Youth

In descriptions of the Proletkult's variegated membership one common denominator stands out—their age. Again and again observers commented on the youthfulness of Proletkult participants. "Young people, freshly arrived in the cities and swept along by the whirlwind of events, were only too ready to accept the simplified ideas of Proletkult extremists," wrote Ilia Ehrenburg in his memoirs of the Civil War years. "I often heard remarks such as 'Why be so complicated? It's all rotten intellectual rubbish.' "^[77]

Until the years of the New Economic Policy the national organization did not solicit detailed information about the age of its followers, but many local sources bore witness to the Proletkult's appeal to adolescents and young adults. In the Novotorsk artistic studios 80 percent of the participants were

[76] P. Arskii, "Rabochii krest'ianinu," Mir i chelovek , no. 1 (1919), p. 5.

[77] Ilya Ehrenburg, First Years of Revolution, 1918–1921 , trans. Anna Bostock (London, 1962), p. 175.

under twenty. The entire acting troupe of the Proletkult theater in the Presnia district of Moscow, one of the oldest proletarian parts of the city, was young. An observer of a local art studio noted that all its members were between the ages of sixteen and twenty.^[78] Lecturers and instructors continually remarked on the enthusiasm (and the ignorance) of their young charges.^[79] When the central Proletkult finally published age statistics in 1925, the youthful nature of the Proletkult was made overwhelmingly clear; 65 percent of all members were under the age of nineteen.^[80]

It is not surprising that the Proletkult excited youthful imaginations. Youth organizations founded in urban centers during the revolution were very interested in cultural and educational work. Urban adolescents were better educated than their parents or their rural counterparts and had both the leisure and the dedication to devote their free time to study and self-improvement. Not yet burdened by family responsibilities, young workers made educational and artistic circles part of urban youth culture.^[81] The Proletkult, with its broad offerings of cultural studios, lectures, and festive evenings, gave the young ample opportunities for education, entertainment, and conviviality.

Young people also came to the Proletkult because they were welcome there. Many other proletarian organizations, such as trade unions and factory committees, limited their member-

[78] "Novotorskii Proletkul't," Proletkul't (Tver), no. 1/2, p. 53; Gorn , no. 1 (1918), p. 94; and E. Lozovaia, "O raionnom Moskovskom Proletkul'te," Vestnik zhizni , no. 6/7 (1919), p. 141.

[79] See Serge Wolkonsky, My Reminiscences , trans. A. E. Chamot (London, 1924), vol. 2, p. 220; and V. Mitiushin, "Tesnyi kontakt," Gudki , no. 6 (1919), p. 16.

[80] "Sosrav Proletkul'tov," Al'manakh Proletkurta (Moscow, 1925), p. 183.

[81] See Diane Koenker, "Urban Families, Working Class Youth Groups and the 1917 Revolution in Moscow," in The Family in Imperial Russia , ed. David Ransel (Urbana, 1978), pp. 289–90, 294–97; and David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (New York, 1983), pp. 40–41.

ship rules to exclude those under eighteen.^[82] However, this was not the case for the Proletkult. Although central leaders clearly preferred experienced, skilled, and hence adult workers, they did not enforce age restrictions. Local groups made their own rules, but their age limits were usually low. The Novoselsk village circle took members from age fifteen on, the Tula Proletkult from age sixteen.^[83]

The preference of Russian youth for the most radical and extreme solutions to social problems has been well documented. During 1917 young workers turned much more quickly to support the Bolsheviks than did their older colleagues.^[84] As a result, the Bolshevik Party could claim a very youthful membership, as could the Red Guards, special units formed to defend the revolution.^[85] The Proletkult's reputation as the most revolutionary and utopian cultural organization clearly won it friends in the same circles. In the words of Maksim Shtraukh, who came to the Moscow Proletkult as a teenager and eventually became a famous actor and director: "We wanted to serve the kind of art that would answer the combative spirit of the times, that would be a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. That's why we went to the Proletkult. . . . We young people chose this theater because we were burning with the desire to serve not simply art, but a new and revolutionary art."^[86]

At the local level many Proletkult organizations had close ties to the Komsomol, the Communist Party's youth org anization, which encouraged a young following. In the small town

[82] Isabelle A. Tirado, "The Socialist Youth Movement in Petrograd," Russian Review , vol. 46, no. 2 (1987), pp. 139–41.

[83] "Novosel'skoe Prosvetitel'noe Obshchestvo 'Proletkul't,'" TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 430, l. 73; "Ustav," d. 1536, l. 1.

[84] Mandel, Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime , p. 41; and Smith, Red Petrograd , pp. 197–200.

[85] Koenker, "Urban Families," pp. 281, 300; and Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolution (Stanford, 1984), pp. 173–75.

[86] Quoted in G. A. Shakhov, Maksim Maksimovich Shtraukh (Moscow, 1964), p. 31.

of Lukino, in Tver province, the Proletkult president helped to start the local Komsomol division. A Proletkult club on the Moscow-Kazan railroad line catered exclusively to Komsomol members.^[87] In Samara the Komsomol and the Proletkult even had overlapping leaderships.^[88]

Surely another attraction was the fact that the Proletkult advanced young people into responsible positions. The records of the 1921 national congress offer many examples of teenagers in leadership roles. Iakov Smirnov, assistant head of a theater section in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1921, was only eighteen years old but he had already been in the Proletkult for three years. Nina Polekova, age nineteen, was president of the Rzhev organization. At twenty Pavel Karpov was part of the governing presidium in Saratoy. Anatolii Stepahoy, metalworker and Komsomol member from Rzhev, was on the presidium of his local organization at age seventeen. He had first joined the Proletkult when he was fourteen years old.^[89]

Proletkult organizers valued young people because they were seen as the future of the revolution. Work with adolescents and children insured the survival of proletarian culture and the Proletkult as an institution.^[90] Although class origins were a dominant theme in discussions about adult workers, the same standards did not apply to the young. In both local and central records Proletkultists counted the children of workers as part of the proletariat, regardless of their current occupation.^[91] Unlike adults, young people were to some de-

[87] Proletarskaia kul'tura , no. 11/12 (1919), p. 66; and the 1919 questionnaire for the Perovskii raionnyi klub, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 430, l. 10.

[88] From a local questionnaire, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 117, l. 98 ob. See also reports for the Shchelkovo and Archangel organizations, d. 117, l. 70, d. 1209, l. 85.

[89] Delegate list for the 1921 national congress, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 144, ll. 114, 117, 124, 116.

[90] For a discussion of the issue of the Proletkult and young children see Chapter 6.

[91] See, for example, the records for the Novotorsk Proletkult in Tver province, Proletkul't (Tver), no. 1/2 (1919), p. 53.

gree "classless." At the founding national conference in 1918 the central leader E. P. Khersonskaia insisted that the Proletkult had to take dramatic steps to include adolescents; she went so far as to extend an invitation to the children of intellectuals, shopkeepers, and artisans.^[92] This solicitous concern won the Proletkult youthful support. At the same time, however, it further diluted the organization's industrial proletarian identity.

Who wasn't drawn to our little light—children, young girls, youth from the barricades, graybeards in homespun coats and bast shoes from the countryside, poets no one had ever heard of who previously had scratched out their verses in a scrawl in cellars, under the eves of stone houses, at their workbench, or behind a plow. Until then I had never seen such characters and costumes in my life as those that appeared in the Proletkult.^[93]

These loving memoirs by Aleksandr Mgebrov, a theater instructor in the Petrograd Proletkult, are a testament to the movement's broad social appeal. Mgebrov obviously relished this mixed following, but for those who perceived the Proletkult as a purely proletarian movement, such diversity posed a real threat to the organization's identity.

The Proletkult's popularity reveals the flexibility—and inaccuracy—of class categories in this period of rapid social change. The label "proletarian" was not a neutral class description: it conveyed political power and revolutionary sentiment. This was not the only allegedly proletarian institution faced with a crisis of class identity. In the Communist Party, supposedly the vanguard of the working class, workers were

[92] E. P. Khersonskaia, "O rabote s iunoshestvom," Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , pp. 66–67, 72.

[93] A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre (Moscow and Leningrad, 1933), vol. 2, pp. 314–15.

no longer in the majority by the end of the Civil War.^[94] But the party, in contrast to the Proletkult, never professed to appeal to the proletariat alone.

One result of the Proletkult's diversity was certainly positive. Its large size helped it to win national attention and gain the backing of local cultural groups. Proletkultists' attempts to stand equal to trade unions and the party in proletarian affairs would have had no resonance at all if the organization had really limited itself to a small vanguard of industrial workers. And despite the national leaders' distress about the organization's mixed following, they were certainly in part responsible for making it into the mass organization it became.

However, the Proletkult's large and varied membership also posed real threats to the organization's continued survival. Proletkultists had initially won the support of Narkompros precisely because they were supposed to be doing something different than state educational institutions. The more socially diverse the Proletkult was, the weaker this argument became. By the end of the Civil War Narkompros educational workers asked with ever greater urgency why an organization that duplicated state programs so closely needed to maintain its autonomy. In addition, party leaders came to doubt the wisdom of sustaining a mass institution that defended its independence so fiercely.

The Proletkult's heterogeneity also complicated the internal workings of the movement. Bogdanov and his allies envisioned an experienced, literate, sophisticated following able to work on its own or with minimum aid from the intelligentsia. With such a membership they believed that they would have the human resources necessary to question prevailing scientific propositions and to create unique artistic forms.

[94] Official party figures show the working-class contingent declining from 60 percent to 41 percent in the years 1917 to 1921, T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R . (Princeton, 1968), pp. 52, 85.

However, the organization drew in a much broader constituency, thus altering the scope of all its work. Local groups offered literary circles for the uneducated, French classes for those who sought "refinement," and dance evenings for young people's entertainment. Rather than investigating the nature of working-class creativity, Proletkult circles tried to satisfy the wide-ranging cultural demands of the lower classes. This skewed the very definition of proletarian culture and undermined the national leadership's conception of the movement. The central Proletkult could not shape its constituency. It was very much the other way around; the constituency shaped the Proletkult.