The Russian Avant Garde and the Bolshevik Revolution Essay

The Bolshevik Consolidation of Power 1918-21 The Bolsheviks under Lenin, when they came into power in October 1917, faced immense problems in trying to consolidate their hold over the ex-tsarist empire. Firstly, how were the Bolsheviks, in view of their military resources, to extend their hold over the nation at large? The second, was how could they achieve a speedy end to the war and effect a rapid withdrawal of the German army, which was currently occupying the western part of Russia. Thirdly, how quickly would they be able to stage an economic recovery?

Leon Trotsky, originally known as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was born November 7th in the year 1879. Born to a Jewish-Russian family of wealthy but illiterate farmers, he was sent to school in Odessa by age nine. Although he was enrolled in a German school, during his studies there the school was “Russified” during the Imperial Government’s policy of Russification. The environment of the town of Odessa contributed greatly to the development of Trotsky’s revolutionary ideas and his international outlook. Later on in his life, by 1896, he quickly became involved in revolutionary activities after moving to the harbor town of Nkdayev. As a narodnik, also known as a revolutionary populist, he was first introduced to Marxism, but disliked the core

The October Revolution was perhaps the most momentous event of the twentieth century. It led to the creation of the Soviet Union, the first avowedly Communist nation in history, which was to become a global superpower, an inspiration to many, an object of the hatred of many more. Possibly more important was the role the memory of the October Revolution played in the

In the city capital of St. Petersburg, there were 2 different ideology on music emerged. Anton Rubinstein had the opinion that in order for Russian classical art to move on, teaching and using the influence of western European values and techniques would be the right way forward. Mily Balakirev led the group of composers who opposed this ideology and instead they treasured the works of Glinka and believed in distinct Russian style of music not influenced by the West. The five (also known as the mighty five) was the name given to a group of composers who believed in the idea of Russian music and didn’t agree with the western European teaching and the composers were Mily Balakirev, Céser Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky – Korsakov .

Key members and supporters? Key members and supporters include, chairman Nikolay Chkheidze, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev. Supporters included the Central Workers’ Group and the St Petersburg

Russian Intellectuals in the Russian Revolution and their influence on the events in the revolution. There will be info on five different topics about the Russian intellectuals. There will be the Russian Intellectuals in the Revolution, Russian Intellectuals and the Hand that Feeds Them, Who is Russia’s Top Intellectual, Socialism and the Intelligentsia, and Peasants, Workers, Intellectuals, and anti-intellectualism.

While taking the course, Contemporary Russia, we discussed Protest Art and specific artists who share their beliefs with the Russian people through art to expose their worldviews. Protest Art plays a major role in Russia revealing how corrupt and brutal the government operates. We focused on contemporary artists including Voina, Pussy Riot, and Petr Pavlensky because they are willing to risk their safety to honestly portray how the Russian government abuses the rights of its citizens. In my essay I will be discussing each artist and going more in depth on what their art meant. Protest art is a general phrase that references artistic works that cause unease or are produced by activists and social movements. Are these artists successful in gathering

Visual and performing arts were certainly, interlaced with politics most of the time, taking part in many of these other approaches or at least, without doubt, they were parallel and always present. Such collectives are described in the volume called Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette in which Jelena Stojanovic’ text explores the most influential art collectives before and after Modernism. It is also coherent, along with what has been said so far in the chapter, saying that “The Internationaleries” (as Jelena categorise the main art collectives in Europe) managed to spread their thoughts in a considerable scale even though the lack of institutional bridges that would had otherwise encouraged cultural exchange was

Constructivist artist believe that art could play an important role in the creation of a new, utopian society. However, the social and political aims of the Russian avant-garde, the various state art and cultural bodies created and the new communist state itself, developed a complex relationship. The hope for a utopian Russia diminished under the progressively totalitarian proclivity of Lenin and later,

By forming the creative unions, the state “swept away” the entire state art system of the 1920’s, initiating a “surge of unity among composers” into the Union of Soviet Composers. Boris Schwarz claims that although joining this Union was voluntary, the political climate was such that no artist could have afforded not to join, while Simo Mikokonen, writing on the composer’s bureaucracy nearly forty years after Schwarz, instead argues that composers joined because “they believed it would be useful or at least not harmful. Unions seemed to offer benefits and were obviously different from associations of proletarian artists.”

The meaning and inspiration behind the works of Dmitri Shostakovich has long been a fertile source of debate for scholars, both of music, and of Russian political and cultural history. Dmitri Shostakovich was most active composing during the rise and zenith of the Soviet Union, from 1920 to his death in 1975. During this time, Shostakovich was denounced by the government twice, defamed by various pro-Soviet sources, and frequently criticized for straying too far from the desired pro-Soviet, social realist, artistic mold the Soviet Union desired. Yet the fact remains that despite all these negative setbacks, Shostakovich was wildly popular and successful during his lifetime within the Soviet Union, often acting as an emissary of culture to various

The nature of the universe is that every society is greatly under the effect of politics, especially during the revolution time in which Solzhenitsyn called those young people who participated as “the new generation”. The truths behind those ideological lies of The Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, are revealed implicitly through the story of Anatoly Pavlovich Vozdvizhensky, an engineer and a professor, and Lyoshka Konoplyov, one of his least competent working-class student in the Strength of Materials course but later join the GPU on orders of the Komsomol. First of all, Vozdvizhensky realized the problem of the authorities’s “policy of mass education” that tried to push the Worker’s Faculty into universities and “dragged [their life]

Aleksandur Deineka's painting entitled, Stakhanov Workers (Stakhanovites), embodies the Stalinist vision of the good society through the creation of "Homo Sovieticas."  After the Russian Revolution, Stalin and other leaders of the Socialist party wished to transform their tattered and broken country into a global symbol of heightened modernity.  In order to accomplish this mission, Stalin sought to demolish the old social order and reinvent the Russian people into ideal soviet subjects to be used to further the country's modernization process.  According to Stalin, this model citizen, known as "homo sovieticas" possessed the primary identity of a worker while placing all other defining characteristics of an individual aside, including: sex,

It is with certainty that musicologists can say that Shostakovich suffered terribly from oppression by the Soviet Union most of his adult life, yet he regularly received the government’s most prestigious prizes and accolades. At every development of Soviet Policy regarding art, whether becoming increasingly strict or more lax, we find Shostakovich lamenting and jubilant, respectively. He truly was the epitome of the roller-coaster ride of being an artist in the Soviet Union. Ultimately, it is impossible to distinguish whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a cynical dissident or a loyal civic artist of the Soviet Union through the examination of publications by: Solomon Volkov, Laurel Fay, Irina Shostakovich, Ian McDonald and Richard Taruskin, due to the polarizing viewpoints that these sources present.

Russian Constructivism was a movement in Russia that supported the goals of the socialist/communist revolution. It borrowed ideas from Cubism, Suprematism, and Futurism. It employed the idea of constructing objects differently and entirely new, because it wanted to abolish the old and everything that was concerned with tradition. The purpose of this was to model for the public how constructing a new society, a communist society, would be. Russian Constructivism employs Marxism as a theory, because they both center around politics and objects. There was a clear political motivation, specifically a Marxist one, for the Constructivists. Trotsky’s “Literature and Revolution” argues how art