by robertdreed » Sat Nov 19, 2005 9:13 pm
...not content to funnel government money to artistic movements they supported, they sought to destroy the careers of any artist they didn't support. At its worst, this included pretty much any artistic movement that didn't toe the line of Socialist Realism.<br><br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/067-101e.htm">www.ifla.org/IV/ifla64/067-101e.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Censorship in the Soviet Union and its Cultural and Professional Results for Arts and Art Libraries<br>Olga Sinitsyna <br><br>Arts and Children's Literature Department,<br>M. I. Rudomino All Russia State Library for Foreign Literature<br>Moscow, Russia<br><br><br><br>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>Abstract:<br>Although official censorship ceased 10 years ago, the effects of censorship in the Soviet Union in art and art libraries are still felt. The focus of this paper is on censored library materials, and on the censorship of art. The censored books were marked with a hexagon, and relegated to the "spets-hran" or special stacks which for many years were off limits to the public and library staff alike. The author takes a look at materials from the All Russia State Library for Foreign Literature that had been censored, and examines the rules of the censors to determine why certain items were censored. In art, only certain themes were sanctioned. Because art can be abstract and difficult to interpret figuratively, it was determined that the only allowable style of art was that of social realism... <br><br><br>...Within the country it became vital for the sake of «the mental health» of the Soviet people to intrude in the very process of creation of an art object regardless to its media. This task was articulated shortly after the Revolution on the earliest days of the Soviet state, but it was not an easy one. Perception of the art works is more a sensation than a rational understanding. For example, the Russian avant-garde art of that period was predominantly non-figurative and the subjects could hardly be guessed or were too abstract. In this regard the decision of the Soviet cultural authorities was as simple as brilliant: To avoid any kind of double or hidden meaning, equivoques, misunderstanding of the contents of the art works the socialist realism was declared the one and only acceptable style and method of all arts in the Soviet Union. <br><br>After the Revolution the foremost Russian artists were forced to emigrate. It was a great tragedy of the national art. Those who for various reasons refused to leave the country had either to accept the communist dictatorship in art or to give up working. It took about 10 years (1922-1932) for the final break down and to put an end to «the art of the bourgeois past». Every -ism of the early 20th century art became the synonyms of the rudest words, generalised in the worst two terms: «formalism» and «modernism». Thus a great man-made gap had been generated in the evolution of Russian art. Every single attempt to change the direction of the main trend was suppressed and the guilty artist badly prosecuted. <br><br>Architecture, being the most social and the least personal art, was put under the total state control. The only accepted official architectural image was that of the imperial greatness of the Soviet state, which could have been produced only by the classical forms and language of masses and space borrowed from the Roman architecture. Few exceptions, presented by Melnikov for instance, were merely experiments. Demolition of the historical buildings was another form of censorship in the architectural environment. Even some architectural forms were considered to be associated with the «hatred past» and therefore banned. That was the church dome - symbol of the heaven. Thousands of churches had been demolished in the country during that battle with the symbols of the past. The same was the fate of numerous manor estates, palaces, and private houses. Some of them, however, were successfully used by the new Soviet «aristocracy» or converted into the residential blocks, museums, warehouses, garages, etc. <br><br>In fact the Soviet sculpture had suffered the similar fatal violence. Immediately after the Revolution it had been worked out a special Plan of Monumental Propaganda, under which all the statues to the tsars had to be demolished or taken away, with the few exceptions. They were to be replaced by the new monuments to the progressive leaders of all times according to the special approved list. Strangely, some really good monuments were erected in the first years of that «pilot-project», like the one to Timiryazev by Merkurov in Moscow. In general the Soviet sculpture was aimed to glorify the formal party leaders in the basic forms of the socialist realism. Only the II World War monuments bare the true emotions of their authors and express the total grief and glory of the nation. <br><br>The recognition of the powerof art in promotion of the state ideas to the masses was well demonstrated by the emerging of «agit-farfor» (propaganda pottery) - a unique type of Soviet pottery design. The painters on their part were highly recommended to learn from the works of Repine and to follow the tradition of Russian critical realists of the 19th century. The language of Soviet painting should be strictly realistic and the themes chosen should depict and praise the delights of the life in the Soviet Union. <br><br>As the result of such a violent «weeding» during a substantial period of time a certain generation of the obedient artists had been brought up. They knew the rules of the play they were all playing. The censors had done a good job offering the public well-selected information concerning the national cultural and historical heritage. There appeared some blank periods in the pre-Revolutionary history, some cultural epochs were totally neglected, some important names crossed out for decades (at that time it seemed forever). The Soviet art criticism suffered the same pressure of censorship. The only accepted approach for an art critic was that from the ideological position «of the class struggle», which was regarded more important than consideration of the aesthetic values. From that point of view the world art had been divided into two parts: progressive and regressive (often called reactionary). <br><br>The quoting of classics of Marxism-Leninism in any work on any subject was required. Selection of appropriate citations became a sort of a new art. Those were the requirements for every publication and public speech. The Bibliographies were to start with the works of «classics», even though none of them had ever written anything on the subject. The best scholars, like Lazarev, Grabar, Bakushinski, Vipper, Zavadskaya, Kaptereva, Nekrasova somehow managed to publish their works in the history of art paying only a little fee to that set of rules. The less prominent scholars had to pay a bigger tribute. Those, who refused to accept the rules were prosecuted and «taught» in the Stalin camps <br><br>The criteria for division of art of the past into two categories was quite simple: the work of art should bare or not some peculiar signs of progressiveness, such as themes of labour, struggle for justice, protest against the bourgeois society, pity for suffering, depiction of poor people, social and class struggle. For obvious reasons the mediaeval art, being the art which served the religion, was not worth studying. Some excellent surveys on Byzantine and Ancient Russian art were published, because the art works had been taken only as the cultural, not religious objects and certainly because of the highest prominence of the authors (Grabar, Lazarev, Alpatov). Strangely, the art-nouveau was badly criticized in spite of the obvious socialist ideas of the improvement of the society by means of art. The attitude towards this style has gradually changed only in the late 70s. The same was true about the historicism (eclectic style) of the mid-second half of the 19th century. <br><br>In fact it had been only one book called «Modernism: Analysis and criticism of the major trends in art of the 20-th century» (the last edition of which was published in the late 1980-es) in which one could get an information on the art movements and key-figures of the 20-th century and even to look at the poor black and white plates. Along with the rude criticism of the bourgeois art, presented by the obedient authors some good art critics managed to present just a brief review of facts, names and events avoiding any judgment at all. But even that limited information had been invaluable to the researchers and reading public. <br><br>By the mid 1970s the protest against that total brain-control couldn't have been concealed any more and it burst out...</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br><br><br><br> <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/world/russia/kgb/su0519.htm">www.fas.org/irp/world/rus...su0519.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>...Another important facet of KGB preventive work was censorship of literature and other media, which it exercised at both an informal and a formal level. The KGB censored informally by harassing writers and artists, arranging for their expulsion from professional organizations or from their jobs, and threatening them with prosecution for their unorthodox views. Such forms of intimidation forced many writers and artists to exercise selfcensorship by producing only what they thought would be acceptable. The KGB maintained strong surveillance over the Union of Writers, as well as over the journalists' and artists' unions, where KGB representatives occupied top administrative posts. <br><br>The KGB played an important role in the system of formal censorship by taking part in the work of the Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press (Glavnoe upravlenie po okhrane gosudarstvennykh tain v pechati--Glavlit). Some Western specialists believe that at least one of Glavlit's deputy chiefs was a KGB official and that the KGB assisted in Glavlit's compilation of its Censor's Index, a thick volume, updated frequently, listing all military, technical, statistical, and other subjects that could not be publicized without special permission from the Central Committee...</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br>Any questions? <p></p><i></i>