There is a ton of scholarship on the arts and culture in the Soviet Union following the revolution, a historiography to which my own work contributes. I’m going to give a relatively broad overview here. At the outset, I’ll say the same artistic movements that you are thinking of were present in the early Soviet Union, but the relationship between the artists in those movements and the state was often contentious, as was the role of politics in defining cultural generally.

The Bolsheviks understood the importance of culture in legitimizing their new state. Sheila Fitzpatrick's work in this area is particularly important. It discusses the meaning of culture in the early Soviet context as well as Bolshevik attempts to define and grow proletarian culture. As it is now, culture was a somewhat nebulous term in the 1920s. Fitzpatrick explains that culture had several meanings, including “high culture” which “embraced literature, scholarship and the arts” and tended to be associated with bourgeois culture, “culture” which was opposed to “lack of culture” and culture which “was also one of the primary spheres of revolutionary contestation.” There was also, however, a revolutionary culture that came from "the people." Not so much a "popular culture" in the sense we use the term today, but a revolutionary culture that did not arise from the revolutionary state. The tension between a desire to bring "high culture" to the masses and the desire for the masses to dictate culture is one of those contradictions that drove early Soviet cultural policy.

In the same way that political and economic power played a vital role in ruling the country, cultural power helped the Bolsheviks to define what it meant to be a Communist. Cultural questions weighed heavily in the revolutionary era because they demanded answers which went to the heart of identity. In other words, the Bolsheviks were forced to answer not just “what are we going to do?” but also “who do we want to be?” Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1-4.

For all the concerns the Bolsheviks had about culture in the early years of the Soviet Union, the revolution did, I think predictably, foster an era of experimentalism. Although those who associate the Soviet Union only with authoritarianism will find it somewhat unintuitive, the early years of the Soviet Union were very much defined by being a period of utopianism and experimentation. “As all problems in a socialist society,” Trotsky wrote, “the problems of life which formerly were solved spontaneously and automatically, and the problems of art which were in the custody of special priestly castes - will become the property of all people, one can say with certainty that collective interests and passions and individual competition will have the widest scope and the most unlimited opportunity.” Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution, Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 64.

The revolution meant that essentially everything was up for discussion and that meant it was an exciting time for artists who had something to say about the world. It was no different in the arts. Richard Stites' work on this is absolutely fantastic and if I have to recommend just one book about experimentalism in the Soviet Union (not just limited to culture), then it would definitely bet Stites’ work Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Stites remarks in the opening to his landmark monograph “one must not envision the utopianizing process of the revolution as one where actors scrutinize a text in order to find a guide to action – though this often happened – but rather as a very thick and rich interaction between what is sometimes called life and art, one imitating the and each reshaping both.” (Revolutionary Dreams, 7)

Therefore manner of experimental and avant-garde art popped up in the Soviet Union.

Sergei Eisenstein, a filmmaker known for pioneering montage in film wrote extensively about the relationship between film and communism. The scholarship on Eisenstein is incredibly deep as he is interesting to both historians and those working in film and film studies because of the mark he left on the art form. The scholarship on Eisenstein is so vast that I actually won’t mention anything specific here, just googlescholar his name and you can find endless articles and books. Eisenstein argued that montage made sense not just from an aesthetic sense, but from a Marxist sense. By deriving meaning from the juxtaposition of two images in succession, Eisenstein understood montage to be a dialectical approach to film, one that could be compared to the Marxist dialectic. Dziga Vertov, another experimentalist filmmaker in the 1920s (and 30s to some extent), sought to use documentary footage to capture real life in a way that would lay bare the necessity of a Marxist world view. Vertov wrote “the movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena, so that we do not forget what happens and what the future must take into account. But the camera experienced a misfortune. It was invented at a time when there was no single country in which capital was not in power. The bourgeoisie’s hellish idea consisted of using the new toy to entertain the masses, or rather to divert the workers’ attention from their basic aim: the struggle against their masters.” Annette Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 67.

The early Soviet Union also saw the rise of a staggering, large workers arts movement. One particularly revolutionary version of this movement was Proletkult (for Proletarian Culture) and was very hostile to “bourgeois” art, even when it was explicitly revolutionary. Proletkult understood that revolutionary art had to come from the revolutionary class – the workers. Art that came from other classes – as it so often did even after the revolution – could not be revolutionary according to their hardline doctrine. Proletkult was not a state initiative although in the end the state did work with them, it rose up out of the grassroots of the revolution. Likewise, amateur theater troupes began to pop up all over the young Soviet Union. In addition to putting on plays on revolutionary themes, such troupes also explored new forms like “talking newspapers” which were meant to give the news of the revolution to the audience.

Mally, Lynn. Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Studies on the History of Society and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ———. Revolutionary Acts: Amateur Theater and the Soviet State, 1917-1938. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Poets like Mayakovsky who had been relatively marginal before the revolution rose up as artists of the revolution. Mayakovsky had been a prominent futurist before the revolution, he became renowned after the revolution and was an outspoken supporter of communism. As are many Soviet stories, Mayakovsky’s is in the end tragic. Even before Stalin’s rise to power the relationship between avant-garde visions for the world and the Bolshevik desire to define socialist culture had sometimes put them at odds with even those who were genuinely their supporters. This tension was always present. But after Stalin’s rise to power that tension became much more visibly dangerous. By the end of the 1920s Stalin’s “Cultural Revolution” which reacted against avant-garde and experimentalist culture (because it was bourgeois in nature) in favor of a realist aesthetic, caused Mayakovsky and other experimental artists to have to subtly adapt to the times or face hostility from the state. Although that story is in itself very complicated and censorship was often a complicated process in practice, the fact remains that this marked an end of the era of freer experimentation that had occurred early in the 1920s. Mayakovksy, perhaps in response to the changing times, committed suicide in 1930.

Mayakovsky has likewise spawned considerable scholarship. Two books you might find interesting are:

Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Columbia University Studies of the Russian Institute. Princeton, N.J.,: Princeton University Press, 1973.

And

Brown, Robert. Sleepwalking with Mayakovsky. Wick Poetry Chapbook Series. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994.

If I keep this up with all of the individual arts it’s going to turn into a book, so I’ll leave it there. The early Soviet Union was a very fertile place for experimentation in the arts and that experimentation took on a particular, revolutionary quality. Regardless of how you feel about socialism, communism, or the Soviet Union it simply can’t be denied that the revolution inspired considerable optimism and hope for many artists. Such an atmosphere didn’t last, but for a decade or so the Soviet artists were very much participants in many of the international artistic movements of the time. That doesn’t mean things were great for artists – particularly those from upper class backgrounds, who often faced class-based discrimination and antagonism regardless of their artistic work.