By Sheila Fitzpatrick
ISBN-10: 0801495164
ISBN-13: 9780801495168
While Lenin requested, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to salary innovative category struggle in tradition. Many younger Communists concept otherwise, although. looking within the identify of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they grew to become tradition right into a battlefield within the Nineteen Twenties. yet was once this, as Communist militants suggestion, a real classification fight among "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was once it, because the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by means of the ruling Communist occasion at the everlasting rules of cultural autonomy and highbrow freedom?In this quantity, one of many most excellent historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce conflict on "the cultural entrance" from the October Revolution during the Stalinist Nineteen Thirties. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings jointly ten of her essays—two formerly unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which remove darkness from key arenas of the lengthy fight over cultural values and institutional regulate. person essays take care of such significant concerns because the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the recent Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, in addition to recounting colourful episodes together with the uproar over Shostakovich's opera girl Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the recent consumerism of the Nineteen Thirties. heavily analyzing the cultural elites and orthodoxies that built less than Stalin, Fitzpatrick bargains a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's ultimate consequence within which the intelligentsia, regardless of its lack of autonomy and the debasement of its tradition, emerged as a partial victor.The Cultural entrance is vital interpreting for someone drawn to the formative background of the Soviet Union and the dynamic dating among tradition and politics.
