The October Revolution in 1917 profoundly shocked the cultural ecosystem. The new authorities recast notions of freedom, of the arts, and of the public. Links between and among audiences at different levels that had thrived in the prerevolutionary cultural market were dismantled. Over time the government imposed strictures on culture requiring alignment with political directives. By 1934, the official policy of Socialist Realism was mandatory and compliance enforced by rewards and terror. The early years of revolutionary ferment yielded aesthetic innovation of the highest order, yet the mounting pressures took their toll on creativity. Writers, artists, and performers responded variously. Some took cover in works employing irony and in the (somewhat) safer terrain of children’s literature. By seeding children’s literature with values counter to those practiced by Soviet officialdom, selected writers and artists spread counter-values to a new generation. They worked with the guile of the fox, the flight of the firebird, and, perhaps, the recklessness of the Fool. By keeping alive Russian stories of wise Fools, sentient animals, and magical powers, their creators carried forward folkloric traditions barred from the reigning Socialist Realism. In doing so, they protected limited public space for artistic innovation.

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.