Soviet socialist realism required art to be cheerful, clear and loyal
From 1934 the Soviet state allowed exactly one way to make art: socialist realism. Paintings had to show muscular workers, sunlit fields and busy factories, and tragedy was banned unless it happened somewhere else or long ago. Stalin called its practitioners engineers of souls.
The phrase first appeared in print on May 23, 1932, when Ivan Gronsky, who chaired the organising committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, used it in Literaturnaya Gazeta, after approval at meetings attended by Stalin himself. Maxim Gorky championed the idea for literature and published an essay under that title in 1933. The next year the First Congress of Soviet Writers declared it the only acceptable method in every medium.
Its roots reach back further. Nineteenth-century realists such as Ilya Repin and the Peredvizhniki supplied the techniques, minus the politics. After the Bolsheviks seized power on October 25, 1917, Anatoly Lunacharsky took charge of cultural policy and argued that images of a healthy body or a friendly smile could improve the people who saw them. Futurists wanted a clean break with the past, while traditionalists preferred realistic scenes of daily life. Private patrons kept both camps alive under the New Economic Policy, but once the state closed private enterprise in 1928, the avant-garde lost its buyers.
The 1934 congress set four tests. A work had to speak to workers in terms they understood, show typical everyday scenes, depict things representationally and back the aims of the Party. Content outranked form, so art that dwelt on style could be condemned as formalism.
The mood was compulsory optimism, later labelled revolutionary romanticism. Favourite motifs included flowers, sunlight, youth, flight and new machines, and the goal was to mould the New Soviet Man, the fresh kind of person Lenin had imagined. Characters had to be plainly good or plainly bad, and under Stalin painters produced countless heroic portraits of the leader, rendered as realistically as possible.
Source: Socialist realism
