9 - A New Normal

Summary

The October Revolution hit a Russia sapped by the casualties and widespread shortages of World War I. Civil war plunged the cities and the countryside into the horrors of violence and disorder mythologized in tradition. The new government raised expectations but could not deliver even basic necessities of daily life. In 1918, the Bolshevik leaders centralized publishing under the state agency Gosizdat, but their effort to create new languages of popular communication lost many readers in a maze of acronyms, foreign words, and Marxist jargon. Avant-garde artists who offered their talents willingly after 1917 were initially given an almost free hand to run artistic affairs. The premier visual innovations of the period, Suprematism and Constructivism, were consistent with the ideological commitment of Bolshevism to what was basic, simple, and within the material vocabulary of ordinary people. The agency of the artistic community fell toward the end of the 1920s, however, as a consolidated Party apparatus, itself administered through the nomenklatura system, exerted control. Innovations other than those mandated by the Party were curtailed. Artists and writers who had fought for decades for independence fell again under a system of restrictive state-sponsored patronage.