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Soviet Union [USSR] Leninist Principles
Calls for the politicization of literature and art appeared in
the works of several radical nineteenth-century Russian thinkers.
The literary critic Vissarion Belinskii (1811-48) called upon
literary figures to channel their creative energies toward changing
the sociopolitical environment. He believed that writers could
influence the masses by challenging the status quo through their
works. Eventually, his philosophy of criticism galvanized other
writers and other artists. Several of his disciples continued to
advocate Belinskii's message after he died.
Like Belinskii, both the journalist and author Nikolai
Chernyshevskii (1828-89) and one of his followers, Nikolai
Dobroliubov (1836-61), a literary critic, argued that progress
could be achieved only if the individual human being were liberated
and could espouse his or her own beliefs without feudal oppression.
Both Chernyshevskii and Dobroliubov motivated writers and artists
to contribute to this progress by criticizing society and
presenting examples of human liberation in their works.
Following these radical ideas, the Bolsheviks, too, rejected
the notion of art for art's sake. Like the nineteenth-century
radical theorists, the Bolsheviks held that media and the arts were
to serve political objectives. Unlike the critical realists,
however, who called for protests against social injustice, the
Bolsheviks used media and the arts to mobilize the population in
support of the new sociopolitical system.
One of the initial means for controlling the population through
the politicization of the media entailed closing newspapers deemed
anti-Bolshevik. On November 9, 1917, the new Bolshevik regime
declared in the Decree of the Press that all nonsocialist
newspapers would be closed because they endangered the newly formed
government. In the November 10, 1917, issue of Pravda--the
newspaper of the Bolshevik Central Committee and the main voice of
the new regime--the Bolshevik leadership stated that "the press is
one of the strongest weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie" and
added that, given its capacity to incite rebellion among workers
and peasants by distorting reality, the press ought to be strictly
controlled. On January 28, 1918, the Bolshevik leadership decreed
that "revolutionary tribunals" would be used to prevent the
bourgeois press from spreading "crimes and misdemeanors against the
people." On April 5, 1918, Bolshevik censors instituted further
controls by mandating that the inclusion of "decrees and ordinances
of the organs of the Soviet power" had to be included in all
newspapers. By the early 1920s, all non-Bolshevik newspapers had
been outlawed, thus giving full control to the regime. Such
controls continued in the late 1980s.
Data as of May 1989
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