreign to the spirit of the people, who have by some miracle lived on into our own times, can do nothing but shut themselves up in themselves and live with chimeras. ‘All has been plundered, betrayed and sold’, writes Akhmatova.
“Osip Mandelstam, a prominent Acmeist, wrote this, not long before the revolution, on the social, political and literary ideals of this little group: ‘The Acmeists share their love of organism and organisation with the physiologically perfect Middle Ages….’ ‘The Middle Ages, with their own peculiar way of estimating a man’s relative weight, felt and recognised it in every individual irrespective of merit….’ ‘Yes, Europe once passed through a labyrinth of filigree-fine culture, when abstract being, personal existence, wholly unadorned, was valued as an outstanding achievement. This gave rise to the aristocratic intimacy binding everybody, so foreign to the spirit of ‘equality and fraternity’ of the great revolution…’ ‘The Middle Ages are dear to us because they had so highly developed a sense of boundaries and dividing line….’ ‘A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism, and a perception of the world as a living equilibrium, make us feel a kinship with this age and prompt us to draw strength from the works that appeared on Romance soil about the year 1200.’
“These statements of Mandelstam’s contain the Acmeists’ hopes and ideals. ‘Back to the Middle Ages’ was the social idea of this aristocratic-salon group. ‘Back to the monkey’ choruses Zoshchenko. Incidentally, the Acmeists and the Serapion Brothers are of the same descent. Their common ancestor was Hoffman, one of the founders of aristocratic-salon decadence and mysticism.
“Where was the need to popularise Akhmatova’s poetry all of a sudden? What has she to do with Soviet people? What need is there to offer a literary pulpit to all these defeatist and un-Soviet literary trends?
“We know from the history of Russian literature that the reactionary literary trends to which the Symbolists and the Acmeists belonged tried time and time again to start a crusade against the great revolutionary-democratic tradition of Russian literature and against its foremost representatives, tried to deprive literature of its high ideological and social significance and to drag it down into the morass of meaninglessness and cheapness.
“All these ‘fashionable’ trends have been engulfed and buried with the classes whose ideology they reflected. What, in our Soviet literature, has remained of all these Symbolists, Acmeists, Yellow Shirts, Jacks-o-Diamonds and Nichevoki (‘Nothingers’)? Nothing whatever, though their crusades against the great representatives of Russian revolutionary-democratic literature, Delinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, were launched noisily and pretentiously and just as noisily failed.
“The Acmeists proclaimed it their motto ‘not to improve life in any way whatever nor to indulge in criticism of it’. Why were they against improving life in any way whatever? Because they liked the old bourgeois-aristocratic life, whereas the revolutionary people were preparing to disturb this life of theirs. In November 1917 both the ruling classes and their theoreticians and singers were pitched into the dustbin of history.
“And now, in the twenty-ninth year of the socialist revolution, certain museum specimens reappear all of a sudden and start teaching our young people how to live. The pages of a Leningrad journal are thrown wide open to Akhmatova and she is given carte blanche to poison the minds of the young people with the harmful spirit of her poetry.
“One of the issues of Leningrad contains a kind of digest of the works written by Akhmatova between 1909 and 1944. Among the rest of the rubbish, there is a poem she wrote during evacuation in the Great Patriotic War. In this poem she describes her loneliness, the solitude she has to share with a black cat, whose eyes looking at her are like the eyes of the centuries. This is no new theme: Akhmatova wrote about a black cat in 1909, too. This mood of solitude and hopelessness, which is foreign to the spirit of Soviet literature, runs through the whole of Akhmatova’s work.
“What has this poetry in common with the interests of our state and people? Nothing whatever. Akhmatova’s work is a matter of the distant past; it is foreign to Soviet life and cannot be tolerated in the pages of our journals. Our literature is no private enterprise designed to please the fluctuating tastes of the literary market. We are certainly under no obligation to find a place in our literature for tastes and ways that have nothing in common with the moral qualities and attributes of Soviet people. What instructive value can the works of Akhmatova have for our young people? They can do them nothing but harm. These works can sow nothing but gloom, low spirits, pessimism, a desire to escape the vital problems of social life and turn away from the broad highway of social life and activity into a narrow little world of personal experiences. How can the upbringing of our young people be entrusted to her? Yet her poems were readily printed, sometimes in Zvezda and sometimes in Leningrad, and were published in volume form. This was a serious political error.
“It is only natural, in view of all this, that the works of other writers, who were also beginning to adopt an empty-headed and defeatist tone, should have started to appear in the Leningrad journals. I am thinking of works such as those of Sadofyev and Komissarova. In some of their poems they imitate Akhmatova, cultivating the mood of despondency, boredom and loneliness so dear to her.
“Needless to say, such moods, or the extolling of them, can exert only a negative influence on our young people and are bound to poison their minds with a vicious spirit of empty-headedness, despondency and lack of political consciousness.
“What would have happened if we had brought our young people up in a spirit of despondency and of disbelief in our cause? We should not have won the Great Patriotic War. It is precisely because the Soviet State, and our Party, with the help of Soviet literature, had brought our young people up in a spirit of optimism and with confidence in their own strength, that we were able to surmount the tremendous difficulties that faced us in the building of socialism and in defeating the Germans and the Japanese.
“What does this mean? It means that by printing in its pages cheap and reactionary works devoid of proper ideas, side by side with good works of rich content and cheerful tone, Zvezda became a journal having no clear policy, a journal helping our enemies to corrupt our young people. The strength of our journals has always lain in their optimistic revolutionary trend, not in eclecticism, empty-headedness and lack of political understanding. Zvezda gave its full sanction to propaganda in favour of doing nothing.
“To make matters worse, Zoshchenko seems to have acquired so much power in the Leningrad writers’ organisation that he even used to shout down those who disagreed with him and threaten to lampoon his critics in one of his forthcoming works. He became a sort of literary dictator surrounded by a group of admirers singing his praises.
“Well may one ask, on what grounds? Why did you allow such an unnatural and reactionary thing as this to occur?
“No wonder Leningrad’s literary journals started giving space to cheap modern bourgeois literature from the West. Some of our men of letters began looking on themselves as not the teachers but the pupils of petty-bourgeois writers, and began to adopt an obsequious and awestruck attitude towards foreign literature. Is such obsequiousness becoming in us Soviet patriots who have built up the Soviet order, which towers higher a hundredfold, and is better a hundredfold, than any bourgeois order? Is obsequiousness towards the cheap and philistine bourgeois literature of the West becoming in our advanced Soviet literature, the most revolutionary in the world?
“Another serious failing in the work of our writers is their ignoring of modern Soviet subjects, which betrays on the one hand a one-sided interest in historical subjects and on the other an attempt to write on meaningless, purely amusing subjects. To justify their failure to keep pace with great modern Soviet themes, some writers maintain that the time has come to give the people meaningless and ‘entertaining’ literature, to stop bothering about literature’s ideological content.
“This conception of our people, of their interests and requirements, is entirely wrong. Our people expect Soviet writers to understand and integrate the vast experience they gained in the Great Patriotic War, to portray and integrate the heroism with which they are now working to rehabilitate the country’s national economy.
“A few words on the journal ‘Leningrad’: Zoshchenko’s position is even stronger here than in ‘Zvezda’, as is Akhmatova’s too. Both of them have become active powers in both journals. Thus ‘Leningrad’ is responsible for having put its pages at the disposal of such cheap writers as Zoshchenko and such salon poetesses as Akhmatova.
“The journal ‘Leningrad’ has, however, made other mistakes also.
“For instance, take the parody of ‘Evgeny Onegin’ written by one Khazin. This piece is called ‘The Return of Onegin’. It is said to be frequently recited on the variety concert platforms of Leningrad.
“It is hard to understand why the people of Leningrad allow their city to be vilified from a public platform in such a way as Khazin vilifies it. The purpose of this ‘satire’ is not simple ridicule of the things that happen to Onegin on finding himself in modern Leningrad. The point is that Khazin essays to compare our modern Leningrad with the St. Petersburg of Pushkin’s day, and for the worse. Read just a few lines of this, ‘parody’ attentively. Nothing in our modern Leningrad pleases the author. Sneering in malice and derision, he slanders Leningrad and Soviet people. In his opinion, Onegin’s day was a golden age. Everything is different now: a housing department has appeared, and ration cards and permits. Girls, those ethereal creatures so much admired of Onegin, now regulate the traffic and repair the Leningrad houses and so on and so forth. Let me quote just one passage from this ‘parody’:
“’Our poor dear Evgeny
Boarded a tram.
Never had his benighted age known
Such a means of transportation.
But fate was kind to Evgeny;
He escaped with only a foot crushed,
And only once, when someone jabbed him
In the stomach, was he called an idiot.
Remembering ancient customs,
He resolved to seek satisfaction in a duel:
He felt in his pocket, but
Someone had taken his gloves,
A frustration that reduced
Onegin to silence and docility’.
“That is what Leningrad was like before, and what it has turned into: a wretched, uncouth, coarse city; and that is the aspect it presented to poor dear Onegin. It is in this vulgar way that Khazin describes Leningrad and its people.
“The idea behind this slanderous parody is harmful, vicious and false.
“How could the editorial board of ‘Leningrad’ have accepted this malicious slander on Leningrad and its magnificent people? How could Khazin have been allowed to appear in the pages of the Leningrad journals?
“Take another work, a parody on a parody by Nekrasov, so written as to be a direct insult to the memory of the great poet and public figure Nekrasov, an insult that ought to arouse the indignation of every educated person. Yet ‘Leningrad’s editorial board did not hesitate to print this sordid concoction in its columns.
“What else do we find in ‘Leningrad’? A foreign anecdote, dull and shallow, apparently lifted from hackneyed anecdote-books dating from the late nineteenth century. Is there nothing else for ‘Leningrad’ to fill its pages with? Is there really nothing to write about in Leningrad? What about such a subject as the rehabilitation of the city? Wonderful work is being done in Leningrad; the city is healing the wounds inflicted during the siege; the people of Leningrad are imbued with the enthusiasm and emotion of post-war rehabilitation. Has anything on this appeared in Leningrad? Will the people of the city ever live to see the day when their feats of labour are reflected in the pages of this journal?
“Further, let us take the subject of Soviet woman. Is it permissible to cultivate in Soviet readers the disgraceful views on the role and mission of women that are typical of Akhmatova, and not to give a really truthful concept of modern Soviet woman in general and the heroic girls and women of Leningrad in particular, who unflinchingly shouldered the heavy burden of the war years and are now self-sacrificingly working to carry out the difficult tasks presented by the rehabilitation of the city’s economic life?
“The situation in the Leningrad section of the Union of Soviet Writers is obviously such that the supply of good work is now insufficient to fill two literary journals. The Central Committee of the Party has therefore decided to cease publication of ‘Leningrad’, so as to concentrate all the best literary forces in ‘Zvezda’. This does not mean that Leningrad will not, in suitable circumstances, have a second or even a third journal. The question will be settled by the supply of notable literary works. Should so many appear that there is no room for them in one journal, a second and even a third may be started; it all depends on the intellectual and artistic quality of the works produced by our Leningrad writers.
“Such are the grave errors and failings laid bare and detailed in the resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on the work of ‘Zvezda’ and ‘Leningrad.’
“Leninism and literature
“What is the cause of these errors and failings?”
Having asked this question, Zhdanov replies thus: “It is that the editors of the said journals, our Soviet men of letters, and the leaders of our ideological front in Leningrad, have forgotten some of the principal tenets of Leninism as regards literature. Many writers, and many of those working as responsible editors, or holding important posts in the Writers’ Union, consider politics to be the business of the Government or of the Central Committee. When it comes to men of letters, engaging in politics is no business of theirs. If a man has done a good, artistic, fine piece of writing, his work should be published even though it contains vicious elements liable to confuse and poison the minds of our young people.
“We demand that our comrades, both practising writers and those in positions of literary leadership, should be guided by that without which the Soviet order cannot live, that is to say, by politics, so that our young people may be brought up not in the spirit of do-nothing and don’t care, but in an optimistic revolutionary spirit.
“We know that Leninism embodies all the finest traditions of the Russian nineteenth-century revolutionary democrats and that our Soviet culture derives from and is nourished by the critically assimilated cultural heritage of the past.
“Through the lips of Lenin and Stalin our Party has repeatedly recognised the tremendous significance in the field of literature of the great Russian revolutionary democratic writers and critics Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Plekhanov. From Belinsky onward, all the best representatives of the revolutionary democratic Russian intellectuals have denounced ‘pure art’ and ‘art for art’s sake’, and have been the spokesmen of art for the people, demanding that art should have a worthy educational and social significance.
“Art cannot cut itself off from the fate of the people. Remember Belinsky’s famous Letter to Gogol, in which the great critic, with all his native passion, castigated Gogol for his attempt to betray the cause of the people and go over to the side of the Tsar. Lenin called this letter one of the finest works of the uncensored democratic press, one that has preserved its tremendous literary significance to this day.
“Remember Dobrolyubov’s articles, in which the social significance of literature is so powerfully shown. The whole of our Russian revolutionary democratic journalism is imbued with a deadly hatred of the Tsarist order and with the noble aspiration to fight for the people’s fundamental interests, their enlightenment, their culture, their liberation from the fetters of the Tsarist regime. A militant art fighting for the people’s finest ideals – that is how the great representatives of Russian literature envisaged art and literature.
“Chernyshevsky, who comes nearest of all the utopian socialists to scientific socialism and whose works were, as Lenin pointed out, ‘indicative of the spirit of the class struggle’, taught us that the task of art was, besides affording a knowledge of life, to teach people how to assess correctly varying social phenomena. Dobrolyubov, his companion-in-arms and closest friend, remarked that ‘it is not life that follows literary standards, but literature that adapts itself to the trends of life’, and strongly supported the principles of realism, and the national element, in literature, on the grounds that the basis of art is life, that life is the source of creative achievement and that art plays an active part in social life and in shaping social consciousness. Literature, according to Dobrolyubov, should serve society, should give the people answers to the most urgent problems of the day, should keep abreast of the ideas of its epoch.
“Marxist literary criticism, which carries on the great traditions of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, has always supported realistic art with a social stand. Plekhanov did a great deal to show up the idealistic and unscientific concept of art and literature and to defend the basic tenets of our great Russian revolutionary democrats, who taught us to regard literature as a means of serving the people.
“Lenin was the first to state clearly what attitude towards art and literature advanced social thought should take. Let me remind you of the well-known article, ‘Party Organisation and Party Literature’, which he wrote at the end of 1905, and in which he demonstrated with characteristic forcefulness that literature cannot but have a partisan adherence and that it must form an important part of the general proletarian cause. All the principles on which the development of our Soviet literature is based are to be found in this article.
“’Literature must become partisan literature’, wrote Lenin. ‘To offset bourgeois customs, to offset the commercial bourgeois press, to offset bourgeois literary careerism and self-seeking, to offset ‘gentlemanly anarchism’ and profit-seeking, the socialist proletariat must put forward the principle of partisan literature, must develop this principle and carry it out in the completest and most integral form.
“’What is this principle of partisan literature? It is not merely that literature cannot, to the socialist proletariat, be a means of profit to individuals or groups; all in all, literature cannot be an individual matter divorced from the general proletarian cause. Down with the writers who think themselves supermen! Down with non-partisan writers! Literature must become part and parcel of the general proletarian cause….’
“And further, from the same article: ‘It is not possible to live in society and remain free of it. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actor is merely a masked dependence (hypocritically masked perhaps) on the money-bags, on bribes, on allowances.’
“Leninism starts from the premise that our literature cannot be apolitical, cannot be ‘art for art’s sake’, but is called upon to play an important and leading part in social life. Hence derives the Leninist principle of partisanship in literature, one of Lenin’s most important contributions to the study of literature.
“It follows that the finest aspect of Soviet literature is its carrying on of the best traditions of nineteenth-century Russian literature, traditions established by our great revolutionary democrats Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin, continued by Plekhanov and scientifically elaborated and substantiated by Lenin and Stalin.
“Nekrasov declared his poetry to be inspired by ‘the Muse of sorrow and vengeance’. Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov regarded literature as sacred service to the people. Under the tsarist system, the finest representatives among the democratic Russian intellectuals perished for these high and noble ideas, or willingly risked sentences of exile and hard labour.
“How can these glorious traditions be forgotten? How can we pass them over, how can we let the Akhmatovas and the Zoshchenkos disseminate the reactionary catchword ‘art for art’s sake’, how can we let them, behind their mask of impartiality, impose ideas on us that are alien to the spirit of the Soviet people?
“Leninism recognises the tremendous significance of our literature as a means of reforming society. Were our Soviet literature to allow any falling off in its tremendous educational role, the result would be retrogression, a return ‘to the Stone Age’.
“Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of the human soul. This definition has a profound meaning. It speaks of the enormous educational responsibility Soviet writers bear, responsibility for the training of Soviet youth, responsibility for seeing to it that bad literary work is not tolerated.
“There are people who find it strange that the Central Committee should have taken such stringent measures as regards literature. It is not what we are accustomed to. If mistakes have been allowed to occur in industrial production, or if the production programme for consumer goods has not been carried out, or if the supply of timber falls behind schedule, then it is considered natural for the people responsible to be publicly reprimanded. But if mistakes have been allowed to occur as regards the proper influencing of human souls, as regards the upbringing of the young, then such mistakes may be tolerated. And yet, is not this a bitterer pill to swallow than the non-fulfilment of a production programme or the failure to carry out a production task? The purpose of the Central Committee’s resolution is to bring the ideological front into line with all the other sectors of our work.
“On the ideological front, serious gaps and failings have recently become apparent. Suffice it to remind you of the backwardness of our cinematic art, and of the way our theatre repertoires have got cluttered up with poor dramatic works, not to mention what has been going on in Zvezda and Leningrad. The Central Committee has been compelled to interfere and firmly to set matters right. It has no right to deal gently with those who forget their duties with regard to the people, to the upbringing of our young people. If we wish to draw our members’ attention to questions relating to ideological work and to set matters right in this field, to establish a clear line in this work, then we must criticise the mistakes and failings in ideological work severely, as befits Soviet people, as befit Bolsheviks. Only then shall we be able to set matters right.
“There are men of letters who reason thus: since during the war, when few books were printed, the people were hungry for reading matter, the reader will now swallow anything, even though the flavour be a trifle tainted. This is not in fact true, and we cannot put up with any old literature that may be palmed off on us by undiscriminating authors, editors and publishers. From Soviet writers the Soviet people expect reliable ideological armament, spiritual food to further the fulfilment of construction and rehabilitation plans and to promote the development of our country’s national economy. The Soviet people desire the satisfaction of their cultural and ideological needs, and make great demands on men of letters.
“During the war force of circumstances prevented us from satisfying these vital needs. The people want to understand current events. Their cultural and intellectual level has risen. They are often dissatisfied with the quality of the works of art and literature appearing in our country. Certain literary workers on the ideological front have not understood this and are unwilling to do so.
“The tastes and demands of our people have risen to a very high level, and anyone who cannot or will not rise to this level is going to be left behind. The mission of literature is not merely to keep abreast of the people’s demands but to be always in the vanguard. It is essential that literature should develop the people’s tastes, raise their demands higher and higher still, enrich them with new ideas and lead them forward. Anyone who cannot keep pace with the people, satisfy their growing demands and cope with the task of developing Soviet culture, will inevitably find himself no longer in demand.
“The lack of ideological principles shown by leading workers on Zvezda and Leningrad has led to a second serious mistake. Certain of our leading workers have, in their relations with various authors, set personal interests, the interests of friendship, above those of the political education of the Soviet people or these authors’ political tendencies. It is said that many ideologically harmful and from a literary point of view weak productions are allowed to be published because the editor does not like to hurt the author’s feelings. In the eyes of such workers it is better to sacrifice the interests of the people and of the state than to hurt some author’s feelings. This is an entirely wrong and politically dangerous principle. It is like swopping a million roubles for a kopeck.
“The Central Committee of the Party points out in its resolution the grave danger in substituting for relations based on principle those based on personal friendship. The relations of personal friendship regardless of principle prevailing among certain of our men of letters have played a profoundly negative part, led to a falling off in the ideological level of many literary works and made it easier for this field to be entered by persons foreign to the spirit of Soviet literature. The absence of any criticism on the part of the leaders of the Leningrad ideological front or of the editors of the Leningrad journals has done a great deal of harm; the substitution of relations of friendship for those based on principle has been made at the expense of the people’s interests.
“Comrade Stalin teaches us that if we wish to conserve our human resources, to guide and teach the people, we must not be afraid of hurting the feelings of single individuals or fear bold, frank, objective criticism founded on principle. Any organisation, literary or other, is liable to degenerate without criticism, any ailment is liable to be driven deeper in and become harder to cope with. Only bold frank criticism can help our people and overcome any failings in their work. Where criticism is lacking, stagnation and inertia set in, leaving no room for progress.
“Comrade Stalin has repeatedly pointed out that one of the most important conditions for our development is for every Soviet citizen to sum up the results of his work every day, to assess himself fearlessly, to analyse his work bravely, and to criticise his own mistakes and failings, pondering how to achieve better results and constantly striving for self-improvement. This applies just as much to men of letters as to any other workers. The man who is afraid of any criticism of his work is a despicable coward deserving no respect from the people.
“An uncritical attitude, and the substitution of relations of personal friendship for those based on principle, are very prevalent on the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers. The Board, and its chairman Comrade Tikhonov in particular, are to blame for the bad state of affairs revealed in Zvezda and Leningrad, in that they not only made no attempt to prevent the harmful influence of Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and other un-Soviet writers penetrating into Soviet literature, but even readily permitted styles and tendencies alien to the spirit of Soviet literature to find a place in our journals.
“Another factor contributing to the failings of the Leningrad journals was the state of irresponsibility that developed among the editors of these journals, the situation being such that no one knew who had the overall responsibility for the journal or for its various departments, so that any sort of order, even the most rudimentary, was impossible. The Central Committee has, therefore, in its resolution appointed to Zvezda an editor-in-chief, who is to be held responsible for the journal’s policy and for the ideological level and literary quality of its contents.
“Disorder and anarchy are no more to be tolerated in the issuing of literary publications than in any other enterprise. A clear-cut responsibility for the journal’s policy and contents must be established.
“You must restore the glorious traditions of Leningrad’s literature and ideological front. It is a sad and painful thing to have to admit that the Leningrad journals, which had always sponsored the most advanced ideas, have come to harbour empty-headedness and cheapness. The honour of Leningrad as a leading ideological and cultural centre must be restored. We must remember that Leningrad was the cradle of the Bolshevik Leninist organisations. It was here that Lenin and Stalin laid the foundations of the Bolshevik Party, the Bolshevik world outlook and Bolshevik culture.
“It is a point of honour for Leningrad writers and Party members to restore and carry further these glorious traditions. It is the task of the Leningrad workers on the ideological front, and of the writers above all, to drive empty-headedness and cheapness out of Leningrad literature, to raise aloft the banner of Soviet literature, to seize every opportunity for ideological and literary development, not to leave up-to-date themes untreated, to keep pace with the people’s demands, to encourage in every possible way the bold criticism of their own failings, criticism containing no element of toadying and not based on friendships and group-loyalties – a genuine, bold, independent, ideological, Bolshevik criticism.
“By now it should be clear to you what a serious oversight the Leningrad City Committee of the Party, and particularly its propaganda department and propaganda secretary Comrade Shirokov (who was put in charge of ideological work and bears the main responsibility for the failure of these journals), have been guilty of.
“The Leningrad Committee of the Party committed a grave political error when it passed its resolution at the end of June on Zvezda’s new editorial board, in which Zoshchenko was included. Political blindness is the only possible explanation of the fact that Comrades Kapustin (Secretary of the City Committee of the Party) and Shirokov (the City Committee’s propaganda secretary) should have agreed to such an erroneous decision. All these mistakes must, I repeat, be set right as quickly and firmly as possible, to enable Leningrad to resume its participation in the ideological life of our Party.
“We all love Leningrad; we all love our Leningrad Party organisation as being one of our Party’s leading detachments. Literary adventurers of all sorts who would like to make use of Leningrad for their own ends must find no refuge here. Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and the like have no fondness for Soviet Leningrad. It is other social and political ways and another ideology that they would like to see entrenched here. The visions dazzling their eyes are those of old St. Petersburg, with the Bronze Horseman as its symbol. We, on the contrary, love Soviet Leningrad, Leningrad as the foremost centre of Soviet culture. Our ancestors are the glorious band of great revolutionary and democratic figures who came from Leningrad and whose direct descendants we are. Modern Leningrad’s glorious traditions are a continuation of those great revolutionary-democratic traditions, which we would not exchange for anything else in the world.
“Let the Leningrad Party members analyse their mistakes boldly, with no backward glances, no taking it easy so as to straighten things out in the best and quickest way possible and to carry our ideological work forward. The Leningrad Bolsheviks must once more take their place in the ranks of the initiators, of the leaders in the shaping of Soviet ideology and Soviet social consciousness.
“How could the Leningrad City Committee of the Party have permitted such a situation to arise on the ideological front? It had evidently become so engrossed in day-to-day practical work on the rehabilitation of the city and the development of its industry that it forgot the importance of ideological and educational work.
“This forgetfulness has cost the Leningrad organisation dear. Ideological work must not be forgotten. Our people’s spiritual wealth is no less important than their material wealth. We cannot live blindly, taking no thought for the morrow, either in the field of material production or in the ideological field. To such an extent have our Soviet people developed that they are not going to swallow whatsoever spiritual food may be dumped on them. Such workers in art and culture as do not change and cannot satisfy the people’s growing needs may forfeit the people’s confidence before long.
“Our Soviet literature lives and must live in the interests of our country and of our people alone. Literature is a concern near and dear to the people. So the people consider our every success, every important work of literature, as a victory of their own. Every successful work may therefore be compared with a battle won, or with a great victory on the economic front. And conversely, every failure of Soviet literature hurts and wounds the people, the Party and the state profoundly. This is what the Central Committee was thinking of in passing its resolution, for the Central Committee watches over the interests of the people and of their literature, and is very greatly concerned about the present state of affairs among Leningrad writers.
“People who have not taken up any ideological stand would like to cut away the foundations from under the Leningrad detachment of literary workers, demolish their work’s ideological aspect and deprive the Leningrad writers’ work of its significance as a means of social reform. But the Central Committee is confident that Leningrad’s men of letters will nevertheless find in themselves the strength to put a stop to any attempts to divert Leningrad’s literature detachment and journals into a groove of empty-headedness and lack of principle and political consciousness. You have been set in the foremost line of the ideological front, you are facing tremendous and internationally significant tasks; and this should intensify every genuine Soviet writer’s sense of responsibility to his people, his state and his Party, and his sense of the importance of the duty he is carrying out.
“Whether our successes are won within our own country or in the international arena, the bourgeois world does not like them.
“As a result of the Second World War the position of socialism has been strengthened. The question of socialism has been put down on the agenda of many countries in Europe. This displeases the imperialists of every hue: they fear socialism and our socialist country, an example to the whole of progressive mankind. The imperialists and their ideological henchmen, writers, journalists, politicians and diplomats, are trying to slander our country in every way open to them, to put it in a false light, to vilify socialism. The task of Soviet literature in these conditions is not only to return blow for blow to all this vile slander and all these attacks on our Soviet culture and on socialism, but also to make a frontal attack on degenerating and decaying bourgeois culture.
“However fine may be the external appearance of the work of the fashionable modern bourgeois writers in America and Western Europe, and of their film directors and theatrical producers, they can neither save nor better their bourgeois culture, for its moral basis is rotten and decaying. It has been placed at the service of capitalist private ownership, of the selfish and egocentric interests of the top layer of bourgeois society. A swarm of bourgeois writers, film directors and theatrical producers are trying to draw the attention of the progressive strata of society away from the acute problems of social and political struggle and to divert it into a groove of cheap meaningless art and literature, treating of gangsters and show-girls and glorifying the adulterer and the adventures of crooks and gamblers.
“Is it fitting for us Soviet patriots, the representatives of advanced Soviet culture, to play the part of admirers or disciples of bourgeois culture? Our literature, reflecting an order on a higher level than any bourgeois-democratic order and a culture manifoldly superior to bourgeois culture, has, it goes without saying, the right to teach the new universal morals to others.
“Where is another such people or country as ours to be found? Where are such splendid human qualities to be found as our Soviet people displayed in the Great Patriotic War and are displaying every day in the labour of converting our economy to peaceful development and material and cultural rehabilitation? Our people are climbing higher and higher every day. No longer are we the Russians we were before 1917; no longer is our Russia the same, no longer is our character the same. We have changed and grown along with the great changes that have transfigured our country from its very foundations.
“Showing these great new qualities of the Soviet people, not only showing our people as they are today, but glancing into their future and helping to light up the way ahead, is the task of every conscientious Soviet writer. A writer cannot tag along in the wake of events; it is for him to march in the foremost ranks of the people and point out to them the path of their development. He must educate the people and arm them ideologically, guiding himself by the method of socialist realism, studying our life attentively and conscientiously and trying to gain a deeper understanding of the processes of our development.
“At the same time as we select Soviet man’s finest feelings and qualities and reveal his future to him, we must show our people what they should not be like and castigate the survivals from yesterday that are hindering the Soviet people’s progress. Soviet writers must help the people, the state and the Party to educate our young people to be optimistic, to have confidence in their own strength and to fear no difficulties.
“Hard as bourgeois politicians and writers may strive to conceal the truth of the achievements of the Soviet order and Soviet culture, hard as they may strive to erect an iron curtain to keep the truth about the Soviet Union from penetrating abroad, hard as they may strive to belittle the genuine growth and scope of Soviet culture, all their efforts are foredoomed to failure. We know our culture’s strength and advantages very well. Suffice it to recall the great success of our cultural delegations abroad, of our physical culture parades and so on. It is not for us to kowtow to all things foreign or to stand passively on the defensive.
“If in their heyday the feudal order and then the bourgeoisie were able to create art and literature asserting the establishment of the new order and singing its praises, then we who form a new socialist order embodying all that is best in the history of civilisation and culture are yet fitter to create the most advanced literature in the world, far surpassing the finest literary examples of former times.
“What is it that the Central Committee requests and wishes?
“The Central Committee of the Party wishes the Leningrad Party members and writers to understand clearly that the time has come for us to raise our ideological work to a high level. The young Soviet generation will be called upon to consolidate the strength and power of the socialist Soviet order, to make full use of the motive forces of Soviet society to promote our material and cultural progress. To carry out these great tasks, the young generation must be brought up to be steadfast and cheerful, not to balk at difficulties but to meet and know how to surmount them. Our people must be educated people of high ideals, tastes and moral and cultural demands. It is necessary to this end that our literature, our journals, should not hold aloof from the tasks of the day but should help the Party and the people to educate our young people in the spirit of supreme devotion to the Soviet order and service in the interests of the people.
“Soviet writers, and all our ideological workers, are now standing in the foremost fighting line; for our tasks on the ideological front, and those of literature above all, have not been removed but, on the contrary, are growing more important in conditions of peaceful development.
“It is not a removal of literature from contemporary problems that the people, the state and the Party want, but the active incursion of literature into every aspect of Soviet life. Bolsheviks set a high value on literature and have a clear perception of its great historical mission of reinforcing the people’s moral and political unity, educating them and consolidating their ranks. The Central Committee wishes us to feed the human spirit abundantly, regarding the attainment of cultural wealth as a chief task of socialism.
“The Central Committee of the Party feels sure the Leningrad detachment of Soviet literature is morally and politically sound and will quickly set its mistakes right and take its due place in the ranks of Soviet literature.
“The Central Committee feels sure the failings in the work of Leningrad writers will be overcome and the ideological work of the Leningrad Party organisation soon raised to the level now required in the interests of the Party, the people and the state.”
In defence of Marxist philosophy
The life of Andrei Zhdanov was the life of an outstanding Marxist-Leninist. Zhdanov was true to Marxism and like Lenin waged a relentless fight against the enemies of Marxism, the enemies of the proletariat. He never became that which he despised, a “toothless vegetarian” in philosophy.
One of his last major theoretical-practical speeches was made at a conference of Soviet philosophical workers in 1947. Summing up the corruption of bourgeois ideology after the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War, Zhdanov said:
“Today the centre of the struggle against Marxism has shifted to America and Britain. All the forces of obscurantism and reaction have today been placed at the service of the struggle against Marxism. Brought out anew and placed at the service of bourgeois philosophy are the instruments of atom-dollar democracy, the outworn armour of obscurantism and clericalism: the Vatican and racist theory, rabid nationalism and decayed idealist philosophy, the mercenary yellow press and depraved bourgeois art.
“But apparently all these are not enough. Today, under the banner of ‘ideological’ struggle against Marxism, large reserves are being mobilised. Gangsters, pimps, spies and criminal elements are recruited.
“Let me take, at random, a recent example. As was reported a few days ago in Izvestia, the journal Les Temps Modernes, edited by the existentialist, Sartre, lauds as some new revelation a book by the writer Jean Genet, The Diary of a Thief, which opens with the words: ‘Treason, theft and homosexuality – these will be my key topics. There exists an organic connection between my taste for treason, the occupation of the thief, and my amorous adventures.’ The author manifestly knows his business. The plays of the Jean Genet are presented with much glitter on the Parisian stage and Jean Genet himself is showered with invitations to visit America. Such is the ‘last word’ of bourgeois culture.
“We know from the experience of our victory over fascism into what a blind alley idealist philosophy has led whole nations. Now it appears in its new, repulsively ugly character which reflects the whole depth, baseness and loathsomeness of the decay of the bourgeoisie. Pimps and depraved criminals as philosophers – this is indeed the limit of decay and ruin. Nevertheless, these forces still have life, are still capable of poisoning the consciousness of the masses.
“Contemporary bourgeois science supplies clericalism and fideism with new arguments which must be mercilessly exposed. We can take as an example the English astronomer Eddington’s theory of the physical constants of the universe, which leads directly to the Pythagorean mysticism of numbers which, from mathematical formulae, deduces such ‘essential constants’ as the apocalyptic number 666, etc. Many followers of Einstein, in their failure to understand the dialectical process of knowledge, the relationship of absolute and relative truth, transpose the results of the study of the laws of motion of the finite, limited sphere of the universe to the whole infinite universe and arrive at the idea of the finite nature of the world, its limitedness in time and space. The astronomer Milne has even ‘calculated’ that the world was created 2 billion years ago. It would probably be correct to apply to those English scientists the words of their great countryman, the philosopher Bacon, about those who turn the impotence of their science into a libel against nature.
“In like measure, the Kantian subterfuges of contemporary bourgeois atomic physicists lead them to deductions of the ‘free will’ of the electron and to attempts to represent matter as only some combination of waves and other such nonsense.
“Here is a colossal field of activity for our philosophers, who should analyse and generalise the results of contemporary natural science, remembering the advice of Engels that materialism ‘with each epoch-making discovery, even in the sphere of natural science… has to change its form….’ (Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 36)
“Upon whom, if not upon us – the land, of victorious Marxism and its philosophers – devolves the task of heading the struggle against corrupt and base bourgeois ideology? Who if not we should strike crushing blows against it?”
Death and legacy
Zhdanov didn’t live long after making this speech, he died the following August in 1948. His contemporaries to whom we referred earlier, Pospelov and Gorkin lived nearly into the 1980s and had the peak of their careers in the 1950s and 60s. Zhdanov died early, as did his close comrade Shcherbakov, and their deaths were reported in 1953 as being attributed to the Doctors Plot, which, after the death of Stalin in March 1953 was said to have been a fabrication of Lavrentiy Beria and Viktor Abakumov. Zhdanov, Shcherbakov, and Stalin, all appear to have died awaiting medical treatment. Abakumov and Beria died violent deaths. Andrei Zhdanov was survived by his son Yuri who as a scientific worker in the USSR went on to become a Professor at the Rostov University.
In remembering Andrei Zhdanov, we remember him as a great Bolshevik, a Soviet statesman and talented propagandist. He was a product of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and, taking him in his historical context, far from diminishing his historical significance, raises him up.
Reproduced in full with permission from and thanks to Edward Renyard of the Communist Party of Great Britain - Marxist Leninist, and of course to the author! The original was first published in Lalkar:
