The Icon and the Axe

At the same time, the futurists provided a more secular form of cultural stimulus, continuing to clamor for public attention on the pages of Lef ("Left Front in Literature"), which began to appear in 1923 with the collaboration of Maiakovsky and Meierhold. Older traditions of satirizing contemporary life were revived by promising new writers, such as the Odessa team of Ilf and Petrov and Michael Zoshchenko. The latter, the son of a Russian actress and a Ukrainian painter, became probably the most widely read contemporary Soviet writer in the twenties, with more than a million copies of his works sold from 1922 to 1927.5 In the field of history, non-Marxist and pre-Revolutionary figures like Tarle and Platonov continued to work inside Russia, though some of their works (and many in the literary world) were published in Berlin. Serge Prokof'ev, one of the greatest Russian composers, returned to take up permanent residence in the USSR in 1927, and was followed within a year by Maxim Gorky, its most renowned prose writer.

Even religion seemed to be receiving a new lease on life in the USSR of the mid-twenties. In 1926 the newly chosen Patriarch of the Russian Church was released from prison. In the following year, both he and the

patriarchal church were grudgingly recognized by the regime and the puppet "Living Church" allowed to die. The various sects-and particularly the locally organized and administered communities of the newly consolidated Protestant community (the "Evangelical Christians-Baptists")-grew rapidly in strength. Lenin's secretary, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, was an historian of Russian sectarianism who argued with some success that the indus-triousness, productivity, and communal methods of the sects might have something to contribute to the construction of a socialist society."

The relatively permissive cultural atmosphere of the twenties was, in part, the result of Bolshevik preoccupation with political consolidation and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of seven years of international and internal war. In part also it was the result of the relatively optimistic and humanistic reading of Marx's theories of culture that were advanced by the reigning ideologists of the early Soviet period: Deborin in philosophy and Voronsky in literature.7 These men insisted that a new culture must follow rather than precede a new proletarian society. Following Marx and his most brilliant interpreter among the Bolsheviks, Nicholas Bukharin, they considered literature and art part of the superstructure rather than the base of human culture. Art could, thus, be transformed only in the wake of profound social and economic change. In the meantime, the arts had a duty to absorb the best from past culture and provide an independent reflection of reality in a complex era of transition. The practical consequences of this position were to discredit the earlier hopes for "immediate socialism." One could no longer speak seriously of replacing the traditional university with a new "fraternity ef teachers, students and janitors"; nor of replacing the family system with "the new family of the working collective."8 Gradually, however, it became apparent that this relaxation of control and return to old ways was only temporary. Whereas about two fifths of all publishing was outside of government hands at the time of Lenin's death early in 1924, only one tenth had survived three years later.9 The beginnings of tightening ideological control can be traced to the founding of the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, Bolshevik, in 1924,10 and to a series of party discussions on the role of literature in the new society held in 1924 and 1925. Although the party resolutions rejected the demand of the extremist "on guard" faction for detailed party regulation of literature, they did assert the right of party control over "literature as a whole" and call for a centralized "All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers" (VAPP): the first in an apostolic succession of increasingly powerful organs for tight regulation. In the same 1925 a comparable group was formed on what was soon to be called "the musical front," "The

Association of Young Professional Composers"; and a new shock army was constituted in the "struggle for scientific atheism," the notorious "League of the Militant Godless." The suicide of Esenin and the collapse of Maia-kovsky's LEF movement within a few months of each other in 1925 provided testimony to the growing gulf between the new regime and some of the very intellectuals who had initially supported the Revolution.