Purges and the Coming War – Prompt # 6

This week our focus in class shifted from the more positive visions of building socialism to the darkness of the purges and preparations for the coming war. For your next post, please choose a primary cultural artifact from MC pp. 287-329 and explore it’s connection to the broader context of the development of Socialist Realism or popular mass culture. You should try to correlate the artifact you choose to one of the modules on 17 Moments in one of the following thematic areas: film, fine arts, or literature. (Relevant moments are: 1934, 1936 and 1939). You may also choose to explore a topic we worked on in class in more depth (i.e. Shostakovich / Lady M, the purges and the intelligentsia, or Zhdanov and Soviet Literature). You might also write about Gorky’s “Mass Attack on the Watershed” (RR, pp. 453-456)

Last week’s video embeds looked great! For this week’s “level up” try one (or more) of the following: 1) add depth to your post by linking to related material or one of your sources; 2) add captions to your images 3) provide a link to your image.

Image: Viktor Ivanov: A Tractor in the Field (1942) “A Tractor in the Field is Worth a Tank in Battle”