Part I

The Soviet state approached the legacy of Great Russian culture and art with two minds. On one hand, the Soviet cultural authorities saw it as their duty to advance a true proletarian culture, which would include stimulating high art for the masses that would reflect the hopes, problems, and aspirations of the toiling masses. Conversely, Soviet cultural policy also stressed that its new order would bring high art to the masses and leisure within the worker's state would be culturally elevated under the auspices of the Soviet state. State propaganda often went to great pains to note that the Great Russian cultural canon from Tolstoy to Tchaikovsky was now available to the mass of the population, not just to the elites as it was in the old tsarist order. These two ideas-proletarian and canon high art- were not necessarily exclusive to each other, but they also co-existed uneasily together in the USSR. There was a tension between old and new high culture in the USSR that was never fully erased during the life of the USSR.

The tension between old vs. new was most apparent in the first years of Soviet rule after the Civil War. Although Lenin was not incredibly fond of tsarist high art institutions, he recognized that keeping them open was an incredible propaganda coup for the new state. When the Bolshoi faced closure in the winter of 1919-1920, Lenin funneled state resources to the ballet company claiming "it is much too early for us to hand over the heritage of bourgeois art to the archives." But for Lenin, artistic production in the new state had to evolve into a modern proletarian direction. Soviet cultural production in this time often prioritized new forms of aesthetics like socialist realism (art should convey the real problems of real people) and there was considerable experimentation in Soviet arts, most notably in cinema. There was a concerted effort by Soviet cultural authorities to harness the arts to build socialism after the civil war. This focus on the new often attracted many a Great Russian artists back to the USSR, most famously Prokofiev who returned for a series of tours in the 1920s and 30s before permanently returning in 1936. Inprokofiev's case, for decades it was assumed that the composer was mostly apolitical and the state forced his turn towards socialist realism. However, the publication of his diaries in 2002 revealed that his Christian Science beliefs encouraged him to want to produce simple music for the masses. Prokofiev's egalitarian approach to music was somewhat reflective of the Great Russian musical establishment as a whole; Russian music had come to especially notable prominence in Europe and the US in the decades before 1914 and there was a whole cohort of Great Russian composers and musicians willing to experiment with new forms and aesthetics. The canon sometimes came under attack in this period, but more often it was reimagined and reinterpreted. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the head of Narkompros summed up this attitude towards the old regime's cultural legacy in an address to the Bolshoi in 1920:

Yet it does not follow from what has been said that we, having inherited such a nice toy, such a golden rattle that the tsars and tsarinas, the bourgeois and bourgeoisie once delighted in, can amuse ourselves with it and not do anything new in the field of opera and ballet? On the contrary, if it is such a great aesthetic force that it invigorates out audience notwithstanding even its alien content- now what a mighty weapon is it going to be in our hands if we insert into it our content?

Although Lunacharsky came under criticism for Narkompros for spending too much time on high culture and not enough on mass literacy, his idea that new Soviet high culture would take the best of the old and fuse it with a new aesthetic was a very powerful one. Concerts, operas, and ballet performances were quite popular entertainments in the 1920s NEP era and many Soviet officials recognized that the value of encouraging high culture.

The Stalin turn brought a hardening of the dual-nature of Soviet high culture. Stalinist cultural authorities often used the moniker "formalism/formalist" to attack any artist performing art that did not conform to the state's fuzzy directives on proper socialist realism. In ballet, the companies were strongly encouraged to use dramballet styles which used more realistic dance steps to bring ballet back to its theatre routes. High culture in this period often became wed to propaganda, such as Khachaturian's Happiness/Gayene, whose setting was a kolkhoz or Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky, which drew explicit parallels between the Teutonic Knights and the Third Reich and whose protagonist was an analogue for Stalin.

But at the same time as socialist realism was becoming a dominant orthodoxy in Soviet arts, there also was a new Soviet elite and an increased demand or high culture both from above and below. The Soviet state prized itself on prominent works of masterpieces, and that sometimes meant incorporating the canon into its cultural programming. Both the elite and the masses took great pains to become kulturnost (cultured- as my adviser said, the best definition in English is "a gentleman and a scholar") As Sheila Fitzpatrick nicely put it, "the wife of a factory manager who was ignorant of Pushkin and had never seen Swan Lake was considered an embarrassment." Soviet advice magazines often had columns like what books from the canon to read, or how to best approach the works of Shakespeare. Soviet radio stations seldom lacked for volunteers in the 1930s to help bring music through the airwaves. Soviet cultural gatekeepers often looked askance at the popularity of more base music like jazz and instead looked to the canon as a means to elevate the rude habits of the newly formed proletariat. The 1930s also saw a rebirth in the state's embrace of Great Russian culture, especially as the conflict with the Third Reich seemed eminent. The figures of the canon, as well as tsarist military generals and Peter I were increasingly treated as precursors to the Soviet state. The authors of the canon thus emerged as spiritual ancestors of the modern Soviet state who by accident of birth could not break out of their particular epoch of historical development. War and Peace became particularly popular with the state after Barbarossa as it showcased a unified Russian people uniting against the foreign invader. Prokofiev composed an opera of War and Peace during the war and it premiered after the war due to wartime disruption and the composer's endless tinkering with it.

The Cold War sharpened the instrumentalization of high culture as the USSR sought to portray itself as the true bearer of culture versus a decadent Western that could only produce forgettable dross. The war had sanctified the Great Russian nation as the "elder brother" of the Soviet family of nations and Soviet cultural activity had little problem prominently featuring the canon in their programming, especially if the prominence of these Great Russian composers could show the the West's culture owed a debt to Russian classics. There was however a problem with the Cold War cultural programming. Despite the fact that the Soviets had nearly three decades of control over the artistic life of the state, it had produced little original art that was truly "socialist" in character. Its great musical triumphs were the results of artists who like Prokofiev who had already established themselves in the arts scene prior to 1917, or figures like Khachaturian and Shostakovich, who often famously but heads with the state's cultural authorities. Explicitly Socialist Realist forms like dramballet were failures both abroad and among domestic audiences at home, who often preferred more classical styles.