The Reaction

The holiday was enjoyed by many celebrants. The futurist work and its carnival gaiety garnered most of the praise, from various semiofficial papers and from the official organs Pravda and Izvestiia . The official solemnities received little notice; the less official a paper was, the less space it devoted to the "triumphs." As a young member of the Proletkult Literary Studio noted:

What was remarkable was that the "triumphs'" official side—the passing of marching columns, the unveiling of memorial plaques and statues—paled before the universal exultation and immediate feeling of joy. It was majestic, but the majestic took a back seat to carefreeness, solemnity to gaiety. . . . It was not the celebration of an anniversary, the memory of sacrifices, or the ecstasy of a future victory and creative spirit, but the joyful greeting of [the] revolution, the childlike merriment of the great masses' laughter that made the day of [the] Overturn great. . . . The anniversary of the October Revolution became the first day of a new era.^[108]

The mood of the day and its peculiar sense of time are captured admirably here.

Articles of the time were in unanimous praise of the festival.^[109] Hostile reviews did appear—these are the articles that scholars now quote most often—but they were written long after the fact, in 1919, when criticism of the futurists had gained official backing and was somewhat fashionable.^[110] Still, to call the exultation universal was an exaggeration; those antagonistic to the Revolution—a sizeable part of the population—did not share in the celebration and seem to have been rather frightened by the whole affair. As Tamara Karsavina, prima ballerina of the imperial stage, commented, "One was safer indoors."^[111]

Oddly enough—and unfortunately since it was a formative event in Soviet artistic policy—many Bolshevik officials agreed with Karsavina. In Petrograd, Andreeva expressed strong disapproval of futurism and claimed the support of the Petrograd proletariat. At a rally of the "working intelligentsia," Andreeva took the podium and read what she claimed were excerpts from the letters of workers incensed by the futur-

ist decorations.^[112] Initially, the Petrograd Soviet confirmed its support of the futurists, and the brouhaha quieted down for a few months.

Meanwhile, the battle flared up in Moscow. Modernists were situated in the Moscow branch of IZO Narkompros, a national organization; the aesthetic conservatives (who were often political radicals) were in local soviets. In early February 1919, Lunacharsky decreed that local branches of IZO would be in charge of decorating cities for May Day.^[113] Friche, by now director of the Moscow Soviet's Department of People's Festivals, whose control was threatened by Lunacharsky's decree, initiated a long series of antifuturist polemics in the soviet's Vechernie izvestiia (Evening News ), for which he was arts editor. He set a mean-spirited tone in an initial editorial,^[114] which was followed by articles by other authors, all under Friche's editorship. The articles, incidentally, inveighed mostly against IZO futurists; Moscow futurists, many of whom worked with the Moscow Soviet's Arts Department, do not seem to have bothered the authors. Kameneva, a vocal advocate of futurists before November 1918, when they worked under her in TEO Narkompros,^[115] joined the antifuturist campaign in February, when she was organizing a festival for the Moscow Soviet,^[116] and Andreeva initiated antifuturist polemics in Petrograd through her editorship of Zhizn' iskusstva (The Life of Art ).

Friche and Andreeva soon found official support. Friche turned to the soviet, which, after the IZO commission had published its May Day plans, met and decreed that the festivities should be conducted under "the direct control of the Moscow proletariat"—that is, Friche's department. The department vowed to pursue a policy of "neutrality" in matters of artistic taste, at the same time stating that "foolish, tasteless, and antirevolutionary artistic manifestations should not be sanctioned by soviet authority or waste the people's money."^[117] In other words, anything but futurism was acceptable. At the same time Andreeva, who stayed in close touch with Lenin, discovered that he was equally displeased: he thought the monuments "outright mockery and distortion" and was particularly miffed when the paint did not come off the trees on Theater Square.^[118] Andreeva sent Lenin what amounted to a denunciation of the futurists and, for good measure, blamed her rivals in TEO, Kameneva and Olga Menzhinskaia, who could hardly have been at fault.^[119]

By late February, antifuturist sentiment was running strong. When Petrograd painters when to Moscow on the 23rd to help with decora-

tions for the Day of Red Gifts (to front-line soldiers), they were criticized for being alien to the workers; Kameneva's letter was the strongest but not the only condemnation. Andreeva transported the charge to Petrograd and in an unsigned article described the Petrograd painters in a way that stuck in Soviet criticism: "The driving forces of the Revolution were accumulated by degrees, in the depths of the same way of life that the futurists turned their backs on with disdain. . . . To create a work of art answering the demands of the Revolution, to [make] a revolutionary work of art, can be done only by someone in a position to artistically interpret the Revolution. An absolutely necessary condition for that is a close connection with the authentic life and psychology of the people."^[120] This was the same argument anti-Bolshevik commentators had forwarded on May Day 1918;^[121] and it smelled strongly of prerevolutionary conservatism.

Andreeva's previous complaint to the Petrograd Soviet had met with no sympathy (she was carrying on a notorious feud with Zinoviev's wife, Lilina).^[122] But now that administrative control was at stake, the antagonists rallied together; two months after the Narkompros decree was promulgated, the Petrograd Soviet decreed that "in no circumstances shall the organization of the May Day festival be given into IZO futurist hands" and assigned organization to Andreeva, Antselovich, and Nikolai Tolmachev.^[123] The Moscow Soviet soon put Friche and Kameneva in charge of its May Day celebration. Because soviets controlled the only available funds, IZO was shut out of the celebration.^[124]

IZO made extensive—and ultimately useless—plans for the May Day 1919 celebration. A commission headed by Altman met on March 7 and decided that the holiday would celebrate international proletariat solidarity, a theme to be emphasized by the decoration of important gathering points in harmony with the surrounding architecture.^[125] The futurists forsook the brashness and discord of November 1918. Projects were drawn up for "obelisks, architectural barricades, and arches to be erected in squares, streets, and parks. The themes of these decorations will be: the arch of factory labor, the obelisk of farm work, arches and obelisks for the trade unions, science, art, literature, and arches dedicated to revolutionaries."^[126]

These projects were far from the modernist "degeneracy" that had so offended Friche, but too much ink had been spilled for polemics to clear. In an article kicking off the February antifuturist campaign, Friche had blamed the failure of previous festivals on the fact that most were

organized in a mere week's time.^[127] The bureaucratic scramble preceding the May Day 1919 festival, alas, had the same result: plans were not completed until a week before the holiday.

Discussion of the social role of festivals in the Bolshevik Revolution would be helped by information on mass reception. Unfortunately the masses did not write newspaper articles, and the only accounts we have are of suspect impartiality. The Russian intelligentsia's timeworn tradition of using the people as a rhetorical fig leaf for partisan opinion was continued after the Revolution. Officials steeped in the nineteenth-century academic tradition and speaking in the name of an imaginary people subsequently became the bane of innovative Soviet artists, so it would behoove us to examine Andreeva's charges closely.

The legend that futurism was rejected by the masses—a charge repeated by Russian scholars (often understandable for political reasons) and by their Western colleagues (less understandable)—is unsubstantiated. It was certainly possible that the masses did not like futurist work (though I have seen group portraits from November 7, 1918, taken in front of Altman's column). Andreeva's distaste was not feigned, and it probably represented some portion of popular taste. In Saratov (one of the few well-documented provincial cities), officials were mortified by a tribune decorated, after Henri Matisse, with unclothed female figures painted an unrestrained red.

Nevertheless, we cannot simply declare that popular audiences disliked modernism, whether or not we sympathize. Common Russians, after all, did not share the intelligentsia's prejudice—that art must depict something. Folk art itself was often nondepictive (for example, the applied arts); the simplified and stylized futurism most common on November 7 was familiar to the people from lubki (woodcut illustrations); and abstract work like that of the Alekseevs fit in with popular traditions of carnival decoration. Most of the Russian intelligentsia in 1918 was unfamiliar with modernism, so that the popular audience was in many ways better prepared to receive futurist work—even if they did not understand it as painters intended.

Few if any of the numerous press accounts of the time are reliable indicators of public reception, and speculation on our part is unwarranted. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from the stylistic debate of 1919. Although we cannot distill a single meaning from the revolutionary festivals, we can discern many potential interpretations. The dynamics of revolutionary culture are manifest in the ways that

potential meanings were rejected by and others accepted into Bolshevik mythology. Perhaps most important, we can watch the Bolsheviks reacting to a society that did not always act as expected. Revolutionary Russia was filled with diverse nations, classes, and factions whose divisions did not always mirror the formulas of Marxist ideology. Commentators of most every stripe agreed on one thing: each felt free to describe the voice of the people as if there could be only one. That notion, shared by Wagner and Ivanov as well as the Bolsheviks, was just one of the authoritarian seeds latent in revolutionary festivals that would bear fruit within a decade.

Official reaction shows how difficult it was for Bolsheviks (and not the Bolsheviks alone) to deal with dissenting views. They saw subversion in stylistic unorthodoxy and division in diversity. Their trepidation was fully manifest in the banishment of futurists, whose unorthodox art actually expressed revolutionary fervor. In his Ode to Revolution, written for the 1918 anniversary, Mayakovsky asked:

How else will you turn out, you of two faces?
A well-balanced building,
Or a heap of rubble?

Judging by their reaction, the Bolsheviks were not sure which he preferred. Their anger at futurists resembled the fulminations of clerics ancient and modern against the license of carnival: both saw beliefs and rules they cherished mocked and defied, and both meant to put an end to it.

Perhaps disapproving officials saw in the futurist decorations an unwelcome hint of anarchy. The year 1918 had seen acute conflicts between the anarchists and the state apparatus; by November they were over but not forgotten. What to the futurists was displacement was to disapproving Bolsheviks anarchy. Alexei Tolstoy, a novelist who never hesitated to inform his readers of the mood in official circles, made the identification of futurism and anarchism explicit in his Road to Calvary:

Moscow under the black [anarchist] flag! We are going to celebrate our victory—do you know how? We'll announce a universal carnival, set up winebooths in the streets and let military bands play in the squares. A million and a half men and women all masked. There's not the least doubt that half of them will come stark naked. . . . We will put up hoardings to the full height of the houses along the streets and paint them with architectural subjects of a new style never seen before. We are going to repaint the trees—we consider natural foliage impermissible.^[128]

Yet revolution was the message in 1918, and futurism told it well. This, at least, was the impression that German prisoners of war quartered in Moscow got from the celebration. On Sunday, the final day of the festival, they stormed their own embassy and raised the red flag on its roof. Revolution had broken out in Germany.