The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, 1918-1927: Politics and Imagery

213 Pages·2005·0.86 MB·English

by  Jon T. Smith

The Anniversaries of the October Revolution, 1918-1927:
Politics and Imagery

by

Susan M. Corbesero

B.A., Pennsylvania State University, 1985

M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 1988

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of

Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Pittsburgh

2005
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

This dissertation was presented

by

Susan Marie Corbesero

It was defended on

November 18, 2005

and approved by

William J. Chase

Seymour Drescher

Helena Goscilo

Gregor Thum

William J. Chase
Dissertation Director

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The Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1918-1927:
Politics and Imagery

Susan M. Corbesero, PhD

University of Pittsburgh, 2005

This dissertation explores the politics and imagery in the anniversary celebrations of the October
Revolution in Moscow and Leningrad from 1918 to 1927. Central to Bolshevik efforts to take
political and symbolic control of society, these early celebrations not only provided a vehicle for
agitation on behalf of the Soviet regime, but also reflected changing popular and official
perceptions of the meanings and goals of October. This study argues that politicians, cultural
producers, and the urban public contributed to the design and meaning of the political
anniversaries, engendering a negotiation of culture between the new Soviet state and its
participants. Like the Revolution they sought to commemorate, the October celebrations
unleashed and were shaped by both constructive and destructive forces. A combination of
variable party and administrative controls, harsh economic realities, competing cultural
strategies, and limitations of the existing mass media also influenced the Bolshevik
commemorative projects. Approaching political culture through a study of civic ritual and
revolutionary symbolism, this work examines the official mass parades, street art, mass media,
popular entertainment, and workers’ club campaigns in the holidays during this turbulent era of
civil war, reconstruction, and political consolidation. The study concludes by looking at
Moscow’s Decennial of the October Revolution in 1927 and explores how the Bolsheviks
ultimately mobilized the population and harnessed cultural forces to project legitimacy and the
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image of national consensus as the regime embarked on the Stalinist path of rapid societal and
industrial transformation.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction............................................................................................................................1
2. Communism Triumphant?.................................................................................................18
2.1. Revolutionary Designs....................................................................................................23
2.2. Aporias and Accommodation.........................................................................................37
2.3. Celebrating the “Triumph of Communism”...................................................................43
2.4. A Contentious Wedding of the Arts................................................................................49
2.5. Cultural Borrowings and New Beginnings.....................................................................52
2.6. Mobilizing New Media and Marketing...........................................................................64
2.7. Towards A New World Order?.......................................................................................67
3. Bread and Circuses (1919-1921).........................................................................................72
3.1. “A Strict Economy”: Priorities and the Party.................................................................75
3.2. Enlisting the Cultural Workers: Opportunities and Opportunism..................................86
3.3. War Holidays..................................................................................................................93
3.4. October’s Message and the Masses..............................................................................101
3.5. Compromise(d) Theater of the Revolution...................................................................111
4. October on Display (1922-1926).......................................................................................125
4.1. October and Political Culture: Exhibitionism and Inhibitions......................................126
4.2. Octobering.....................................................................................................................138
4.3. Spectacles of the New Economy...................................................................................141
4.4. Battles for October On Screen......................................................................................151
4.5. October on Stage...........................................................................................................156
4.6. October in the Clubs.....................................................................................................164
5. Epilogue: The October Decennial in Moscow (1927).....................................................171
BIBLIOGRAPHY.....................................................................................................................199

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1. Introduction

Anniversaries, for some reason, are dear to the Bolshevik heart.
Perhaps it is because the regime is still young, so that each
repetition of the day it began its existence is a cause for rejoicing,
as children rejoice over their birthdays.
Walter Duranty, 19321

In the first decade of Soviet power the anniversary celebrations of the October
Revolution served as powerful tools to forge national consensus. Central to Bolshevik efforts to
take political and symbolic control of society, these early commemorations not only provided a
vehicle for agitation on behalf of the Soviet regime, but also reflected changing popular and
official perceptions of the meaning and goals of the Revolution. For the regime, the
commemorations fit into the state’s larger political and cultural agenda, which aimed to unify
national culture, mobilize the masses, transmit ideology, and mold a Soviet citizenry. With mass
parades, street art, theatrical productions, popular entertainment, and workers’ club holiday
campaigns, these impressive commemorative projects constituted a strong nexus for the state,
cultural producers, and for the public. Throughout the twenties, celebratory practices such as the
commemorations took shape and were influenced by a diverse range of social groups, such as
politicians, cultural ideologues, artists, and workers who contributed to the design, meaning,

1 Walter Duranty, “Fifteen Years of Soviet Power,” in Sunday Magazine, November 6, 1932 cited in William
Duranty, Duranty Reports Russia, ed. Gustavus Tuckerman, Jr. (New York, 1934), 3.
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organization, and execution of the revolutionary festivals, engendering a negotiation of culture
between the Bolshevik state and the participants.
Like the Revolution they sought to commemorate, the anniversary celebrations unleashed
and were shaped by constructive and destructive forces in this decade of upheaval. In their
efforts to create a new revolutionary festival, symbolism, and celebratory practices, the
Bolshevik commemorators intended to destroy the vestiges of the tsarist order and (tenacious)
pre-Revolutionary cultural traditions. In the construction of a new identity, the anniversaries of
October provided the new Soviet state with a vehicle to communicate patriotic values and a
political agenda, as well as an opportunity to mobilize the public to participate in the framing of
the October Revolution. However, competing strategies for structuring the commemoration
frequently undermined the creation of an unambiguous historical narrative of the Revolution,
effective political propaganda, and a unified cultural model for the festivals. Party and cultural
producers had designed and contributed celebratory practices, symbolism, and art forms
expressing differing views of culture—utilitarian, popular, conservative, and proletarian. From
below, worker passivity, resistance to overt (and often incomprehensible) agitation, and
divergent popular cultural tastes thwarted official plans to mobilize the citizenry. Moreover, in
this turbulent era of civil war, reconstruction and political consolidation, Bolshevik
commemorative projects suffered from a combination of financial restraints, variable party and
administrative controls, scarce material and human resources, as well as the limitations of the
existing mass media.
Subsequently throughout the decade of revolutionary change, the form and content of the
early commemorative celebrations presented those in power with conflicting and shifting
interpretations of the Revolution and its aims. By 1927, the Soviet state had succeeded in
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achieving greater control of the design, coordination, and execution of the commemorative
project, presenting an outwardly unified and disciplined display of national unity and mass
mobilization. However, as this study suggests, the centralized system of national coordination
for the political anniversaries circumscribed, but did not completely annihilate, alternative
meanings and challenges to the official meaning of October.
Once considered anecdotal marginalia of history, official commemorations recently have
been embraced as integral elements of emerging national identities and the legitimization of
political orders.2 This study draws on the pathbreaking studies of French revolutionary festivals
and the attendant symbols, language, and civic rituals. Formative in this regard is Mona Ozouf’s
magisterial study of the French Revolutionary fêtes from 1789 to 1799 that investigates how the
revolutionary festivals, in lieu of politics, proved to be crucial elements to transfer legitimacy to
the new order. Moreover, the French planners viewed the celebrations as instrumental to the
utopian project to forge a new political community, recasting time and space to create a new
man. French (and later Bolshevik) festival organizers saw the revolutionary fêtes as schools for
patriotism, a new civism. Ozouf’s extensive treatment provides ample evidence to show that
even in their most radical moments, the French revolutionaries deployed antiquity and battled
popular and religious festive traditions in their attempts to construct a cult of new beginnings and
unify the nation.3 In this rich vein of French history, other cultural historians of the French
Revolution have further investigated the power of revolutionary symbolism to reflect and shape

2 Recently, the literature on commemorations and the construction of national identity has flourished. For a
collection of European and American studies, see Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John
Gillis (Princeton, 1994).
3 Mona Ozouf, Festivals of the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1976).
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political perceptions of the emergent political culture and its visual, symbolic, and iconographic
expression.4
As the present study highlights, Bolshevik festival planners consciously modeled early
celebrations on the French revolutionary fêtes. Influential Bolshevik cultural leaders and
celebration organizers, such as Anatolii Lunacharskii, People’s Commissar of Enlightenment,
aimed to create a genuine democratic people’s festival, in which all the arts (and artists) would
be mobilized to achieve national communion, thereby producing a like-minded new citizenry.
Bolshevik anniversary organizers absorbed French models and ideas of festivity from a variety
of works, including histories of the French Revolution, Roman Rolland’s popular pre-
Revolutionary writings on mass theater, and the timely publication of the Russian translation of
Julien Tiersot’s study of the French fêtes, Prazdnestva i pesni frantsuskoi revoliutsii in 1918.
However, Bolshevik planners, party leaders, and the cultural critics often found the deployment
of the symbolism and the historical analogue of the French Revolution in the early anniversaries
of the October Revolution consistently problematic. In a Marxian analysis, the French
Revolution represented a bourgeois revolution, and many cultural critics attacked the French
revolutionary symbolism, rituals, and theater on these ideological terms. More controversially,
the Provisional Government had openly appropriated the political culture of the French
Revolution to legitimize its power born in the February Revolution. Yet, despite these problems,
Bolshevik festival organizers, cultural producers and the party continuously drew on the

4 See, for example, Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Los Angeles, 1984), Maurice
Agulhon, Marianne into Battle (Cambridge, 1981), Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French
Past, vol. 3: Symbols, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1998), and James Leith,
Media and Revolution (Toronto, 1968).
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historical precedent of the French Revolution in the anniversary celebrations to emphasize and
transmit the socialist and revolutionary lineage.5
Operating from a different historic optic, Western scholars of modern revolutionary
political cultures and regimes have further enriched historical inquiry into symbolic and
celebratory practices as important means to mobilize mass constituencies. Exposed to the
practices in their earlier underground activities, Bolshevik anniversary organizers adopted the
cultural system and traditions of European socialist revolutionary movements in the late
nineteenth century. As George Mosse has noted, the socialist movement in Germany depended
upon workers’ songs, flags, mass meetings, and processions to rally and maintain support,
fighting spirit, and comraderie. The central idiom of socialist festival traditions, the mass
workers’ demonstration to the urban center presented spectators not only with a powerful visual
representation of strength, but also served to reinforce working-class solidarity. Moreover, the
European socialist movement skillfully deployed the agitational theater as a crucial political
weapon to educate, inspire, and bind workers, often recasting Christian symbolism and allegories
to spread a radical socialist message. The rituals and idioms of this political culture undeniably
influenced Bolshevik festival theorists and organizers.6

5 James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1918-1920 (Berkeley, 1993), 22-23. For one example of Lunacharskii’s
comparison of Bolshevik and French festivals, see A. Lunacharskii, “O narodnykh prazdnestvakh,” Vestnik teatra,
no. 62 (1920). On the Provisional Government’s use of French revolutionary culture, see Orlando Figes, A People’s
Tragedy (London, 1996), 357, Orlando Figes and Boris Kolotnitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The
Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT, 1999), 30 -31, and Dmitrii Shlapentokh, “Images of the French
Revolution in the February and October Revolutions,” Russian History, vol. 16, no.1 (1989).
6 George Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movement in Germany from the
Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, 1991), esp. ch.7; Joan Wallach Scott, “Popular Theater and
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