What Is Cultural Revolution?

Abstract

Old historical paradigms never die; they are simplified and codified in textbooks. The collapse of Soviet Union has prompted many historians to reassess Communist experience. Those who discuss cultural revolution, however, continue to treat problem-one crucial in both Russian Revolution and Western understandings of early Soviet period-in ways that have been dominant in Anglo-American scholarship since late 1970s. First, we are taught, cultural revolution was an episode largely bounded by years of First Five-Year Plan. One new account predictably begins topic with Shakhty trial of 1928 and associates cultural revolution solely with a few selected themes from years that followed: purging of intelligentsia, proletarian episode in literature, vydvizhenie.' Secondly, when understandings of cultural revolution on part of historical actors are discussed at all, a familiar opposition is drawn between Lenin's definition, frequently reduced to mass education and cultivation of civilized behavior, and sudden and abrupt introduction of militant class-war definitions after 1928. Another new account, while discussing that 1920s dichotomy, explains that 1928-31 period in culture and literature came to be known as 'Cultural Revolution' -neglecting to add that it acquired that label only in Western scholarship circa 1978!2 Ubiquitous references to the cultural revolution of 1928-31, in both general histories and specialized scholarship, convey impression that we are dealing with a concrete, particular phenomenon or even periodization. The title of this article, in contrast, deliberately recalls perennial cursed of Russian revolutionary movement, such as Who is to blame? What is to be done? and, most evocatively, What is intelligentsia? To debate such questions was to talk at once about transforming