Negotiating “Historical Truth”

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-331
Author(s):  
Leah Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Ideal Candidate ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Bolshoi Theater

In 1925, when Soviet composer Iurii Shaporin began writing his first opera, Polina Gebl’, about the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov and the French emigrée shopgirl who followed him into exile, he had no idea how tumultuous its journey would be. It took twenty-eight years and countless revisions for the opera to gain official approval. When it finally premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1953, with the title The Decembrists, the love story had been backgrounded and the historical plot line vastly expanded; scenes, characters, and arias had been added, dropped, or altered; and Polina herself had been written out entirely. The negotiated process by which Polina became The Decembrists reveals much about the evolving relationship between music and power in the Soviet Union, especially in the high-stakes realm of Socialist Realist opera, in which a suitable exemplar had yet to be produced. Amidst the pressures of the late-Stalinist state’s assault on the creative intelligentsia, and in the wake of major opera scandals in the 1930s and 1940s, the Bolshoi Theater saw in Shaporin’s work an ideal candidate to fill this void: a historical opera with an unimpeachable subject, the Decembrist Revolution, understood as the foundation point of the revolutionary legacy to which the Bolsheviks laid claim. This article analyzes the intense negotiations among Shaporin, the Bolshoi and its consultants, and official censors to ensure The Decembrists’ historical accuracy, which they believed would guarantee its acceptance. Yet, as the article demonstrates, while Soviet musical authorities upheld “historical truth” as their standard, in the end the Socialist Realist ideal of “artistic truth” was far more important for The Decembrists’ success.

The Making of a Soviet War Photographer and the German Occupation of Kerch

Grief ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 5-29
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
Rapid Advance ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realist

This chapter introduces the reader to Dmitri Baltermants, beginning with his birth to a Warsaw-based Jewish family and then describing his development as a Soviet photographer in the 1930s. A second-generation Soviet photographer and master of the horizontal, Baltermants was trained in socialist realist aesthetics, which documented and elevated the revolutionary experiment that was Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Baltermants’s world turned upside down. The second half of the chapter focuses on the German invasion and its rapid advance through Soviet territory until its occupation of Kerch in November. The chapter walks the reader through the unfolding process of Kerch under German occupation. In a matter of two weeks, German authorities rounded up the entire population of Jews, drove them to an antitank trench in nearby Bagerovo, and then murdered them in a Holocaust by bullets. It concludes with Kerch’s liberation in late December.

Stalinallee

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
State Building ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Housing Issue ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Building Program

For more than a century before the war, debate over the “housing issue” engaged politicians and reformers in Berlin, although Communists refused to participate, seeking revolution rather than reform. After World War II, newly empowered Communists had no choice but to address the housing crisis. Initially they joined others in supporting modernist planning efforts, with a first “residential cell” that would be constructed along Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain. The introduction of socialist realism necessitated a halt in construction as new plans for a monumental Stalinallee were developed. This formed the centerpiece of the state building program until the 1953 Uprising, which along with a shift to industrialized construction in the Soviet Union would result in a search for a new “socialist architecture.” As a result, the section of the street between Straussbergerplatz and Alexanderplatz would be built combining some socialist-realist tenets with modernism, while highlighting technological power.

Mythological, Religious, and Philosophical Topoi in the Prose of Valerii Shevchuk

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-913
Author(s):  
Marko Pavlyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
The Status ◽  
Contemporary Reality ◽  
Party Congress

Liberalized cultural discussion in the Soviet Union after the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1985 was concerned in part with the nature of a literature that would be appropriate to the new ideals of openness and restructuring. In Ukraine, as elsewhere, the debate brought forth a list of imperatives that, without challenging the socialist realist principle that literature must serve overarching social and political goals, amounted to a formula for a new kind of literary engagement. Literature must “boldly intrude into contemporary reality,” it must defend the historical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological heritage and must unmask the crimes and abuses of the past and present. It must no longer be bland and inoffensive and must not avoid controversial issues or praise the status quo as a matter of course.

scholarly journals LENINGRAD INSTITUTE OF TRANSFUSION UNDER THE SIEGE AND IN FIRST POSTWAR PERIOD. TRUTH AND FICTION

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5(S)) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
V. V. Bobrus
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
World Journal ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Leningrad Institute ◽  
Post War ◽  
Historical Truth

Basing on detailed study of open information and documentary sources, the author of the paper assumed the ground-lessness of official narrative setting out in the A. A. Crohn’s book «Deep-sea master. A tale of friend” (Moscow, New World Journal. Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union Publishing House, 1984. 272 p.) with regard to causes of conviction of the Hero of the Soviet Union, Diver No. 1 — A. I. Marinesco, as a result of malice from former director of Leningrad Institute of Transfusion (LIT) — associate professor, candidate of medicine V. V. Kuharchik. An exceptional importance of collaborative work of collective and chiefs of LIT on organization of donor movement under the severe conditions of the siege Leningrad and in a time of despiteous political repressions during the Great Patriotic War was shown. On the basis of analysis of confusion of biographies of two special persons: A. I. Marinesco and V. V. Kuharchik, it was made a conclusion of necessity of continuation historical and documentory studies aimed to discover the historical truth representing heroism of Soviet people at struggle with fascism.

A Game for High Stakes: Lessons Learned in Negotiating with the Soviet Union

1986 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 873
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Pierre ◽  
Leon Sloss ◽  
M. Scott Davis
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
The Soviet Union

The Mutability of the Canon: Socialist Realism and Chingiz Aitmatov's I dol'she veka dlitsia den'

Slavic Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Clark
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
The Way

Chingiz Aitmatov's recent novel I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ provides an excellent case study of the way the socialist realist canon can generate new paradigms out of itself. At a time when it is widely assumed in the West that all reputable Soviet authors have gone “beyond” socialist realism, the appearance of this novel is particularly instructive.Aitmatov's book has had greater impact in the Soviet Union than any other novel published there in recent years. It covers subjects that are both highly topical and sensitive politically. Yet it does so by using the conventions of socialist realism to a greater extent than has been seen in the major Soviet writing of the past fifteen years. Indeed, Aitmatov has somehow contrived to weave into the fabric of his text patterns reminiscent of every period in the development of socialist realism.

scholarly journals Rattling Sabres and Evil Intruders: The Border, Heroes and Border-crossers in Panfennist and Soviet Socialist Realist Literature

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 1165-1181
Author(s):  
Thekla Musäus
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
Border Crossers

In this article I analyse Russian and Soviet Karelian literary texts written in Finnish at the time and in the style of socialist realism, and Finnish poems, songs and novels of the same era, proposing the idea of a ‘Greater-Finland’. I turned my attention to the question of how the depiction, construction and use of borders is handled in the respective texts, and look to determine whether the opposed ideologies of Soviet Communism and Panfennism led to similar or different artificial results. This analysis proves that the texts of the two ideologies generally draw strict distinctions between the ‘heroes’ of their own side and the bad ‘Others’. Only the heroes of the plot are able to either cross borders or to establish new ones. While in the Soviet texts opponents of Soviet society inside the Soviet Union are depicted as foreign and separated through ideological, symbolic and topographical borders, the Karelians in the Finnish texts are suspected as a hybrid people, spoiled by their contact with the evil Russians.

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