--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural
> expectations for the
> working class - they wanted proletarians to
> assimilate the best of
> bourgeois culture.
Well, Lenin and Trotsky were both intellectuals (and neither of them had very radical artistic tastes -- Lenin's favorite poet was Pushkin). The people who came after them were decidedly not -- well, you could argue about Stalin, who was a prodigiously well-read autodidact, but Khrushchev had a fourth-grade education, and I think that was common for most of the Stalin circle and the following GenSecs up to but not including Andropov. I think someone like Khrushchev thought something like "hmmph, I'm as working class as you can get, so if I don't get it, there must be something wrong and anti-working class about it."
I've always been fuzzy about what exactly the Bolshevik notion of "proletarian culture" and "proletarian literature" was supposed to be about.
Also, I think there is an undertone of unease, skepticism and angst in modernism, and that did not make sense in a supposedly utopian society like the USSR which claimed to have solved all the basic problems and have a universal ideology.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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