Parallel Realities: Soviet Propaganda and Reality during and after Stalin

• In Event: Social Parallels in the History of Russia, the USSR, and East Europe

Abstract

After Stalin’s death in 1953, many members of Soviet literary intelligentsia asked publicly some vexing questions about how the written word had diverged from everyday realities of Soviet life. These questions were related especially to the postwar tendency of embellishing reality (lakirovka) and to the controlling policies known as zhdanovshchina, named so after Andrei Zhdanov, who played a crucial role in implementing Stalinist policies in the late 1940s – and who had launched socialist realism as a key concept of Soviet art in 1934.
This paper aims to show the relationship between socialist realism and Soviet domestic policies by asking how media and art were used to convey a false apprehension of reality in the USSR. It proposes a novel approach that combines research on Soviet social history (especially on late Stalin era corruption) and cultural history with archival research on post-Stalin era criticism by key Soviet literary figures – the people who had themselves helped create the image of Soviet reality after the war. These well-known figures were Konstantin Simonov, Vladimir Pomerantsev, Olga Berggolts and Vladimir Dudintsev. By analyzing the ideas of these figures in the context of Stalin era society, the paper proposes that socialist realism was used, intentionally and unintentionally, to cover the reality of life in the Soviet Union, mainly widespread corruption but also the failures that the Stalinist party and government had committed in executing the promises made by the Revolution and official propaganda.

Author

• Susan Ikonen, U of Helsinki (Finland)