HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

220 Reviewsthey remained pro-Bolshevik.Lynn Mally attentively examines the membership and the leadership of thisProletkult and its structure and debates. She points out that it was never a homogeneousorganization and that it included a variety of people in its ranks who interpretedthe meaning of culture and, specifically, proletarian culture. What emergesfrom her portrait of the organization is that its identity was closely linked to workers'autonomy, self-affirmation, and self-definition. Proletkult leaders tried very hardto define a separate role for themselves within the context of what was called the"proletarian" state. In the end, they failed. The author shows that as soon as theimmediate danger of the Whites receded, the Bolshevik leaders tightened controland stamped out any calls for autonomy—and not only in the realm of culture, onemight add.My primary criticism of this book is that it takes uncritically the claim of theProletkult leaders that they, in fact, represented proletarian culture. The author mistakenlyinterprets the growth of the organization as an indication of a grass rootssupport and refers to it as a movement. Yet, as she herself admits (p. 66), one localorganization "allowed participation" of such-and-such laborers. So the grass roots"movement" was shaped from above. The self-appointed Communist cultural elitedecided who was and who was not a "conscious" proletarian. Could that dogmatic,ideological propaganda machine be called a popular movement? The author's evidencealso clearly shows that the "movement" had begun in Moscow, existed onstate funds, and then collapsed when state funds were withdrawn.Second, the author assumes as something quite natural, and not in need of explanation,that worker-proletarians were necessarily socialist and that Proletkult wastheir organization. In fact, "proletarian consciousness" was a mental creation ofMoscow intellectuals and their worker upstart students. During the Civil War thetrue workers exhibited all kinds of cultural and political preferences; most of themhad probably never heard of Proletkult. Most Russian workers, by Bolshevik terminology,exhibited petty bourgeois cultural traits and tastes. Large categories ofworkers, such as railroad workers and metal workers, were explicitly anti-Communist. Other workers such as those in Tula, often referred to in the book, werestaunchly and continuously pro-Menshevik and anti-Bolshevik. Still others, forexample in Orel, joined in the anti-Semitic pogroms under the Whites. By focusingonly on the Bolshevik cultural organization which claimed to be of the workers, onereceives a distorted view of the workers' real cultural needs and real political dispositions.Lynn Mally clearly demonstrates that Lenin and the Bolsheviks stamped out culturalautonomy in 1921. Yet, the issues she raises in the book beg a broader view.The author correctly shows that the intellectual origins of Proletarian Culture wentback to Bogdanov's dreams during the 1910s of a proletarian identity and aproletarian culture that would supersede bourgeois culture. From here, it followed asan axiom that proletarian culture was necessarily a socialist culture. Intolerance anddoctrinairism were a part of Bolshevik cultural thinking from the very beginning.The Bolshevik intelligentsia's mission was to educate the proletariat and to lead it tosocialism. Why is it so surprising, then, that in 1921 Lenin decided that this task