Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism

Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Groys starts by arguing that the complete power over all spheres of life in the USSR gave the Communist Party aesthetic authority over the Soviet society. “the Communist party leadership… was transformed into a kind of artist whose material was the entire world and whose goal was to "overcome the resistance" of this material and make it pliant, malleable, capable of assuming

any desired form.” (3) He, consequently, argues that social transformation of the Soviet society were based on aesthetic principles.

His agenda is, however, too grounded in established stereotypes about the Bolshevik revolution: “Revolution in the West could not be as radical as in the East, because Western revolutionary ideology was too aware of its debt to tradition (a-ha), too heavily relied on previous intellectual, social, political, technical, and other achievements, too highly valued the circumstances that generated it and in which it was first articulated.” This comparison is totally senseless: what Western revolution? What Eastern revolution? “For this reason, no Western upheaval could equal the Russian Revolution's merciless destruction of the past.” – How can “the past” be destroyed? “Russia, however, was aesthetically far better prepared for revolution than the West; that is, it was far more willing to organize all life in new, as yet unseen forms, and to that end it allowed itself to be subjected to an artistic experiment of unprecedented scale.” – nice words, but whom does he mean by “Russia”? “Russia was willing to organize all life…” – another totally senseless construct.

Groys examines the Stalinist art and the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s in their relations in order to argue that the latter wasn’t an ‘innocent’ victim of Stalinism. He instead argues: “Socialist realism was not created by the masses but was formulated in their name by well-educated and experienced elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the internal logic of the avant-garde method itself, which had nothing to do with the actual tastes and demands of the masses.” (9)

He betrays his position (social, political and ideological) when he discusses the sots art: “The contemporary artistic reflection on the Soviet order as a work of state art reveals a great deal in the system that is inaccessible by other means but that can also be approached only through the history of this state art.” (12) He occupies a position of an art critic, and silences all other possible positions, rather than this—which allows for the construction of his research object, socialist realism, as a universal sphere that defined the entire structure of the Soviet state: “the Soviet order as a work of state art.”

He further substitutes his specific position for the “entire” history: “After the October Revolution and two years of civil war… not only the Russian avant-garde but practically the entire population of the former Russian Empire correctly perceived that this zero point [for the creation of a new culture and a new world] had actually been reached. The country was reduced to ashes, normal life was utterly disrupted, housing was uninhabitable, the economy had reverted almost to the primitive state, social relations had disintegrated, and life gradually began to resemble a war of everyone against everyone.” (20) (my comment: This created an illusion (which Groys shares) that the ground was ready for the radical transformation of the social fabric—but this ‘emptiness’ was less empty, because social relations survived and once people would return material possessions, they will start to re-create, through them, the social world of the past.) Groys argues that avant-gardists rushed for power after the victory of Bolsheviks (although without any empirical evidence), arguing that “This rush for political power derived not merely from opportunism and the desire for personal success on the part of the avant-garde, but followed from the very essence of the avant-gardist artistic project.” (20)

Basically, his main argument about the Soviet avant-garde is this: “in the early years of Soviet power the avant-garde not only aspired to the political realization of its artistic projects on the practical level, but also formulated a specific type of aesthetico-political discourse in which each decision bearing on the artistic construction of the work of art is interpreted as a political decision, and, conversely, each political decision is interpreted according to its aesthetic consequences. It was this type of discourse that subsequently became predominant and in fact led to the destruction of the avant-garde itself.” (21) Sounds nice, but this nice scheme doesn’t withstand any encounter with empirical material.