Once the Bolsheviks claimed power following the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin instituted his plan for the Soviet Union and the monumental change of Communism. An area of interest he addressed was culture, and it was in culture (art) that Lenin literally instituted a monumental change– with the commissioning of monuments to be built all around Moscow. He took propaganda off the walls and brought it to the public square. He molded a new history, one not distinctly Russian at all, by erecting statues to German or French socialists, and the not-typically-idolized famous Russian assassins who made attempts at the lives of Tsars. By doing this, he created the entity of “international Communism,” and brought history out of the pages of books and into the sight of the proletarian masses. But further than that, he formed the monolithic socialist/Communist myth through the idolization of non-Russians, which led me to interpret this “monumental propaganda” as the creation of the eternal history of the Soviet Union, one that is not wholly Russian (or true for that matter) yet one that Lenin brilliantly manipulated to make it appear as though the “Soviet” had been around for ages in human history and that now it was fully coming to fruition. Not only could he undermine the ages of poisoned bourgeois history, he himself could transcend that of all the other “great fighters for socialism” because, unlike them, he had actually realized the dream of a socialist state. And his use of monuments as propaganda sought just that, a socialist state that with a unified cause and a unified history, which ultimately became the Communist/socialist ideology as told through Lenin’s faux “historical continuum. But, especially under the shadow of Lenin, did the progressive Soviet cultural movements have any chance of survival?
The short answer is no. Culture (referring to art), while addressed as a propaganda medium in the very early Soviet Union, lost out to the need for literacy/civic education, technical training, and, the most glaring of all needs (especially for Communism), the economic modernization of the state. Thus, in essence, Lenin– who had little regard for art in the first place as he grouped distinctly different art movements as “futurist”– labeled avant-garde art movements as “politically indulgent,” and the schools of culture soon found themselves branded as “left-wing infantilism”– or worse counterrevolutionary. This ultimately led to the fall from favor from the party, which, in the Soviet Union, meant isolation, which meant an indefinite vacation in Siberia (which coincidentally did happen to some artists).