>However I think it is important to note that the
>Akhmatovs and the Mayakovskys and the Malevichs
>represented a small percentage of the population
>located in the bouregousies of St. Petersburg and
>Moscow. The majority of the population had very
>different tastes -- it was made up of people like
>Khrushchev, with his fourth-grade education and
>peasant/working class roots. If anything Social
>Realism represented a move in the direction of the
>tastes and world view of the general masses.* Note the
>similarity in structure between the Socialist Realist
>novel and the popular 19th-century Orthodox Lives of
>the Saints.
This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing - aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a radically egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few compromises to appeal to a popular audience; even the Manifesto requires the reading skills of a high-school graduate (according to Microsoft Word's grammar checker, which recommends documents aspire to the 7th or 8th grade level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural expectations for the working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate the best of bourgeois culture. In fact, raising the cultural level of the working class seemed central to their revolutionary project. That didn't last through the 1920s. That's never been too big a part of the American left, has it? My Pacifica colleagues mostly frown on anything that smacks of elitism.
Doug