Page 30 - summer 22

Russia’s cultural renaissance ended in the early 1930’s. Lenin’s death in 1924 had
opened the way to Stalin. Stalinism prioritised the crash industrialisation* of the
economy and forced collectivisation of agriculture. This required a totalitarian regime
of unprecedented ruthlessness and brutality. Avant-garde art gave way to the
crudest form of “cult of personality” propaganda. By 1934, it was outlawed; only

paintings in the Socialist Realism style were tolerated, portraying happy and
determined peasants and workers building Stalin’s Soviet utopia. Modernism was
effectively shut down in Soviet Russia – as in totalitarian Nazi Germany. The descent
of the Russian Revolution into the nightmare of Stalin’s purges, the mass murder of
alleged dissidents, shirkers and backsliders, was a major setback for Marxists all over
the world.

*This was of course completely opposite to what Marx said was supposed to happen:
industrialisation was supposed to come before the communist revolution, not after.

Worse followed. The rise of fascism was a fatal blow to Marxist hopes. It was bad
enough that the workers of the world had failed to rise to the occasion as the
vanguard of world communist revolution. But the dramatic rise to power of the
Fascist Dictators, Mussolini in the 1920’s and Hitler in the 1930’s, was only possible
with the backing, or at least consent, of a significant proportion of the working

classes; workers who remained loyal to communism were unable to prevent it.