Autonomy and Identity: Proletkult, Narkompros, and the Communist Party

Although the workers and intellectuals who met in Petrograd in October 1917 to lay the foundations for the Proletkult were preparing for revolution, they did not envision the consequences the impending upheaval would have on the structure they were creating. The Petrograd Proletkult had been shaped in opposition to the Kerensky regime's perceived cultural inadequacies. Now, when the Bolsheviks came to power, the Proletkult refused to give up its autonomy, much to the surprise of many advocates of the Soviet state. Its partisans insisted that an independent Proletkult would enhance the proletariat's position in the new political order.

Lunacharskii had already provided a justification for this

position when he insisted that there were four organizational forms of the workers' movement—political parties, trade unions, cooperatives, and cultural circles—and that the last was no less important than the others. In the same spirit Proletkultists—combining unions and cooperatives under the rubric of "economic organizations"—began to write about the three paths to workers' power through economics, politics, and culture.^[8] In institutional terms this meant that unions, the Communist Party, and the Proletkult should pursue their own agendas, free from state intervention. Implicitly, it also denied the party any special power over Proletkult or union affairs.

The Proletkult's claims to autonomy (samostoiatel'nost' ) and its slogan of "three paths to workers' power" quickly became controversial. When the Proletkult lost favor with the Communist Party at the end of the Civil War, critics chose to interpret its initial demand for independence as an anti-Soviet, anticommunist posture. This negative or oppositional explanation has colored subsequent scholarship to such an extent that it is difficult to recapture what autonomy meant to Proletkult members. Because the organization's best known leader, Aleksandr Bogdanov, never rejoined the party after his ouster before the revolution, many commentators have assumed that the Proletkult's claim to independence was an implicit critique of the Communist Party's role.^[9]

However, if we examine the Proletkult's demands for autonomy more closely, it becomes apparent that they were directed much more against the state than against the party. Proletkult theorists did not equate state and party power. For

them the Communist Party, like their own organization and trade unions, was an expression of proletarian class interests. The government, by contrast, had to take the needs of non-proletarian classes into account, and this necessity made it a suspect partner for workers' groups. In the minds of Proletkult theorists only pure working-class institutions could usher in the dictatorship of the proletariat. "In questions of culture we are immediate socialists ," proclaimed the editorial board of the central Proletkult journal Proletarian Culture (Proletarskaia kul'tura ). "We demand that the proletariat start right now, immediately, to create its own socialist forms of thought, feeling, and daily life , independent of alliances or combinations of political forces. And in this creation, political allies—the rural and urban poor—cannot and must not control [the proletariat's] work."^[10]

Proletkultists were not the only ones to draw a sharp distinction between state and party authority as the new system took shape. The function of the Communist Party within the state was not predetermined in 1917.^[11] As party members gained dominant positions in the central government, some revolutionaries, including Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, suggested that the party be disbanded altogether because it duplicated the structure of the state.^[12] These ideas also found favor at the local level, where many activists initially assumed that the soviets would take precedence over the party bureaucracy.^[13]

To be sure, some leaders envisioned the Proletkult as the Communist Party's equal, which lent a peculiar bravado to their statements. In this regard the most extreme was Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, the first Proletkult national president. He insisted on a kind of symmetry between the Proletkult and the Communist Party; if no one questioned the party's need for independence, they should not question his organization's autonomy either. "If a proletarian political organization is necessary and its existence does not contradict the institution of Soviet power, then the Proletkult is also necessary as an independent workers' organization. Like the party, it will not contradict the basis of Soviet power, but rather will strengthen it."^[14] There might come a time when the Proletkult was no longer necessary, but by then the Communist Party would not be needed either.

Not all of the organization's members defined their relationship to the party in such provocative terms. Instead they felt that the Proletkult could aid the Bolsheviks' cause. "Of course Communists play a leading role in the Proletkult," wrote one activist in Tambov. "But the Communist Party's hegemony is in essence a political dictatorship; its performance in the field of cultural construction leaves much to be desired. Therefore the Proletkult remains the pure dictatorship of the proletariat in the creation of socialist values."^[15]

Proletkultists did not present themselves as opponents of the Communist Party. Indeed, the national organization had a high percentage of Bolsheviks among its leaders, including Lebedev-Polianskii. At the first national conference in 1918 over half the delegates were party members. By the 1920 conference the share had risen to two–thirds, and the only person on the national presidium who was not a Bolshevik was Bogdanov.^[16] Prominent leaders included people with impeccable party credentials, such as the old Bolsheviks Anna

Dodonova and Fedor Blagonravov, who had helped to instigate the revolution in Moscow, and the union activist Vladimir Kossior, whose brother would later join Stalin's central committee.^[17] Some participants, such as Karl Ozol-Prednek, a leader in both the Petrograd and the national organizations, even asserted that only party members should be allowed to join the movement.^[18]

The Proletkult's first serious clashes over its autonomous status were with representatives of the state's cultural bureaucracy, not with the Communist Party. In fact, in these early altercations Lebedev-Polianskii suggested that the Proletkult would more willingly accept subordination to the party than to Narkompros.^[19] Only as the distinction between party and state power became increasingly blurred was the Proletkult's opposition to state control increasingly interpreted as opposition to the Soviet system itself.^[20]

Conflicts between the Proletkult and Narkompros began soon after the organization started operation. Already early in 1918 leaders of the Petrograd Proletkult refused to cooperate with efforts to create a citywide theater consortium, insisting that they would not align themselves with nonproletarian groups.^[21] At the founding conference for the Moscow Proletkult in February 1918 delegates laid claim to vast areas of competence that extended far beyond any narrowly defined

cultural sphere. Speakers considered ways to improve workers' hygiene and expand the city's cafeteria system. Lecturers on educational issues endorsed measures to start labor schools, technical education courses, and to create a proletarian university for the city's workers. They also proposed plans to direct the education of all proletarian children.^[22] The broad range of topics raised a host of organizational questions. Just where would the Proletkult's responsibilities end and the government's begin? Did it intend to satisfy all of the proletariat's cultural and educational needs? What would the role of Narkompros be?

State cultural workers were clearly alarmed by the Proletkult's ambitions. In the spring of 1918 Lunacharskii called a series of meetings to discuss relations between the government and the Proletkult.^[23] State representatives argued that Proletkultists did not understand how the revolution had changed the political landscape. The new state was the expression of proletarian rule, even if it did have to consider the needs of other classes. Krupskaia worried that the Proletkult would detract workers from the important task of state construction and, because of its autonomy, turn into a haven for anti-Soviet forces. Dora Elkina was convinced that an independent Proletkult would duplicate the Adult Education Division's work. Even the sympathetic Lunacharskii wondered whether the Proletkult was really the proper organ to create a proletarian culture, as it had already attracted nonproletarians to its ranks.^[24]

In these discussions the Proletkult was represented by Fedor Kalinin, head of the government's Division of Proletar-

ian Culture, which had been created by Lunacharskii in 1917.^[25] Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, chair of the organizing bureau for the national Proletkult, was also on hand to defend the organization.^[26] They both contended that the government had no right to tell them what to do. Because the Proletkult and Narkompros had different purposes, they should be allowed to maintain separate institutional identities. If no one demanded that unions become part of the Commissariat of Labor, or that the Communist Party itself cease to exist because there was now a Soviet government, Lebedev-Polianskii argued, then no one should question the separate identity of the Proletkult from that of Narkompros.^[27] Their forceful arguments, combined with disagreements among Narkompros representatives, won the advocates of autonomy an initial victory.

Yet despite their abrasive tone, Kalinin and Lebedev-Polianskii took government fears of parallelism seriously. Working together with other Proletkultists associated with the new journal Proletarian Culture , they sought to define a separate sphere of cultural activity that would not duplicate Narkompros work. Already in the first issue of the journal in March 1918, Lebedev-Polianskii wrote that purely educational programs could be left to other groups. The proletariat obviously had to assimilate the accomplishments of past culture, but that was not the Proletkult's task. Its role was to awaken independent creative activity (samodeiatel'nost' ) within the working class.^[28]

Proletarian Cuhure 's editorial board, which included Alek-

sandr Bogdanov, defined the Proletkult as a laboratory and compared its functions to those of the Communist Party. The party was a laboratory for political affairs where the direction of government policies could be planned. "The proletariat's cultural-educational organizations are also laboratories to realize the revolutionary-cultural program of the proletariat on a national level and then, of course, in the world."^[29] By choosing this particular description, Proletkult leaders implied that the organization would be a controlled environment that served a restricted following and that studied carefully selected projects. By definition a laboratory was not open to everyone.

There are clear links to the Vperedist platform in this formulation of the Proletkult's mission. This is not surprising because key veterans of that prewar movement—Bogdanov, Lebedev-Polianskii, and Kalinin—all helped to shape it. Rejecting the idea that the Proletkult should educate the entire proletarian population, they hoped to capture the interest of a working-class vanguard particularly suited for their cultural laboratory. Let Narkompros take control of mundane educational concerns; the Proletkult would take charge of cultural creation.

However, this division of cultural terrain was not simply the result of prerevolutionary conceptions. It was reached through dialogue and conflict with Narkompros. The Proletkult's central planners were intelligent enough to realize that if the organization's independence was going to be respected, they would have to limit its power. Thus they backed away from expansive claims, directly contradicting the ideas of many local followers. Participants in Moscow and Petrograd advanced very ambitious schemes, with some members even demanding that the Proletkult become the "ideological leader of all public education and enlightenment."^[30] The conception

of the Proletkult as a laboratory, with all the restrictions that this idea implied, tempered these demands and thus marked an astute trade-off with the government. The grandiose vision of the Proletkult as a rival to Narkompros was renounced in return for greater independence from the state.