Wednesday 12 September 2012

Mally, Lynn. Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938



Mally, Lynn. Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938. Cornell University Press, 2000.

The purpose of the book is to study what functions amateur theater played in the establishment and legitimation of the new political, social, cultural and symbolic order that came to being after the Bolshevik Revolution. Aesthetic and political self-expression, entertainment, dissemination of political information by authorities, testing ground for professional scene. Eventually, evolution of Soviet amateur theater contributed to the emergence of the genre of socialist realism. Extremely popular in post-revolutionary time, “amateur theaters provided a venue where performers, the audience, and political overseers intersected” (3).

One aspect: legitimation of the Soviet power. “encourages army enlistment, mobilized participants for Soviet celebrations, and informed audiences about international events… spread the political message of the revolution” (4). Bolshevik government did its best to control both professional and amateur theater, since “by integrating the intellect and the emotions, theater had the power to create new patterns of behavior” (9). Amateur theaters played on the side of Soviet ideology in its cultural struggle with “low-level” entertainment during the NEP. Evolution of different genres: Mally emphasizes a difference between aesthetic drama and social drama (the latter aimed at immediate and concrete transformation of the real world) and problematizes evolution of Soviet amateur theater as searches for new forms of social drama, where there would be no principle difference between audience and actors. Hence Soviet amateur theater was an important venue of collective space (never of the private one!). Education and mobilization of audience, the enlightening function.

Soviet clubs (of which amateur theater was, perhaps, the most important part) served to create new revolutionary public space. Hence interest to them from revolutionary architects and power bodies, including Red Army, trade unions, and ministerial bodies. Struggle in repertoire between pre-1917 plays and new theatrical forms. Use of old cultural forms (folklore heroes and motives) in new theater. Different forms of improvisation and “living newspapers” as reaction to contemporaneous events and urge for revolutionary activism—social drama. Mass events involving large groups of people.

Spread of agitational theater of small forms during the NEP as a reaction to the return of a competing petty bourgeois culture. Part of state efforts to “enlighten” the audience by means of cultural production. Use of amateur performance for creating new Soviet traditions: in particular, Soviet celebrations: theaters as a means to construct atmosphere and emotions of festivity. Propaganda of a new way of life (novyi byt) through theatrical performances – performance as a didactic text (hence the metaphor “living newspaper”). Criticism of small forms: trying to conform to their audiences’ tastes, they started to resemble bourgeois theatrical forms (cabaret). Avant-Garde (Meyerhold) trying small forms, too: the moment when amateur and professional theater meet. Debates of whether amateur theater as a place which draws on immediate professional experience of actors as workers should become the starting point of new socialist culture.

Second half of the 1920s: “professionalization” of amateur theaters. They are no longer regarded as a heuristic venue where new forms are searched for: now the state makes a stronger effort to control them. Amateur theaters as potentially political unreliable (a high level of support of Trotsky and other opponents of Stalin). Criticism of small forms as no longer capable of attracting audiences. Club plays as a solution. Initially writing by actors themselves, but criticism for “poor taste,” and controlling organs publish “repertoire guides” to show what is acceptable (and “good”) on the scene. At this point, a problem with evidence springs up: Mally makes claims about audiences’ positive or negative reaction on the basis of official press and documents, which is problematic (p. 100). Growing demands to introduce “professional” plays in repertoire of amateur theaters. Collaboration between amateurs and professionals.

Mally then focuses on the best-known amateur theater TRAM in Leningrad as a case of her studies into Soviet amateur theater of the NEP era, a kind of encapsulation of tendencies characteristic for this cultural phenomenon. “Staging Soviet youth culture.” Depiction of social characters and tensions as a way to criticize and eliminate them. She doesn’t really analyze the material of plays stages there, actually—e.g., Sashka Chumovoi offers an excellent example to look at new cultural norms and values (and reiteration of certain old ones), but Mally offers instead a Soviet-type literary analysis of the plot and uses categories borrowed from contemporary scholarly criticism – no critical theory of her own working here. She analyzes plays as didactic text, but only to the respect that was intentionally didactic there. Silences are omitted, too. Analyzes how discussion of sexuality on stage was mixed with politicization to exercise a better political control over the Komsomol youth. Debates over the status of TRAM as somewhere between amateur and professional. Its professionalization, search for identity (with whom are you, TRAM?) and expansion during the Great Break. Emergence of new amateur theatrical forms directly at factories and other sites of production which challenge the status of TRAM as a vanguard theater. Criticism from nascent apologists of ‘social realism’ for non-realist methods of cultural presentation; political claims related to visions of what proper Soviet culture should look like.

New wave of amateur theater in the Five-Year Plan: agitprop brigades. Rejection of professional stage for its distance from “real life,” aggressive search for and the making of audiences. Rejecting of principles of aesthetic drama, agitprop brigades urged to change their spectators immediately. Cultural production as “weapon.” Unlike club theaters of the early NEP, agitprop brigades were highly mobile and stressed that they don’t take interests of their audiences into account, but rather only interests of the socialist building. They even were supposed to engaged into “extra-stage” activities, performing functions of education and disciplining outside the stage. Inclusion of rituals of public shaming of “bad” workers and praise of “good” ones. “The main goals of agitprop brigades were to inspire action, not to produce works of lasting artistic value” (161) – which gave birth to a specific aesthetics. Criticism, breaking the borders of public life, acute attention to current events, interaction with audience. Challenge of conventional understandings of performance space. Aggressive egalitarianism, for which agitprop brigades were attacked from other cultural groups. However, with the decrease of the militant rhetoric in Soviet culture and media, their role also started to decrease. Call for synthesis and cooperation with professional theater (professionalism + attentiveness to social problems) as one of bases for social realism.

End of the First Five-Year Plan meant end of militant youth revolution and culture. Creation of a “spectacle state” which attempted to fix the spectators’ point of view (kultura dva). Show trials, parades, conventions, public parks, massive sport stadiums, workers’ palaces, etc. – Von Geldern, Cultural and Social Geography. “The spectator became the model for the ideal Soviet citizen.” (182) Mally then examines how this change in Soviet cultural policy sterilized amateur theater from all possibly unexpected meanings it could create. More focus than ever was placed on “professionalization” of amateur troupes, allegedly in the name of better quality, but actually for the sake of better control of their production and of their audiences. Social drama disappeared from the agenda, amateur performances were re-aestheticized and the distance between audience (which was no more on show) and actors (who were now the spectacle) was restored.

In sum, the trajectory of Soviet amateur history from 1917 to late 1930s was an itinerary from an original cultural phenomenon to “proto-professional” theater, its repertoire was narrowed (anti-formalist campaign, removal of most Western plays) to a small set of approved plays.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Can the Subaltern Speak?



Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. London, 1993, 66-111.

Spivak starts with a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, arguing that their inattentiveness to their own intellectual position and stance made them at certain points blind to the role of ideology in reproducing of oppressive and hegemonic social relations of production between West and the rest of the world. She, in particular, focuses on the fact that when intellectuals take the task of representing “subalterns,” they actually represent those images of subalterns which they created themselves, falsely pretending to be “transparent,” that is, speaking for oppressed groups without changing meanings of their  message.

Spivak then explores how Marx speaks of a Subject: it not a canny individual with undivided personality, but rather “a divided and dislocated subjects whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other.” (71) Subjectivity, thus, not only is not individual; neither it is collective: while capital/power imposes on oppressed classes interests which actually do not belong to them, this operation fails to create any kind of unity (a feeling of community, political organization). If economic conditions form a class as a socio-economic category, but it does not exist as a political-cultural category, power structures and intellectuals come in and act to “represent” the class, failing to acknowledge that this class still doesn’t have its own interests.

Thus, Spivak attacks an implicitly promoted in contemporary critical theory distinction between a totalizing Subject of desire and power and “the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed.” (74) She claims that intellectuals, even such critical as Foucault and Deleuze, have deep roots in socialized and institutionalized capital and their emphasis on discourses and ignoring of the role of economics, class warfare, etc. is misleading. She sees the problem of this “blindness” in the fact that European (and a priori American) philosophers belong to “the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor” (75) and their intellectual baggage is part of European production of the Other, so their writing only reinforces “the constitution of the Subject as Europe” (ibid). In this process, they stood on the side of West as a kind of oppressor of the rest of the world, in the way that they participated in taking away the original forms of speaking from colonized nations.

Spivak then looks at the ways the British codified Hindu law in order to ask a question: the international division of labor created a situation when Third World territories don’t have socialized capital operated by intellectuals (such as Foucault), which had been subordinated through political violence, education and similar forms of discipline and control, and, most importantly, economic exploitation: are there possibilities for the subaltern to speak? Spivak addresses the problem of “epistemological violence”: how imperialist powers created structures of knowledge which silenced actual experience of colonized people, reinterpreted it in case of open confrontation (“mutinies,” “riots”) and imposed their meanings which facilitated colonial exploitation. Contemporary situation is not principally different, she argues, only that direct colonial exploitation is replaced with international division of labor. Exploited classes in colonial countries are not “trained” in the ideology of consumerism, class mobility is almost non-existent, women are subordinated through cultural patterns of patriarchal social relations. And there are people outside of the international division of labor who are in an even deeper silence (Third World farmers or unemployed).

Thus, Spivak mostly accuses Foucault and Deleuze for ignoring “the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor” (84). Foucault is, in particular, criticized for not making a difference between exploitation and domination, which makes his analysis of power flawed in terms that he doesn’t draw parallels between modern power and structures of colonial exploitation. His concept of subject and subjectivity is, consequently, also pretty closely tied to a specific time and place (modern First world), so while its analytical potential is pretty high in the field of European studies, it is more useless elsewhere.

To overcome the pro-Western bias in contemporary scholarship, Spivak suggests that Derrida’s approach to textual analysis should be rehabilitated. “The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other” (87). Derrida gives tools and insights into criticism of European ethnocentric tradition of constituting Others; his research also provides an understanding that historical and geographic position of European intellectuals doesn’t allow them for “transparent” representation of the Others, no matter by what benevolent desires this representation is driven. “Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advantage of learning and civilization.” (90)

Spivak takes an artificially constructed sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men” to deconstruct possible meanings related to hegemony and oppression underlying it, to look for silences which serve the oppression and to identify meanings which reinforce intellectual and cultural trends (western intellectuals as playing on the part of the oppressor) she had described above. Analysis of 19th-century ideological debate over sati as an example of situation when two “male” visions were involved in a conflict where women remained silent subalterns. Analysis of jauhar as another phenomenon by which men reinforce their rule and possession of women, objectify them: patriotic stories of mass self-immolation serve to impose these gender categories from early childhood in a very effective way. But British abolition of sati was imposed in such terms and cultural categories that it didn’t liberate them, but simply changed modes and models of male domination.

Monday 10 September 2012

Zhuravliov, Sergey. Small people and big history: foreign workers of the Moscow Electric Factory in Soviet society of the 1920s-30s



Журавлев С.В.  "Маленькие люди" и "большая история": иностранцы московского Электрозавода в советском обществе 1920-1930-х годах. М.: РОССПЭН, 2000.

Methodologically, the author draw inspiration from contemporary Western social history (in particular, Steven Kotkin’s research of Magnitogorsk) and aims to study the history of the Soviet society from perspectives of social history, taking as a case a group of foreign employers in one of Moscow’s factories and arguing that a research focus on this group might highlight social, political and cultural evolution of the interwar USSR in a kind of litmus test.

The book starts with a study of the organization of industrial espionage in Germany in electrical industry, with the technological process of production of tungsten lamps as the main aim of Soviet efforts. Zhuravlev looks at rank-and-file executors of this operation, particularly at their life trajectories, as an entrance point to this period of Soviet history. He then switches his attention to immigrant specialists, focusing, in particular, on biographies of several of German engineers and technicians to examine how they organized work process and their everyday activities, how they communicated with German community in Moscow and with Soviet society. He draws quite extensively on their investigative files from NKVD (all of them were arrested in 1937-8).

Narrative strategy of the book alternates a story line of the production process with biographies of immigrants and Soviet specialists – as a result, there are multiple chronological breaks and different story lines not always create context for each other. A disadvantage rather than an advantage of the author’s style. Another problem – Zhuravlev uses categories coined by Soviet organs (including NKVD): inokoloniia, for example, which offers a specific perspective on the subject which he not always overcomes in his analysis.

Second part of the book starts with the turn of 1930s when a huge influx of new foreign specialists forced Soviet government to take measures to accommodate foreigners to Soviet realities. Selection of candidates and their re-inculcation in Soviet norms and values were regarded as clues to success (146ff). A sociological overview of immigrants, their workplace conflicts with administration and coworkers, their adaptation to ways of life in the USSR. Mid-1930s: a changed attitude to foreign specialists, from “what we should learn from foreign workers?” to “what foreigners should learn in the USSR” (273). Purgest and trials as a spectacle (276–7). Return of German workers to Nazi Germany as a choice (often tragic) between their failed belief in Communism and their inability to adapt to Soviet conditions.

Friday 7 September 2012

Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921



Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Agenda: to look at Russian history not within conventional chronological breaks, but rather focus on continuity where a rupture (1917) was customarily seen. It will also allow for a reinterpretation of Russian history after 1917 into a wider European history. “The continuum of mobilization and violence that began with World War I and extended through Russia’s civil war.” Wartime mobilization as a context which created structures, institutions, modes of thinking for the revolutionary mobilization.

Main aim: “I examine the mechanisms for instituting and reinforcing political projections, the methods for finding a political purchase in sociological experience,” in a way of top-to-bottom approach (how elites used social resources). (6) Studies a relationship between politics and ideology in three particular practices: “state management of food supply; the employment of official violence for political ends; and state surveillance of the population for purposes of coercion and ‘enlightenment’.” (6)

In other ways, this books is a story of how Bolsheviks used the debris of the old world to build a new one, what political institutions, practices (Holquist doesn’t write, but also modes of argumentation, concepts, etc.) were used to achieve new socialist political goals. This research is based on a case of Don Territory, a specific Cossack territory.

Chapter 1 starts with pre-WWI polarization of the Russian political spectrum: Nicolas – government; bureaucracy – parties; intellectuals – people. State control over the food supply for the Russian Army some time after the war broke out. “Fusion of government structures and public efforts:” “many public organizations… willingly collaborated in the state’s war-mobilization plans because they believed they provided an unparalleled opportunity to transform society according to their own programs.” Then comes August 1915: a split between the government and parastatal organizations. Government now exercises a direct control over the food supply through a bulky chain of bureaucratic management.

Food crisis of 1916 and 1917: contracted production of grain, insufficient transportation infrastructure, “scissors crisis” when rising prices on scarce manufactured goods and stagnant or falling prices on agricultural products led peasants to holding their grain from the market. Russian government then tried to use extraordinary wartime circumstances to supplant market structure and establish a direct connection between the producer and the consumer. Moreover, democratic opposition advocated (although still opposing to ruling policies) a state grain monopoly. Political struggle over food supply in Russia focused on the criticism of inefficient autocracy and greedy private trade, missing dissatisfaction and concerns of rural producers.

Thus, “roots [of the antimarket outlook] were in a broader [not exclusively Bolshevik] ecosystem in which both the Bolsheviks and their political competitors were situated.” (45)

Chapter 2 “Radiant Days of Freedom” examines how a new political process was organized in the Don Territory after the February Revolution of 1917. Inability of new organs of power to exercise their control over remote areas with a distinct identity brings to life new form of political organization (such as the Cossack Congress) which inherited their political legitimacy from regional master-narratives (of a specific role of Cossacks in history). Non-Cossacks, in response, employed new forms of political mobilization (Soviets) to fight for their perceived rights.

Chapter 3 “Persuasion and Force” describes how collapse of hopes for a voluntary and united war sacrifice forced new political forces to appeal to force (damned tautology) in maintaining the war effort. In Don, the important development was a rising importance of Soviets to struggle Cossacks’ structures. In return, the Provisional Government read into Cossacks its narratives of statist principles of government, relying on them as a pro-governmental force. Among Cossacks themselves, counter-revolutionary sentiment grew strong. Conflicts throughout 1917 polarized Cossack society, too, with younger and poorer social groups among Cossacks coming into opposition to the Cossack establishment.

Simultaneously, during the summer of 1917, the Provisional government introduced and tried to exercise grain monopoly, which peasants opposed, since it was not followed by a monopoly and fixed prices on manufactured goods. Makes interesting observations on how visions of the role of the State (sic) among, primarily, Kadets influenced their food politics leading, among other things, to attempts to increase the role of food-supply committees in the use of force to requisition grain (101) – a direct predecessor to Bolshevik prodrazverstka: Not only Army had to supply through this, but the whole exchange of grain between producers and consumers was envisioned in these terms (105).

Conclusion: the Russian educated society turned during the WWI into a “parastatal complex under the aegis of the state,” which with its “mobilization techniques provided a common heritage for all political movements after 1917.” (110) Attempts after February 1917 to impose a new political order based on “statist consciousness” onto defragmented Russian society only accelerated its disintegration.

Chapter 4 “Toward Civil War”: Bolsheviks’ seizure of power demonstrated a split among Cossacks: leaders were eager to send forces to suppress the Bolshevik revolt, while rank-and-file Cossacks opposed to this idea and were ready to defend only their native Don Territory. From outside, however, there were monolithic beliefs that Cossacks were a-priori anti-revolutionary, which was imposed on them by all forces in the Russian Civil War, notwithstanding the “real” split inside the Don Territory (The Silent Don).

After Bolshevik forces took control in February 1918 over Don Republic, they had to issue a certain degree of autonomy to it to secure loyalty of revolutionary Cossacks. This allowed the latter to pursue their own goals which could be different from the way Moscow wanted to define them. In particular, an emphasis was on the idea of local self-government through soviets, which were not necessarily controlled by Bolsheviks. In particular, instead of universal representation of all social groups, soviets in the Don Republic were still dominated by Cossacks. Neither helped the class struggle which was embodied in arrests and executions of Cossack officers.  

Chapter 5 “Forging a Social Movement” looks more closely at how “the institutions and practices of total mobilization became the building blocs of both a new state and a new socio-economic order” (144). Holquist offers an interesting story of interchange between narratives/perceptions and political events, arguing that narratives and perceptions did more for the polarization of the situation in the Don Territory than “real” hostile actions. Manipulation of identities (accusing hesitant Cossacks of “treason” by persistent anti-Bolsheviks) and of institutions (adaptation of, say, “soviets” or “Bolshevism” to reach one’s own political purposes) was a commonplace practice. This game of identities and loyalties resulted in escalation of civil conflict in the Cossack-populated areas.

Chapter 6 “We Will Have to Exterminate the Cossacks” looks at the level of Bolshevik ideology which informed their revolutionary practice in suppressing the Cossack rebellion of 1918. Subordination of all pro-Soviet forces under strict Bolshevik control as a wartime measure, thus suppressing local deviations into a uniform Bolshevik vision of a proper power control. A reinforced image of Cossacks as a uniform anti-Soviet force, which was, in particular, facilitated by an existing split between “Cossacks” and “peasants” (or non-Cossacks) in the Don Territory (the latter tended to support Soviet power). Resulting “de-Cossackization” during the Red Army’s advance in early 1919. Anti-Cossack terror, which was “policy – organized, sanctioned, and conducted by officially established institutions” (182). Curiously, here Hollquist deviates from his own hypothesis that the Civil War mutated from WWI-practices and forms: terror against civilian population wasn’t practiced there, other than in the case of Armenian genocide. He, however, later makes comparisons between de-Cossackization and earlier colonialist practices of genocide, mass deportations, etc.

This policy sparked a wide-spread anti-Soviet uprising in Cossack-populated territories. Much of discursive logic is borrowed from Sholokhov, but nowhere it is expressed explicitly, although there are a couple of references to Sholokhov. It required a reassessment of Bolsheviks’ attitude to Cossacks. Their construction as a hostile class discontinued, instead, tactics of the “normalization” were employed.

Chapter 7 “Psychological Consolidation” addresses state surveillance, disciplining and propaganda in the Cossack areas by Tsarist, Provisional and then Bolshevik and anti-Soviet governments as a form of control, simultaneously in the Army and in home front. Cooperation between state and civic institutions in “rededicating” the society for continued war effort. Makes parallels with similar developments elsewhere among belligerent nations.

The final chapter 8 “The Revolution as Orthodoxy” looks at how Bolsheviks reinforced their rule after immediate victory in 1920. Military measures were for a while retained (prodrazverstka, in particular), although certain concessions were made and no large-scale attack at the Cossackry was anymore conducted. “The statist planning ethos, fostered in the Great War, thus was endemic to nearly all movements in the Civil War” – and its immediate aftermath. Use of state surveillance (perlustration of letters) to trace popular dissatisfaction with these methods. Still imposition of the Bolshevik worldview “in the face of” obvious signals from below. Application of “military-command” principle as a universal solution. Resulting famine and forced transitions to NEP. An accent on popular participation as a characteristic feature of Russian revolution, and therefore the alienation of people from public politics by the end of the Civil War Hollquist regards as a political orthodoxy: “By 1921, revolution as event had ended. For the Soviet state and its supporters, revolution as ongoing state project, as a work-in-progress, was just beginning.” (281)

Conclusion: Post-Civil War Soviet Russia – a result of failed experience to impose a new social order on an old society, in which political practice was much based on international practices of policing one’s or another countries and populations.