Stalinism and Russian Intellectuals, 5 op

This course focuses on social, intellectual and cultural phenomena in the Soviet Union during what has been called the epoch of ‘Stalinism’, a period that lasted from the late 1920s until the early 1950s. Due to its many abnormities and excesses, the period when Stalin was in power has always posited specific methodological problems for scholars. It is pertinent to ask, what was the cultural methodology of Stalin’s statecraft since it has led historians to keep on repeating rather totalising societal and cultural definitions of his power? Our aim is to go beyond these definitions and paint a subtler picture. By offering new insights on Soviet philosophy of science and humanities, linguistics, philosophy, musicology, literature and mathematics from the point of view of general cultural theory, our course challenges the image of Stalin-era humanities as mere propaganda, showing instead the hermeneutic challenges that the Stalinist politics of culture produced for later generations seeking to penetrate and comprehend the individual worldviews of thinkers during that time.

In the course, our approach to Stalinism stems from the analyses, data and methodological experience of various ‘schools’ of thought, which we will introduce to students. However, we find the concept of culture far too complex an issue to be subordinated to any of the major previous models of Stalinism as such. When assessing Stalin era culture, it is more fruitful to analyse the methodologies of interaction between the fields of culture (here, cultural actors) and politics (Stalinism) and the results of their complex interplay. Our course addresses not only the politically ‘positive’ dissident intellectual productions that opposed Stalinism and went ‘underground,’ but also the more neutral intellectual productions in field of the humanities, which tried to further the critical ethos of cultural modernisation and yet remained part of a non-persecuted intellectual culture during the Stalin era. In this course, we focus mostly on the humanities and intellectuals during the Stalin era. We will ask, among others, in the class, in what ways did culture / cultural actors remain autonomous actors from politics?

Focusing on a selection of early Soviet cultural theoreticians – Shpet, Lifshits, Asafiev, Deborin, Megrelidze, Yanovskaya and Bukharin – who had more or less important, but hitherto not well analysed, formative or analytical roles in the culture of the 1930s and 1940s, our course also offers novel perspectives on thinkers like Gorky, an important formulator of Stalinist cultural politics, or Marr, the notorious creator of the ‘Japhetic’ theory.

The topicality of our course lies in our focus on questions that concern how the intellectual society functioned and what it produced given the circumstances of dictatorship, state violence, political propaganda, censorship and ideological blackmail. All lectures are tangential to Stalin's politics, but neither Stalin nor the history of the richly theorised term ‘Stalinism’ are our main objects as such, although they will be introduced to students. The lectures focus on Soviet intellectual and cultural life – scholars and cultural theoreticians – during the Stalin era from a methodological perspective that distinguishes between Stalinism and culture, an outlook that forms one of the common threads of the course.