What is Revolutionary Culture? 3rd Blogpost Prompt

Reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s study has given us insight about the scope of political, economic, and social change the Russian Revolution inspired.  Of necessity, the Bolsheviks’ overarching concern was political — they needed to secure and maintain political authority. Yet they also believed that the revolution must be secured by profound changes in economic relationships, and assumed that those changes must be accompanied and informed by a comparably profound transformation of society and culture.  These early years were ones of open debate and disagreement about what socialist culture should “look like,” and you will notice an array of competing ideas about what artists, revolutionaries and ordinary people thought about the culture of the future.

For this post, please explore a creative work or social issue from the early Soviet period in the context of the question “what is revolutionary culture?” You may use any item from MC pp. 22-122.

You may also develop a post on revolutionary cinema using Dziga Vertov’s “We: Variant of a Manifesto” (RR, pp. 365-369); Trotsky, “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema,” and Blyakin’s “The Little Red Devils” (MC pp. 36-52)  The “Socialist Cinema” module of 17 Moments in Soviet History is also quite useful.

Finally, if you are more interested in “c” culture, you may write about the selections in section VIII (Building a New World from Old), pp. 349-394) in the Russian Reader.

N.B. If you choose Zoshchenko, note that he is represented in MC as well as RR. You might also enjoy thinking about Zoshchenko’s “Lady Aristrocrat” (MC) alongside Kollontai’s “Make Way for Winged Eros” (RR)