Text 3. Socialist realism

Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. It should not be confused with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern, although it is related.

Socialist realism in the Soviet Union

Karp Trokhimenko. Stalin as an Organiser of the October Revolution. Oil on canvas. 1940s

Socialist realism was the officially approved type of art in the Soviet Union for nearly sixty years. Communist doctrine decreed that all material goods and means of production belonged to the community as a whole. This included works of art and the means of producing art, which were also seen as powerful propaganda tools. During the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks established a movement called Proletkult (the Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations) which sought to put all arts into the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Russian and Soviet artists embraced a wide variety of art forms under the auspices of Proletkult. Revolutionary politics and radical non-traditional art forms were seen as complementary. In art, constructivism flourished. In poetry, the nontraditional and the avant-garde were often praised.

This, however, aroused criticism from elements in the Communist party, who rejected modern styles such as impressionism and cubism, since these movements existed before the revolution and hence were associated with «decadent bourgeois art». Socialist realism was thus to some extent a reaction against the adoption of these «decadent» styles.

Socialist realism became state policy in 1932 when Stalin promulgated the decree «On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations». The Union of Soviet Writers was founded to control the output of authors, and the new policy was rubber-stamped at the Congress of Socialist Writers in 1934. It was enforced ruthlessly in all spheres of artistic endeavour. Artists who strayed from the official line were severely punished – many were sent to the Gulag labour camps in Siberia and elsewhere.

The restrictions were loosened somewhat after Stalin's death in 1953 but the state still kept a tight rein on personal artistic expression. This caused many artists to chose to go into exile, for example the Odessa Group from the city of that name. Independently-minded artists that remained continued to experience the hostility of the state. In 1974, for instance, a show of unofficial art in a field near Moscow was broken up, and the artworks destroyed, with water cannon and bulldozers. Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika facilitated an explosion of interest in alternative art styles in the late 1980s, but socialist realism remained in force as the official state art style until as late as 1991. It was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that artists were finally freed from state censorship.

Socialist realism in other states

The Soviet Union exported socialist realism to virtually all of the other Communist countries, although the degree to which it was enforced there varied somewhat from country to country. It became the predominant art form across the Communist world for nearly fifty years.

Today, arguably the only country still focused on these aesthetic principles is North Korea. The People's Republic of China occasionally reverts to socialist realism for specific purposes, such as idealised propaganda posters to promote the Chinese space program. Socialist realism had little mainstream impact in the non-Communist world, where it was widely seen as a totalitarian means of imposing state control on artists.