3
Proletkult Membership:
The Problem of Class in a Mass Organization

The Bolsheviks promised to create a proletarian dictatorship in a largely peasant country, a formidable undertaking. For the Proletkult, even founding a proletarian institution posed insurmountable problems. The Communist Party and trade unions, the Proletkultists' closest reference points, had easier tasks. Although the party presented itself as the vanguard of the proletariat, it never claimed that its ranks would be composed of workers alone. Trade unions, with their roots in the factory, were guaranteed a working-class composition. Proletkult leaders saw their organization as a hybrid of these two forms—a vanguard that would be truly proletarian. But this proved to be a very difficult species to breed in the uncertain social climate of the Civil War.

Proletkult ideology demanded a worker following. According to the Proletkult's national leaders, only the industrial proletariat could express the collective spirit of socialism. These leaders had important organizational concerns as well: Proletkult autonomy was justified as a way to shield the movement's pure proletarian essence from the encroachments of the state. Because a proletarian identity was so important, central leaders devised a whole series of rules and restrictions to keep out socially undesirable elements. Yet

despite their best efforts, the Proletkult attracted a very mixed membership drawn from the laboring classes as a whole.

The reasons were partly demographic. Factory workers were never a large social group in Russia, and their numbers diminished during the Civil War. But more important was the fact that the national Proletkult lacked the power to impose its vision of the organization on the provincial affiliates that rejected its narrow social rules. Local circles opened the organization to a broad alliance of the underprivileged, including artisans, white-collar workers, and sometimes even peasants. Thus as it grew, the Proletkult lost its pure class identity. In the process, however, it gained a mass following.

Defining the Proletkult's Constituency

In a rudimentary sense the Proletkult's intended membership was already apparent in its name—it was to be a cultural organization for the proletariat. But the issue was not resolved with the Proletkult's title because "proletariat" was a term open to many interpretations. Did it mean everyone who labored for a living without owning the means of production? Did it include artisanal workers who themselves might hire and supervise other employees? Did it encompass the entire breadth of Russia's half-urbanized, half-ruralized labor force? These definitional problems were particularly complex for the Russian proletariat because the lines between the working class and the peasantry had always been very hard to draw.^[1] Processes set in motion by the revolution and Civil War

made it even more difficult to set clear limits.^[2] This was a time of rapid social change, as workers left factories for the countryside, the army, or the state bureaucracy, and new groups took up industrial jobs.

Before the revolution Russian Marxists, and Bolsheviks in particular, addressed the complexities of the Russian working class by stressing hierarchies within it. Although the Bolsheviks realized that it was very hard to separate the industrial proletariat from the peasantry, for them the workers who really mattered, those who were most inclined to develop a revolutionary consciousness, were the ones who had completely severed their rural ties.^[3] The Bolsheviks not only defined the proletariat narrowly, reducing it to the industrial working class alone, but also insisted that only an elite within this group would develop a keen political awareness. This proletarian vanguard would be led by the political vanguard of the Bolshevik Party.

Proletkult national leaders, who were themselves Bolsheviks (or in Bogdanov's case a former Bolshevik), shared many of these assumptions.^[4] If anything, the workers they cared about formed an even smaller vanguard. They searched for a political and cultural elite within the industrial proletariat. Those positive values that were to form the foundation for the culture of the future were nurtured by the industrial labor process. The factory taught workers the need for cooperation, group action, and collective solutions to shared problems. Working-class neighborhoods and families could also help to mold a proletarian worldview, but those who had not studied long and hard at the school of factory labor could not hope to

develop the values necessary to shape a proletarian culture.^[5]

After October the Bolshevik Party began to stress the need for cross-class alliances, particularly with poor peasants and those intellectuals who were willing to cooperate with the new regime. Although Proletkult leaders understood the reasons for these conciliatory programs, most still insisted on class purity within their organization. Proletarian culture could not be created by representatives from the peasantry, the army, the Cossacks, or the narrow-minded urban poor proclaimed the editorial staff of Proletarian Culture in 1918.^[6]

For Proletkult leaders the most serious threat to proletarian consciousness lay within the laboring masses themselves because workers could easily be led astray by petty-bourgeois influences. Lebedev-Polianskii, the Proletkult's first president, was particularly sensitive to these dangers. He felt the organization had to be free of all unskilled and unemployed workers, as well as artisanal laborers and the urban poor. Proletarians who had not broken their ties to the countryside were also questionable allies because they might be too sympathetic to the peasantry.^[7] Those who had no factory experience at all had no business in the Proletkult. LebedevPolianskii lumped professionals, shop workers, and salaried employees together with the petty bourgeoisie and categorically denied them all the right to participate in the movement.^[8]

The peasantry posed a particular danger to proletarian consciousness. In the opinion of Aleksandr Bogdanov, the

most articulate spokesman on this subject, it did not matter that both the working class and the peasantry had been exploited under capitalism. They still engaged in very different labor processes that engendered two different worldviews, two opposing class ideologies. Through the process of factory labor, the proletariat had developed a collectivist consciousness. The peasantry, however, was individualistic, patriarchal, and religious. Therefore it was emotionally and psychologically closer to the bourgeoisie than to the working class.^[9]

At times the proponents of class purity assumed a shrill and frightened tone. They seemed to fear that workers' psyches were much too fragile and their class ideologies too uncertain to ward off the temptations posed by other social groups. The only solution, then, was isolation. Mikhail Gerasimov, a popular proletarian poet and a founding member of the organization, gave an impassioned exposition of these views at the national Proletkult conference in 1918, using the industrial imagery so common to Proletkult writers:

We know that the psychology of the peasantry is petty-bourgeois. [Peasants] hide their grain and won't hand it over to urban workers. If there are many petty-bourgeois attitudes among workers now, what can we say about the peasantry? . . . We must found a workers' palace where workers' interests will always be central. We cannot abandon the Proletkult. It is an oasis where our class will (volia ) can crystallize. If we want our furnace to blaze, we must throw coal and oil into the fire, and not the peasants' salt or chips from the intellectuals. Nothing but smoke can come from these.^[10]

The national organization's membership rules reflected these restrictive understandings of class and class consciousness. They stated in no uncertain terms that only the most

conscious and culturally advanced industrial workers belonged in the Proletkult. The argument was made by comparing the Proletkult to the Communist Party. Clearly, the party could not let its political line be determined by the least conscious workers because that would not be the best expression of proletarian class interests. If the party descended to the level of the majority, it would forfeit its leadership role. Similarly, the Proletkult could not let its cultural line be determined by the least conscious mass of workers, because it would lose its claim to leadership in the field of culture. It was intended for the cultural vanguard of the working class.^[11]

This vision of the Proletkult's constituency proved to be very difficult to put into practice because its rigid social categories contradicted local "languages of class."^[12] Membership rules drawn up by provincial organizations illustrate this contradiction quite clearly. In the Parfenev Proletkult, Kostroma province, the local charter allowed the participation of all "toilers" (trudiashchiesia ), a word often used by Socialist Revolutionaries to apply to workers and peasants alike. Tver Proletkultists rejected a suggestion to limit their organization to industrial workers alone and instead extended an invitation to all "laboring and exploited people."^[13] Numerous groups offered their services to local "citizens," an expansive social term made popular after the February Revolution. Still others avoided class definitions altogether and linked Proletkult participation to social needs. One factory circle in Ekaterinburg was open to all who wanted to improve their knowledge.^[14]

At issue were fundamentally different understandings of

what the proletariat was. Local groups that welcomed toilers defined the working class broadly, including all the laboring masses in its ranks. They did not share the strict Marxist understanding of the industrial proletariat as a class distinct from and more conscious than other laborers. In fact, many used the word "proletariat" as a synonym for "the people" (narod ), something particularly common in provincial Proletkult poetry.^[15] According to this conception of the working class, laborers were united against their common enemies above them. Intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, and the supporters of the old regime might be the villains, but certainly not "petty-bourgeois influences" within the laboring classes themselves. Local groups simply ignored strictures against artisans, office workers, unskilled workers, and the urban poor. Some openly contradicted official statements about the peasantry.

Such divergent perceptions of class insured the Proletkult a large and diverse following. Lebedev-Polianskii was fond of comparing his organization to the Communist Party, but in fact it was a very poor analogy.^[16] It implied that the Proletkult was much more cohesive and better organized than was in fact the case. Although the party had methods of supervising who its members were (even though these methods were often ineffective), the central Proletkult had very little authority over its affiliates. There were no centrally approved "Proletkult cards,"^[17] no candidate membership periods, nor any secure methods to eliminate undesirable elements. The national

leadership had to depend on local groups to understand and implement its wishes.

In fact, the central Proletkult was not a very competent collector of data about its rapidly expanding network. It is even difficult to make definitive statements about the organization's size. In the fall of 1920 the center claimed between four hundred thousand and five hundred thousand members, eighty thousand of those in elite artistic studios.^[18] These figures, the only aggregate totals available, are very problematic. On the one hand, they are necessarily incomplete because there were many registered organizations that did not provide information about their participants.^[19] On the other hand, the central leadership never gave any sources for these estimates, nor did it clarify exactly what it meant by membership, allowing ample room for exaggeration. To take one example, the Petrograd Proletkult asserted that it controlled over one hundred and twenty clubs with approximately five hundred participants in each in 1919.^[20] Of these estimated sixty thousand "members," how many were casual auditors of plays or lectures, and how many actively identified with the organization's goals?

Whether they were accurate or not, these substantial membership figures were readily exploited by the movement. They gave the Proletkult visibility and power and also lent some credence to its claim to be the organizational equal of trade

unions and the Communist Party. Some Proletkult advocates went so far as to argue that the membership was drawn entirely from the working class, which would have assured the movement a hold over a significant percentage of Soviet Russia's small proletariat.^[21] But such boasts can be easily disproved by the records of local affiliates, which show sizable numbers of nonworkers within the ranks. They were also contradicted by the more candid comments of the central leaders themselves, who frequently bemoaned the organization's social diversity.

Despite their angry rhetoric directed at nonworkers, national leaders were at times quite willing to stretch their stiff guidelines in order to secure a broad following. Although there were strong ideological justifications for class purity, there were equally strong organizational reasons for large membership figures. The Proletkult's size and breadth made its cultural agenda very difficult to ignore. Thus both the actions of local circles and the partial complicity of national leaders ensured that many different social groups found a place under the banner of the Proletkult.

The Worker Contingent

The Proletkult expanded as the proletariat declined. It gained popularity as mobilizations, food shortages, and factory closures drastically diminished the ranks of Russian workers. Not only did the number of workers drop, but the lines between the industrial proletariat and other laboring classes—never very clear in the best of times—became more fluid as a result of wartime upheavals. This process could not help but affect an organization aimed at the working class.

In numerical terms the early Soviet years were a disaster for the industrial proletariat; many scholars have noted that the most immediate consequence of the workers' revolution was the decimation of the working class.^[22] The process of what Lenin called the "declassing" (deklassirovanie ) of the proletariat had already begun during the First World War.^[23] Experienced workers were mobilized into the army and their places taken by the unskilled, either members of workers' families or fresh recruits to factory life from the cities and the countryside. With the outbreak of the October Revolution, which brought demobilization, the situation improved somewhat as seasoned workers reclaimed their jobs. However, the beginning of the Civil War was a renewed blow to the size and quality of the labor force. Hunger, disease, the decline of industry, and renewed mobilizations all combined to deplete workers' ranks.^[24] In the first three years of Soviet power the industrial labor force was more than halved.^[25]

Factory workers left the cities in search of food and were absorbed into the peasantry. They also either voluntarily joined or were drafted into the Red Army. As a result, many of those who held industrial jobs were new, inexperienced recruits. Nonproletarian city dwellers who, unlike workers, often did not have relatives in the countryside, entered urban factories. In rural areas industrial plants found new laborers among the local peasantry. Not only did the size of the working class decline, its social makeup changed as well.

As the Proletkult spread throughout Soviet territory, it secured a following in the most industrially advanced areas of the country. During the Civil War it expanded from Petrograd, a stronghold of the metalworking industry, to the Central Industrial Region, the Urals, and even to parts of the White-controlled industrial South. Metalworkers, the traditional elite of the working class and a much sought after clientele, appeared to be very open to the organization's message.^[26] Many defense-related engineering and metalworking factories had Proletkult organizations. Of the ten large private plants that were nationalized in 1918 and united to form a machine-building consortium called "GOMZ" (Tsentral'noe pravlenie gosudarstvennykh ob"edinennykh mashinostroitel'nykh zavodov ), at least half sponsored Proletkults.^[27] Both metalworking plants in Tula opened Proletkuh organizations, as did many others: the Simbirsk cartridge factory, the Kovrov machine-gun factory, the Bezhetsk armament factory, metalworking plants in Izhevsk and Podolsk, the Putilov factory in Petrograd, and the Pudemskii factory in Viatka province.^[28]

Several of the Proletkult's first organizers, Fedor Kalinin, Vladimir Kossior, and Aleksei Gastev, were active in the Metalworkers' Union.^[29] Perhaps because of their influence,

some local trade union branches became strong Proletkult backers. The organizations in Izhevsk and Rybinsk were largely financed through the union.^[30] The Moscow Metalworkers' Union even came to the aid of the Proletkult in a territorial dispute with the city's educational division.^[31]

Railroad workers, another elite sector of the working class, were well represented in the Proletkult, too. There were special organizations for these workers in many parts of Russia, and railroad stations were frequent sites for local circles in the provinces.^[32] As in the case of the metalworkers, the Railroad Workers' Union showed a lively interest in Proletkult ideas. In mid-1918 the cultural division of the union, named "Tsekult," organized classes in Moscow for provincial cultural workers. Among the many lecturers was Aleksandr Bogdanov, who addressed the topic "Culture and Life."^[33]

However, even these leading proletarian groups had suffered severely from the combined effects of war and revolution. The quick expansion of the metal industry during the First World War meant that new and unskilled workers had entered the labor force. During the Civil War parts of the industry moved away from urban centers to areas where the working class had much closer ties to the peasantry.^[34] Thus just because one was a metalworker did not in itself insure a proletarian pedigree, nor did it guarantee the possession of

any of those special traits—literacy, job experience, and a long separation from the countryside—that so appealed to Proletkult theorists.

Moreover, the Proletkult was not restricted to the most advanced segments of the working class. The movement also found a following in industries employing mainly unskilled labor. Textile workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk were some of the first to start local organizations. By 1920 the provincial Proletkult encompassed groups in twenty-six factories along with district branches in Shuia, Kineshma, Vichuga, Rodniki, Sereda, and Teplov. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk Textile Workers' Union was an active supporter of both the city and the provincial networks.^[35] In Saratoy the cultural activities of the Tobacco Workers' Union were taken over by the Proletkult.^[36] As in the textile industry, the labor force for tobacco factories was primarily composed of unskilled workers. The national Sugar Workers' Union tried to unite all its factory cultural circles with the Proletkult. According to the union, sugar workers had a special need for well-planned cultural activities because refineries were located in small villages far away from cultural centers.^[37]

Rather than trying to isolate a cultural vanguard within the proletariat, many local groups made a special effort to reach out to the least advanced and least educated workers. The Kostroma Proletkult is an excellent case in point. In this town dominated by the textile trade a Proletkult took shape after many other attempts to organize educational projects for workers had failed. One commission, funded and organized by the local Narkompros division, determined through surveys and census data that there were over sixteen thousand illiterate or semiliterate workers in Kostroma, concen-

trated especially among women. It also concluded that workers' willingness to make use of cultural offerings decreased as their educational level decreased. The commission's solution was to start active agitation among the least educated workers. It proposed to open literacy schools right at the workplace, aimed specifically at female workers.^[38] As one commissioner noted, it was not possible to create a proletarian culture without sharing the rudiments of culture with the broadest possible working-class audience.^[39]

When the Kostroma Proletkult began operation, it reflected the concerns of the educational circles that preceded it. A founding member, V. A. Nevskii, was also the head of the local Narkompros division. He believed that the new organization should not abandon the masses for the quiet of isolated studios. Rather, the creation of a proletarian culture had to be accomplished by the masses themselves.^[40] To demonstrate its commitment to these goals, the Proletkult absorbed the factory workers' literacy commission into its organizational structure.

Together with unskilled laborers, many artisanal workers joined in local Proletkult activities, despite repeated warnings that they posed a threat to genuine proletarian values. As recent research on the Russian working class has shown, artisans were often well integrated into the factory proletariat, even constituting a significant percentage of those employed in large industrial complexes.^[41] Indeed, one might argue that the most common symbol of Proletkult creation, the mighty blacksmith wielding his hammer over an anvil, was itself an artisanal image. It certainly did not portray a worker whose life was regulated by the pace of the machine. The records for

organizations that compiled precise occupational data reveal all kinds of members with artisanal occupations, including tailors, seamstresses, bakers, and house painters.^[42]

Unfortunately, most local organizations did not keep detailed descriptions of the occupational status of their participants; at best they distinguished between workers and nonworkers. But the category of "worker" by itself was a blunt tool for social analysis in revolutionary Russia. It conveyed political power, and local groups at times distorted their official records to make themselves appear more proletarian.^[43] It also had a metaphorical meaning that extended to the "people" as a whole. It is only in this sense that we can understand why one Proletkult music teacher could survey her class, composed of the children of priests, peasants, artisans, and petty bureaucrats, and conclude that "the majority are workers."^[44]

White-Collar Workers and the "Laboring Intelligentsia"

The Proletkult reached beyond the industrial working class to embrace laborers in the service sector—office workers, shop assistants, and sales personnel. Their ubiquitous presence reflected the open-door policy that many local groups pursued. However, they also found a place because many employees considered themselves, and were considered by their peers, to be legitimate members of the working class. The two shopkeeper's apprentices who founded the Proletkult theater studio in Tamboy called themselves workers, and so did the

young typist who was the president of the Rzhev organization.^[45]

Before October the poor working conditions of many salaried employees led them to form alliances with artisanal and industrial workers.^[46] Although there were frequent hostilities in factories between workers and the white-collar staff during the 1917 revolutions, there were also strong alliances formed between manual laborers and those engaged in "mental labor."^[47] With the nationalization of industry and the expansion of the Soviet bureaucracy the distinction between manual and mental laborers became even less clear. Wartime conditions created new opportunities for workers to leave their factory jobs and become part of the expanding bureaucracies in the new Soviet state. Thus although a part of the proletariat was declassed, another part was reclassed and advanced into the hierarchies of trade unions, industry, and government. Those who took employment in the burgeoning bureaucratic system did not feel that they were abandoning their class. Rather, they were serving a state dedicated to the victory of the proletariat. In turn, the state showed its commitment to workers by promoting them to responsible managerial and governmental posts.^[48]

At all levels of the Proletkult hierarchy, nonmanual laborers took part in cultural activities. These participants were variously described as white-collar workers (sluzhashchie ), the "laboring intelligentsia," or "workers no longer involved in production." The inclusion of white-collar workers began already in factory Proletkults, the bottom rung of the orga-

nizational ladder. Although these groups could have easily fulfilled the center's mandate to serve only the industrial proletariat, in practice many of them encompassed the entire factory community, including the office staff. The Proletkult at a textile mill in Pushkino, Moscow province, reported that its activities were attended by factory workers and white-collar employees alike. At the Staro-Gorkinskii factory, a quarter of the members were drawn from the office staff.^[49]

The participation of white-collar workers did not end as one moved up the organizational hierarchy. In questionnaires sent out by the central Proletkult in 1921, most city and provincial circles reported significant percentages of white-collar employees in their ranks. Fifty percent of all studio members in the factory town of Rybinsk, site of one of the most successful Proletkults, came from the laboring intelligentsia. Only the Proletkult in Ivanovo-Voznesensk claimed an all-proletarian constituency, and this was because it had formed an elite central studio for its most advanced working-class students. In lower level workshops only half the members were workers, with the rest holding office jobs.^[50]

At least some of these employees were former workers, or the children of workers, who had moved into white-collar and bureaucratic posts. At the second Proletkult congress in 1921 delegates gave detailed personal information about their class status, including their social background (soslovie ), social position, specialty, and current occupation. Among the 141 delegates, many of whom were not workers at all, are several examples of industrial laborers who had taken jobs outside of factories. The textile worker V. F. Mozer from the Sokolovskii factory Proletkult worked in 1921 as a typist for her factory committee. L. I. Zaitsev from the Tula Proletkult

was a weaver by trade who had left the factory to become a union organizer. Mark Grishchenko of the Iurevsk organization listed his background and social status as "worker" and had only received a primary education. In 1921 he had a job as an employee for the railroad.^[51]

The presence of white-collar workers sometimes caused conflict in local circles. One disgruntled railroad worker in Samara bitterly attacked the Proletkult for allowing nonworkers to take part. Tula membership rules restricted office workers to 13 percent of the total membership and only accepted those who were in favor of Soviet power. Anna Dodonova, leader of the Moscow organization, defended Proletkult autonomy in a meeting with Lenin, insisting that it was necessary to keep employees from taking over workers' clubs.^[52]

Nonetheless, the confusion of social categories caused by the revolution worked in favor of white-collar employees who wanted to participate in Proletkult activities. As more and more workers gained jobs in state bureaucracies, soviets, trade unions, and the party, distinct divisions between the working class and the laboring intelligentsia became much harder to draw. This confusion made it more difficult for local groups to exclude white-collar workers from their ranks.^[53] Although there were those who opposed workers leaving the factory for any reason, these purists eventually lost out in internal organizational debates.^[54] By the 1920s the central

leadership counted "workers no longer involved in production" as part of the Proletkult's proletarian contingent.^[55]

Peasants in the Proletkult

Artisans and white-collar employees clearly posed a gray area for those who tried to delineate the boundaries of the working class. These groups often had close ties to the industrial proletariat and individuals within them may even once have been workers themselves. However, the case of the peasantry was less ambiguous. Although the central leaders eventually altered their perception of workers who joined the bureaucracy, their stance on the peasantry was quite unyielding. Peasants had no place in a proletarian organization. The national Proletkult central committee tabled a request by Sergei Esenin and others to open a special section for peasant literature in the Proletkult.^[56] It threatened to close down organizations in areas where there was evidence of widespread peasant participation. In addition, its members warned continually of the dangers peasants posed to proletarian class consciousness.

The official Proletkult position on this issue was at odds with the Communist Party line, which advocated an alliance between the poor peasantry and the proletariat. Indeed, Bogdanov seemed to be arguing directly with the Bolshevik platform when he insisted that peasants could not share a proletarian worldview, regardless of how poor they were.^[57] However, many local groups articulated a position much closer to the party line, one that reflected what appeared to be

an obvious truth to many participants: under capitalism, both workers and peasants, particularly poor peasants, had been oppressed and thus both were entitled to the cultural benefits of the revolution. "The proletariat is an exploited class struggling for its emancipation," wrote one Proletkultist in the small town of Klin, Moscow province. "It has its own form of comradely cooperation to a high degree. But aren't these traits also inherent in the poor peasantry? Don't they also shape the character of the future art of the peasant masses? Of course they do. Therefore it follows that the art of the future will be the same for both classes.^[58]

This perception that worker and peasant interests were intertwined encouraged the proliferation of Proletkult organizations in small towns and villages with negligible working-class populations. The phenomenon was so widespread that the fate of "peasant" and "socially mixed" organizations was a recurring topic of debate for the central leaders. To take one example, a Smolensk organization petitioned to register fifty-eight new Proletkult circles in small rural centers (volosti ) during the summer of 1919. The central Proletkult responded with a decision to turn over all groups with a peasant composition to Narkompros.^[59] By the following year national leaders claimed to have closed down many nonproletarian Proletkults and reorganized others to conform to their guidelines.^[60]

But if the center intended to purge all branches with strong nonproletarian followings, that process was incomplete. According to national records many rural and small town organizations survived through the 1920 congress.^[61] The Prolet-

kult in Kologriv, Kostroma province, is an interesting example. It was started in September 1918 by an organizer from the Petrograd Proletkult named Chumbarov-Luchinskii.^[62] Kologriv was a very small district center; in 1917 it had a population of only 3,350, and by 1920 it had shrunk to 2,700. The 1923 city census showed that less than 10 percent of the population was workers.^[63] Just why the Petrograd organizer picked this small town for his endeavors remains unclear, but he pursued his task with vigor.

From its founding, the Kologriv Proletkult directed its activities to include the "broad masses," a notion that also encompassed the peasantry. Chumbarov-Luchinskii felt that the Proletkult should sponsor literacy schools, peasant reading rooms, and peasant theaters in the surrounding villages.^[64] In late 1919 the leadership was taken over by a local man who had just completed a course at the Moscow Proletkult. With aid from Moscow he announced his intention to reorganize the Proletkult "more in the spirit of the central organization."^[65] He hoped to put the Kologriv Proletkult on the correct proletarian path. However, even the new leadership could not change the social structure of the town. From the many membership lists sent from Kologriv to Moscow, it is quite clear that the proletarian path in Kologriv was trod mainly by nonworkers. The art studio, for example, had fifty-nine students, mainly from the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, with a few from a clerical background. Workers were not mentioned on the roster at all.^[66]

Despite ample evidence showing the suspect social composition of the Kologriv circle, the central Proletkult made no

effort to close it down. Its demise was the result of other causes. In March 1921 the local Narkompros division took it over, dispatching a terse telegram to inform the central Proletkult that the Kologriv Proletkult branch no longer existed. Rather than welcoming the end of this nonproletarian affiliate, the national organization protested the action.^[67]

The center's reluctance to relinquish control of the Kologriv organization illuminates a real tension in its operating procedures. Should it promote a broadly based popular movement, or should it instead attempt to achieve social homogeneity? On the one hand, dedicated Proletkultists were afraid to dilute the movement's proletarian essence with peasant followers. On the other hand, it was appealing for them to watch their organization expand as "a strong young tree, budding everywhere across the boundless expanses of Soviet Russia."^[68] Petrograd participants were quite proud of their role as the original supporters of the Kologriv organization. The editors of the radical Petrograd journal The Future (Griadushchee ) declared that the existence of a Proletkult in such a remote corner of Russia showed the vitality of proletarian culture.^[69]

Even if all village circles had closed their doors, that would not have rid the Proletkult of its peasant members. Factory organizations in rural areas drew in part on peasant labor, and some offered cultural activities for the peasant population at large. At the Lenin State Sugar Factory in Kursk province the Proletkult sponsored literacy classes together with the local labor school. Its choir was composed of factory workers and peasants alike, and the theater even decided to start evening performances for village youth in the hopes of curbing their rowdy behavior on the street.^[70] Such practices be-

came official policy in the Moscow Province Proletkult, which united nineteen different local groups. Delegates at a 1920 conference decided to make greater efforts to include the peasant population living near rural factories. The membership rules made this quite explicit: the organization was open to workers, poor peasants, intellectual laborers in factories, and all party members.^[71]

The Proletkult's collaboration with the Red Army opened yet more doors to peasants because soldiers came overwhelmingly from the countryside. At the first Proletkult conference in 1918 the issue of peasant-soldiers was a topic of a heated debate. Some delegates demanded that soldiers be considered part of the proletariat, which was the official party position. Others wanted to exclude them because peasant soldiers' "petty-bourgeois" mentality would undermine the Proletkult's claims to be a pure proletarian movement. As a compromise, delegates voted to open special Red Army clubs, which would be kept separate from the rest of Proletkult activities.^[72]

As with so many other resolutions, this one was not followed very closely. Numerous Proletkults included soldiers in their activities; in some soldiers constituted the majority of members. According to one local report, 80 percent of all men in the Archangel organization came from the military.^[73] Some groups even merged parts of their operations with Red Army divisions.^[74] For Tamboy Proletkultists the soldier took precedence over the worker during the big mobilization of 1919. Military imagery completely eclipsed the factory metaphors so common in Proletkult pronouncements: "On the Red Front with our rifles in our hands we will continue to break a trail to the Culture of the Future."^[75]

The movement's official stance on the peasantry reflected the vanguardist visions of the prerevolutionary Bolsheviks, who determined workers' sophistication and consciousness according to their distance from the countryside. However, the revolution and Civil War confused these preconceptions and drastically reformulated class configurations. It was a shift some committed Proletkultists saw quite clearly. Pavel Arskii, a Petrograd leader, proletarian writer, and Red Army soldier, had sympathetic words for the Russian peasantry. "I am your son," he wrote in the 1919 poem "A Worker to a Peasant." "I left my native fields for the kingdom of smoke, iron, and steel." The poem stresses the common interests of the two groups and concludes: "Together we will live as a close and happy family in the new, radiant, and mighty Russia."^[76]

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

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-

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

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-

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

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.

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.