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Bolshevik Festivals, 19171920

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Studies on the History of Society and CultureVictoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, Editors

1. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Re-volution, by Lynn Hunt

2. The People of Paris: An Essay in PopularCulture in the Eighteenth Century, by Daniel

Roche

3. Pont-St-Pierre, 13981789: Lordship, Com-munity, and Capitalism in Early Modern

France, by Jonathan Dewald

4. The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics,and Popular Culture in Transylvania, by Gail

Kligman

5. Students, Professors, and the State in TsaristRussia, by Samuel D. Kassow

6. The New Cultural History, edited by LynnHunt

7. Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Polit-ics, Psychology, and Style, by Debora L.

Silverman

8. Histories of a Plague Year: The Social andthe Imaginary in Baroque Florence, by Giulia

Calvi

9. Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Move-ment in Revolutionary Russia, by Lynn Mally

10. Bread and Authority in Russia, 19141921,by Lars T. Lih

11. Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in theSeventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble, by

Keith P. Luria

12. Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolu-tionary Paris, 17891810, by Carla Hesse

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13. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class inNineteenth-Century England, by Sonya O. Rose

14. Moral Communities: The Culture of ClassRelations in the Russian Printing Industry

18671907, by Mark Steinberg

15. Bolshevik Festivals, 19171920, by Jamesvon Geldern

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Bolshevik Festivals, 19171920

James von Geldern

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley / Los Angeles / London

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University of California PressBerkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.London, England

©1993 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataVon Geldern, James.Bolshevik festivals, 19171920 / James von Geldern.p. cm. (Studies on the history of society and culture ;15)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-520-07690-7 (alk. paper) 1. TheaterSoviet UnionHistory20th century. 2. SovietUnionHistoryRevolution, 19171921Theater and therevolution. 3. FestivalsSoviet Union. I. Title. II. Series.PN2724.V636 1993792'.0947'09041dc20 92-9074

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American Na-tional Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Ma-terials, ANSI Z39.481984.

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To Anita,with love and affection

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O hushed October morning mild,Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,Shall waste them all.Robert Frost, October

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Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1The Precursors: Tsars, Socialists, and Poets

15

2Revolution and Festivity

40

3The Politics of Meaning and Style

72

4New Uses for Popular Culture

103

5Transformation by Festival: Mass Festivals as Performance

134

6Marking the Center: Festivals and Legitimacy

175

Epilogue 208

List of Abbreviations 221

Notes 223

Bibliography 259

Index 305

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Page xi

List of Illustrations

Figures

1. L. Petukhov, poster, May Day 1917. 19

2. E. Kruglikova, poster, Liberty Bond Campaign, May 1917. 20

3. Circus arena-stage for a production of Macbeth in Petrograd, 1918. 24

4. Cover of Kerzhentsev's Creative Theater, 1923. 29

5. V. Fidman, Smolny, engraving. 47

6. Poster for Meyerhold's production of Mystery-Bouffe, 1918. 67

7. Mayakovsky's costume sketches for the "clean" and the "unclean," Mystery-Bouffe,1918.

69

8. Monument to Taras Shevchenko, Moscow, built as part of Lenin's monumentalplan.

87

9. Grigory Zinoviev addressing the May Day 1918 parade on the Field of Mars,Petrograd.

92

10. Emblem of the Mobile-Popular Theater, Petrograd. 120

11. Mikhail Blokh, The Metalworker, monumental sculpture, Petrograd, July 1920. 170

12. Amphitheater, Rock Island, Petrograd. 171

13. Stereotypical Polish nobleman of Civil War posters. 173

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14. Poster claiming the heritage of the Paris Commune for the Bolsheviks, 1921. 179

15. Graphic representations of the Third International, 1919 and 1920. 182

16. Maria Lebedeva, commemorative plate for the Second Congress of the ThirdInternational.

184

17. Layout of Palace Square, Petrograd, for the November 1920 mass spectacle. 202

Plates

1. Holiday fireworks display, Moscow, 1744. Followingpage 133

2. Lithograph of the carnival on St. Petersburg's Field of Mars, 1825.

3. Mariinsky Palace, Petrograd, November 7, 1918.

4. Demonstration in Red Square, November 7, 1918.

5. Decoration of Hunters' Row, Moscow, November 1918.

6. Tribune covering Pavel Trubetskoi's equestrian statue, Uprising Square,Petrograd, May Day 1919.

7. Boris Kustodiev, Celebration for the Second Congress of the Third Interna-tional, Petrograd, July 1920.

8. Toward a World Commune, mass spectacle, Stock Exchange, Petrograd,July 1920.

9. Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, Petrograd, 1920.

10. The Red stage, Storming of the Winter Palace, mass spectacle, Petrograd,November 1920.

11. Liubov Popov and Alexander Vesnin, design for a theatricalized massmaneuver in honor of the Third International, Moscow, 1921.

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Acknowledgments

I have been gratified during the writing of thisbook by the interest I have met with on the partof my colleagues. Studying mass festivalsnudged me into new and unanticipated fields,where my knowledge and skills were often min-imal; and I cannot thank enough those scholarswhose advice has guided my first steps. My ap-preciation goes to Victor Terras, Sam Driver,and Patricia Arant, who encouraged me when Ichose an untraditional dissertation topic andcontinued to support my work. I would also liketo thank Albin Konechnyi, Lewis Siegelbaum,Lynn Mally, and Hubertus Jahn for lending metheir knowledge of topics beyond my ken. AlmaLaw gave me great joy by showing me the filmof a mass spectacle, one that I had given up forlost, finally allowing me to see this thing I hadstudied so many years in print. Richard Stitesoffered essential assistance throughout the writ-ing period, ranging from simple encouragementand fertile brainstorming to suggestions for the

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more mundane matter of bibliography. VictoriaBonnell and others who remain anonymous readthe manuscript several timesfortitude enoughalreadyand offered me far-reaching guidanceand criticism. I thank them particularly for theircommitment and diplomacy.

Important institutional support has come fromIREX, the U.S. Department of Education in theform of a Fulbright-Hayes grant, a Mellon Fel-lowship from Stanford University's Center forSoviet and East European Studies, and a sum-mer grant from the University of Illinois'sCenter for Russian and East European Studies. Iwould also like to thank my anonymous friends,advisors, and aides in Russia, particularly

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those in Leningrad's Theater Institute and theLunacharsky Theater Library and TheaterMuseum.

Most of all, I thank my wife, Anita, who readthe manuscript more times than anyone shouldhave to, provided persistent and conscientiouscriticism, and endured a year in Russia. Thisbook, which would never have been completedwithout her help, is dedicated to her.

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IntroductionFinding a Focus for Memory andExperience

The people's army takes up position. Orders aretelephoned. Movement in the streets. . . The RedArmy encloses the Winter Palace in a ring ofsteel. . . . A demand for surrender to avoidbloodshed is written and carried to the WinterPalace by messengers with a white flag. A wo-man soldier receives it and passes it into thebuilding. Waiting. . .

Agitators from Smolny penetrate into the WinterPalace. They enter through cellars, past electriccables, up stairways, along elaborate gallerieswith chandeliers. . . . The agitators reach theCossacks in the inner courtyard and begin talk-ing to them. . . . A sailor in the gallery of theWinter Palace throws a grenade among the ca-dets. The Cossack artillery gallops out of thePalace, deserting the Government. But still noanswer to the ultimatum.

The envoys with the white flag return from thePalace and firing begins. . . . The cruiser Auroraopens fire on the Winter Palace. The Mayor ofPetrograd at the head of the bourgeois Commit-tee of Salvation crosses a bridge to parley withthe workers and is held up by pickets of sailors.. . . While the Mensheviks are still protesting,midnight strikes, and the Bolsheviks set thepeople's army on the attack of the WinterPalace. The attack begins. . . .

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The people pour up through the palace . . . anddrive out the women soldiers, who surrenderwith the other troops. . . . The Ministers are ar-rested in their council room. By 2 a.m. . . . theProvisional Government is overthrown and Len-in announces the news. 1

Many of us know the storming of the WinterPalace from the enactment in Sergei Eisenstein'sTen Days That Shook the World, which is sum-marized above. The great event began with asalvo from the battleship Aurorathe shot heardround the worldand by the time it was over theworld had been transformed by revolution. Theaccount,

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which is filled with a human drama and historic-al sweep that have fired the imaginations of gen-erations, is no less gripping for its being impre-cise. The historical storming was something of aletdown. The palace housed a powerless and in-effectual cabinet; it was seized a day after theBolsheviks had taken power; and it was neverreally stormed. Eisenstein was not in Petrogradfor the October Revolution and can be excusedfor the embellishments. Far from detractingfrom the event, he improved on it, focused it,and, for many contemporaries, made it seemmore truthful than before.

The inspiration for Eisenstein's film was, in fact,a mass spectacle performed at a festival on thethird anniversary of the event. If he seemed un-duly inspired by the battle, it was because thespectacle was as thrilling as history claimed thestorming to have been. Thousands of angry RedGuardsmen, led by Lenin and whipped on bycenturies of oppression, charged across the vastsquare and seized the destiny that history de-creed was theirs. There were more soldiersstruggling, more ammunition fired, and prob-ably as many injuries suffered during thetheatrical re-creation as during the historicalevent. A hundred thousand spectators witnessedit from the square. It occurred at the stroke ofmidnighta much more dramatic setting than thedrizzly, gray, typically dreary Petrograd morn of1917and banks of floodlights illuminated theprogress of the battle.

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Bold, colorful, and striking, mass dramatizationswere memorable features of the culture of theRussian Revolution, and they came to symbolizethe era to many contemporaries. Yet why, onemight ask, did the regime make such an invest-ment? Politicians sacrificed valuable time to or-ganize and participate in the festivals; the pressgave them central coverage, even when the CivilWar hung in the balance. The festivals weredeemed so important that essential funds andmanpower were diverted to them during a timeof economic disaster. In the midst of famine,valuable foodstuffs were distributed almostfreely; and during a housing and heating crisis,lumber and fuel were appropriated for decora-tions and parade floats. And why did the fest-ivals prove so memorable? Revolutionaries, Co-mintern delegates, foreign dignitaries, and incid-ental bystanders all remembered the celebrationsyears afterward. Yet these were minor incidentsin an axial era: a world war divided the nation;

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three hundred years of Romanov rule were over-thrown; the October Revolution swept the coun-try and launched it into civil war. Social, eco-nomic, and political life were shaken to the core;still, everyone remembered the holidays. Theimpression was often so strong, as in

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the case of the Winter Palace spectacle, that therecollections of original participants were over-ridden. Nikolai Podvoisky, a member of thetroika that commanded the Palace Square attackin 1917, was so enamored with the dramatic ver-sion that he sponsored Eisenstein's 1927 filmand incorporated its dramatism into his mem-oirs. His enthusiasm was testimony to the plasti-city of human memory.

This book describes the mass festivals and spec-tacles celebrated by revolutionary Russia in theyears 191720 and their impact on the memoryand experience of revolution. Experience is awelter of chaotic, often conflicting impressions,which require sorting and interpretation. We areguided in this task by our culture, whichprovides clues as to what should be perceived as''real,'' what should be ignored, and how the ac-knowledged impressions should be arranged in aconstruction of reality. The revolutions of 1917shook Russian political culture to the foundationand discredited the alternatives that appeared. Ahoary tradition of discourse on political powerand legitimacy, revolving around religion,bloodlines, and fealty, was effaced; the demo-cratic language spawned by the February Re-volution was discredited by hunger, disorder,and continuing war; the Marxist idiom remainedincomprehensible and alien to most of the popu-lation. Mass festivals helped fill the vacuum of

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public debate that ensued. Public spectacleswere a medium that allowed for the enactmentof revolutionary stories. Recent and remote his-tory could be picked through and molded to re-flect the most attractive sides of the Bolshevikuprising and to animate the historical vision thatlay at its center.

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The Bolsheviks were fortunate, though not al-ways pleased, to have some of the century'smost talented artists eager to help them. Thefestivals were often aesthetic triumphs. Artistswere given entire cities as their canvases: MarcChagall covered Vitebsk buildings with murals;Nathan Altman redesigned Petrograd's PalaceSquare. Theater directors were given thousandsof actors and vast urban expanses for mass spec-tacles, which culminated in the Winter Palacespectacle of 1920. The festivals realized artists'wildest dreams: they had the trust of the state,almost unlimited funds, and audiences thatcould approach one hundred thousand people.Art once again mattered, and artists met thechallenge with verve and creativity.

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The spectacles generated considerable scholarlyexcitement in their own day, with fortunate andunfortunate results. Our good fortune is that thefirsthand accounts of many perceptive witnesseswere recorded, which give a rich and variegatedpicture of how the spectacles were made

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and perceived. However, these impassioned crit-ics were often themselves directors, whose ob-servations were skewed by subjective involve-ment. Detailed descriptions were often preju-diced by partisan judgment and aesthetic evalu-ations influenced by political considerations. Al-though the spectacles purported to speak withthe people's voice, accounts of spectator reactionusually reflected the tastes of the commentator,not the audience. This bias made the rare dispas-sionate observer, like the Hungarian journalistRené Fülöp-Miller, even more valuable.

Dispassionate analysis was rarely the aim ofcritics during the Revolution. Nevertheless, al-most everyoneFormalists, Marxists, advocatesof proletarian culture, materialist sociologists,refined aesthetes, and cultural activists, evenforeign visitorsfound mass festivals and spec-tacles worthy of attention. All, including themost discerning, were impressed. Some of thefinest critics, who were situated in Leningrad'sState Institute of Art History (GIII), produced aseries of rich monographs on mass festivals thatare still among the best sources available. 2With deep erudition they traced the origins ofpublic spectacles and festivals back through theRenaissance, Middle Ages, and classical world.Although they saw the Russian Revolution asthe start of a new epoch, they did not believe itunique in world history, and they examined par-allels in all civilizations. Perhaps for politicalreasons, they neglected two important preced-ents, Russian dynastic celebrations and popular

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festivals; and they often found in ancient fest-ivals a class consciousness that was not there.Yet their learning and perception led to essentialinsights on why festivals are celebrated and howthey shape culture. Of particular import was thecritics' broadening of the notion of theater to in-clude other performative activities like rituals,game playing, parades, and demonstrations.Many of the critics, notably Adrian Piotrovsky,a young poet, translator, playwright, and direct-or, were artists in their own right, and theyprovided invaluable information on how themass spectacles were made.

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Fêtes, as well as criticism on the subject,suffered a precipitous decline under Stalin. Vastoutdoor entertainments were celebratedthroughout the 1930s in Moscow, but theylacked all spontaneity.3 The Great War andpostwar reconstruction made festivals a distantmemory. Few authors wrote on the Civil Warfestivals for thirty years, and those who did weretoo busy apologizing for revolutionary excess tosay much of value.4

Interest did not revive until the Thaw of themid-1950s. The moderate reforms initiated byKhrushchev compelled propagandists to developforms of political education that enlisted citizencompliance

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through means other than force. They looked tothe Revolution as a model; and cultural formslike festivals associated with the Revolution ex-perienced a revival that continued through theBrezhnev years. Leading directors like GeorgyTovstonogov produced mass spectacles; theKrupskaia Institute of Culture in Leningrad es-tablished a curriculum for mass-festival cadres.New celebrations and rituals for weddings, in-duction into the army, and granting internalpassports were developed, and old holidays likethe winter solstice were revived. There wereseveral objectives for the new festivals andrituals. They were meant to reinvigorate popularsupport for Soviet socialism; as one festival or-ganizer said, "Mass festivals reflect the unity ofthe Soviet people and their support for the Com-munist Party and Soviet government." 5 Reli-gious sentiment was growing among the popula-tion, and socialist festivals were thought tocounterbalance the compelling beauty of the

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Russian Orthodox service.6 The festivals alsofed on nostalgia for the Revolution's spontan-eous enthusiasm, something long absent fromSoviet public life.

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The rebirth of festivals has led to a salutory re-vival of scholarship on the subject. Collectionsof materials have been published;7 the memoirsof survivors of the revolutionary years havebeen published;8 a large critical and theoreticalliterature on the subject has developed.9 There iscontroversy in Russia over what festivals ac-complish and how they should be conducted, yetseveral general themes emerge, all of which un-derscore the educational role of festivals ratherthan their immediate political context. Festivalsenable citizens to celebrate and experience thevalues of society in ways that other forms of dis-course do not allow. They are spontaneous civicmanifestations, and citizens understand theirmessage directly. Political orthodoxy has oftenled commentators to overstate claims of spon-taneity and political-education impact, but some,notably A. I. Mazaev, are capable of subtle com-mentary. Mazaev notes the unique features of

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the festival world, and he is aware that festivalshave served many purposes in many societies.

Western scholars, led by anthropologists, havearrived at the topic of mass celebration along asomewhat different routethrough an interest inculture and symbolic analysis. Festivals haveproved a particularly fertile topic. They demon-strate how a system of beliefs can mobilize apopulation, either to support the status quo or toundermine the present social structure.10 Publiccelebrations become particularly meaningfulduring times of revolutionary change, when so-cieties not only must project themselves into thefuture but must grapple with the legacy of

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their past. Historians of the French Revolution,which the Russians saw as a model for theirown, have produced fascinating accounts of howfestivals and symbols were used to replace theold regime's hierarchical culture with an egalit-arian, revolutionary culture. 11

An erosion of the totalitarian model of the so-cialist state and society has also led those whostudy Russia to a shift in focus that makes fest-ivals a fertile topic. The belief that the Sovietsystem rested solely on institutions of power andthat its foundation was a systematic ideologyhas been shaken, allowing historians to reach amore layered and nuanced understanding. Cul-tural studies have contributed to the revision; re-volutionary Russia has come to be seen as a par-ticipatory, if not democratic, society, wherecompeting myths and ideas were exchanged bythe population and leaders. Official culture usedto be dismissed as political hackwork, yet underscrutiny it has yielded many insights into the so-ciety that produced it.12 Attention has been de-voted to the revolutionary propaganda and uto-pian enthusiasm that underlay popular supportfor the Bolsheviks during the war;13 the flexibleapplication of the "cult of Lenin," which guidedthe party through various phases of its

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development;14 and the traditions, tastes, andmyths that constituted socialist realism.15 Therehas been considerable interest in Soviet fest-ivals: scholars have examined them as a theat-rical phenomenon,16 as a source of the emergingSoviet culture,17 and as a means of culturalmanagement in post-Stalinist Russia.18

The purpose of this book is to provide an over-view of mass festivals during the Civil War(191720) and to discuss some of the theoreticalissues raised by their study. The intended audi-ence is broad: it includes specialists in the his-tory and culture of the country; lovers of thetheater, particularly the rich Russian theater ofthis century's first quarter; historians interestedin revolutionary cultures and cultures undergo-ing rapid change; anthropologists and sociolo-gists interested in symbolic performance andcommunication.

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Combining the roles of historian and theoreti-cian has been difficult; the chapters are arrangedchronologically but with the intent of building atheoretical argument at the same time. The nar-rative begins not with the Marxist ideology thatinspired the Revolution, not with the needs andaims of the Bolshevik regime, but with the leg-acy of mass celebration active in 1918. The tra-dition, which seemed democratic back then, wasin parts authoritarian and often contrary toBolshevik doctrine. Its sources included theFrench Revolution, the Russian autocratic tradi-tion, and the February Revolution. Festivalswere integral to

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the utopian tradition that animated Bolshevism;ideas were borrowed from Tommaso Campan-ella, Thomas More, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Festivals had been a centerpiece of the FrenchRevolution; 19 and they were deemed a supremeart form by continental reformers of theater andsociety such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Niet-zsche, and Romain Rolland. The Russian sym-bolists Viacheslav Ivanov and Andrei Bely haddevoted considerable attention to the topic, ashad the Bolsheviks Anatoly Lunacharsky,Vladimir Friche, Platon Kerzhentsev, andAleksandr Bogdanov. Holidays were, in fact, in-strumental to revolutionary history. The Febru-ary Revolution was sparked by an InternationalWomen's Day demonstration; and later in 1917the Bolsheviks used Petrograd Soviet Day, de-clared by themselves on October 22, as a dryrun for taking power.

After the Revolution, the regime created a newholiday calendar of its own, which for severalyears coexisted and competed with the extensivecalendar of Orthodox religious holidays. TheBolshevik celebrations combined tradition withinnovation. A demonstration was usually thecentral moment. In prerevolutionary times,working-class demonstrations were an expres-sion of animosity toward the rich and powerful;they were illegal and thus an act of civil dis-obedience. After the February Revolution theybecame legal, and after the October Revolutionthey received full state sponsorship. Grim mani-festations became celebratory parades; days ofstruggle became holidays. Festival participantscarried brightly colored banners through decor-ated streets and squares; they were greeted fromtribunes by local and national leaders. Puppetbooths were set up on sidewalks; wandering act-ors performed skits about revolution and classstruggle; party orators addressed marchers from

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impromptu platforms. The banners were usuallymade by workers in their factories, and the art-work was prepared only days before the celebra-tion; thus, alongside works that have entered arthistory, much was crude and amateurish. Thisonly contributed to the mood of spontaneity thatenlivened the earliest festivals. After the demon-strations, theaters and variety houses werethrown open at discount prices; tickets were dis-tributed in Soviet enterprises, but it was easyenough to buy a ticket from a scalper. On occa-sion, restaurants and cafés offered cheap hotmeals to the starving population (they often shutdown again the next day). If money was avail-able and the local authorities were so inclined,the celebration could be crowned by a fireworksdisplay or even a mass spectacle.

Many traditions brought together in the revolu-tionary festivals were

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transformed by new social purposes. The mostimportant factor in remaking celebrations was anew function: propaganda. The use of publicspectacles to explain intricate political principlesmoved the Bolsheviks into a dialogue with acultural tradition that was in many ways alien totheir goals. Drawing an idiom from traditionalpopular culture, liturgical rites, and even tsaristceremonies was expedient because that vocabu-lary was most familiar to the people. Yet thesesymbols and spectacles shifted attention awayfrom ideology, the Bolsheviks' fundamentalclaim to power.

The spectacles had a tangled, and surprisinglyunrevolutionary, genealogy. Before the Revolu-tion, many Bolsheviks were fascinated by theprospect of socialist mass celebrations; and sev-eral of them, most prominently Lunacharsky,held sufficient power after 1917 to sponsor fest-ivals. Yet, oddly, these enthusiasts could takelittle credit for revolutionary festivals, particu-larly after 1919. Responsibility for the festivals-for their shape, content, and the message theyconveyed to spectatorsbelonged more to artistsand directors than to politician/sponsors, whooffered little concrete guidance. The directorssifted the Bolshevik program, ideology, and his-tory for elements that would fit the festive tradi-tion and suit dramatic presentation. They selec-ted what was appropriate for a revolutionary cel-ebration; in doing so, they reshaped the Revolu-tion. This is not to say that the festivals werenonpolitical. Rather, it confirms the substantial

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influence of two outside factors: the aestheticsof festivity and the Russian artistic tradition.

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What makes a festival festive is not its politicsbut the fact that it stands apart from everydayexistence. Festive time can be compressed orexpanded; the setting can be universalized orminutely compacted. Festivals can be celebratedby deists and atheists, conservatives and revolu-tionaries, the rich and the poor; but they must,above all, feel different. Frequent attempts havebeen made to associate aspects of the festivalaesthetic with certain messages and certain so-cial groupings. Carnivals, which offer a com-pact, immediate experience of reversed hier-archy, have been associated with the lowerclasses and their aspirations. Stately rites, whichspan breathtaking expanses of time to commem-orate the past, have been ascribed to ruling or-ders and their dominant ideologies. But this the-ory has flown in the face of the evidence, partic-ularly in Russia. Revolutionaries observed ritesas solemn and pompousif not as sumptuousasthe Romanovs; and Russia's merriest urban

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carnivals were sponsored by the imperial dyn-asty on the square right next to the palace. Rath-er than forcing festivity into the straitjacket ofideology or

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class and asking how certain groups celebratedcertain ideas, it is more productive to reverse thequestion and ask what happened to ideas whenthey were celebrated.

The festive environment is segregated from sur-rounding time and place by decorative mark-ings. The marking systeman artistic styleinformsand shapes the content of the festival. Someartistic styles decorate better than others. Therealism dominant in late nineteenth-centuryRussia was uniquely inappropriate to the task.Realists drew or wrote about things, they filledtheir work with ideas, they frowned on playful-nessall of which are designed to spoil a festival.The fin-de-siécle symbolist movement reactedto realism with consternation. How, the symbol-ists asked, can truth be depicted realistically,when it is intangible, objectless, ethereal? Even-tually, with the arrival of a second generation ofsymbolists, the antirealist impulse bred an in-terest in older styles of theater associated withfestivals and fairgrounds. These forms includedmedieval mystery plays, Italian commediadell'arte, and eventually even Russian fair-ground entertainments. The analogy proved

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fertile; from these experiments, prerevolutionarydirectors, most prominently Vsevolod Meyer-hold and Nikolai Evreinov, learned the rudi-ments of what would become mass theatrical artafter the Revolution.

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One aspect of symbolism's philosophical herit-age that proved durable was the belief that theat-er could remedy the ills of modern society. Thethread ran back at least to Wagner, whose dra-matic vision was inspired by the social upheavalof 1848. Wagner believed that theater and soci-ety had been fragmented by industrialization.Nineteenth-century theater was divided: actorswere separated from spectators by the prosceni-um arch, and patrons were segregated by ticketprice. Reformers strove to return the theater toits festive origins: the audience, chosen from alllevels of society, would celebrate its most cher-ished myths and find respite from the alienationof modern life. Participants and spectators couldthen transport the experience outside the theaterwalls and reform society.

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The vision was both naive and dictatorial, andaugured terrible consequences under state pat-ronage. A desire for social harmony was com-mendable, but the quest for unanimity hid a dis-trust of diversity. The unforeseen repercussionswere later represented by the bone-chillingFestival of Unanimity in Evgeny Zamiatin'sdystopian novel We:

At the beginning all arose, and the Hymn, like asolemn mantle, slowly waved above our heads.Hundreds of tubes of the Musical Tower, andmillions of

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human voices . . . All eyes were directed upward;in the pure morning blue, still moist with thetears of night, a small dark spot appeared. Now itwas dark, now bathed in the rays of the sun. Itwas He, descending to us from the sky, Hethenew Jehovahin an aero, He, as wise and as lov-ingly cruel as the Jehovah of the ancients. Nearerand nearer He came, and higher toward Himwere drawn millions of hearts. 20

Festivals, as Zamiatin notes, are a powerful toolof social manipulation. They engage spectatorsin a symbolic, yet highly tangible, vision of real-ity. Clearly, the Bolsheviks invested valuable re-sources in festivals for the purpose of indoctrin-ating the population with new ideas and legitim-izing the October Revolution. Subsequent com-mentators have taken the intention as the result.A 1981 book by a western sociologist calls theSoviet festivals part of "the arsenal of means toexert social control employed by politicalelites," "a means to structure and maintainpower relations," and "the behavioral dimensionof ideology.''21 Intention, though, should not bemistaken for execution; that position presup-poses a systemic consistency never present inRussian society, certainly not during the Re-volution. It assumes the existence of a single,monolithic ideology; a knowledge of that ideo-logy by local festival makers; the willingness ofartists to transmit the message objectively; the

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capacity of festivity to convey a political ideo-logy without distortion; the absence of alternat-ive interpretations of the message; the ability orwillingness of the spectators to understand it.

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All these assumptions ignore the vagaries ofsymbolic communication, the subjectivity injec-ted into the process by the audience, and thechaos and confusion of Civil War Russia. Pro-paganda was a dialogue, with the audience asthe silent interlocutor. It was a living interactionin which audience and maker were in constantcommunication. Agitators read the latest decreefrom a rostrum; newspapers were read aloud toa group or performed in skits; pamphlets weredelivered by "agit-trains" that penetrated thedark corners of the country. Each new presenta-tion faced a new audience; and the messagesthat reached deepest into the people's conscious-ness were those that targeted the audience best.The interaction was idiosyncratic, fluid, elusive;propaganda rarely conveyed a single messagebut offered potential messages on many levels.Sometimes they were contradictory. Spectatorsrejected and distorted particular symbols andideas; and their stubborn habits of

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misinterpretation often thwarted understandingbetween state and people.

The frustration that confronted the Bolsheviks intheir quest to reform their country and the meas-ures taken to bridge the communication gap

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speak eloquently about the dynamics of state/so-ciety communications and the popular dimen-sion of the Revolution. Though the need to un-derstand these dynamics makes the lack of reli-able sources on popular reception even more re-grettable, information is available with a bit ofdecoding. Popular reaction was rarely recordedin the press, yet its imprint was discernible inthe lengths to which organizers went to controlaudience response. The struggle to shape spec-tator impressions often was waged over wordsand symbols: newspapers provided acceptablereactions, while alternative interpretations weresuppressed; photos were cropped to draw theproper focus; old icons were forciblyreinterpreted.

Ultimately, the conventions and rules of the per-formance conditioned audience response,providing clues to the role of popular participa-tion. Commentators then and now have acquiredthe habit of calling all the celebrations rituals,but that term is perilously inexact. Ritual is onlya single form of festive performance, one em-ploying hieratic, hermetic symbols that allow forcompact communication and encourage inter-pretative unanimity among spectators. This lan-guage is highly conventionalized; because its in-terpretive code exists prior to the performance,it addresses an exclusive audience. In revolu-tionary times, when the regime was presentingits program to new and unfamiliar people withwhom it shared no political language, ritual wasof limited utility. Forums in which many peopleof different classes and opinions could be ad-dressed and in which the dynamism and intrigueof revolution could be conveyed offered greateradvantage. Performance modes like drama and

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play, which were native to the festive environ-ment and offered communicative properties un-available in rituals, became increasingly popularas the Revolution progressed and the ambitionsof directors expanded. Directors eschewed sev-eral constricting properties of ritualaudienceparticipation, narrative disjunctionand cultivateddramatic properties that could project powerfulmyths to hundreds of thousands of citizens. Re-volutionary commentators often claimed to re-cognize rituals in the mass spectacles, but theywere likely incorrect. The misperception wastelling; it indicated an unfamiliarity with popu-lar spectators and a failure to recognize theirautonomy.

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The urge to dramatize the Revolution, represen-ted by the shift away from ritualism, inspired anew mythology of revolution that was enactedin the mass spectacles. Each spectacle presenteda new understanding of the revolutionary past,which suggested new needs in the present andnew paths into the future. To label the festivalsmere propaganda, and point out that the historyin them was distorted, is to miss the

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point. Historical drama usually "distorts" his-tory, and it is always partisan: Sophocles,Shakespeare, Schiller, as well as their prede-cessors and successors, turned to the past not todiscover precisely what happened but to drawfrom it a message for the present. This was alsothe design of revolutionary spectacles; the pastwas probed to define who, precisely, were theancestors of the Bolshevik revolution. The factthat Marx was rarely mentioned, while StepanRazin, the Cossack rebel, was frequentlybrought up, reveals an evolution of theBolshevik's public image and perhaps even oftheir self-conception. Mass dramas grouped theBolsheviks at one time or another with Sparta-cus, the French Revolution, the Cossack rebelsRazin and Emelian Pugachev, the Paris Com-mune, even the Decembrists. Each associationthrew a different light on the Revolution andsuggested a different destination.

In the process of communicating their programto the people, the Bolsheviks shaped andchanged themselves. The myths created and pro-jected in mass festivals were constantly chan-ging, and the party program was rarely, if ever,the central theme. It would therefore be wiser toconcentrate less on what the message or mythwas and more on how it came into being, whatcontext it appeared in, and to what uses it wasput. The cultural process was dynamic and cre-ative, like the revolution it sought to represent.New socialist practices sprang to life in celebra-tions; and the Bolshevik mythos continuallyevolved. Festivals, along with the other propa-ganda media, allowed the party to develop newidentities that would legitimize its rule and assistits difficult transition from a revolutionary un-derground inspired by ideology to a rulingpower.

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In many ways, the Bolsheviks' ideology im-peded their consolidation of power. To under-mine the legitimacy of the monarchy and then ofthe Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks hadrejected the old culture and spoken of the redis-tribution of power and a social order that wouldtranscend national boundaries. In doing so, theyweakened the legitimacy of all authority.Festivals countered this tendency by shaping thepast into a myth of destiny. The Bolshevikswere associated with the most progressive ele-ments of Russian and world history, which cre-ated a hierarchy of events. The October Revolu-tion stood at its summit. History was a highlypolitical issue. To make the October Revolutionthe sole heir of progressive history was to legit-imize Bolshevik power.

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When the Bolsheviks celebrated their revolu-tion, they did not seem to be a party emergingfrom the underground and split by ideologicalconflicts; they were united by a clear historicalmission stretching from the

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beginnings of civilization to its culmination incommunism. The process was not simply a mat-ter of propagandists choosing a new identity andfoisting it on the population. The decision washardly conscious, and it was not made by theparty alone. Artists, directors, marchers, actors,and political sponsors all took part; give-and-take, not command from above, was the norm.This interaction involved a complicated and of-ten frustrating dialogue between the sponsors'needs and the artists' abilities; factors as variedas the Russian festival tradition, artistic and dra-matic form, audience comprehensionas well, ofcourse, as socialist ideologyhad to be taken intoaccount. The result was that the Bolsheviksjoined the tradition of fledgling regimes usingfestivals to propagate legitimizing genealogies.Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom had to estab-lish their descent from the gods; the Stuarts andMedicis claimed an ancient royal bloodline.What is remarkable about the Bolsheviks is not

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that they pursued this time-honored practice, butthat the mythic past was for them only severalyears prior.

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The immediate past was, during the Revolution,undergoing constant change as it was asked toreflect the present. As our understanding of theOctober Revolution and of abrupt historicaltransformation becomes ever more intricate andas the historical tapestry is increasingly woventogether from politics, society, and culture, wemust question the primacy of politics. If the re-volutionary festivals did ultimately serve tostrengthen Bolshevik powerwhich is not at allclearthey did so because artists displayed theirmagic according to their own rules. Politiciansdid not make the festivals, just as the artistscould not have run the state. What is fascinatingis to observe their interaction and their influenceon one another. Artists were given opportunitiesthat they could not have dreamed of before andthat would soon cease to exist; politicians sawtheir program and movement imagined in new,often salutory, ways. The Revolution was not,contrary to the Marxism current during that

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time, a historically determined occurrence; it un-derwent constant redefinition, and the leadingactors were not always aware of the script. Inthat sense, the mass festivals were, as leadingproponents fancied, vast improvisations, whererevolutionaries, artists, soldiers, and simple cit-izens reenacted the past in the hope it mightyield images of the future.

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OneThe PrecursorsTsars, Socialists, and PoetsI am convinced that awful magistrate my Lord Mayorcontracts a good deal of that reverence which attendshim through the year by the several pageants whichprecede his pomp.Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

By the summer of 1918, Soviet power in Vor-onezh was six months old, and local Bolshevikshad already formed a municipal theater depart-ment. One evening the department invited fourthousand spectators to a natural amphitheater onthe sloping banks of the River Voronezh for are-creation of the city's greatest moment in his-tory: the taking of Azov from the Turks by Peterthe Great's navy, built under his supervision atthe town wharves. The actors were foot soldiersof the new Red Army, stunt men from the tour-ing Cinizelli Circus, and local yachtsmen.

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The presentation lasted two hours and consistedof five scenes. ''The Turks in Azov," "The Battleof the Russian and Turkish Navies near Azov,""The Siege of Azov," and "The Taking of Azovby the Russians," topped off by a "Parade of theVictors.'' The scope of action necessitated a cer-tain compression of dramatic time and space.An island in the middle of the river representedthe Azov Fortress; prop fortifications and can-nons were built over the ruins of Peter'swharves; the river was the Gulf of Taganrog.Because the gap between audience and stageprecluded spoken dialogue, a brass band ofninety played throughout

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the production, interspersed with commentaryfrom onshore megaphones. The result was simil-ar to a silent movie. Artillery battles were ef-fected by illuminations and Bengal fire, hand-to-hand fighting by the circus stunt men, and navalengagements by the yacht club. The aquatic"Parade of Victors" gave the yachtsmen achance to flaunt their skill, and it was accom-panied by circus numbers performed on deckand by fireworks. At the show's conclusion,spectators were ferried to the island for a carni-val that lasted until two in the morning.

For even the best of times there is a spoilsport,and here the Voronezhskii telegraf (VoronezhTelegraph), a paper soon shut down for its"bourgeois tendencies," complained that "inconditions of starvation and the general uncer-tainty of human existence the Bolsheviks de-cided to organize a mass festival needed bynobody." But according to the organizernot anunbiased observerthe spectators enjoyed them-selves and the yachtsmen put on an unmatchedshow. 1 Whether the yacht club was bourgeoisor proletarian is unknown.

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Though this was the first mass spectacle inBolshevik Russia, such things were not new in1918. They were popular under the Romanovs,particularly during the patriotic years of theGreat War. One of the most spectacular hadbeen The Taking of Azov, performed in St.Petersburg's Petrovsky Park under the directionof Aleksei Alekseev-Iakovlev.2 During the war,battle programs were a specialty of Petrogradcircuses, and the Cinizelli group on tour fromthat city provided practical experience to theVoronezh production.3

The Autocratic Tradition

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Mass dramas require a sponsor, a duty that hasmore often than not devolved on the state or thechurch. The Roman state held the masses' fickleloyalty with extravagant spectacles, and the me-dieval Catholic church gave birth to the massliturgical drama (mystery play). In RomanovRussia, rituals and spectacles were an essentialchannel of communication between the auto-cracy and its subjects; for many years, the Len-ten festival allowed tsars to mingle with com-mon folk. Imperial sponsorship did not, ofcourse, guarantee artistic success; nineteenth-century mass dramas attracted few talented act-ors or directors. The reign of Nicholas II wasmarked by many sumptuous celebra-

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tions: two hundred years since the founding ofSt. Petersburg (1903); fifty years since the de-fense of Sebastopol (1906); one hundred yearssince the Battle of Borodino (1912); and, thegreatest of all, the tercentenary of the Romanovdynasty in 1913. 4 For the 1913 anniversary inKostroma, home of the dynasty, a grand cere-mony was followed by a carnival and fire-works;5 and similar programs were sponsored incities and provinces. But artistic participationwas limited to some crude historical films, onethem starring the young Mikhail Chekhov asFedor Mikhailovich, founder of the dynasty.6

Artists had once willingly contributed to statecelebrations. Eighteenth-century poets had con-sidered it the highest honor to compose versesfor an imperial procession or coronation, archi-tects to construct allegorical floats. Peter theGreat was himself an enthusiast of carnivals. Onthe occasion of the Treaty of Nystad (1723), thewhole of St. Petersburg was treated to a three-day masquerade, followed by a carnival proces-sion. The merriment halted only once, for a me-morial service, which most of the celebrants at-tended in costume. Peter and his circle offriends, the Most Drunken Council of Fools andJesters, headed the procession, dressed as any-thing from the Pope to a slave; ethnic costumeswere also popular.7 Catherine the Great laidclaim to Peter's tradition in her coronation cere-mony. Fedor Volkov, founder of the Russiantheater, arranged an allegorical tribute, MinervaTriumphant, for the occasion, with verses by thepoets Aleksandr Sumarokov and Mikhail

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Kheraskov celebrating reason's ascendancy overthe elements (the elements were triumphant inthe end, for Volkov soon died of pneumoniacontracted during the march).8

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The procession closed out an era, though laterartists would occasionally decorate royal cere-monies. For the June 1883 coronation of Alex-ander III, Mikhail Lentovsky, renowned for hisfairground theater (balagan), arranged a carni-val on Moscow's Khodynka Field. Four theaters,a circus, puppet shows, choirs, and orchestras allcompeted for the spectators' attention; and theday was capped by an allegorical procession,Spring Is Beautiful.9 The coronation of the lastRomanov, Nicholas II, in May 1896, saw anominous end to the tradition. A sumptuous ser-vice in Moscow's Kremlin was followed by acarnival on the Khodynka. As the tsar distrib-uted gifts to his people, the crowd surged towardthe platform, crushing women and children; andwhen boards covering a ditch collapsed, thou-sands perished in a panicked stampede.

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The February Revolution

The February Revolution, which swept away thehated autocracy, let artists consider cooperationwith the state honorable. On March 4, 1917, theArts Commission (Komissiia po delamiskusstva) was established; its leading memberswere the renowned author Maxim Gorky andAleksandr Benois, Nikolai Roerich, and Mstis-lav Dobuzhinsky, who were connected with theWorld of Art movement. Two days later thecommission, which was a private organization,established contact with the Petrograd Workers'and Soldiers' Soviets, and, on March 13, thesame group under the name Special Conferencefor Matters of Art (Osoboe soveshchanie podelam iskusstva) met in response to overturesfrom the Provisional Government. Although thegroup devoted some discussion to an arts pro-gramincluding mass spectaclesit focused on themore pressing need to save art from the ravagesof war and revolution. 10 Other artists in Petro-grad banded together to form the All-Arts Union

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(Soiuz deiatelei vsekh iskusstv). The union, cov-ering everything from futurism to traditionalrealism, proved an odd coalition. Artists wereorganized, if not entirely united; at least organ-ized enough to help the government create twovery different mass festivals: May Day andLiberty Bond Day (May 26).

Festivals and commemorations in autocraticRussia were a projection of power; only the tsar-ist state commanded the financial resources andlegal authority to sponsor them. Demonstrationswere illegal, and May Day observances weremet by severe countermeasures. The only legalprocessions were funerals, which often served aspretexts for political manifestations. The prohib-ition was not exclusive to socialists; the radicalright, even monarchists, often had their marchesoutlawed, despite their carrying religious andnationalistic banners and chanting antiworkerslogans. Left and right shared the marching col-or red.11

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Russia's first legal May Day was declared by theProvisional Government in 1917. Revolutionhad changed the nature of the day; it could nolonger be a demonstration against the autocracyand begged a new celebratory style.12 Plannersfelt May Day should celebrate the fresh revolu-tion, and to mark its optimism and unity theysuggested a great Social Mystery-Play.13 In theend, though, a more traditional street demonstra-tion was preferred. Social Mystery-Play, with itsliturgical overtones of oneness, implied a ca-maraderie absent in Russian society. Workershad rid themselves of the tsars, but the factoryowners and an unpopular war

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Figure 1.L. Petukhov, poster, May Day 1917 (V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn' Moskvy

i Petrograda v 1917 godu, Moscow, 1983).

remained. Most of the nation turned out for May Day, but it was not thehoped-for show of unity. 14 Professional artists helped with the postersand decorations (see Figure 1), but judging from the few pictures thatremain, they used only simple color (red), slogans (of all variety), andallegorical figures (usually in classical dress and pose).15 The center ofthe Petrograd celebration was the Field of Mars, whose most recent usehad been for the imperial review of troops marching off to the front. Areviewing stand was raised and garlanded, and soldiers and workers-some armedfiled past members of the government. Who organized theevent is not clear: some claim the Bolsheviks did much of the work,16but the municipal soviet (not Bolshevik at the time), the ProvisionalGovernment, and Gorky's commission also contributed.

The All-Arts Union likely did not take part in the celebration, even ifsome members did as individuals. On May 25, however, the unionmade its contribution to the national welfare by arranging Liberty BondDay (Den' zaima svobody), the first mass festival in revolutionary Rus-sia to make full use of artists' talents. The event, which included aparade, speeches, and theatrical performances, was organized by FedorSologub, the symbolist poet and head of the union's Curia of VerbalArt, and by two members of the Theater Curia: its director,

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Figure 2.E. Kruglikova, poster, Liberty Bond Campaign, May 1917 (V. P. Lapshin,

Khudozhestvennaia zhizn' Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu, Moscow, 1983).

Pavel Gaideburov, and Aleksandr Mgebrov. State war cofferswere seriously depleted, so the union organized a parade throughtown to sell bonds and collect money. Members ranging fromimperial actors to futurist artists contributed to what was to bethe union's sole concerted action. (Figure 2 shows a poster de-signed for the event.) Each group, school, or theater within theunion was responsible for the adornment of a car. As carstraveled the parade route, speeches were improvised, and music,usually the Marseillaise, was played. The holiday was a rousingsuccess, judging from accounts in the newspapers Rech'(Speech) and Russkaia volia (The Russian Will). (The Bolshev-iks had nothing to do with the war effort, and Pravda refusedcomment.) Copies of a one-day newspaper, Vo imia svobody (Inthe Name of Freedom), featuring such unlikely comrades asLeonid Andreev, the poets Igor Severianin and Sergei Esenin,and the radical socialist Georgy Plekhanov, were snapped up inan instant. 17 The parade had a reception that bordered on hys-teria:18 spectators threw money and even jewelry to the BoyScouts assigned to each car, who passed it on to bankers inbooths set up along the route.19

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Of greatest import for the future of revolutionary theater was aperformance of Rachilde's Le vendeur de soleil by Gaideburov'sMobile-

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Popular Theater, which set an example later fol-lowed by the Bolsheviks. 20 It was the firsttheater performed in the streets. The scripthardly conformed to our modern notion of streettheater, and the actors, who had no relevant ex-perience, had to find new style almost spontan-eously. They spoke of a temptation to impro-vise, to address the audience directly, to adapt amonumental style: broad, economic gestures,omission of details, and highlighting of essen-tialsall of which would have seemed artificialindoors. An anecdote that must have been strik-ing at the time was prophetic for the future:"After the show, played directly on the pave-ment in the middle of a crowd of soldiers, one ofthem, deeply moved, approached an actor andasked: 'OK, but who should we vote for?'"

In Moscow, too, artists organized themselves in-to a union, the Soviet of Moscow Art Organiza-tions, but the center of action was anothergroup, which chose to cooperate with the gov-ernment: the Arts-Educational Commission(Khudozhestvenno-prosvetitel'naia kommissiia)of the Moscow Soviet of Workers' Deputies.The commission, formed in April 1917, cutacross aesthetic and political lines.21 The otherMoscow soviet, the Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies,established a parallel administration, the arts de-partment of which included the artists KasimirMalevich, Georgy Iakulov, and Pavel Kuznet-sov. This group was not as well-funded as thecommission, and, to raise money for a programof popular lectures and presentations,22 it or-chestrated a Holiday of the Revolution on July12 at the racetrack. Sculptors and paintersframed the track with posters and panels of re-volutionary events; the restaurants and buffetswere decorated; and artists of the theater, opera,

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ballet, and circus gave performances. The holi-day raised the neccessary funds, but to do sotickets were sold at exorbitant prices, and it canbe assumed that a proletarian or even broad pub-lic did not attend.23 None of the celebrations ar-ranged by artists between the two Revolutionsof 1917 could or would claim to speak for alarge part of the nation.

The October Revolution and the Arts

The October Revolution provoked a realignmentof artists and government. Under the ProvisionalGovernment, the state and the Revolution hadnot been identified with any one party. Artistswere

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free to identify their work with the Revolutionwithout subordinating themselves to a party orplatform. This was a right that the Petrogradunion defended, and a principle upheld by theMoscow commission. Not so after October. Thestate and the Revolution had becomedespitetheir inherent antagonisma single body and, fur-thermore, one under the aegis of a single party.

Bolshevik policy on the arts had not beenclearly articulated when power was seized. Leftsocialist thinkers such as Plekhanov and Lun-acharsky, head of the new Commissariat of Edu-cation (Narkompros), had speculated on the artof the socialist future, but their ideas did notconstitute an official Bolshevik policy. The nat-ive tradition closest to materialist socialists wasthat of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pis-arev, utilitarian radicals who had subordinatedart to "reality," which in practice meant negatingart's autonomous value. But the newborn revolu-tionary state made little attempt to regulateartistic activity. Its foremost concern was togather the instruments of power; art was of sec-ondary importance for the moment.Lunacharsky's policy was twofold: to gain thecooperation, if not the sympathy, of leadingartists and, at the same time, to assert adminis-trative control.

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For the moment little attempt was made to for-mulate the relationship between the state andart. No state had ever been socialist, so therewas no precedent to rely on. Bolshevik leaderspresented the state publicly as an intermediatestage on the way to a stateless society. Specula-tion was directed not toward the ephemeralpresent but toward the future. For this specula-tion there was a rich tradition; but, like so muchof socialist thought, it concealed an antagonismlatent until power was taken.

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Tradition, a cosmopolitan mix of history andutopian philosophy, exerted a decisive influenceon the Russians until they could mold their ownexperience. The most obvious model was theFrench Revolution. The parallel was welcomedby the Bolsheviks, who saw the glorious fest-ivals of the French as a model for their own.One of the first theater books to come off Sovietpresses was Julien Tiersot's Les fêtes et leschants de la révolution française, 24 and even in1920 Lunacharsky regretted that Soviet fêteshad "turned out to have less creative genius interms of organization and appeal to the massesthan the late eighteenth-century French [fêtes]had."25

One could disagree with Lunacharsky, howevercommendable his modesty. French festivals hadfollowed the inclination to allegory of their era.In November 1793, a Festival of Reason wascelebrated at the

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Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris; June 1794saw a magnificent Festival of the Supreme Be-ing. The latter festival, instigated by Robespi-erre, fired the imagination of future revolution-aries more than any other fête; it was both asharp attack on the church and a display of civicvirtues. Open skies and lush meadows embracedthe common people as they filed onto theChamps-de-Mars; encomiums were sung to di-vine harmony; children were offered to theheavens, not in a pagan blood sacrifice but as abaptism into life. An altarlike mountain erectedin the middle of the field inspired most (but notall) of society, which was united by a singleemotion at a single place and time. That Robes-pierre would be purged within a month and theFrench Revolution would descend into fratricidemade this moment all the more precious for fu-ture generations. Lunacharsky and otherBolsheviks knew the French festivals from re-spected peers: Rolland had described them in his

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Le théâtre du peuple, and the anarchist PrinceKropotkin dwelled on them at length in his His-tory of the French Revolution.

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The French Revolution was a beacon for theRussians, but in Marxist terms it was bourgeois,and Bolsheviks venerated it from a distance.The prerevolutionary writings of those Bolshev-iks concerned with art, such as Lunacharsky andFriche, express enthusiasm for mass theaterwithout mentioning the French. 26 Culturalpolitics made the French Revolution seem par-ticularly less attractive, because its heritage wasclaimed after the February Revolution by theProvisional Government. That body had, for in-stance, used the Marseillaise as its anthem, andits fêtes were inspired by the French. There wasa proposal to celebrate the burning of theLithuanian Castle, a political prison, in a holidaylike Bastille Day.27 A more ambitious plan, an-nounced in August 1917, proposed a "grandiosecarnival-spectacle honoring the epoch of theFrench Revolution to be organized in the Sum-mer Garden to aid Russian prisoners-of-war. . . .A prop city will be built depicting the Paris of

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that time. Actors will portray the artistic andtheatrical bohemia of the late eighteenth cen-tury."28 The projected director was Evreinovand the designer Iury Annenkov, who wouldcreate the grandest of the Bolshevik festivals in1920.

Based on the French example, mass festivalswere thought to be democratic, an assumptionnot unique to socialists. The theatrical worldalso saw open-air mass theater as a salvation.Theater had become exclusive; it had fled fromthe popular arena to intimate chambers access-ible only to the wealthy and had succumbed tofinancial pressures to ignore questions disturb-ing their relaxation. The Berlin director andimpresa-

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Figure 3.Circus arena-stage for a production of Macbeth in Petrograd, 1918 (Istoriia sovetskogo teatra,

Leningrad, 1933; image has been computer-enhanced).

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rio Max Reinhardt tried to revive the open stageearly in this century. He looked for inspirationto Greek tragedy and the medieval mystery play,where actors had addressed a broad audienceand spoken directly to its heart. Reinhardt es-chewed the subdued tones of bourgeois theaterfor a monumental theater of primitive but strongemotions. He was renowned for productions likeHugo von Hofmannsthal's Everyman (1911), acontemporary mystery play that he produced ina cathedral, and Oedipus Rex, which was per-formed in a circus arena. His Oedipus wasbrought to Petersburg's Cinizelli Circus in 1911,with the fabled Sandro Moissi in the starringrole.

Reinhardt's revolution was aesthetic, not politic-al. Still, Russians in 1918 found monumentaltheater apt for their own revolution. The poetMikhail Kuzmin noted that ''many types ofdrama have fallen to the wayside: psychologicaldrama, the theater of half-moods [i.e., Chek-hovian], plays written for a particular socialstratum, or comedies of mores and the salon. . . .Our time clearly calls for the tragic theater.'' 29The circus arena served better as the center oftheatrical life: "More than anywhere else, thechanges in the make-up of the audience are no-ticeable in the circus. . . . The corridors, buffetand auditorium of the circus are closest of all tothe camp of revolution."30

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In March 1918 Iury Iurev, lead actor of theAleksandrinsky Theater, began negotiationswith the Cinizellis to restage Reinhardt'sOedipus. The original sets remained intact inPetrograd; and Aleksei Granovsky, a Reinhardtdisciple just back from Berlin and familiar withhis master's production, was hired as director.31Negotiations were difficult: the arena wasalready let to Arthur Lurich, a popular wrestler,who wanted a part; but in the end the lease wassurrendered without conditions. Iurev took therole of Oedipus; Mgebrov was hired to playTiresias; Granovsky set the all-important chor-uses and mass scenes. Iurev was a tragic actor ofthe neoclassical school, and his delivery filledthe arena expanses. The play was a huge suc-cess, selling out its week-long run to an audi-ence of all social classes.

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Gorky and Fedor Chaliapin, the great operasinger, enlisted in Iurev's next project:Shakespeare's Macbeth. Again Granovsky wasto produce the tragedy in the Cinizelli Circus (adiagram of the stage is shown in Figure 3);Maria Andreeva was cast in the role of LadyMacbeth. Andreeva's assistance was essential:once a leading player in Stanislavsky's MoscowArt Theater, wife of Gorky, and now head ofPetrograd theaters, she possessed the talent toplay a difficult role and the political muscle (shewas close to Lenin and Lunacharsky) to ensurethe play

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would run. Its success rivaled that of Oedipus,and Iurev, Andreeva, Gorky, and Chaliapin de-cided to found a "tragic theater," to be housed ina new building designed specially for monu-mental productions. It would feature the classicrepertory so apt for revolutionary élan: Aes-chylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Schiller, andByron. The collaborators (who had playedMacbeth as a clash of good and evil) saw inthese playwrights a clarity of moral vision lack-ing in the prerevolutionary theater. The Revolu-tion was a time of great passion and striving,and only a monumental theatera truly masstheatercould meet its needs. Although they didnot build their theater (there were no funds dur-ing the Civil War), they did found the BolshoiDramatic Theater, which made the classic reper-tory one of the most popular of the time.

The Theater of the People

The mass-theater debate touched on ambiguitiesof great consequence after the Revolution. Thebelief that spectacles embodied the spirit of so-cialist revolution was common, but its rootswere tangled. Some, following Wagner, felt thatmass drama would, like the Greek drama, ex-press the nation's unified will; others consideredit an instrument of political struggle. When theOctober Revolution placed a party claiming torepresent the working class in power, the leadersfaced a dilemma: Should mass theater representthe workers in power or the people strugglingfor expression? Lunacharsky, representing thestate, assumed optimistically that both interestscould be served. 32 Rolland, whose Le théâtredu peuple had influenced his friend Lun-acharsky, saw people's theater as an educator.33Its task in a bourgeois society was to agitateagainst the status quo; under socialism, it wouldintroduce workers to progressive culture. Rol-land considered people's theater inherently

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progressive: popular fêtes had furthered theFrench Revolution; the popular theaters ofMaurice Pottecher and Louis Lumet were toolsof democratic mobilization; the Swiss populartheater instilled democratic virtues. It would beequally progressive under socialism.

Though innocent sounding, such assumptionsraised two issues central to Bolshevism: rela-tions between activist intellectuals and the la-boring classes they claimed to serve; and theprimacy of politics over culture in party activity.Items of hot debate after the failed revolution of1905, they had split the party and would alwayslurk behind the mass-

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theater discussion. Lenin and his followers, whoformed the core of the party, did not entirelytrust the popular classes to act in their own in-terests. Lenin molded the party as a vanguardand considered its first task revolution. Socialistculture was a dream of the future, a task of sec-ondary import during the initial phase of politic-al struggle. Lenin's opponent in the debate wasBogdanov, a fellow exile whose faction felt thatsocialist society was unthinkable without social-ist culture. Bogdanov stressed the vanguard'sduty to nurture a socialist consciousness in theworking class, which would allow it to realizeits own power and form a new worker state. Bo-gdanov did not deny the utility of political or-ganization, nor did he neglect the role of edu-cated activists; his merit was in balancing thisside of the revolutionary equation with popularinitiative and cultural consciousness.

In early October 1917, the ProvisionalGovernment's dying days, Bogdanov and otherculturalists (including Lunacharsky) foundedProletkult, an organization devoted to working-class culture. Born under a bourgeois govern-ment, Proletkult kept its autonomy from thestate after the Bolshevik coup. 34 The Proletkultboard pursued the dogma that socialist culturewould be proletarian and collective. Theater, aninherently collective art, was at the cutting edgeof its work, and Proletkult clubs throughoutRussia searched for a mass theater to express theneeds of the working class. Its most ardent ad-herent was Platon Kerzhentsev. A Bolshevikfrom 1904 and leader of the Proletkult TheaterSection, he had studied mass theater in English-speaking countries and Europe in his years ofexile.

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Though collective proletarian spectacles wereunknown, mass spectacles had been popular inthe West before the First World War, andKerzhentsev was familiar with them. There weretwo traditions in Europe and the United States.The first was a revival of Greek outdoor drama,part of a general neoclassicism.35 In California,for instance, Isadora Duncan was reviving Hel-lenic dance; the Bohemian Club was founded inthe woods near San Francisco; and Pasadena in-stituted the Rose Festival, which back then fea-tured not football but chariot races. The move-ment placed faith in the tonic of the open air.Outdoor theater was healthier physically and so-cially; its audience could commune with art andnature, undivided by the architecture of aristo-cratic and bourgeois theater. Russians carriedthe faith in open air into their revolution andheld to it despite a climate less benevolent thanthat of Athens or San Francisco.36

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The eastern seaboard of the United States wasthe site of mass specta-

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cles more directly presaging those of the Russi-ans. The tradition exemplified by PercyMacKaye (author of The Civic Theatre) was of amore rationalist bent than that of the WestCoast, which satisfied the Russians' didacticurge. As the title of MacKaye's book suggests, itwas a civic theater, based on the reintegration ofart into the life of the democratic community. 37Before the war, MacKaye and his associates or-ganized a number of "civic masques," orhistorical re-creations: in 1914, for instance, the150th anniversary of the founding of St. Louiswas marked by a pageant in which much of thecity participated. The participation of thepeople, who normally avoided theater and act-ing, was essential, for the goal of civic theaterwas "the conscious awakening of a people toself-government in the activities of its leis-ure."38 Such participation was an expression ofdemocracy, and though MacKaye's bourgeoisdemocracy was alien to the Russians, both

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considered mass spectacles an antidote to capit-alism.39

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Kerzhentsev was an eclectic, borrowing fromWagner and Bogdanov, but he was close toMacKaye's practicality. In a series of workspublished in 1918, Kerzhentsev established thetheoretical and practical foundations for muchof Proletkult's theater work.40 (Figure 4 showsthe cover for his most famous book.) Like otherProletkult theoreticians, Kerzhentsev treated artfrom the viewpoint of performance and insistedthat people's theater be not a theater for thepeople but a "'theater of the people,' i.e. basedon the creative work of the lower classes."41 Itwould "start from a desire to facilitate the fullartistic expression of the proletariat's 'I' in har-monious collective theatrical creativity."42 Nat-urally, creativity would not be matched by virtu-osity, but, as Kerzhentsev pointed out, "the taskof the proletarian theater is not to produce goodprofessional actors who will successfully per-form the plays of a socialist repertory, but togive an outlet to the creative artistic instinct of

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the broad masses"43 The instinct grew from abroader creative urge called samodeiatel'nost'(MacKaye's self-government).44 Mass spec-tacles fit the twin demands for self-governmentand collectivity, and offered an aesthetic equi-valent to the revolution in politics.

Many Bolsheviks, Lenin in particular, were dis-tressed by Proletkult's flair for independence.Organizers of official celebrations did their ut-most to keep Proletkult away. Yet in the earlyyears of the Revolution, there was often no al-ternative. On May Day 1918 most theaters couldnot respond to the holiday appropriately. Privatetheaters were not yet under state control; publictheatersthat is, the former imperial theatershadonly reluctantly acquiesced to new administra-tions. The

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Figure 4.Cover of Kerzhentsev's Creative Theater

(P. Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr, Moscow, 1923).

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only theater in Petrograd with both a stage andan enthusiasm for the Revolution belonged toProletkult. In the spring of 1918, state expropri-ation had brought the columned Assembly ofNobles into Proletkult hands, and a ceremonialopening of the oxymoronic Proletkult Palacewas scheduled for May Day.

The evening was graced by the work of the newtheater studio, 200 students of both sexes led byPavel Bessalko, Mgebrov, and Victoria Chekan.Bessalko was a "proletarian poet," a writer ofverse on the proletariat and its revolution. Hewas a graduate of the Paris exile, where he hadmet the other future founders of Proletkult: Bog-danov, Lunacharsky, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky,and Fedor Kalinin. Mgebrov and Chekan cameto Proletkult from different backgrounds.Mgebrov, a graduate of the tsarist Military Ca-det School, was a talented and nomadic actor.Early in the century, he wandered from the Mo-scow Art Theater to the Theater of Vera Komis-sarzhevskaia and then, in 1911, to Evreinov'sAncient Theater, where he met Chekan. A cycleof seventeenth-century Spanish dramas was pro-duced that year, and Chekan played Laurenciain Lope de Vega's Fuente ovejuna. She playedthe peasant girl with a remarkable vitalityhertrademarkand years later Mgebrov would

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remember her "possessing a rare, completelySpanish temperament. . . . Some nights shetossed people about the stage like balls, so theyfell into the orchestra pit and broke the musi-cians' instruments. And yet she was a frail wo-man." 45 Like Chekan, Mgebrov favored a ro-mantic idealism that flourished during the Re-volution. A beloved role was the hero of PedroCalderón's The Purgatory of St. Patrick. Hisgaunt features and pathetic declamation lentthemselves to the role of prophet (like Tiresias)or martyr; the die-hard typecasters Meyerholdand Eisenstein found him ideal for the roles ofthe Prophet in Emile Verhaeren's Les aubes(Meyerhold's 1920 reworking) and ArchbishopPimen in Eisenstein's Aleksandr Nevsky.

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Mgebrov and Chekan left professional theater inthe spring of 1917 to direct an after-hours theat-er in Petrograd's Baltic Factory. They were des-ignated delegates by their club when Proletkultwas organized in October, and when the Petro-grad branch opened in March 1918, they be-came theater instructors at Lunacharsky's insist-ence.46 Mgebrov's enthusiasm for the FebruaryRevolutionhe had organized the Liberty BondFestivalwas not held against him, and he trans-ferred his faith to the new revolution. Mgebrov,like Wagner, saw revolution less as a politicalthan as a spiritual movement and felt the "rise ofcreative

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powers hidden in man's collective consciousnessfrom ancient times." 47 With many Proletkultleaders, he shared a style: cosmic and ecstatic.

Although most of the students shared his enthu-siasm, none had stage experience; given amonth to mount a program, Mgebrov wiselystarted with the basics. He rejected the standardrepertory because few authors spoke sympathet-ically of workers' lives. As Kerzhentsev said:"The repertory situation is abominable.European literature has in essence no repertoryfor the proletarian theater. The number of au-thors and works that reflect the aspirations andspiritual needs of the proletariat is extraordinar-ily thin. Socialist plays can be counted not bythe tens, but by the ones. And the majority ofthose are not on a high artistic level."48

Even they were beyond the range of Mgebrov'sstudents, who were amateurs and more amateurthan most. Rather than a script they usedsomething called instsenirovka, a calque of theGerman inszenierung: an adaptation of nondra-matic material, usually prose, to the stage. Thetrick was not new; the Moscow Art Theater hadused it in the 1910s, when Chekhov was nolonger around, and two of its adaptations,Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth andDostoevsky's The Possessed, were great suc-cesses. When scripts are not available, adapta-tion becomes a useful approach. The techniquewould help later festival directors transform theRevolution itself into theater. Proletkult chosethe verse of Aleksei Gastev, a leading proletari-an poet, for dramatic material. Gastev's recentlypublished Poetry of the Workers' Hammer wasenjoying great popularity. Although the poetryin many respects was original, the influence ofWalt Whitman was evident in the powerful

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rhythm, propelling lines across the page, and inthe imagery of cosmic harmony. In fact,Mgebrov's next project was Whitman. Both po-ets profited from declamation.

None of the young students was trained to readverse, which prompted a decision that the read-ing be collective.49 The motive was purely prac-tical, but the result was lauded by Proletkult the-orists. Collective declamation was just reachingthe apex of popularity; a Professor Serezhnikovwould soon found the Proletarian Studio of De-clamation.50 Collective declamation was simple;it allowed many students to participate and gavethem a first taste of art, an experience that,judging by the proliferation of studios in thenext five years, did not go to waste.

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The May Day 1918 production of Gastev's WeGrow Out of Iron provides an illustration of theProletkult method. The mise en scène bore astriking resemblance to the new Proletkult em-blem unveiled for that

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morning's procession. As the curtain rose,"wheels, gears and flywheels began to spin, andfrom this primeval chaos rose the symbolic fig-ure of a worker representing the full significanceof the collective and the power based on over-coming the elements through the will to free-dom. The bared muscles of arms, an intent pose,a sickle, a hammer and anvil, a hammer strokefrozen in mid-air . . . all this at the same time an-imated by a truly fiery inspiration and, most im-portant, love and faith." 51

Mgebrov sought harmony; he chose Gastev'spoem to "confirm the full, absolutely harmonicmastery of life by the human collective, and seethe possibility of such mastery in continuity ofmotion."52 Rhythm provided the unifying im-pulse. Lines were broken up into phrases,words, and syllables, then distributed among thechorus. As the reading progressed, individual re-citations were united into a single ecstatic chor-us. In Mgebrov's words:

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Suddenly the whistles began . . . At first separatefigures of girls and workers rose to its summonsas if against a background of dawn and the risingsun. They began with a joyous exchange ofshouts that merged with the call of the factorywhistles. Then voices, source unknown, respon-ded to a singing and ringing summons drawingnearer and nearer. The summons swelled andhundreds of voices merged into it. With each ad-dition they became more intoxicated. In the end,united, they were no longer distinct from eachother and merged into a song created by a singleimpulse.53

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The audience received the reading enthusiastic-ally. Some reviewers and all of Proletkult's fu-ture critics measured it against the pretension ofProletkult's leaders (Bessalko among them) thatthey were creating a new culture. By that stand-ard it was a failure. But there is no reason toburden the students with the pretensions of oth-ers; they were amateurs, and applying profes-sional standards to them would be unfair. In pro-fessional theater only the show, the finishedproduct presented to an audience of strangers, isimportant; for amateurs, who usually performfor an audience of like people, production is im-portant as a process of participation and educa-tion. Something similar should be kept in mindwith festivals, which are created for both thespectator and the participant, who are notwholly differentiated. The Proletkult perform-ance belonged more to festivity than to thetheater; it was a ritual celebrationstylized, meas-ured, a canvas of ideas and not details. It was a

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proletarian show for a worker audience. Its pe-culiar stylistics were absorbed by future festivalspectacles.

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Festivals of a One-Minded People

The European progressive tradition inspired twoapproaches to mass drama that differed sharplyin defining the "people" of people's theater. Thetrend followed by Kerzhentsev saw people asthe oppressed masses struggling against thebourgeoisie. People's theater thrived in a dividedsociety. The second viewpoint understood thepeople to be a homogeneous and essentially un-changing mass. Both traditions could be tracedto the intoxicating summer of 1848, progenitorof Marx, but also of Wagner and his Art and Re-volution and Art-Work of the Future. 54 Theyoung Wagner shared his generation's infatu-ation with revolution; but Wagner's vision of re-volution was uniquely aesthetic. Revolution wasnot an inspiration for art, it was an equivalent;both expressed the popular will, both harnessedits chaotic powers. Wagner's democratic art de-manded a merging of the artist's will with thepeople; the historical necessity they embodiedwould become manifest through the artist's

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obedient hand. Wagner's ideas were an eternaltemptation to Bolshevik materialists; Lun-acharsky, for instance, saw mass drama as a"moment of orgiastic exultation,"55 a recoveryof humanity's primeval oneness.

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Greek tragedy, the unity of unities, was the pre-cedent for Wagner's drama, motivated by an oddanalogy drawn first by the Reverend Johann vonHerder: the Hellenes and the people (Volk).Both represented the organic ideal, societies thatWagner, following Ludwig Feuerbach, claimedlive in "necessity," where "life is a true mirror ofnature."56 Vital harmony was the alleged virtueof both, and "intellect with all its arrogant di-vorce from life,"57 the culprit of decline. Wagn-er also blamed capitalism for the decay of mod-ern society and theater. His aesthetic revolutionaimed to reunite both society and the arts. Thetragic theater would combine the arts of thepoet, the musician, and the dancer, and the tra-gic poet would find "the noblest part of his ownnature united with the noblest characteristics ofthe whole nation."58

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The older Wagner's conservatism was evidenteven in the young radical. He believed thatGreek art was concordant not only with societybut with the state; it "was conservative, becauseit was a worthy and adequate expression of thepublic conscience." But in Wagner's time, whichlacked Hellenic harmony, "true art is revolution-ary, because its very existence is opposed to theruling spirit of the community."59 With

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the coming of the new society it would be, inWagner's paradoxical phrase, "conservativeanew." 60

Wagner opened a rich vein for socialism; he es-tablished a line of thought that grafted Germanideas onto a predominantly French, English, andrationalistic tradition. Wagner's artwork of thefuture belonged to a complex of ideas thatpreached revolution but was strongly retrospect-ive. His sense of history was cyclical; revolutionculminated a process that shattered an originalunity only to reinstate it in finer form.

The mixture of radicalism and conservatism,looking forward and looking backward, was notnew; the French revolutionaries had claimedRousseau as a forefather. Rousseau's ideal wasrural and retrograde, but its sanction of demo-cracy had great appeal in 1789. Rousseau wasthe first modern enthusiast of mass spectacles.His belief that they were vehicles of nationalunification was accepted by French revolution-aries and then socialists, and given egalitarianovertones. In the Letter to M. D'Alembert on theSpectacles (1758) and Consideration of theGovernment of Poland and Its Reform (1772),Rousseau saw spectacles as the people's welfareand as bringing about their unity. They were amodela microcosmof harmonious democracy:"Plant a stake crowned with flowers in themiddle of the square; gather the people togetherthere, and you will have a festival. Do better yet;let the spectators become an entertainment tothemselves; make them actors themselves; do it

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so that each sees and loves himself in the othersso that all will be united."61 Rousseau inspiredthe French revolutionaries; Robespierre de-veloped a particular enthusiasm for fêtes. Butthe revolutionaries translated Rousseau's ideasinto their own terms. It is difficult to imaginehim approving of the Festival of Reason.

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There were differences between Wagner andRousseau. Wagner provided a historical basisfor the ideal; and his modern vocabulary wasmore digestible than Rousseau's for the social-ists. But in one respect Rousseau exerted moreinfluence. Although Wagner's artwork was "col-lective," it was also Apollonian. Translated intosocial terms, this meant that "art's life force" isprovided by the people, but it is expressed by asingle poet. Rousseau's fêtes were an art of andby the people. Both thinkers were influential inRussia, but there is more Rousseau than Wagnerin Friche's article: "In socialist society the stagewill once again merge with the audience, andtheatrical spectacles with their division of spec-tator and actor will yield to collective fêtes, ce-remonial processions, mass choruses."62

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The ideology of socialism was systematic, butits broader cultural tradition was a muddle. Theconfusion was greatest where Wagner enteredthe picture. Wagner of the socialist tradition wasnot the historical Wagner, who preferred socialintegration to dialectical struggle. His Art-Workof the Future was an inspiring vision of socialistmass theater, but his conservatism was unpalat-able to revolutionaries, so its aesthetic ideal wasgrafted onto another socialist tradition. The re-cipient of the graft was Friedrich Engels. In Ori-gin of the Family, Private Property and theState, Engels argues that primeval society wasbased on the genes, a family-centered system hethought bore the seeds of communism: a lack ofprivate property and class division, an equal dis-tribution of labor and its fruits, and the com-munal ownership of the means of labor. Engelslooked back for his vision of the future. ''Demo-cracy in government, brotherhood in society,equality in rights and privileges, and universal

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education, foreshadow the next higher plane ofsociety to which experience, intelligence andknowledge are steadily tending. It will be a re-vival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equalityand fraternity of the ancient gentes.'' 63

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Engels's work, a reiteration of principles in TheGerman Ideology, his 1846 collaboration withMarx, legitimized the harmonic ideal for social-ists. Ideals travel through a tradition in clusters;as the harmonic ideal passed from Engels to theRussians, the Wagnerian artwork of the futuretraveled with it and surfaced in unexpectedplaces. Chernyshevsky speculated that the finalstage of socialism would be close to primitivesocialism, as did Bogdanov.64 Bogdanov's vis-ion of communism, as expressed in the utopiannovel Red Star, foresaw that labor would nolonger be split by specialization; people wouldnot be divided by class; government would notseparate the ruler from the ruled; and philosophywould not differentiate the material from theideal. Art would be characterized by "extremesimplicity and thematic unity." The art of trans-itional epochs was discordant; but socialism's fi-nal stage would feature a monumental art in-spired by the return to harmony.65 Bogdanov

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never cited Wagner, but Lunacharsky, whoshared his ideals, saw Wagner as gatekeeper forthe theater of the future before the Revolutionand throughout his stewardship of Narkom-pros.66

The Russians' admiration for Greek drama andtheir willful misconceptions about the societythat engendered it placed them squarely in thetradition of Winckelmann, Herder, Hölderlin,Schiller, and Hegela tradition continued byWagner and the young Marx. Each of thesethinkers considered the Hellenes a model for thefuture, a society free of

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modern life's great schisms: work and play,theater and church, government and governed,religion and philosophy. Nadezhda Krupskaiacould in all seriousness call Soviet Russia "thenew Athens" because probourgeois wholenesswas a model for postbourgeois socialism. 67

The latest and most compelling version of Hel-lenic culture available to turn-of-the-century in-tellectuals was Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.Wagner's theater was a temple where art formsand social classes could be reunited; Nietz-schean tragedy was a synthesis of two poles ofexistence, the Dionysian and the Apollonian,with no middle ground. Dionysus was the ele-mental, undifferentiated experience poweringtragedy; Apollo, the artistic consciousness thatrises above chaos and crystalizes it in a sereneartistic dream. Associating Nietzsche with so-cialism was a feat of imaginative reading; never-theless, grafted to the modified Wagnerian tradi-tion, Nietzsche became more amenable to so-cialists. Wagnerian drama was the product of asociety in repose; Nietzschean tragedy arosefrom chaotic popular emotions. Its home wasnot Pericles's marble city, as Wagner seems tohave thought, but the muddied byways of lowerAthens: a place that bred upheaval. A creative

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socialist armed with excerpts from the Birth ofTragedy could trace an analogy between the tra-gic artist and the revolutionary: both were im-bued with the demotic spirit, yet possessed aclarity of vision beyond that of the commoncrowd. The artist and the revolutionary stood onthe threshold of two worlds: the elite and thedemos, the past and the future. They could alsosee, as many did in 191720, an analogy betweenfestivalstragic or otherwiseand revolution.

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If Lunacharsky was profoundly (and selectively)moved by Nietzsche, the transmission of Wagn-er and Nietzsche to the Revolution was mostclearly the work of the symbolist ViacheslavIvanov.68 Ecstatic rites of the demotic cult ofDionysus gave birth to tragedy; Ivanov sawtheater's only hope in returning to this "demo-cratism." He wanted to take tragedy directlyback to its Dionysian rootswithout the socialists'historicism. Dionysian rites were the answer tocontemporary social problems, for they unitedthe entire people in ecstatic worship, wherefrenzy obscured class distinctions. Ivanov founda kindred spirit in Aleksandr Scriabin, composerof Divine Poem (1903), The Poem of Ecstasy(1908), and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire(1910). Scriabin saw art as a holiday, the anti-thesis of everyday life, in which art and lifemerge into one.69 His final, uncompleted projectwas the ambitious Mystery, a fusion of

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sacrament and art. Mystery was to be a massiveperformance without spectators, only

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participants. Music, dance, poetry, a light show,and even perfumes were incorporated into thescore. Its opening chords were to be struck inthe Tibetan Himalayas, continue way over toEngland, and culminate in a moment of mysticunion on the banks of the Ganges. 70 Mysterywould be an expression of a single, universaltruth, a synthesis of music, poetry, dance, andlight.

Ivanov's retrospective ideal could be given rad-ical political implications; drama was, like re-volution, a threshold state. It merged life and art,actor and audience, stage and theater, and over-came Marx's despised differentiation. Criticallyspeaking, it also confused dramatic art and ritu-al, both covered by the catchall term deistvo.Ivanov's retrospective program led him to sug-gest "reforms" strikingly similar to The Theaterof the Future (Die Schaubühne der Zukunft,1906) of Munich director Georg Fuchs. In an-cient rituals worshipped and worshipper, priestand sacrifice became one: "The spectator mustbecome a do-er, a participant in the drama. Thecrowd of spectators must merge into a choralbody, like the mystic commune of the ancient'orgies' and 'mysteries.'"71 If the actors and spec-tators were to merge, the theater would have tobe rebuilt; the footlights and proscenium archsegregating participants of the rite would haveto disappear.

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Theater's social force was predicated on its com-munality. The main actor in Ivanov's deistvo, asin later Reinhardt and Proletkult productions,was the chorus. It played two roles: "the minorchorus, tied directly to the action . . . and a chor-us symbolizing the entire community(obshchina), which can be increased at will bynew participantsa chorus, hence, that is mani-fold and inserts itself into the action only at mo-ments of the highest ascent and full liberation ofDionysian energies."72 Insertion into the actionwas a curious notion that later Soviet critics anddirectors would adopt. It implied a bondbetween stage and auditorium that could trans-form a theatrical event into a social event. Thiswas Ivanov's "mystery," "drama transformed in-to a real event,"73 which identified the choralchant (created by the dramatic poet) with thevox populi.

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Communal drama was possible only in an "or-ganic age," when art was pannational(vsenarodnyi).74 Here was the source of an un-fortunate corollary: art flourishes best under un-animity. Organic art and society spring from asingle source, a single body of myth. Embodiedby the tragic chorus and expressed in its song,myth is "the perceptible signaling of communal[sobornyia religious term] one-mindedness and

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unity of spirit, a manifest testament to the realtie binding differentiated consciousness into aliving whole." 75 Myth speaks for the people;artists, engaged in Platonic mythopoeia(mifotvorchestvo), embody the myth in their cre-ations. Artists are assigned a tremendous role insocial renaissance: apprehending the myths in-herent in God's universe and communicatingthem to the people, they provide a medium fornational unification. Poets are, in a phrase thatwould echo terribly in Stalin's mouth, respons-ible for "the organization of the national soul."76

Ivanov's ideas shared certain profound contra-dictions with those of socialists. He encouragedself-creativity in the demos, yet channeled it inprescribed ways. There was no provision for adivergence from the leader's guiding vision. IfIvanov's phrase was perverted by Stalin, itreached him through other socialists: Bogdanov,Lunacharsky, and Gorky. Ivanov spoke of myth-opoeia in its Platonic sense, as recollection; so-cialists used the calque, an equivalent of theEnglish "mythmaking," in another sense, as adynamic and creative principle. They literallywanted to make myths to spur the working classto action.77 Lunacharsky said (following Ge-orges Sorel), "The leading class of an economic-ally flourishing society is the carrier of the mostvital, strong and bright ideal."78 The "God-builders" (Gorky's phrase) saw consciousness asthe molder of reality. Ideology was a motor ofconsciousness; and mythology, which translatedideology into art (art was presumably a

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transparent medium), became a tool of socialchange. Though symbolists and Bolshevikswould seem to have had little in common, theymet every Wednesday evening at Ivanov's"Tower'' apartment; Lunacharsky contributed anarticle to the symbolist anthology Teatr: Knigao novom teatre (Theater: A Book about the NewTheater) (1908); and when the symbolists or-ganized Torches (Fakely) in 1905 to pursuedreams of a mythmaking theater, one of thegroup's enthusiasts was Gorky.79

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The prerevolutionary Bolsheviks' experiencewith public manifestations was limited to streetdemonstrations, particularly May Day marchesthat were often suppressed. The October Re-volution brought them power, and power in theRussian tradition was expressed through elabor-ate rituals and celebrations. The Bolsheviks hadfew models to fall back on, but there was avail-able a tangled tradition of state pomp, theatricalart, and socialist philosophy that party leaderscould selectively exploit for their own festivals.Bolsheviks concerned with the arts, particularlyLunacharsky, were subject to diverse and oftencontradictory influences. Each influence helpedshape the festivals, but this often

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indiscriminate assimilation led to deep tension.Mass drama was considered an expression ofpopular will; but many revolutionaries also be-lieved that the popular will should be unanimousand correspond to the will of the Revolution(and its leaders). It was an ambiguity inherent tofestivity itself, regardless of its social applica-tions, and one that would play itself out over thenext several years.

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TwoRevolution and FestivityAll human affairs have two opposite aspects; so thatwhat at first glance seems to be death, on closer in-spection is seen to be life, and life on the contrary isseen to be death. The same is true of what is appar-ently beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, shameful andglorious, learned and ignorant, noble and base, joyousand sad, friendly and inimical, healthful and harmful.In short, you find all things suddenly reversed.Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

Tsarist celebrations were traditionally composedof two elements: a dynastic observancea corona-tion or anniversaryand popular entertainment,with fairground shows, rides, and plenty of foodand drink. Solemnity and merriment stood sideby side. Bolshevik festivals evolved into a simil-ar pattern by late 1918. Holiday mornings weremarked by long demonstrations, eulogies, andspeeches. Evenings, if funding was forthcomingfrom war-pressed budgets, featured fireworks,carnival games, sometimes even burnt effigies.For citizens born before the Great War, celebra-tions seemed incomplete without both elements.

Voronezh celebrated the first anniversary of theRevolution on November 7, 1918, with a day-long affair. It began with a "Eulogy of theRevolution":

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The stage showed a craggy locale. As the curtainrose there was complete darkness on stage. Sud-denly the sacrificial altar located on a platformcenter-

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stage was illuminated. A chorus dressed in Greektunics was distributed along the base of the plat-form. The show opened with a musical introduc-tion. Then the chorus began to sing, explaining insong the hard life of the oppressed people. Thenthe leader appeared near the altar, and betweenhim and the chorus a dialogue on the power andoppressiveness of Capital began. All this was ac-companied by music and ballet numbers. Thedialogue ended. A tremole [sic] in the orchestra,fanfares thunder. The altar burned brighter andDestiny [female in Russian] appeared, approvingthe people. A fugue in the orchestra. Three eldersappeared, illuminated by violet reflectors, andthree old women. The old women were terrifiedby the possibility of revolution, and tried to con-vince the people not to think of it. In reply, thechorus sang of growing rebellion and the neces-sity of punishing capitalistsperpetrators of thewar and the people's hardship. Evil Fate [male inRussian] appeared with his companions to turbu-lent and triumphant music, rejoicing at the evilhe brings people. Destiny supported the people'sspirit, which was conveyed by appropriate music.Seven old women appeared, warning the people

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of their mistake. A conversation was struck upbetween the chorus and Destiny. The mood ofthe people kept rising. Unexpectedly Revolution[female] appeared with her companions. Thedance of the victory of Revolution was danced.Evil Fate and the old women disappeared. Thechorus sang of its readiness to build the futureand glorified the Revolution. Children entered,singing joyful songs and promising to follow intheir fathers' footsteps. Total ecstasy. 1

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The revolution's bloodier side was celebratedthe same night in Voronezh with The Burning ofthe Hydra of Counterrevolution, inspired by aFrench revolutionary holiday described by Tier-sot.2 A certain Faccioli, visiting town with theCinizelli Circus, took upon himself constructionof the hydra, an art learned in the carnivals ofhis native Italy. A wire carcass was coveredwith bast and painted green, and a tail of springywire was attached. The tail bobbed up and downin unison with the creature's three heads, whichfeatured glistening green eyes and were toppedwith speaking platforms. The entire effigy wassixty meters long, and it was accompaniedthrough the streets by a mounted guard of forty.An orator atop the hydra's head summonedpeople to the central square; his call clashedwith the laments of 200 "counterrevolutionaries"towed alongside in cages. The procession wasgreeted in the square by a panel of judges thatpronounced a death sentence on the unfortunate

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monster. Chopped into four sections and dousedwith kerosene, it was burned; the burning wascelebrated with readings from the verse of pro-letarian poets and Whitman, and it was followedby dancing and fireworks.

Clearly, Bolshevik festivals had many forms.The ideology that inspired the Revolution wasoften a distant echo; when it was featured, it

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was sometimes distorted. There are a number ofexplanations. Local officials were often unin-formed about the policies and writings of centralparty leaders; experts hired to design the fest-ivals were rarely Bolsheviks; and dry ideologycould seem tedious to the populace. A moresubtle and fundamental cause was the origin andshape of festivity itself. Festivity has an ancientpedigree as both a public forum and an artisticmedium. Though festivals seemed democratic tomany revolutionaries, the tradition of celebra-tion inherited from Russian culture and from theWest was highly ambiguous. When the Bolshev-iks celebrated their new holidays, they entered adialogue with that tradition.

Examining the role of public celebration in theRussian Revolution begs the question of howfestivals projected the party's program. In theprevious chapter, the Russian and Western tradi-tions were examined. Now the medium itselfwill be studied. What is festivity and what areits attributes; what is its structure and how doesit mold what is celebrated? What parts of theRevolution were most suited to celebration;what parts were not; how was history reenacted?

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Of parallel import is the kinship between festiv-ity and revolution, which was perceived thenand has been again many times since. Leninhimself claimed that "revolutions are festivals ofthe oppressed and the exploited. At no othertime are the people in a position to come for-ward so actively as creators of a new social or-der as at a time of revolution. At such times thepeople are capable of performing miracles." 3He expressed the giddy and transient exultationfelt at moments of abrupt change, when a newworld seems possible, and the old has yet to re-surface. There was a another metaphor beneaththe phrase, which became evident during theRevolution. Festivity thrives on extremes; it po-larizes the world socially, morally, and aesthet-ically. The experience of revolution has much incommon with festivity; both divide the world in-to clear and discrete camps, and both merge per-sonal and collective experience. Festive

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expression, in fact, can give the revolutionaryexperience a clarity it might otherwise lack.

A final point that bears consideration and shouldshed light on the above questions is the Russiantheater world's enthusiasm for revolutionary cel-ebrations. Bolshevik festivals were not the cre-ation of party workers, who were often inattent-ive sponsors; they were directed and decoratedby artists, many of whom were exploring festiveculture fifteen years before the Revolution.Turn-of-the-century artistic currents had a pro-found impact on Bolshevik celebration becauseof the formative influence of directors such asMeyerhold and Evreinov, who either

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directed the festivals or mentored the directors.Some artists saw theater as a powerful tool ofrevolution, but others apathetic to the Revolu-tion saw it as an opportunity to realize theirartistic ambitions. Their work, and particularlythe collaboration of Meyerhold and VladimirMayakovsky on Mystery-Bouffe, exemplifiedthe festivalization of culture that first foreshad-owed and then distinguished Bolshevikfestivals.

The Forms of Festivity

Celebration has performed a unique function inhuman culture. Societies have traditionally re-served special places and times for the celebra-tion of their fundamental beliefs. Prehistoricman retreated into caves to worship the gods;the priestly caste in Pharaonic Egypt segregateditself in temples, holy ground inaccessible to thelaity; medieval monks walled themselves offfrom the squalid cities of Europe. Guardianshipof space and time was an ecclesiastical prerogat-ive: Egyptian priests scanned the heavens forsigns of the celestial order; monks created thefirst daily schedules to chart the pattern of theirprayers.

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As Mona Ozouf notes in regard to the FrenchRevolution, civic festivals were used to manipu-late the value of space and time in moderntimes. 4 Revolutionaries inherited the OldRegime's civic spaces, which reflected its hier-archy of values: central squares housed monu-ments to the upholders of autocracy; the nobilitylived behind walls along the finest avenues.Festivals reshuffled the urban hierarchy by se-lecting new routes to be taken through the city,new places to be honored, and new spaces to bedeclared sacred. Space itself acquired newmeaning. Revolutionaries spurned dusty urbansquares for sprawling parks whose opennessmodeled egalitarian society and where fête par-ticipants were not divided by class or enclosedin the walls of authority. Time was reset insidethe festive circle to show the revolution, andthose moments in it that organizers chose to em-phasize, as a new beginning to history.

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Several aspects of festivals recommended themto revolutionaries. Time and space could be dis-integrated in a festival and then reintegrated. Afestival is a recollection, a temporary transcend-ence of time and space that links past and future.Ideally, it refers back to an experience commonto all participants and evokes a time of unity.Participants can leave the conflicts of thepresent behind and return to a common origin inthe past. The past is selected and organized tomeet the needs

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of the present; and during the celebration themythicized past becomes real. Society experi-ences moments of harmony and order that allowit to function as an entity under the revolution-ary party's aegis once the holiday has lapsed.

Robespierre was inspired most by the power offestivals to sway minds, as were the Bolsheviksand many other future revolutionaries. The en-thusiasm was founded on a perceived corres-pondence between festivity and society thatproved unfounded. The error has been shared bythinkers ancient and modern, from the left andright of the political spectrum, and it informs in-fluential contemporary theories. In festive spaceand time, Ozouf sees a model of open society;Mircea Eliade, a hierarchy of sacred space andtime; and Mikhail Bakhtin, a temporary utopiaof demotic power. 5 Yet function does not al-ways follow form. Autocracies have sponsoredcarnivals; democracies and revolutions havepromoted hierarchical rituals. The forms of cel-ebration exist apart from the purposes they serveand the meanings society attributes to them. Afestival is festive not because of the ideas orevents it celebrates, not because of its socialfunction or the rank of its celebrants, but

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because it is a special, separate time and place.To be festive is to stand apart from the quotidi-an; the festival aesthetic is festive only if it isdistinct from the everyday.

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The sponsors of revolutionary celebrations as-sumed that revolution would transform festivityand that any celebration of revolution would benecessarily revolutionary. In practice, however,the effect was reversed: when the October Re-volution was celebrated, it was festivalized. Astatic historical event was re-created, and duringthe process it assumed the forms of celebration.The misconception was compounded by thesponsors' assumption that festive art was a real-isticthat is, transparentdepicter of ideas. Whenthe Bolsheviks hired artists to arrange festivals,they assumed that the medium would match themessage. This was an unwise assumption, re-gardless of the artists' intent. Each age, eachschool of art has its own principles of selectionand reassembly independent of the subject mat-ter: the French Revolution in its bloodiest daysprojected an epic calm from the neoclassicalcanvases of David. Politicians could sponsor afestival; ideologists could determine what

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should be said; but artists were the medium oftransmission.

This chapter will examine the revolutionaryfestivals as a medium. In their missionary zeal,the Bolsheviks intended them as a school of so-cialist ideas. Yet the messages invested andthose transmitted were not

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always the same. Festivity has a shape all itsown that is common to the celebrations of re-volutions and autocracies and must be con-sidered as part of the festival's social impact.Along with festive form, Bolshevik celebrationswere shaped by the prerevolutionary artistic cur-rents that predisposed artists to collaborate onfestivals. Many people of the theater worked instyles eminently suited to festive celebration.Prerevolutionary society offered few opportunit-ies to exploit that potential, but when the Octo-ber Revolution made festivals a medium of pub-lic importance, the artists were ready, and theyimported their aesthetic programs into theBolsheviks' festivals. They helped make revolu-tionary festivals brilliant expressions of theirtime and shaped the Revolution as they celeb-rated it.

Festive Time and Space as Continuity

Public festivities help a political party claim le-gitimacy by occupying the city center (the seatof political power), decorating it with partisansymbols, and filling it with supporters. The usesof celebration were evident in prerevolutionaryRussia. The political opposition used demon-strations to claim a voice in national affairs, andthe autocracy defended its monopoly on powerby banning them. Bolsheviks participated in il-legal May Day marches, and their newspaperPravda encouraged workers to do likewise. Theholiday, which commemorated the slaughter ofChicago workers in the 1886 Haymarket Riot,had great symbolic power, but its primary pur-pose was to show the strength of semilegal andillegal political organizations and spotlight theregime's crumbling foundations.

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Festivity can project another type of legitimacythat, though absent from earlier demonstrations,gained importance after the Bolsheviks hadtaken power. This is a monumental legitimacy-noting the roots of ''monument" in memorythatlinks a party to the past. Festivals, the monu-ments, commemorate the past in ways that exaltit and emphasize the proper connections to thepresent.

Eliade describes a cosmic sense of history inwhich actions are judged legitimate, and thusreal, only inasmuch as they repeat "eternal"mythic patterns. 6 Time and space seem to be anundifferentiated, unoriented mass punctuated by"hierophanies," points of legitimate, sacredactivity fundamental to the social order. Cosmictime recognizes real moments,

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when myth is repeated, and nonreal, insignific-ant moments when it is absent. A festival sus-pends the everyday experience of time andspace and joins distant events across the historicabyss. The immediate and tangible are defied,physical and temporal juxtaposition is declaredcoincidental. Participants are transformed intotheir historical ancestors and reenact momentsthat laid the foundations of the present. The pastis retold to reflect the future it created, and thepresent is legitimized by animating the pastwithin it.

Legitimacy claimed through an eternal pastwould seem alien to revolutionaries, whose fore-most goal is to break history's repetitive cycle.Yet revolution itself was not new with theBolsheviks, and Lenin and his comrades felt akinship to all who had once rejected the statusquo. They understood their historical missionthrough a mythic frame in which their move-ment was a lone island in an ocean of the bour-geoisie, linked with similar islands by symbolicbridges across time and space. When they nar-rated history in the mythic frame, the Bolshev-iks did not follow the tsars or the ProvisionalGovernment, they merely occupied the timeafter; they followed the French Revolution, theParis Commune, and other great rebellions.

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There was abundant cause for the Bolsheviks toretell revolutionary history in 1918. Though theparty held the organs of power, it had never es-tablished its legitimacy with much of the popu-lation, nor could it claim exclusive rights to therevolutionary tradition. Other leftist parties hadstrong followings, and their ideologies and his-tories in the underground qualified them no lessthan the Bolsheviks for leadership of a popularuprising. It was eminently possible in 1918 toconsider the Bolshevik coup a historical anom-aly, a stroke of chance, whereas to claim legit-imacy the party needed to demonstrate the inev-itability of the Revolution and the sole right tobe its initiators.

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Monuments could forward this claim. They aremarked by an extended sense of time and space,which is suggested by a stability and durabilityof form. Such a style was demanded by a re-viewer in the provincial city of Saratov in 1918who asked for revolutionary art distinguished by"harmony of form, the connected equilibrium ofseparate parts that defines true art"and that alsolends cultural values the veneer of eternal truths.7 Monuments express a search for the universalin the parochial, the permanent in the temporary.They depict those moments when ideals becomemanifest in human affairs: the October Revolu-tion could be seen as a hammer and sickle des-cending from the heavens over Smolny, as in V.Fidman's poster (Figure 5).8 Monumental

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Figure 5.V. Fidman, Smolny, engraving

(A. A. Sidorov, Russkaia grafika za gody revoliutsii, Moscow, 1923).

art idealizes by simplification and amplification. Contour be-comes line, shading color: the visible parts of a greater whole.Malevich noted during the Revolution: "Monuments representsystems of perfect stamps recommended for life. In fact the rep-resentation of a man in a monument is not the representation ofa portrait as it is usually understood. It is rather the presentationof a system or plan which is represented by the individuality initself." 9 A similar impulse was manifest in the revolutionarytheater as well as in statuary. Certainly it explains the otherwiseanomalous popularity of medieval mystery plays.

The medieval spirit represented by mystery plays was never en-tirely alien to socialists; one need only remember the chivalricromances of William Morris, the utopian socialist. It appealedto other artists as well. Wagner used medieval legends for hisoperatic cycles; Reinhardt considered the Everyman mystery ex-emplary monumentalism; Ivanov saw mystery as the summit oftheater. Even Nikolai Punin, a futurist critic,

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praised the artist's position in medieval society.10 Medieval theateras it was understood bymodernistswas mythic. It spoke of ideas and is-sues fundamental to its culture and drew anaudience representing the whole of society.

This virtue was compounded by the access mys-tery plays had to monumental time. Time wassealed off from everyday time and correspondednot to a natural but to a spiritual cycle. Theseplays represented spiritual states as time: thetime before salvation; the time after salvation;and the present, in which good and evil dobattle. These times were eternal, in a sense co-eval, and could be entered and exited at will.Byron wrote in his mystery play Cain:

With us acts are exempt from time, and weCan crowd eternity into an hourOr stretch an hour into eternity,We breathe not by a mortal measurement,But that's a mystery.11

Space operated according to similar principles;in fact, as they corresponded to the same spiritu-al states, time and space were fused. A singlemovement on the stage, an ascent or descentthrough a trapdoor, was a step across centuriesor into salvation. Up was Heaven, down Hell,and in between was the life of man.

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The creator of a revolutionary mystery couldmove freely and easily between past, present,and future, using them all to legitimize the Octo-ber Revolution. The form allowed for highsolemnity and vulgar jest, abstract philosophyand topical politicking, monumental pageantsand mobile skits. It was quickly absorbed intothe revolutionary idiom, injected there by artistswho had experimented with the form inprerevolutionary years.

Reform in the Prerevolutionary Theater

Turn-of-the-century theater left many observersdissatisfied. Chekhov's plays featured lost soulsgroping for a meaning that life did not seem tooffer; Tolstoy and Gorky, two other leadingplaywrights, depicted the hopeless struggles ofthe disadvantaged. Modern theater could notconjure up life's transcendent, intangible truths,truths once found in religion.

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The medieval mystery, which had evolved fromreligious rites, offered a forum in which cosmicthemes could be addressed with metaphysicalassurance. Modernists had a particular under-standing of the genre that excluded the coarse-ness and humor of the original. Mystery was tothem the presence of the divine in the theater; itwas a miracle play. In Maurice Maeterlinck'sSister Beatrice, the heroine is graced by im-maculate conception; in Björnstjerne Björnson'sBeyond Human Might (Gaideburov's biggestdraw) life is preserved by the miracle of faith-which is signaled by an avalanche. A miracle isa moment when the laws of everyday life aretranscended, revoked by a higher power; it is anintrusion of the sacred into the profane. Thepresence of the holy is marked by a suspensionof normal laws of time and space.

In a 1902 article, ''Unnecessary Truth," the sym-bolist poet Valery Briusov suggested that therewas a limit to the Stanislavsky method then atthe height of its success: it was incapable ofconveying the new, "miraculous" content. 12Briusov made a point valid for most symbolists:truth is something spiritual, internal, and intan-gible, and the reproduction of lifeshould such athing be possiblecan only hide truth in a profu-sion of detail. Life and art are not the same. Bri-usov saw a truth of essences to be apprehendedby art, which in its purity was something greaterthan life. The task of art was not to reproducedetails but to distill the truth from them. It re-quired a different, nonrealistic style of play,which Briusov called "conventional"(uslovnyi).13

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The theater of convention established its ownrules and language; given only the barest indica-tions, spectators were asked to imagine the restof the stage. Conventionalism allowed symbol-ists to discuss eternal questions without super-fluous detail. Only essentials, things with sym-bolic value, were allowed on stage. Malevichlater echoed the selective principle as describedhere by Briusov: "The ultimate aim of art is toapprehend the universe by a special artistic intu-ition. To this end it strives to single out one as-pect of reality, isolating it, making it possible tofix our attention on it. Out of the infinitely mul-titudinous world of colors, sounds, actions, andemotions surrounding us, each art selects asingle element, as if inviting us to bestow con-templation on it alone, to seek in it a reflectionof the whole."14 Symbolist drama sought theuniversal in the particular. Things appeared onstage in two aspects: as part of the stage's as-sumed reality and as part of a greater whole.

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Locality disappeared under a flood of universal-ized settings that, like most utopias, were notonly nowhere but everywhere. They were pointsof existence in an ocean of nonexistence.

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Maeterlinck's plays were frequently performedin prerevolutionary Russia, most notably in theKomissarzhevskaia Theater under the directionof Meyerhold, a former Stanislavsky actor whohad forsaken his mentor. Under Meyerhold's dir-ection Mgebrov learned the style he would ap-ply at Proletkult. Meyerhold's first attempt atMaeterlinck was a 1906 production of TheDeath of Tintageles. In the play, as in monu-mental art, space and time were not specified.Although the castle suggested a medieval set-ting, the play had broader symbolic meaning ex-tending to the present. As Meyerhold said, "Thesignificance of the play's symbol reaches tre-mendous heights. It's not Death but he whobrings death that arouses indignation. And thenthe Island on which the action takes place is ourlife." 15 The island exemplified symbolist dra-matic spacea hermetically sealed space intowhich nothing could intrude but that neverthe-less represented all space. In a later production

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of Maeterlinck's Sister Beatrice at the Komissar-zhevskaia, Meyerhold used a "bas-relief" set-ting; the stage was spread out like the flat sur-face of an icon. Slow, rhythmic speech and cho-reographed movement mimicked the cadencesof a ritual. Lines were chanted, not spoken; act-ors were distributed about the stage in static,monumental groupings; and, as Mgebrov noted,the performers did not so much act as conduct areligious service.16

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Space and time in the symbolist theater weremarked as in a religious celebration. Meyerholdexperimented with mises en scène for his newstyle, and his first attempt bore a striking re-semblance to a church. Russian Orthodox ritualis conducted in a shallow space in relief againsta vertical iconostasis. Movement is rhythmic,regulated by choral chants, and the iconostasis isflat, depthless. The artistic simplification suitedto eternal principles is often accompanied by aloss of the third dimension: essentials arethrown into stark relief against a flat back-ground. Flattened and idealized against thebackdrop, action takes on new significance.Meyerhold said:

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New devices of conventional depiction are inten-tionally worked out in the mise en scène and act-ors' play. Theatrical art is informed with a pre-meditated condensingnothing on stage should beaccidental. In certain situations the actors areplaced as close as possible to the spectator. Thisfrees the actor from the accidental lifelike detailsof the ever-preponderant stage apparatus. Thisgives the actor's movement the freedom for morerefined expressivity. This helps the actor's voicegive more subtle shading, heightens the spectat-ors' receptivity, and destroys the line separatingthem from the actors.17

Theatrical conventions condition spectator re-sponse. They frame social interactions and thusserve as social models.18 Symbolists looked

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back to the mystery play as a means to reformtheir audience and the society it represented.Spectators trained by Stanislavsky were unac-customed to active viewing: they were held cap-tive by the darkness of an unlit auditorium andforbidden to applaud until the performanceended. Because Stanislavsky depicted realitycomplete onstage, the spectator was allowedlittle interpretive freedom. Meyerhold realizedthat for the conventional theater to work, thespectator would have to "employ his imagina-tion creatively in order to fill in those detailssuggested by the stage action." 19 Spectatorswere to be a creative element in the theater, act-ively perceiving the intangible reality behind theaction. The director's business was to create aspace in which everything would be interpretedsymbolically. Moreover, the director wouldhave to signal the viewer that the stage actionwas not to be perceived and understood as reallife: "there must be a pattern of movement on

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the stage to transform the spectator into a vigil-ant observer."20

The Moscow Art Theater was identified with itsbuilding, the famous work of the architect FedorShekhtel: it was a theater of one place. Ivanovand Meyerhold dreamt of a theater that couldtravel to the people and their open spaces: amarketplace, city square, or open field. For theRussians, like the French revolutionaries, openoutdoor space was egalitarian. Stanislavsky'stheater segregated space (as did most turn-of-the-century theaters); the play was onstage, theaudience was isolated in the dark, and the twospaces were separated by a proscenium. Sym-bolists sought to rupture the proscenium arch; itwas to be the threshold over which art crossedinto life and life into art. Painting offers a usefulparallel: in eras when mimesis is important, pic-tures are framed; when artists aspire to createreality (as would the later constructivists), theframe is dropped.

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Time at the Moscow Art Theater, like space,was "bourgeois": the show schedule conformedto the life of the industrial city. The IndustrialRevolution introduced precise scheduling to citylife; it regularized time, making it independentof nature. Theatrical performances were re-peated daily at the same time. Mystery plays,however, were creatures of feast days, most ofwhich fell in times of slack. Performances were,like the natural clock, irregular; they beganwhen they began. This irregularity created a dif-ferent audience; because the performance wasgiven only once, all people gathered, undifferen-tiated, at one place, one time.

The symbolists were assuming that function fol-lows form, that a mystery play would create itsown audience, and that the audience wouldemerge from the theater and change society. Theassumption

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would later appeal to the cosmic aspirations ofrevolutionary times. Yet symbolists might alsohave noted that mysteries could be used by morethan a single ideology, class, or institution.Probably the most popular mystery play of191720 was King of the Jews, written by GrandDuke Konstantin, uncle of the reigning tsar. 21

The odd history of this play begins with its pre-war banishment from the stage by the Church:no figure from the Bible could be represented onstage, regardless of how piously. If the Roman-ovs would not disobey a church they themselvesheaded, they could bend the rules a bit. Becauseno public performance of the play was permit-ted, in 1913 a production was mounted in theHermitage Hall of the Winter Palace for a "se-lect" audience of friendsabout three thousandpeople for ten performances. Each of the tenperformances was designated a dress rehearsal;an eleventh rehearsal was added for review bythe press. The play was a great success with thepublic and a critical success with the press; evenTeatr i iskusstvo, published by Aleksandr Kugel,no friend of the Romanovs, had a good deal ofpraise for it. But the Church, unmoved, still for-bade public performance. The ban was finallylifted after the February Revolution, and byNovember a full production was ready. Its

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premiere on November 6, 1917 (November 19,new style) was ironically one of the first underthe Bolsheviks, whose embarrassment was ag-gravated when the play repeated its success of1913.22

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Though subsequent Soviet critics dismissed it asa mere curiosity,23 the mystery represented agenre of great relevance during the Revolution.It was an account of the Passion and Resurrec-tion of Christ through the eyes of an averageperson, written in blank verse. For a member ofthe ruling family the author expressed some lib-eral opinions: he claimed, for instance, that theright to rule was based on the mandate of bothGod and the peoplebetrayal of either would in-vite downfall. There was also an attack on capit-alismmore from an aristocrat's than acommunist's point of view, to be sure. That theplay was sometimes anti-Semitic did nothing toimpede its popularity.24 The production at theNezlobin Theater mobilized some of Russia'sbest talent. Nikolai Arbatov of the PetrogradMaly Theater directed it; the dances were cho-reographed by Michel Fokine; and the musicwas written by Aleksandr Glazunov (Glazunov'sstudent Dimitri Tiomkin claimed it was his best

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work).25 In short, it provided a ready exampleof how mystery plays could have public impactand appeal to a broad audience, both of whichhad eluded the symbolists.26

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Time and Space as Discontinuity

Sacred time, when divine order was manifest inhuman affairs, was the setting of a mystery play.The genre traced humanity's progress from sinto piety, from damnation to salvation. Duringthe Revolution, the notions of the sacred and thehistorical were often conflated; mystery playsreimagined history to legitimize revolutionarymovement. Time was divided into history, whenpopular movements urged civilization toward itsprogressive destination in October 1917, andnonhistory, when reaction set in and progressceased.

The mystery format offered Bolsheviks a uniquepublic forum and lent the party's ideology amythic dimension. Yet it did not correspondfully to the nature of the October Revolution,which was a violent seizure of power that hadsplit the country and would plunge it into civilwar. Families, neighborhoods, and communitieswere broken, and a nation on the brink of ruinslid toward catastrophe. Revolutionaries couldoffer a vision of universal equality and justice,popular enfranchisement and progress, but spec-tators noticed a disparity between this vision andthe revolutionaries' violence and frequent dis-regard for human life. To enlist popular support,the Bolsheviks needed a format that could ac-commodate both their movement's lofty aimsand its visceral politics, that could stake itsclaim to the legacy of human history while mak-ing a radical break with the immediate past. Theurgency and impetuosity of revolution were

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better fit by a carnival, the complementary halfof the festive tradition.

Mystery and carnival were integrated elementsof the festive tradition; they mirrored and de-pended on each other. The medieval mysterywas performed during a festival; it preceded ariotous carnival, which was followed by a sol-emn mass and fast. Each aspect drew on aunique understanding of time and space. In thesolemn mystery, time and space were continu-ous. The mystery selected those elements thatcorresponded to its rules and ignored the rest.Carnival was discontinuous; it overturned andshattered time and space, and was nonselective.The experience was brief, bracketed by the termof the feast; it was a compression of time, a tem-porary state to be exploited intensively. Carnivalwas dynamic because it was fleeting.

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Any discussion of carnival must contend withthe work of Bakhtin, a scholar active inpostrevolutionary Russia whose work on Ra-belais and carnival culture has been fundamentalin defining that culture's aesthetic

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and social dimensions. Bakhtin's sojourn in GIIIin the 1920s likely brought him into contactwith thinkers like Piotrovsky and AlekseiGvozdev, who shaped the Soviet debate on fest-ivity. 27 Although Bakhtin rejected his contem-poraries' Marxist slant, he often shared their as-sumptions and probably profited from their cri-tiques of other thinkers.

Bakhtin, like his colleagues, recognized qualit-ies of celebration alien to the symbolists: it wasriotous, excessive, and full of coarse humor.Nothing could be further from the piety of Ivan-ov and Scriabin than the medieval carnivals thatfascinated Bakhtin. The carnival was a rite of re-versal in which the underclass enacted (tempor-arily) its ascendance to the ruling heights of so-ciety and subverted the ecclesiastical and socialhierarchy. Claiming that carnival was an activityof the church subdeacons (the ecclesiastical un-derclass) and citing the oft-quoted disapprovedof select members of the upper clergy, heclaimed that carnival undermined authority. Inthe Feast of Fools, the strict hierarchy of themass was inverted: subdeacons and choirboysdonned the mantle of ecclesiastical authorityand presided over a mockery of sacred rites andsymbols.28 Priestly accoutrements were placedin profane hands; liturgy was recited as gibber-ish; the commemorative feast became a riotous

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banquet. Vestments were turned inside out andhymnals upside down. Most of all, the strict dis-cipline of religious law was dissolved in generallicense.

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Bakhtin shared with his colleagues two assump-tions concerning carnival's social dynamic that,when applied to contemporary Soviet society,could lead to misconceptions. One is that themystery and carnival embodied innately incom-patible spirits; the other is that carnival repres-ented the popular viewpoint and challenged theruling order by encouraging role reversal.Bakhtin ignored the interdependence of carnivaland mystery (captured vividly by Victor Hugoin the first chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris).Each celebrated (in its own way) the same reli-gious holidays. Mystery embodied the highersecrets of the church; carnival turned them up-side down. Carnival was dependent on the high-er mysteries; like any parody, it needed a subjectto distort. Nietzsche understood the two spirits'independence, and in the Birth of Tragedy hedefined them as the Dionysian and the Apolloni-an, the essential components of tragic vision.The Greek tragic festivals grew out of an

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ecstatic popular celebration, and the tragic cyclewas not complete without a satyr play.

Bakhtin's second assumption, that carnival ex-pressed the "common folk's" (narodnaia) cul-ture, in opposition to that of the elite (like Wag-ner and Ivanot, he posited a hermetic isolation)was even more mislead-

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ing. It led to a frequent equation of festival withrevolution. 29 The assertion, contestable even inWestern cultures, simply did not apply to Rus-sia. Doubtless, there was an old Russian tradi-tion of popular urban carnivals: indeed,seventeenth-century travelers described masked''Pharisees" roaming Moscow and lighting thebeards of unwary passersby. Yet the traditionthat inspired Bolshevik festivals was more likelyautocratic carnivals. Antirites were a feature ofcourt life under Ivan the Terrible (the oprichina)and Peter the Great (Most Drunken Council ofFools and Jesters).30 Masques and rites of re-versal were celebrated under Anna Ioannovna(the marriage of dwarf jesters) and ElizavetaPetrovna (masques of gender reversal). Carnivalprocessions were a favorite pastime of Peter;and carnivals were part of coronation festivitiesfrom the age of Catherine to that of the final Ro-manov, Nicholas II (the Khodynka disaster).

To associate the poles of festive activity, carni-val and mystery, with specific themes or socialgroupings leads to contradictions and narrowsour understanding of festivity. Festivity is ahighly conventionalized discourse appropriate toa wide range of occasions, cultures, and classes;it can be used by mystics and materialists, royal-ists and revolutionaries. Festive conventionsserve not a specific idea or class but rather toisolate festive experience from everyday behavi-or and discourse. During a celebration, a societyfocuses on the past and relives memories ger-mane to the present. Foundation events are se-lected from the past and strung together in a se-quence that simulates historical progression.The conventions provide patterns of selectionand, once a selection has been made, help stringthe events into a new whole.

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The reason the Bolsheviks, like other revolu-tionaries before them, turned to festivals in atime of upheaval was that they were a way tograpple with history. Mystery and carnival, thepoles of festive expression, could embody thecontradictions of the Bolsheviks' historical situ-ationgrand visions of the future and tumult inthe presentand their conventions provided thestructure of a historical myth.

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History is not simply what has happened in thepast but a remembrance of the past within a pro-gressive time frame. History is time subdivided;it recognizes both the unity of time and its divi-sion by moments of change. Both senses of timeare as old as history itself and can be found atthe advent of historical consciousness inWestern culture. The Egyptian religion wasahistorical and did not segregate time; the mythof the creation was the myth of beginning. Thiswas true of the primitive Greek religion, but asthe Hellenes developed a historical

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sense, new generations of gods conquered thegods of creation; time was subdivided by newmyths. The Hebrews, who had a piercing senseof history, had both a creation myth and a separ-ate beginning to religious historythe Covenant.

The relevance of historical myth to BolshevikRussia and its festivals is demonstrated by afestival spectacle planned for November 1918(but never realized). Evgeny Vakhtangov, a stu-dent of Stanislavsky's who was graduallyabandoning his master's strict realism, contem-plated staging the Book of Exodus. The Coven-ant had a particular appeal; it was easily trans-lated from religious terms into the historicalterms of social struggle.

1. Moses (tongue-tied). His wife. Aaron. Perhapshe saw an Egyptian beating a Jew. He killed him.That night, aroused, he tells him about it in histent. At night God speaks with him. God com-mands him to go to the Pharaoh and as a signgives him the ability to work miracles (the Rod).Moses, suffering for his people, burning with thethought of liberating his people, prepares to go tothe Pharaoh the next morning.

2. Moses before the people. A speech.

3. At the Pharaoh's.

4. In the desert.

5. Moses before the people with the tablets.

6. The ages pass.

7. Dispersed.

8. Night. Far beyond the boundaries of tangiblespace, a fire. In the night the song of a thousandbreasts filled with hope is heard. The people go,go to build their freedom. Curtain. 31

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The Covenant was a moment when the cosmichistory described by Eliade, with its repetitionsand returns to the moments of creation, was sub-divided in the historical present.

Another Stanislavsky student, Valentin Smyshli-aev, directed a stage adaptation of Verhaeren'sshort poem "La Révolte" for the November 6,1918, opening of Moscow's Proletkult TheaterStudio. The play began with a creation sceneharkening back to Genesis and to the Gospel ac-cording to John. Revolution emerged from theprimeval, undifferentiated chaos of prehistory.

The entire auditorium is sunk in darkness, fromwhich the formless, fleeting sounds of music areborn, which slowly grow into an ecstatic hymn.The curtain slowly parts, and the spectator can-not make out anything onstage. Streams of

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golden sparks shatter the darkness and mergewith the stars. The howl of a formless, perturbedcrowd, the trampling of running feet. Slowly thered reflections of fires disperse the dark. Thespectator begins to make out some lines reminis-cent of the angles of houses, a window, a door;but these are not sharp lines, rather quivering,smashed, rebelling. He sees a seething, stirred-upcrowd. Out of this chaos rise the words. 32

Revolution was the great beginning.

The Second Symbolist Influence

Integrating these two festive conventions into asingle artistic production was a challenge facedby younger symbolists in the decade precedingthe Revolution. Although motives and circum-stances differed from 1918, the solutions wererelevant to revolutionary times and laid thegroundwork for Bolshevik festivals.

The mystery plays favored by Briusov and Ivan-ov offered some advantages, including cosmicreach, but they also locked theaters in a stasisexemplified by Maeterlinck's dramas.33 The di-lemma was more pressing in matters of audienceinteraction: modernist mysteries proved unableto accommodate an active and diverse public.Overcoming these deficiencies was essential tothe poets Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Bely, whosaw them as obstacles to their philosophical andsocial aims. Their ventures in the theater attrac-ted the attention of Meyerhold, whose collabora-tions with older symbolists were becoming in-creasingly fruitless. His subsequent work onBlok's dramas suggested new venues, such asfairgrounds and cabaret theaters, that wouldeventually prove of great benefit to the produ-cers of revolutionary festivals.

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Meyerhold encountered frustration in two pro-ductions of Calderón's Adoration of the Cross,the first in 1910 at the "Tower Theater"(Ivanov's living room), the second, starringMgebrov and Chekan, on an outdoor summerstage in the Finnish resort of Terijoki in 1912.The productions were attempts to revive medi-eval theater: its mystery, broad popular audi-ence, and intimacy with the audience. The firstperformance of Calderón's auto (perhaps thebest translation of deistvo), on Easter Sunday,was radically simplified. The stage was a cu-bicle marked off by draperies. Candles providedthe lighting; the curtains were parted by stageattendants; and there were no set changes, in-deed hardly any set at

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all. The acting was unaffected, almost motion-less and in direct contact with the audience. 34The production realized all but one ofMeyerhold's goals: intimacy was achieved bylimiting the audience to friends and colleagues.

The 1912 performance was to be larger and at-tract all classes. The play was presented "atnight, in the light of blazing torches, with a tre-mendous crowd of the local population."35 Itwas mounted in a white tent, bare of decora-tions; footlights were eliminated, and lanternswere set above the stage. The acting space itselfwas clearly established; "the white curtain had aborder of painted blue crosses and representedthe symbolic boundary between the setting ofthe religious drama and the hostile outsideworld."36 The last comment suggests a fatalcontradiction. Meyerhold had returned theater tothe open air, where the people could gather asone and become part of the presentation. Yet hestill assumed that life and art were opposed, andthat art was superior to life. His open-air publictheater broke down the architecture of the bour-geois theater but retained its hermetic stagespace.37

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In a fragmented society, there could be no uni-versally accepted language of truth becausethere was no universal truth. Theater waswithout a full public language. Bely pointed thislack out sarcastically: "Picture yourself, reader,in this role for just a moment. Is that us spinningaround the sacrificial altaran art nouveau lady, astockbroker, a workingman and a member of thePrivy Council? I am sure that our prayers willnot tally. The art nouveau lady will pray tosome poet in the image and likeness ofDionysos, the workingman will pray for a short-er workday, while the state councillorto whatstar does his gaze aspire?"38 He added presci-ently, "So long as the class struggle goes on, ap-peals to aesthetic democracy are grotesque,"39 aconclusion reached by Wagner before him.

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Blok, Meyerhold, and their contemporariesnoted the aesthetic and social limits of Ivanov'svision of festivity. It deprived the theater of thecoarseness and suddenness of carnival, and keptthe popular audience outside its walls. Changewas difficult to enact onstage. Action progressedon a principle of continuity; change, when it oc-curred, was from one substance or level of beingto a higher power. Drama was supposed to be athreshold, a point of transition; yet wheneverything is of a single quality, there can be nochange. Blok, after the unrest of 1905, couldonly ask, "But where is life with its contradic-tions and its acute and profound struggles?"40

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Blok himself provided an answer in 1906 when,in his Balaganchik (Fairground Puppet Booth),Harlequin stood center-stage and announced:

Hello World! You're back with me againYour heart has long been close to me!I'm going to breathe your spring-freshnessThrough your golden window. 41

Blok turned to a form of popular carnival theat-er, the commedia dell'arte, to remedy the short-comings of symbolist drama. The commediaoffered a rich traditionlayered like the strata ofan archeological digand Blok and Meyerhold,who directed Balaganchik several times from1908 to 1914, drew on them all: the originalItalian players, roaming the country with amixed bag of scenarios; the stationary com-media dell'arte of seventeenth-century France;the Venetian commedias of Carlo Gozzi andCarlo Goldoni. The commedia dell'arte had ahistory in Russia too. It was imported from Ger-many during the reign of Anna Ioannovna(173040) in its courtly French variety.42 Pierrotand Harlequin were stock figures in Russianvaudeville from 183040; and the commediaprovided a pictorial language for modernists,like Picasso in the West and Benois and Kon-stantin Somov of Russia's World of Art move-ment. The title of Blok's play suggests another

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important source: the Italian characters wereRussified and thrived until the late nineteenthcentury in theaters and puppet booths set up onfairgrounds for market days and holidays. Thesewere the balagany of Blok's play.

In Balaganchik, Blok tackled two problemswhose solutions would reappear in revolutionaryfestivals. First, his use of the commedia brokedown the division between popular and elite artforms. Born as a theater of the city square, thecommedia was embraced by the Parisian court;from there it moved to Russia, into the court andback to the popular fairground theater, and wasassimilated by modernists from there. With eachtransfer, standard devices and features took onnew functions and meanings, and both levels ofRussian culture were enriched.

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Blok's second concern was to reintegrate the twoaspects of festive expression into a single artisticwork. To achieve this unification he exploitedthe traditional device of the commedia, the un-motivated and sudden jump from farce to mys-tery.43 Blok structured Balaganchik so that itsfarcical elements parodied the serious. In thisnew context, the jumps were no longer formaland meaningless, as they had been in the puppet

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booth; they became a sharp commentary on thedogma of mystery. Blok mocked symbolism inits more solemn, monolithic variety, turningagainst his own former dreams with what hecalled ''transcendent," renewing irony. 44 Theplay opens with a solemn quorum of "mystics"seated at a central table; Harlequin then imp-ishly crawls out from under the table. In thecourse of the play, characters ask one anotherwhether they understood it; they do not. Aclown loses his head and spouts cranberry juice.And Pierrot, poor Pierrot, the hapless puppetwho represents the poet in Blok's world, leapsthrough a window to his death, only to discoverthe window is a stage prop painted on paper.

Balaganchik was a powerful influence onprerevolutionary theater; it made new demandson the audience and offered new freedom to dir-ectors. Spectators were confronted with abruptshifts from high solemnity to low farce, from re-fined aestheticism to coarse mockery; directorswere forced to develop mises en scène accom-modating extreme and rapid transformations.The need for structural mobility led them awayfrom the large dramatic genres preferred by theirelders to small forms like the skit. New intimatesites, cabarets foremost among them, wereopened to house the new genres.

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Cabaret had its various masters and locales inthose years: the Bat, the Stray Dog, the Comedi-ans' Haven.45 Even Meyerhold, director of theimperial theater, moonlighted as Doctor Daper-tutto (from an E. T. A. Hoffmann story), cultiv-ator of the ironic. Cabaret programs were usu-ally an assembly of short pieces tied together bya conferancé or emcee, who roamed the stageapron and bantered with the audience. Cabaretbrought a new spirit and flexibility to the Russi-an theater: light, intimate, and ironic. Oddlyenough, it was also a training ground for direct-ing revolutionary mass spectacles.

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Meyerhold established a small studio in Peters-burg devoted to the lost craft of commediadell'arte. Meyerhold and his main assistants,Sergei Radlov and Vladimir Soloviev (no rela-tion to the philosopher), future directors of massspectacles in revolutionary Petrograd, initiated aprogram of studio exercises and a theoreticaljournal, Love for Three Oranges. They sought anonliterary theater; recent literature had dener-vated the stage, filling it with pessimism andstasis, and they looked to popular traditions tobreathe new life into it.

Meyerhold's rival in the world of Petersburgcabarets was Evreinov, another master of thesmall theater, who in 1920 would direct TheStorming of the Winter Palace, the grandest ofall the mass spectacles. Evreinov had a lightnessof touch and a carefree spirit alien to symbol-

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ism or, for that matter, to any other creed.Evreinov worked on the Spanish drama, medi-eval mysteries, and commedia dell'arte simul-taneously with Meyerhold and the symbolists,but his motives were different, as he concen-trated on their mixture of the solemn and comic,and on theatrical transformation. 46

Like the symbolists, Evreinov tied the theaterand religion into one bundle; but he understoodtheir common mission differently. The instinctfor theater was, to Evreinov, prereligious; reli-gion was born of the theater, not the theater ofreligion: "In order to believe in gods man hadfirst to acquire the gift of conceiving these gods,of personifying them as a dramatist personifiesideas, feelings and passions. Were it not for thegift of transfiguration, of imaginative creation ofthings and beings that cannot be seen on thisearth, man would have no religion."47

He asked the same questions as the symbolists,used the same models, and spoke the same lan-guage, but somehow Evreinov's answers wereunique. He considered the theatrical instinct tobe part of a greater instinct for transformation, aneed to assume a finer, more beautiful mask.Evreinov shared the symbolist passion formasked drama but with a difference: he wasconcerned less with the result of the transforma-tion than with the process. The purpose of theat-er was to find a new identity or inhabit a differ-ent personality. The question of truth was irrel-evant: theater was not ritual but a game.

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The 19078 season at Evreinov's Ancient Theaterwas devoted to medieval moralités and myster-ies, the 191112 season to Spanish Golden Agetheater; a commedia dell'arte cycle was plannedfor the 191415 season. His treatment of the rep-ertory differed from his predecessors'. Meyer-hold interpreted the Spanish drama in the spiritof a holy day; Evreinov captured the full spiritof the medieval holiday, including its coarsebuffoonery. His "holiday theater" went beyondMeyerhold's vision; it re-created the entire holi-day spectacle, both the art and its spectators.The life on stage was the life of the medievalcity.

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The Ancient Theater's premiere production,Three Magi (1907), an eleventh-century miracleplay, included an eleventh-century audience onstage. The miracle was performed unseen in thedepths of a church, while the "audience" center-stage displayed a gamut of emotions: the pietyof early comers waiting for the prologue, thefanaticism of flagellants, the outraged reactionto Herod's order to slaughter the innocents. Astage-upon-the-stage was also used in a produc-tion of Fuente ovejuna (1911). It was a roughwooden platform on barrels surrounded by anouter set designed to look like a sixteenth-cen-tury Spanish town square.

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Evreinov repaired Meyerhold's neglect; theaudience of sixteenthcentury Spaniards on stageprovided the second audience of twentiethcen-tury Russians with a model of festive behavior.

Theater and Revolution

Even before the Bolsheviks took power, therewas a strongly perceived analogy between theat-er and revolution; theater lives in a similar emo-tional atmosphere and draws its energy from thepolarities that drive revolution. Many, likeAleksandr Tairov, director of Moscow's Cham-ber Theater, understood revolution in theatricalterms: "Motor vehicles, troops, and guns sweptpast us. Powerful waves of workers rolled by,flooding the snowy streetsand we stood on thesidewalks, behind the cordon, the audience at anincomprehensible mystery play that was takingplace before our eyes." 48

Others, like Ivanov and Lunacharsky, often in-terpreted social phenomena in the light ofNietzsche's duad, the Apollonian and theDionysian.49 Revolution, in this scheme, was astruggle of popular Dionysian forces for Apollo-nian expressiona new social order. Festival per-formance (deistvo), which embodied a similarduality, was thus a ready medium for enactingthe revolutionary myth. The disposition wasmanifest in a plan that Lunacharsky submitted tothe Moscow Soviet for the 1918 anniversaryfestival. He proposed "repeating the emotionalexperience of the October Revolution." Thefestival would be "split into three parts: struggle,victory, the intoxication of victory. . . . Initiallythe mood culminates, then attains its high pointand ends in general gaiety. . . . Festivals shouldnot only be official, as May Day [was], butshould have deep internal sense. The massesshould relive the revolutionary impulse."50

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The foundations of the theater of revolutionwere present in the work of Meyerhold,Evreinov, and their contemporaries long beforethe Revolution itself. In mystery plays theymastered the continuous time of cosmic history;from the carnival theater, they learned the art ofdiscontinuity.

Yet without a great event their theaters wereempty shells without an appropriate subject oraudience; revolutionary Russia could not be, asthe Middle Ages had been, created onstage.Meyerhold said at the outset of the First WorldWar: "Working for the sake of joy, in the nameof a rebellion or a manifestation, in which canbe found so much of theatrical-

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ity's charms, . . . the contemporary theater'splaywright will surely find a point of contactwith the country's emotion. . . . The most intens-ive merging of the auditorium with the stage oc-curs precisely at the moment when the peopleare strongly shaken or strongly aroused." 51 Re-volution was the only context in which festivitycould attain its full significance. There could beno dualism without a demarcation; revolution,the threshold, provided the line. As a criticwould soon note, it filled the formal conventionsof theater with historical content: "Only in re-volutionary eras do all the voices heard from thestage, . . . all the laughter and sobbing, soundlike a mighty symphony of the terrible prologue-road that must lead society to its true life. Onlyin these eras do we catch the trumpeting of re-volutionary horns in the harmless tinkling ofHarlequin's bells and the call to action onPierrot's white face."52

Several mass spectacles were produced in thefive years preceding the 1917 Revolution. InAugust 1912, for instance, Evreinov staged a"mass production," 1812, in Luna Park for thecentennial of the Battle of Borodino. The scen-ario, written by his friend Iury Beliaev, con-sisted of seven acts with a total of thirty-threescenes.53 At the outbreak of hostilities in 1913,Meyerhold and two assistants, Soloviev and IuryBondi, set to work on Fire, a mass open-air playabout the war.54 Artillery Fire, battles swung bybetrayal, and a burst dam were all part of theshow, the entire thing to be concluded by anapotheosis. Interpreted as political gestures,these productions were unsuccessful. It wouldbe more accurate, however, to call them mis-fires, plays in search of an audience.

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The October Revolution gave Meyerhold theaudience he needed; the proper script wasprovided by Mayakovsky, the futurist poet whowould be Meyerhold's comrade-in-arms for thenext decade. Meyerhold directed Mayakovsky'sMystery-Bouffe in Petrograd's Musical DramaTheater for the 1918 first-anniversary celebra-tion.55 Mystery-Bouffe reworked the Biblicalstory of the flood into a revue of revolutionarypolitics: the mystery of the title referred to theproletariat's progress toward the gates of para-dise; the bouffe came at the expense of the de-clining bourgeoisie. It was very much a festivalplay, written for a special celebration and com-bining both aspects of the festival aesthetic.

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Mystery-Bouffe, as one of the first revolutionaryplays, guided subsequent dramatic re-creationsof revolutionary history. It was a puzzling mix-ture of apocalypse, modernism, and folk theater:a concoction that established a pattern for CivilWar propaganda. The play was filled with thespirit of revolution: its prologue claimed "weglorify the days / of uprisings, / rebellions / andrevolutions"but it was conceived before

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the October Revolution and did not mention theBolsheviks. 56 Mystery-Bouffe was a play of re-volution, but of revolution in general: the over-throw of the tsar, the petty bourgeoisie, and theold theaters (p. 170):

Todayabove the dust of theatersour motto's ablaze:"Everything new!"Stand up and take notice!Curtain!

[The actors separate. They shred the curtain,painted with the relics of the old theater.]

Old world and old theater, new world and newtheater were not notions that the poet and thedirector differentiated.

Led by the booming voice of Mayakovsky, fu-turistsduring the Revolution, the term coveredmuch of the avant-gardeclaimed an exclusiveability to speak for the new society. Their claimwas based on an aesthetic program that hadevolved before the Revolution rather than on theBolsheviks' approval. To futurists, the Octobercoup was just a beginning, and futurism an en-gine to drive revolution along. They cultivatedthe art of upheaval and displacement, whichthey credited with the ability to shake societyout of its bourgeois torpor. The movement hadan ability to express violent change without thesymbolists' overwrought eschatology. Puninphrased the relationship between futurism andrevolution well when he called futurism "a mo-ment that deepens and widens the cultural baseof communism by introducing a new element: adynamic sense of time."57 It was the art of dis-placement and discord: what the Revolution was

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to society, futurism was to the depicted fig-urethe great displacement.

The futurists, like Blok and Bely, were shapedby their critique of symbolism. Mayakovsky ex-celled in depicting the life of the modern city sonoticeably absent in Ivanov's work. Thetwentieth-century city was not like the Greekpolis or the walled city of the Middle Ages; itwas tense, compact, and dynamic. Conflict andnot harmony, discontinuity not continuity werethe rule. It was a city that bred revolution, notmarble temples. Here the influence of the Italianfuturiststhe poetperformer Emilio Marinetti, theartist Umberto Boccioniand their fascinationwith the modern city. Their art favored dynam-ism and displacement, confrontation and dis-cord: fragmented paintings tracing frenzied mo-tion; noise machines replacing music with urbancacophony; manifestoes provoking the audience.

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The Italian futurists sought to shatter the archi-tectural barrier between the stage and audience;they refused to let the bourgeoisie sit passivelyin their seats. Ivanov had dreamt of uniting theaudience (and the nation) by the magnificenceof tragic art; the Italianslike Belyrealized thatsocial conditions made such unity impossible.They chose smaller forms based on populartheatersthe puppet booth or cabaretand brokedown the stage barrier by insulting the audienceand instigating its angry reaction.

Futurists both Italian and Russian toured theprovinces with variety shows, reading mockingmanifestoes and verse. Their antagonism towardthe audience was demonstrated in the 1896 pro-duction of Alfred Jarry's Ubu roi, later con-sidered the first futurist performance, in theThéâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris. The play had athematic reach later rivaled by Mystery-Bouffe:it was set ''in Poland, that is to say: nowhere,"but the stage was painted to represent "indoorsand out of doors, even the torrid, temperate andarctic zones at once." The first word spoken by aperformer was merde, and as the play pro-gressed, members of the audience clapped andwhistled (depending on their preferences), andfistfights broke out in the orchestra pit. 58 Thedrama had become, as Ivanov hoped, a realevent, but only through conflict, not harmony.Theater controls audience reaction according toits vision of society: prewar futurists exacer-bated conflict, just as Mystery-Bouffe, a play of

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revolution, would unfailingly split its audi-ence.59

Unique to the Russian variant of futurism was autopian strain. The Italians, as the poet VadimShershenevich noted, preferred destroying thecity to re-creating it, while the Russians had avision for the future.60 The utopian element thatrounded out Mystery-Bouffe first found expres-sion in Malevich's abstract paintings and the ret-rospective Slavism of Velimir Khlebnikov'spoems, and it found its first dramatic voice intwo 1913 performances: Mayakovsky's VladimirMayakovsky: A Tragedy and Victory over theSun, an opera by Aleksei Kruchenykh andMikhail Matiushin.61

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Mayakovsky's tragedy opens in Hell-City, hisvision of modern life. The first act features a"holiday of beggars," a frenzied harbinger of re-volution spiced with Nietzsche's Dionysian ritesand Bakhtin's Feast of Fools. Overwroughtmonologues about urban alienation culminate inrevolt, when things "shed the rags of worn-outnames." The next act takes place in a utopiancity, where the poet-protagonist, like Christ theSaviour, accepts the suffering of humanity. Vict-ory over the Sun, for the few spectators (includ-ing Blok and Mgebrov) who understood it, in-

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volves mankind's struggle against the power ofthe sun. The battle ends with the stabbing andcapture of the sun, a triumph that in the final actleads to a utopian Tenth Lands of the future,where the residents attempt to adapt to their newlife. Many of these features would find a prom-inent place in Mystery-Bouffe.

Mystery-Bouffe: Apocalypse and Utopia

Mystery-Bouffe, which was begotten by years ofexperimentation and ferment, festivalized re-volution. This version of the Revolution fea-tured seven pairs of the "clean" (the bourgeois-ie) and seven pairs of the "unclean" (the prolet-ariat), oppressed and ready for rebellion. Theygather on a Noah-less ark to survive the delugeand create a new world afterward. The bour-geoisie, including assorted Europeans and anAbyssinian negus, quickly reassert the old re-gime onboard. They institute a ''democratic re-public," banish workers to the hold, hoard food-stuffs, and perform no labor themselves. The un-clean suffer but soon recognize the state of af-fairs. Realizing their own strength, they enact arevolution. With the sudden appearance of ASimple Man (played by Mayakovsky) the re-volution has its leader, who guides the uncleanthrough Hell, Heaven, and beyond to the Prom-ises Land.

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Mystery-Bouffe drew on the unique abilities ofMeyerhold and Mayakovsky. Their prewar ex-periments shaped a new vision of revolution thatgained increasing currency during the CivilWar. Mayokovsky's revolution was, like thestory of an earlier revolution, a tale of two cit-ies: the revolutionary city of earlier acts and theutopian city of the finale. What these cities wereand how their revolution took place were envi-sioned through festival theater styles, rangingfrom the commedia dell'arte to the mystery play.They provided the structure of space and time,their resolution as apocalypse and utopia, andthe creation and interaction of characters.

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Festival theater was, in effect, a model of soci-ety. In Mystery-Bouffe it was a concentration ofhostile extremes. (Figure 6 is a poster for the1918 production.) There was no passagebetween the two cities, only an abrupt threshold,an apocalypse. This viewpoint, which manycontemporaries shared and associated withMayakovsky's name, was inspired less by re-volution than by artistic change. Its elements ex-isted long before 1917, in the productions ofMeyerhold and the futurists.

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Figure 6.Poster for Meyerhold's production of Mystery-Bouffe, 1918

(Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu. iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria,Leningrad, 1980).

The world of Mystery-Bouffe was remarkable for its incapacity forcompromise: the very idea had strongly negative connotations for thepoet and his contemporaries. On the stage, no meeting of worlds waspossible. The revolutionary city was divided into two camps, workersand nonworkers, locked in a territorial struggle. Conflictthe revolu-tionwas a meeting of opposites that could not end in a truce.Mayakovsky did not complicate the struggle by depicting more than a

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single interest in each camp. To subjugate theproletariat, the bourgeoisie elects itself a tsar;the tsar then declares his sole right to all food.But when the bourgeoisie finds itself hungry, itadopts democratic principles and declares a re-public. This makes no difference to the workers;the republic is "the same old tsar, just with ahundred mouths" (p. 204).

When it is festivalized, revolution shuns gradualchange for apocalyptic suddenness. Apocalypticthought flourishes when the gap between twoworlds seems unbreachable. Apocalypse is aradical solution, a onetime threshold that closesa gap by eliminating one side of it. It is timecompressed to fusion: "the beginning and theend" of the Book of Revelation. Such revolu-tions are terrible to live through, but they can beaesthetically satisfying, which might explain theattraction felt by artists as diverse as Blok, Bely,Meyerhold, and Mayakovsky. 62

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The model's second attraction was its stronglyutopian element. Apocalypse and utopia, likecarnival and mystery work best together. Apoca-lypse precedes utopia. The clash of worlds leadsto the elimination of one, followed by the har-monic reign of utopia. An apocalypse is the "notime" that precedes "all time"; utopia is the "no-where" that is everywhere. Mystery-Bouffe'sPromised Land is the final sum of the apoca-lyptic equation; it is Mayakovsky's image of thecity of socialism.

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The characters of Mystery-Bouffethe citizens ofthe two citieswere imported from festival theat-er, with a strong dose of the fairground. Populartheaterfor example, the Petrushka puppet theateror the Tsar Maximilian playincorporated littlecharacter development; the introductory epi-gram determined a character's actions throughthe entire play. In Mystery-Bouffe the clean areportrayed in the mocking tones of carnival, witha particular flair for exaggerated detail: the nosering of the Abyssinian negus or the top-hat ofthe Frenchman (see Figure 7).63 Entrances ofthe clean are marked by Petrushka-like self-in-troductions, and national conflicts are reduced toslapstick brawls.64 Performance style was de-veloped from the prewar work of Meyerholdand Evreinov, with new additions taken directlyfrom the popular theater and the circus. In thefuture, Meyerhold would even invite a clown,Vitaly Lazarenko, to play a demon in the infernoscene. The unclean were depicted in the

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monumental tones of the mystery play.65 Theyperformed collectively, as a chorus, much of thetime, and their lines were read with a "firm,strong principle, heroic pathos, and plastic mo-numentality."66 Costumes for the unclean re-peated a pattern found in "Apotheosis of theWorker," V. V. Lebedev's street decoration forthe holiday, and in Vladimir Kozlinsky's draw-ings to Mayakovsky's verse in a holiday pamph-let: simple lines, uniformity.67

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Figure 7.Costume sketches by Mayakovsky for the "clean" and the "unclean,"

Mystery-Bouffe, 1918 (Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980). Photos courtesy of Aurora Publishers.

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The revolutionary city of Mayakovsky's playfeatured endless movement. It was an eternalthreshold, and it required a stage space accom-modating sudden, unexplained transitions. Un-fortunately, Malevich's flat, static decor did notfit the bill. 68 Mayakovsky's own backgroundsketches were a more apt illustration. They de-picted the city as a hub; factories, railroads,apartments revolved around the fissionable cen-ter.69 It was the modern city found in his prewarpoetrycompact, dynamic, and discordant. Tramsput the slums within a few minutes of thepalace; neon lights shone on dreary streets.

Once again, festival theater provided the mostappropriate model for Mystery-Bouffe, this timein the definition of space. The entrance to thePromised Land was depicted as simply as in amedieval mystery, by opening the gates andhaving the players step in; and Mayakovsky'sentrance as A Simple Man used a circus trick:he flew onto the deck along a guy wire.70 Anark-stage represented the revolutionary city.Boats have an ancient tradition as the symbolicvessels of threshold states. Noah's ark is an ob-vious model, but there were also Ulysses's shipin the Odyssey, Charon's ferry across the Styx,and the medieval Ship of Fools.

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The ark-stage provided a graphical representa-tion of revolution as threshold. It was dividedinto the deck, occupied by the clean, and thehold, where the unclean were banished. The twolevels were connected by a trapdoor. When inthe third act another set was introduced, thesame spatial division was applied: on top wasHeaven, below Hell, and in between a trapdoor.This trapdoor, fully motivated by the use of aship's deck as the stage, traced its genealogy tomystery stages. Its forbears were the English pa-geant cart, used both as a stage and as a trans-port for mystery cycles, and the Russian vertep(crèche), an itinerant puppet booth featuring theChristmas story on a two-level stage: theSlaughter of the Innocents on top followed bycomic interludes below. The trapdoor was sug-gested by Alekseev-Iakovlev, who showedMayakovsky the model of a balagan hell-mouthwhen he was first planning Mystery-Bouffe.71

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Drawing on futurism and carnival theater,Mayakovsky provided a rousing version of theold regime's fall; but to satisfy the duality offestivity, and to offer a compelling vision of thefuture, he had to speak of what lay beyond thethreshold. The apocalyptic equation, like the Re-volution itself, begged for a utopian solution.Here too, Mayakovsky profited from Blok's ex-perimentation. Blok's response to the Revolu-tion, The Twelve (1918), was a poem of chaos:figures emerge from a

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Petersburg blizzard and are swallowed again asthe violence of revolution plays itself out. Bloklooked to the carnival theaterthe puppet boothforhis central character, Petrukha (Petka), and hismisadventures resembled those in a balagan me-lodrama. 72 At the poem's conclusion a suddenclearing in the whirl of snow gives a glimpse ofthe potential future: Christ, clad in white with acrown of red roses standing out against the bliz-zard, leads the twelve.

The final act of Mystery-Bouffe was set in thePromised Landbeyond Hell, beyond evenHeavena utopia in which the curses of modernlife, differentiation and alienation, were absent.Like Blok, Mayakovsky looked to Christianity,particularly the poetic Christianity of Ivanov, forhis image of utopia. If the city was socialist, itwas only because it lacked individuality. The so-cial order's greatest virtue was a lack of conflictbetween things and people. Mayakovsky lookedback for his embodiment of the future: theSimple Man, the savior come to lead the finalrevolution, was none other than a new Christ,complete with a ''new Sermon on the Mount":

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In my paradise, halls are packed with furniture,the rooms fashionable with electrical services.There the sun plays such tricksthat each step sinks in a sea of sunlight.Here the age pores over the gardener's experienceflooring of glass, manure embankment,and from roots of dillpineapples grow six times yearly.73

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Mayakovsky's progress from revolution to so-cialism reversed the course of symbolist history;a layered grotesque gave way to a world of one-ness. His festival drama, one of the first in re-volutionary Russia, ended aptly with a festivalof the new city; yet it was celebrated as Ivanov(and Rousseau before him) might have wished,with a hymn and a choral dance. Festivity andits many forms had given Mayakovsky a modelfor his play of revolution; his collaboration withMeyerhold familiarized him with the experi-ments of his symbolist predecessors. The com-bination made for a convincing story of revolu-tion that would last many years in Sovietculture.

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ThreeThe Politics of Meaning and StyleWhen any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, whoare so clever that they can imitate anything, comes tous, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and hisart, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet andholy and wonderful being; but we will also inform himthat in our State such as he are not permitted to exist;the law will not allow them. And so when we haveanointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of woolupon his head, we will send him away to another city.Plato, The Republic

Rejecting the politics of the past was easier thanrejecting its culture. Many older Bolsheviks,like Lenin and Lunacharsky, saw the culturallegacy as a resource and advocated savingwhatever could serve the new order. Progressiveculture could be salvaged and reactionary cul-ture discarded. The more radical Proletkultistsand futurists, on the contrary, saw the past asdead weight. They considered little worth sav-ing; and even the bits of ore in the dross neededreworking. Neither side of the debate seemed tounderstand the dilemma fully. Lenin saw thefoolishness of radical rhetoric, yet believed na-ively that the past could be exploited selectively.His wish to preserve the Bolshoi Theater andTchaikovsky's operas rested on the assumptionthat a socialist environment would dissolve theirold-regime associations. Radicals perceived thesticky web of associations that could entangle asocialist culture built on tradition, but they couldnot create culture in a vacuum.

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Even developing partisan symbols was enorm-ously complex. The Bolsheviks came to powerwith few symbols of their own. They were notthe only revolutionaries in Russia (though theywere perhaps the most ardent), and they sharedprominent symbols with other parties. Thesongs, colors, and heroes now associated withthe October Revolution were not always exclus-ively Bolshevik. Though the creation of thehammer and sickle emblem in early 1918signaled a start, the inadequacy of Bolshevikiconography caused complications in the twomajor festivals of 1918, May Day and theNovember 7 anniversary celebration.

Festivals test a symbol more rigorously thanother environments do. An emblem sewn on ashirt or decorating a pamphlet lies in a congenialcontext that supports and complements its mes-sage. Symbols displayed in a public festivalmust compete for attention, and they must drivehome their message through a stew of compet-ing symbols and hostile interpretations. The cul-tural heritage was particularly formidable duringfestivals, when it was embodied by the city it-self. The language and medium of a festival isthe city, its people, streets, and buildings. In oth-er instances when the cultural past proved recal-citrant, the revolutionaries dealt with it summar-ily: paintings were put in the basement, musicalscores in the archives, books on the back shelvesof the library; but streets and buildings could notbe hidden.

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The desire of festival planners to celebrate theRevolution in harmonious style was often frus-trated by the cities themselves, particularly byPetrograd, the former imperial capital.Petrograd's ceremonial center was dominated bythe neoclassicism of later Romanov buildings.In an attempt to overcome the vestiges of auto-cracy, statues of the tsar, some of which werealready slated for removal, were covered withstrips of red material. 1 The center of UprisingSquare (previously Znamenskaia Square) wasoccupied by Pavel Trubetskoi's fine equestrianmonument to Alexander III. But any tsaristmonument was considered an embarrassment,no matter how artistic; so a massive triumphalarch of planks was put over it for the November7 celebration. On another occasion a tribune re-sembling a medieval keep was built.

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Autocracy's symbols could be concealed or ex-cised, but neoclassicism was a more lasting in-fluence. Faced with a cutback of funds, organ-izers of the May Day 1918 demonstration inPetrograd settled for a single centerpiece, a float"modeled on a Roman float with a statue of thegoddess Freedom in a white tunic, a torch in herupraised hand, standing against a background ofthe slogan 'Having proudly made it through thecenturies of oppression, we celebrate the world-wide May

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holiday.'" 2 On a smaller float, labor was depic-ted allegorically by "th e figure of a womandressed in a Greek tunic with a torch in her righthand. . . . Sometimes [in later years] the figureof Lady Liberty [zhenshchina svoboda] wassomewhat altered in the new spirit, receiving thedress of a female peasant or worker."3 Neoclas-sicism also impinged on the emblems of revolu-tion: in a contest for the Russian Republic's newmonetary seal, Sergei Konenkov depicted asatyr and bacchante. The trend continued up tothe November anniversary. There were "a depic-tion of a worker leaping onto a winged horse(the classical Pegasus), angels blowing theirtrumpets, classical heroes wreathed in laurel, orwarriors in helmets and with swords, . . . tri-umphal arches with columns, sacrificial altarsand towers, . . . coats of arms with complete her-aldic detailcrests, mantles, and so forth."4 Tsar-ist iconography also was apparent: the Legendof St. George was used to depict the Revolution

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as a "handsome young folk hero with brokenchains and a red banner in his hand, liberating anaked woman (Russia), at whose feet a dragonwith a crown on its head (tsarism) was coiled.''5

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Although these were festivals of revolution, ex-pressing themes of conflict or disorder led to acertain difficulty: here again the cities were notinclined to cooperate. Few seemed to notice theincongruity; Saratov artists blithely draped thetriumphal arches and obelisks erected by the oldregime in garlands and bedecked them with em-blems of labor.6 In Petrograd, a city of rigid or-der and imperial grandeur, the combinationjarred some observers. Because decorations har-monized with the city's architecture, the an-niversary of the Revolution was not terribly re-volutionary. For November 7 Dobuzhinsky dec-orated the Petrograd Admiralty and surroundingsquare, which were adjacent to the WinterPalace in the center of town. The square hadbeen the site of popular carnivals in the latenineteenth century, but Dobuzhinsky preferredthe building's neoclassical architecture for in-spiration. Staying within the facade's stylisticlimits, he draped the cornices with red flags and

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garlands. Naval code was used as a motif, in-cluding a ship decorated with sea horses and anemblem of the Russian Republic. Obelisks andspheres were placed on the Admiralty and dec-orated with a ribbon bearing the signs of the zo-diac.7 Dobuzhinsky's work was a stylization ofeighteenth-century ceremonial art. Puninobserved:

The October festivities differed little from whatthe worldwide bourgeoisie did in its own time.The same streets decorated with material,wooden arches, garlands, electric and even justcolored lanterns, somehow dully reminiscent ofthe notorious "days of the tsars," with their gaslitdesigns and stars. . . . This

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happened only because the organizers them-selves did not think much about the idea of "cel-ebration" and performed their assignment offhan-dedly, "with whatever fits." For the foundation oftheir plan they took the alien and dead idea of"decoration." They found it necessary to decoratethe old city and old, primarily ''bourgeois''streets. 8

Yet there were possibilities. Moscow was a cityof many architectural styles, which offeredartists a wealth of options. The Moscow decora-tions for May Day, under the direction of theMoscow Commission, matched the city's stylewithout succumbing to its spirit.9 The Vesninbrothers' work on Red Square and the area sur-rounding the Kremlin created an appropriate ce-remonial center, both solemn and brash. The fo-cus was the Red Square reviewing stand, "amonumental three-tiered tribunal with anenormous wreath of fir branches. . . . Brightpurple banners and panels clashed with blackribbons of mourning."10

The Conversion of Symbols

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Festivals were a recollection of the past; but toavoid ensnaring the new culture in the old, thepast had to be remembered selectively. Suchwas the radicals' compromise: the artistic herit-age could be exploited, but only on the terms ofthe present. The issue was not just theoretical, atleast not in the theater, where a dearth of newplays brought proletarian culture to a halt. Blokproposed searching the censors' archives forquality plays suppressed by the tsarist bureau-cracy; but he found to his dismay that there werenone.11 Kerzhentsev proposed tackling twoproblems at once by rewriting the classics to fitcontemporary needs.

The present day increasingly forces us to realizethat we still have no new repertory, that the cre-ation of plays, if only by reworking and adjustingthem, is essential.12

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Some fine plays have become absolutely unac-ceptable, for instance, because of their reaction-ary (by today's standards) tendencies. Why notchange the authors' intentions and give the playsmeanings that will find resonance with the con-temporary audience?13

The problem of the new culture could be solvedfor the time being by the old, by taking the clas-sics and resetting them in a revolutionarycontext.

Proletkult was a leader in bringing these re-makes, or peredelki, to the

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stage. Ivan Krylov's fable The Quartet was re-made by the Moscow Proletkult into A Confer-ence of the Entente on May Day 1919; "themonkey . . . [became] a Frenchman; the goatwas an American; the bear an Englishman; andthe ass, an Italian. Instead of Krylov's sparrow[the raissoneur] there was a worker with a ham-mer who dispersed the foul musicians whose'scraping and strumming' had made the wholeworld sick. Another Krylov fable, The Slaughterof the Beasts, was restaged as a satire aboutpriests, capitalists, policemen, 'high-society'ladies, and their associates." 14 Peredelki couldbe quite topical. Mikhail Glinka's Ivan Susanin(A Life for the Tsar) was reset from the Time ofTroubles to the 1920 Polish-Russian War, withits original patriotic sentiments unaltered.15 Andfive years later, on May Day 1925, the MalyOpera would perform Giacomo Puccini's La To-sca as The Struggle for the Commune.16

Clearly, remakes could be overdone, but themethod also brought positive results.Meyerhold's third-anniversary (November 7,1920) production of Verhaeren's Les aubes, inwhich fraternizing at the front leads to a revolu-tion (the revolution was Meyerhold's addition),was striking and original. On May Day 1919 inKiev, Konstantin Mardzhanov, one of prewarPetrograd's leading directors, produced Lope deVega's Fuente ovejuna as a revolutionary spec-tacle.17 Scenes of the royal court (which wereabbreviated) and the peasant village were placedon opposite sides of the stage and contrasted byacting style and lighting. As Evreinov had donein the Ancient Theater, Mardzhanov stressed thetheme of popular struggle against oppression.The king and queen were, in the revolutionaryversion, identified as the oppressors. Therestaged ending of the drama included a rebel-lion and victory; and soldiers present at the

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premiere marched straight from the theater tothe front.

Nor was music neglected by the new order. OnNovember 7, 1918, at the Workers' Soviet Opera(the former Zimin Theater), Theodore Komis-sarzhevsky transferred the setting ofBeethoven's Lenore18 from Spain to revolution-ary France; cuts were made, revolutionaryspeeches added, and the whole thing was re-named Liberation.19 A piece of music could begiven new meaning simply by changing its con-text. Scriabin, although he had died in 1915 andwas never associated with the Bolsheviks, wasenjoying great popularity in 1918. His symphon-ic poem Prometheus (a figure dear to revolu-tionaries) was performed in the Bolshoi, with acurtain by the artist Aristarkh Lentulov thatprovided a visual complement to the music.20The Bolshoi, which had not welcomed Bolshev-ik management, was trying to catch up on someof the new

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themes invading Russian theaters that year. TheScriabin performance was only part of an even-ing "unified by the theme of rebellion, of thepeople rising up in the name of reason, light,and liberty." 21 It was followed by the Veche(Popular Assembly) scene of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov, and the lastpiece of the evening was Aleksandr Gorsky'sballet Stenka Razin.

For artists searching the past for a myth of popu-lar rebellion to supplement the precursors of theRevolution, the seventeenth-century Cossackand peasant revolt led by Razin seemed suitable.It had several advantages. Razin's biographywas known sketchily by most Russians. Therewere songs, dramatic games, poems, and talesabout the robber; in fact, the first Russian movieproduction (1908) was about Razin. Certainsymbols were universally familiar: the long boatand the Volga river, which represented the brig-and community and its freedom-loving ways,and the captive princess who captured Razin'sheart and almost lured him from his comrades.

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This brigand already had a history as a revolu-tionary icon. Socialists had tried to adopt him,but his spirit was probably closer to anarchism.Mikhail Bakunin (Marx's rival in the First Inter-national) had seen Razin's uprising as a proto-type of his own rebellion: unfettered, risingfrom the depths of the people, destructive, per-haps also aimless.22 The anarchistic sailors ofKronstadt even used a song from the popularRazin lore, with new words, as their battle cry in1917:

From the island-fortress Kronstadt,To the expanses of the Neva,A fleet of vessels sails outwardThe Bolsheviks sit at their prow.23

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Bolsheviks had further reasons for using theRazin legend. Marxist tradition held the peas-antry in low regard, but the Bolsheviks foundthemselves ruling a predominantly peasant na-tion and maintaining an uncomfortable alliancewith the countryside. An attempt was made toabsorb the Cossack rebellions that had shakenthe old order into the genealogy of the Bolshev-iks (who had, after all, done the same). Leninmade the connection nicely on May Day 1919,speaking from Lobnoe Mestothe site of Razin'sexecutionat the dedication of his monument:"This monument represents one of the represent-atives of the rebellious peasantry. Here he laidhis head down in the struggle for freedom. Rus-sian revolutionaries made many such sacrificesin the struggle with capital. The best of the pro-letariat and peasantry perished,

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fighters for freedom, but not the sort of freedomproposed by capital, a freedom with banks, withprivate factories, with speculation." 24

Razin was prominent in the November 7, 1918,celebration even though the lore, which embod-ied the peculiarly Russian notion of freedom(volia) that cherished unfettered will, wasscarcely the stuff of Bolshevism. Nevertheless,party propagandists and sympathizers usedRazin to represent the revolution's utopian aims:freedom, equality, brotherly love.

Not all versions of the Razin legend were neces-sarily like Lenin's: artists had their own inter-pretations. Kuznetsov did a large panel for theMaly Theater in Moscow under the curious titleStepan Razin on the River Beats Back the Ad-vance of Counterrevolution.25 Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin's panel on Petrograd's Theater Square,Stepan Razin, showed a benign soul, tall anderectless a Cossack than a peasant Christ withhis disciples.26

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Perhaps the most curious and compellingRazinone antithetical to Lenin'swas found in averse play by the futurist poet Vasily Ka-mensky, Stenka RazinHeart of the People.27Kamensky's image of Razin, which he had cre-ated long before the Revolution,28 was the trun-cated Razin who would remain popularthroughout the war: an elemental force dedic-ated to the good of the people; a "revolutionarybefore the proper time" to quote Lunacharsky'sparaphrase of Hegel. Razin was naturally de-structive, but destructive in a good way, break-ing down social obstructions that should nothave been there in the first place. It was an op-timistic image patched together from a range ofsources. Folk songs were a strong influence; fu-turism, in the rural variety peculiar to Russia,was felt in the "transrational" exclamations; themartial camaraderie celebrated by Denis Davy-dov returned to Russian poetry after a century'sabsence; and also present was an ideal of social

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harmony that appealed to socialists and symbol-ists alike:

There'll come the dayand the gates will openEachfor free guestsSo that in life any troubleWill be equal for every venture.There'll come the dayand forever friendsWill spin roundabout in a choral circleThe poor manand merchantsand princes.29

This was Razin as Rousseau might have likedhim, a utopian Razin. There was in fact a strongutopian element to the folk legends of brig-

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andry: after the nobility were burned out of theirmanor houses, a more just popular order wouldreign in the countryside.

Russian popular culture had in general a rich veinof utopianism, 30 yet with notable exceptions, theutopian visions present in 1918 festivals weredrawn from other sources. Foremost was Chris-tianity, which Blok and Mayakovsky used so ef-fectively: the Revolution in Russia was analog-ous to the advent of Christ. Lunacharsky had giv-en this imagery a broad sanction. In his Religionand Socialism,31 he reiterated the by-then tradi-tional claim of socialism to the spiritual heritageof Athens and early Christianity. Revolutionaryculture took over Christianity's language of exal-tation and spiritual ascent. Old symbols wereplaced in a new cultural context (revolution) thatgave them new meaning. In 1918 a decorativepanel on the Moscow headquarters of Narkom-pros depicted a worker and peasant in a style fa-miliar from icons of Cyril and Methodius, theByzantine missionaries to Slavdom; Petrov-Vodkin's 1918 in Petrograd (1920) depicted asimple Russian girl standing against the

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background of Petrograd with her child in herarms as a Madonna and Child.32

Christianity was not the only source of a utopianvision. In Vladimir Kirillov's "May Day Hymn"(1918)the first occasional verse for a Soviet holi-daythe language of popular liberation mergedwith the May celebration's pagan roots (perhapsRousseau would have been pleased).

Glorify May Day in all of its greatness,The holiday of Labor and the dropping of chains.Glorify May Day in all of its greatness.The holiday of freedom, and flowers and spring.Sisters get into your wedding dresses,Cover the pathways with garlands of rose,Brothers, open your arms to another's embraces.The years of our suffering and tears are all gone.33

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It sometimes seemed that symbols and the tradi-tions attached to them exerted a stronger influ-ence on the festival than the festival exerted onthe symbols. May Day had always competedwith the Orthodox Easter, which fell on April 28in 1918. Another poem written for the holidaysuggests how strong the crossover could be:

Arise, O mighty Russia!Come down, Crucified, from the cross!The element of liberty is upon us,Our chains are smashed forever more!34

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In fact, even the banners (khorugvi) that boreimages of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in the MayDay demonstration were a direct borrowingfrom traditional Easter processions. 35

Proletkultists most frequently resorted to theutopian symbols of religion. Their Christianitywas not always borrowed directly but obliquelythrough Wagner and the symbolists. Part of thecultural redefinition provoked by the Revolutionwas that responsibilities that had traditionallybelonged to high culture were assumed by newpoets and playwrights, of whom the Proletkult-ists were representative. These responsibilitiesincluded speaking to and for the conscience ofthe nation, giving the epoch historical definition,setting a social agendaall very abstract tasks, butones that could not be accomplished fully bypopular traditions. The last artists to accept andperform these duties had been symbolists; andwhen proletarians assumed the responsibility,they leaned on symbolists for experience and anidiom. The Russian artist who wishes to speakfor the nation assumes a certain tone of voiceand a certain style. In symbolist times the tonewas often apocalyptic.

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On May Day 1919, the Petrograd Proletkult Stu-dio presented The Legend of the Communard,which eventually ran for over 200 shows. Theplay was written by Petr Kozlov, a peasant sol-dier who presented himself as a samouchka, orself-taught artist. Before the Revolution, Kozlovhad written a decadent-symbolist mystery en-titled Above Life.36 Clearly, Kozlov's self-edu-cation had included some Wagner; in a scornfulreview, Viktor Shklovsky called Legend "Wagn-er without the music" ("Vagner, vospriniatyi polibretto").37

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In the first scene the Communard, whose com-ing has been prophesied by a Wise Man (ar-rayed in astrological emblems), is created; hisbirth occurs in a dark Wagnerian forest.38 Bentover a fire, the Son of the Sun and the Son of theEarth (the latter is dressed, like Tarzan, in a leo-pard skin) forge the Communard's heart, whichsprings to life at sunrise. Meanwhile various evilthings, including a Vampire, lurk in the shadowsand gnash their teeth. The Communard reflects afamiliar ideal: he is "a strong, handsome youngman. In him are combined all the elements ofthe earth: wisdom, happiness, thought, earth,and sun. Long, curly black hair. His face reflectsenergy and will power, combining kindness andgoodness. He is almost naked; only a belt with asymbolic hammer and sickle encircles hiswaist."39 Sundry prophesies accompany theCommunard's birth; and as he ventures into theworld, the Wise Man presents him with a sym-bolic ring. In an abrupt and inexplicable shift,

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the second scene opens on a factory floor, wherethe

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proletariat is suffering and exploited. Manifoldcomplaints, however, have not led to any rebel-lion; that initiative is left to the Communard,who appears to the workers in an upper window.Curiously, in this near-naked youth with theflowing black hair, the workers recognizesomeone "dressed just like us." 40

The Revolution had brought egalité and fratern-ité; naturally leaders and followers would re-semble one another. But "the Marxist's com-munism is not at all the same as the communismof a hick straight from the farm," as Mgebrovnoted.41 If a Russian worker could see himselfreflected in long curly hair and a leopard skin,the mirror was less Bolshevik ideology thanpopular culture. There was, as one critic put it, a"petty bourgeoispeasant [!] element" in the cul-ture, which expected revolution to arrive with aSavior: someone extraordinary, above the com-mon crowd.42 Religion offered a paradigm forsuch a historical event.

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If the heroic and utopian traditions were Christi-an, symbols of struggle could also be drawnfrom the Covenant and Exodus. The fourth andfinal scene (there is no third scene) takes placein "a gloomy ravine. All aroundrocks and theoutcroppings of cliffs."43 The resemblance tothe Sinai was not accidental. The people havebeen liberated from the factory floor and led in-to the desert toward the Land of Freedom, butthe hardships of the trek have disheartenedthem. A rebellion challenges the workers' lead-ers; they are accused, like Moses, of leading thepeople from well-fed slavery to the sure death offreedom. As the rebellion reaches a climax, theCommunard again appears to the people andconvinces them to continue their journey. Theytake only a few more steps when their newcitythe socialist utopiaappears on the horizon.The play ends (like Mystery-Bouffe) with aDance of Labor, performed in harmonic plastic

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movements: reaping grain, mowing hay, strikingan anvil.

Meaning as Power

Artists could find icons of the Revolution in thepast. Razin could become a Bolshevik, Christ asocialist. Borrowing and revamping old symbolswere essential for establishing a new culture.The process has been given considerable and il-luminating attention by historians of the FrenchRevolution, who have gauged popular atti-

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tudes by the changing face of political iconssuch as Marianne, the female embodiment ofFrance, and Hercules, the popular battler. 44One aspect of the process has, I believe, beenneglected: symbols are an instrument as well asa reflector of struggle. At any moment a symbolhas a number of potential meanings; and whichmeaning a symbol gets is often a matter of polit-ical struggle. Symbols do not simply acquiremeaning; meaning is given. It is not enough toassert that a political power expresses anddefines itself with the historical figures it hon-ors.45 More emphasis should be put on how his-tory is honored; power expresses itself not inhow it defines itself by history but in how it re-defines history according to itself. Memory isactive and selective; it emphasizes what servesits purposes, rejects what does not. A sign andprerogative of political power is the cooptationof history; and an essential exercise in power isto establish oneself as a focus or center, a set of

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standards and symbols around which historymust be arranged.

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Early in 1918 the Bolsheviks, insecure in theirpower, attempted to create and disseminate theirown version of the past with a government-sponsored "competition to produce designs ofmonuments intended to signalize the great daysof the Russian Socialist Revolution."46 Sinceonly six months had passed since those "greatdays," such an attitude was hardly appropriate,and the plan might have been dismissed outrighthad it not originated at the top: Lenin had sug-gested it to Lunacharsky, who in his own wordswas ''stunned and dazzled by the proposition. Itwas extraordinarily to my liking, and we set toits realization immediately."47 Included werethree undertakings: the removal of monumentsraised to the tsars and their "servants''; the re-naming of streets and squares; the creation ofmonuments to the forerunners and heroes of so-cialism. These three tasks suggested a strategyfor creating a new culture. Tearing down themonuments of the old regime would remove its

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symbols from the Soviet city. Still, all of the na-tional past could not be forgotten or jettisoned.Before a new culture could be created, the re-maining elements of the old had to be redefined.In 1918 the monument plan was, for the mostpart, an effort to grapple with the past: newnames were given to old symbols; monumentsand symbols that could not be renamed wereplaced in a new context.

Quick progress was made on the first undertak-ing: work begun under the Provisional Govern-ment on the removal of tsarist emblems frompublic buildings was continued, and a monu-ment to General Mikhail Skobelev was pulleddown as part of the May Day festivities in Mo-scow. That autumn, monuments to Alexander IIand Alexander III

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were also removed. 48 The constructive side ofthe project was not so quickly commenced. ByAugust 1918 a long list of monuments had beendrawn up,49 and a most interesting list it was;not only were socialists such as Robert Owen,Jérôme Blanqui,50 Marx, and Engels included,but historical "revolutionaries" such as Brutus,Razin, and another Cossack rebel, Ivan Bolot-nikov, were honored. Most intriguing was thelist of "cultural figures," an eclectic group:writers of socialist sympathies such as Verhaer-en found themselves side by side with the likesof Fedor Tiutchev and Rimsky-Korsakovun-likely champions of socialism.51 The monumentplan reached its apogee on the November 7 holi-day with the unveiling of monuments in the cen-ter and outlying districts of Moscow and Petro-grad. A representative of the partyin some casesLenin himselfgave a speech at each unveiling,which then developed into a political rally.52 Asthe original list presaged, the choice of subjects

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was eclectic: Marx, Engels, and Robespierrewere honored, but so were such nonsocialist cul-tural figures as the poets Aleksei Koltsov andIvan Nikitin.53 Even Dostoevsky was honored,which might have surprised him had he lived tosee the Revolution.

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Symbols acquire meaning not only through theirgiven properties but through their context. Thevery fact that a monument had been erected bythe revolutionary regime and the subject com-memorated suggested a new interpretation: thesubject belonged to revolutionary history. For aBrutus or Razin this interpretation was feasible,but when the Bolsheviks claimed the Russianheritage (by honoring Tiutchev, for instance), itwas not. To ensure that the desired aspect ofeach subject was memorialized, the unveilingspeech set the tone, and an inscription, chosenfrom the subject's more progressive statements,was chiseled onto the pedestal. The Cherny-shevsky monument, for instance, was gracedwith the quote: "Create the future, strive for it,work for it, and carry as much of it as you caninto the present." The proper interpretation wasthus engraved in stone for each viewer.

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The monuments, born of symbolic confusion,were often ungainly, and popular understandingresisted the sponsors' interpretations.54 Some,like the monuments to Robespierre and Vo-lodarsky, were blown up by vandals. Marx him-self seems to have suffered most, and that at thehands of his own admirers. One Moscow Marxwas, for some reason, gilded; a Moscow statueof Marx and Engels was nicknamed both "Cyriland Methodius" and "the bearded bathers"; aPetrograd Marx, placed before Smolny Institute,was described as ''a horrible statue, . . . thick andheavy, standing on a stout pedestal and holdingan enormous

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top hat like the muzzle of an eighteen-inch gunbehind him"; there was even a plan for a "KarlMarx, standing on four elephants." 55 His plightdrew embarrassing attention:

Karl Marx has fled the town of Penza.

Actually, it wasn't Marx but his recently erectedmonument.

Contradictory rumors about the causes of hismysterious disappearance are circulating aboutthe city.

Some say that his horse was seized during the re-cent mobilization, and Marx refused to continueon foot.

Others . . . claim he went looking for a more ap-propriate site than Penza. He's decided to tour thecities of the Russian Republic, knowing thatevery city would be flattered to have such amonument but not every city could afford such aluxury. Marxthe monumentwill arrive in somecity, stand on the square for several days, andthen leave for the next city.56

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The Lenin plan confronted the old dilemma ofhow a revolution should celebrate itself bystraddling the fence between the permanent andthe revolutionary. The two involve contradictorysenses of time: the permanent, a sense of etern-ity in which concrete moments disappear; the re-volutionary, a momentary, dynamic present.Lenin seems to have sensed the conflict andsuggested naming the plan "monumental propa-ganda," satisfying both eternal values and thedemands of the moment. If this term was notsufficiently unclear, he added, "For the time be-ing I'm not thinking about eternity or even dura-tion."57 The weather sensed his ambivalence;most of the monuments, cast in gypsum, meltedaway in the first rain.

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Lenin was not alone in his confusion; it repres-ented utopian longings that were strongest whenthe struggle was fiercest. The idea had a preced-ent in the revolutionary tradition: Lenin himselfmentioned Campanella and his plan to cover thewalls of the City of the Sun with edifying fres-coes.58 The plan would also have been familiarto the residents of Utopia, who "put up statues inthe market-place of people who've distinguishedthemselves by outstanding services to the com-munity, partly to commemorate their achieve-ments, and partly to spur on future generationsto greater efforts, by reminding them of theglory of their ancestors."59 A more tangible in-fluence was the efforts of French artists likeDavid (Oath of the Tennis Court) to memorial-ize their revolution.60

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The oddities of the Lenin plan should not ec-lipse an important point: the Bolsheviks sawfestivals as a source of legitimacy. They couldrewrite the past to project their presence backonto it, to include themselves in Eliade's cosmichistory. Monuments have great power to alter

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the structure of time, a task dear to revolutionar-ies from Robespierre to Lenin. Revolutionaries,in fact, have often used their newfound power tolegislate time. One of the Bolsheviks' first legis-lative acts, passed on January 23 (February 5),1918, was to switch from the Julian calendar ofthe Russian Orthodox church to the Gregoriancalendar used in the West. Celebrations of theRomanov dynasty were annulled, but as a con-cession to the religious feelings of the populaceecclesiastical holidays were retained. Therewere clear political consequences to the calen-dar changeschurch rites no longer had legal au-thority 61yet is also true that the calendar changewas long overdue.

A May 12 decree published in Izvestiia introdu-cing a new schedule of holidays was close to theradical legislation of revolutionary France. Inthe brief life of the French Revolution, profoundchanges were made in the measurement ofspace, as were equally profound, albeit tempor-ary, changes in the measurement of time. Thefirst and most controversial change was the con-version to metric measurement; its success isshown by the fact that nobody today remembersthat it was first legalized by the Convention.Even fewer remember that this wise decisionwas followed by the legislation of time in anequally logical manner. The year was dividedinto twelve months of thirty days each, and theseven-day week of Christianity was replaced bya metric ten days. A new era was declared, itsadvent being the establishment of the Repub-lic.62Bolsheviks, fortunately, were less radicaland more generous. The year 1917 remained1917, and where French workers had exchanged

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one day off in seven for one in ten, the Russiansgained a few holidays: January 1 (New Year'sDay), January 22 (Bloody Sunday), March 12(Overthrow of the Autocracy), March 18 (ParisCommune Day), May 1, and November 7 (theanniversary of the Bolshevik takeover in thenew style).63

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The Bolsheviks also attempted to claim urbanspace as their own; streets and squares were re-named during the anniversary celebration. Mostof the new names were appropriate in a city thathad just overthrown the tsar: Palace Square wasrenamed Uritsky Square after the recently slainChekist; Nevsky Prospect became the Prospectof October 25; Palace Bridge became Republic-an Bridge. Not only central points werechanged: Big and Little Gentry Streets becamethe First and Second Streets of the Rural Poor;and Guardian Street became SelfGoverningStreet.64 The plan could be bold and aggressive,as when the Iberian Chapel, one of Russia'smost sacred shrines, had a plaque reading "Reli-gion is the opium of the people" attached to itfor the November 1918 celebration.65

Although the Iberian Chapel plaque was astrong measure, it would

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be an overstatement to say that the Bolsheviks,having seized political control, could manipulatesymbols at will. Symbols do not always suc-cumb to redefinition; nor can the redefiner as-sume that the new definition will be accepted.Pilgrims continued to stream into the IberianChapel until Stalin leveled it in the 1930s; andunpredictable symbols upset festivals from thevery start.

Symbols sometimes gave notice that they werereal things, not to be manipulated freely. Air-planes were considered an outstanding emblemof modern science, which Bolsheviks liked tothink was on their side. Moscow artists, includ-ing Vladimir Tatlin and Kuznetsov, proposeddecorating fifteen airplanes, which would per-form aerial stunts over Khodynka Field. 66 Theintractability of the symbol, however, was dis-covered in Petrograd, where a plane hired to flyover the celebration crashed in the center oftown, killing the pilot and embarrassing the gov-ernment.67 Monuments were also unreliable.The dangers of appropriating national or folkheroes into the revolutionary pantheon weremade plain at the monument to Taras Shevchen-ko (see Figure 8), the Ukrainian poet who "withhis peasant instinct understood the idea of theInternationale long before its dissemination,"when a delegation from the Ukrainian consulateoffered a wreath in the name of Hetman Pavel

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Skoropadsky, head of the nationalist and anti-Bolshevik government.68

Perhaps most dangerous in the symbolic gamewas the outright negation or desecration of anopposing symbol. The Kremlin, which had be-come the center of Bolshevik power, also had along history as the symbolic center of the Russi-an autocracy and Orthodox Church. IakovSverdlov ordered the Kremlin commandant todecorate its walls with Soviet symbols and gavehim an unlimited budget for the task. On theTroitsky Tower an icon, one of the more sacredof Orthodoxy, was covered by a large panel of ahero in red, flying over the earth.69 An over-whelmingly religious crowd was offended, andwhen the panel was blown down by the wind,revealing the icon, rumors of a divine portentspread through Red Square. In the end, theLatvian Riflemen were called in to quell a ri-ot.70

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May Day 1918: The Struggle for Meaning

The sponsors of most Bolshevik festivals in1918 saw them as educational events, whichwould instill in the people the new

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Figure 8.Monument to Taras Shevchenko, Moscow, built as part of Lenin's

monument plan (Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980).

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ideology and unite them in the revolutionarycause. In this sense, the Bolsheviks agreed withmany modern commentators, who have seenfestivals as a prime instrument of socializationinto the Soviet system of values. 71 One mustbeware, however: intention is not execution.Artists commissioned to create festivals oftenthought differently from their sponsors; sym-bols, which have histories of their own, weresometimes interpreted differently from the waythe makers intended. And, finally, sponsorswere not of one mind; as we have seen, therewere different opinions and traditions as to howa revolution should be celebrated.

The festive tradition itself was ambiguous, andpreparations for the May Day celebration of1918 sparked conflicts between incompatiblenotions and hostile factions. To Bolsheviksforged by a decade of political struggle, MayDay was a weapon. In prerevolutionary times itwas a rare occasion for street gatherings; thedemonstrations were actually revolutions inminiature. But another tradition, begun by Wag-ner, saw festivity as an analog of socialism, atemporary utopia. This abstruse theoretical dis-putewhat function should a workers' demonstra-tion have when workers control the statebecamean acute dilemma with the establishment of aworkers' state.

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In a pamphlet released for the 1917 observance,Bogdanov wrote, "The May Day holiday is or-ganized to demonstrate . . . that the proletariat isan army of labor in constant battle with capit-al."72 Although this goal remained, May Day1918, coming after the October Revolution, alsogave the Russian proletariat reason to celebrate.May Day had been a holiday of struggle againstthe existing order; and now that workers werethe existing order, something would have tochange. The holiday could either celebrate whatwas or continue the struggle for what would be.

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Lunacharsky tried to bypass the problem en-tirely by asking, "But isn't the very idea intoxic-ating that the state, up 'til now our worst enemy,is now ours and celebrates May Day as its owngreatest holiday?" 73 Yet many would haveanswered with a flat no because the holiday wasalso a show of power. Before the Revolution,the May Day demonstration had represented theunderclass; now it stood for the state, not onlyas a symbol of power but as power itself. It wasa test of the ability to organize the people. Re-surgent opposition groups like the Mensheviks,the Special Assembly of Petrograd Factory andPlant Representatives, the Church, and even theanarchists called for a boycott of May Day.74

Grigory Zinoviev threatened to "crush the boy-cott in the most deci-

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sive manner," 75 yet for a celebration with somuch at stake, organization was sloppya mistakethe Bolsheviks would not repeat in the future.By spring 1918, the Revolution was in crisis,and it was only in midApril, two weeks beforethe event, that the Petrograd party committeeheaded by Zinoviev decreed that the holidayshould be celebrated at all and that the PetrogradSoviet should assume responsibility for the ar-rangements. The soviet assigned direction of thefestival to several groups with little in common.Scholars to this day are not sure who did the ac-tual organizingand nobody seems to haveknown in 1918. Reports indicate several possib-ilities: that the organizers were local labor uni-ons and the Petrograd section of Narkompros;that the soviet took sole responsibility, its effortsdirected by a special committee under the lead-ership of Andreeva; and that celebrations weredirected by the Central Organizing Committee,chaired by a certain Antselovich, and the

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Commission for Decorating the City, both cre-ated jointly by the municipal soviet and IZO(the national arts section of Narkompros).76 Thereport on this combined effort also states thatthe groups met in the Smolny Institute andWinter Palace, respectively, which would havemade coordination difficult: the two headquar-ters were located on different sides of a citywhere communications were notoriously unreli-able. Even Proletkult tried to infiltrate and takeover the Central Organizing Committee.77 It isclear enough, though, that organizational lineswere not explicit; in fact, the director of thefestival's Arts Section, Iakhmanov, ultimatelyrefused all responsibility.78 Nevertheless, disor-ganization, a flaw by political standards, al-lowed for a broad array of styles that makes thefestival rich and interesting to our time.

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The central newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiia inMoscow and Severnaia Kommuna (NorthernCommune) in Petrograd, were charged with pub-licity for the event, which they produced in aformat that became the subsequent standard.Several days beforehand, official May Day slo-gans, approved by the municipal party commit-tee, were published, as were march routes,which went through every city district. Pageswere filled with recollections of bygone days,when May Day was not celebrated openly. Theofficial papers failed to mention the decorations,as if such efforts were alien to a solemn affair.Should the solemn air, however, have concealedthe day's triumphant essence, the April 30 head-line of Pravda declared May Day "a workers'holiday, the holiday of the victory of socialism."If it is true that a party in opposition is con-cerned with the downfall of the old and that aparty in confident power is concerned with theconstruction of the new, then

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surely triumph was reflected in the slogans ofthe day: of eighteen total, fifteen were of the"Long live . . ." variety, while a paltry three pro-claimed "Down with. . . ." Obviously, no men-tion was made of the boycott.

Stylistic multiplicity, political rivalry, poor or-ganization, and Bolshevik ambivalence complic-ated May Day 1918. The diverse meanings ac-quired by a single symbol in a single festivallikethe panel erected on the Kremlin towershowed alack of consensus. Symbols acquire meaningwithin a context, an interpretative framework:the events they are associated with, the systemof ideas they are placed in, the habits of obser-vation that bring some facets into focus and shutothers out. The ways that a culture can givemeaning to latent signsat all times dynamic andcomplexbecome terribly tangled in times of re-volution. Language itself drifts from its mooringeven in a stable culture, and words take on manymeanings. Interpretation becomes problematic;one can never be sure that a statement is inter-preted according to its design. The act of mak-ing a statement assumes that speaker and inter-preter can find among many strands of culture a

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common interpretive frameworkand that theywish to.

A competition of contexts can enrich a languageand make it flexible in times of change, but ifthere are too many meanings available, the com-monality necessary for communication is lost.The alternative is to assign meaning arbitrarily,by fiat. This is meaning created not by theframework but by the center. For this process totake place, however, there must be a commonlyaccepted, defining center. On May Day 1918,the Bolsheviks could not even create a unifiedorganization or style, and to speak of a definingcenter would be premature. They did not yet oc-cupy the central position that permits the cre-ation of meaning: they did not have the power orlegitimacy.

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To speak of a single meaning in 1918 would besimplistic. It is wiser to find the festival's poten-tial meanings and watch the outcome. The con-test for meaning demonstrated how interpreta-tion can be an exercise in power. The Bolshev-iks and their opponents, who still controlledparty newspapers, had considerable interpretat-ive latitude. 79 Each reporter tried to place thefestival in an advantageous context. May Daywas, as it had been originally, a day of struggle:to the Bolsheviks, it was a struggle for the newsociety; to the opposition, against the existingregime. The Bolsheviks called for a demonstra-tion, while opposition leaders called for acounter-demonstration: to the naive observer,both look like a march through the city streets.But when rank-and-file mem-

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bers of opposition parties voted to skip themarch altogether, the Bolsheviks claimed theywere rejecting the counter-demonstration, whilethe opposition claimed they were avoiding thedemonstration. Now, both sides of the debatewere faced not with a city of full streets waitingfor interpretation, but with empty streets; and atthis time the opposition strategically called for aboycott.

The May Day demonstration drew moderategatherings: although the streets were decoratedgaily and filled with marchers, the crowds pre-dicted by the Bolsheviks failed to materialize.Most embarrassing was the absence of workersfrom the Obukhov and Putilov factories, strong-holds of Bolshevik support. 80 Though sheerweariness was a likely cause, people had goodreason to honor the boycott. Support for theBolsheviks was lagging because of failures inthe agricultural and industrial economies, the in-troduction of radical socialist policies, and theBrest Litovsk peace, among other reasons.Nevertheless, there was interpretative latitude.True, the workers did not march in large num-bers; and the city was not entirely red. Yet citywalls were covered with red banners andposters, and the streets abandoned by workerswere filledmostly by soldiers and by clerks de-pendent on the Bolsheviks for their jobs.

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Given a festival to interpret, the newspaperscould provide an acceptable meaning. Izvestiiaboasted of the fine weather and defended theworkers' right to celebrateneither of which any-one contested. Pravala admitted some disap-pointment but drowned the admission in a sea ofenthusiasm. Krasnaia gazeta (Red Journal) tookthe easy route, adding a zero to some attendancefigures.81 The Bolshevik press called the festiv-al a success; the opposition pointed out that themarchers were soldiers and claimed theBolsheviks had received no support from theworkers. The Bolsheviks said the soldiers werethe workers . . . and so on.

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Published pictures illustrategraphicallyhow aproper framework could create the proper mean-ing. Photographers on the Field of Mars, thecentral congregation point, framed their picturesto show tightly packed crowds around a speaker;but in some pictures a slightly larger frameshowed that much of the field was empty.82(See Figure 9.) May Day 1918 was the last holi-day covered by an independent press; for the an-niversary celebration in November, regulationsmade independent photography virtually im-possible.83

Although the tradition that recommended massfestivals to the Bolsheviks had a strongly plural-istic element, the dominant characteristic of itsunderlying cultural model was unanimity. If theSoviet festivals were

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Figure 9.Grigory Zinoviev (top photo, standing in car) addressing the May Day 1918

parade on the Field of Mars, Petrograd. The lower photograph shows the samecelebration from a more revealing angle (Plamia, 12 May 1918, pp. 8, 9).

to attain the results imagined by their sponsors, conflictingvoices would have to be silenced. In this sense, the holiday was asuccess with those inclined toward the Bolsheviks; they weregiven an experience of unity and a taste of the culture of the fu-ture, while the boycotting opposition gained nothing. TheBolsheviks succeeded in making May Day their own. Herein liesthe only possible explanation of Lunacharsky's rather oddconsid-ering the reality of the holidayrecollection eight years hence:

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As to the holiday's solemn, unusually piercingand joyful mood, and the beauty of form inwhich the first May Day after the October Re-volution was cast, it was the most successful. I'velived through many a May Day since with theproletariat of Leningrad and Moscow. Each wassignificant, each was well attended, each waswhat a proletarian holiday should be, but theywere also business, days of accounting, days ofself-organization, days of inspection. But not aone so impressed me with its many wonderfulpictures, hundreds of thousands of people unitedby unblighted joy, and the efforts of artists whomet the masses with open hearts. 84

He was remembering either May Day 1918 asothers were supposed to or May Day 1917 as itwas.

November 1918: The Struggle over Style

The variety of interpretation found in 1918 wasalso caused by a diversity of styles. The admin-istrators controlling festivals after 1918 were notambiguous about how the new order should cel-ebrate itself. Friche, who took over in Moscow,preferred displays of harmony and unity alongthe lines of Rousseau's choral circles; Andreeva,who dominated Petrograd festivals, liked thetheme of magnificent endeavor. Neither had ataste for futurism. When Mayakovsky and Mey-erhold proposed their anniversary production ofMystery-Bouffe to the Petrograd Theater Section(PTO) headed by Andreeva, she did her best toprevent it.85

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All parties to the debate over style agreed thatartists should devote themselves to the Revolu-tion. The real disagreement was over the natureof the duty and how it should be met. Russianlacks the articles the and a (an); rarely hasgrammar made as much difference as it did inNovember 1918. All concurred with the slogan''Da zdravstvuet revoliutsiia,'' but in Russian thephrase can mean two entirely different things:"Long live revolution" or "Long live the[Bolshevik] Revolution." November 1918, thefirst anniversary of Soviet power, was celeb-rated under this slogan, and it turned out to be astruggle between the artists' iconoclastic exuber-ance and the organizers' wish to tame thatexuberance.

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In Moscow the festival was directed by the Or-ganizing Committee for the October Festivities,established in early October by the municipalsoviet. Its work was overseen by a troika ofVadim Podbelsky, Afonin, and Lev Kamenev,who was head of the soviet.86 Most of the

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artwork eventually became the responsibility ofthe municipal Arts Department, 87 and theaterswere administered by Olga Kamenevahead ofthe Narkompros Theater Section (TEO), wife ofKamenev, and sister of Leon Trotsky.88

Although a Narkompros committee consistingof Petrograd's most talented artists, includingBlok and Meyerhold, had been meeting sinceAugust to plan that city's celebration,89 a mid-September decree of the municipal soviet placedAndreeva in charge of its Central OrganizingBureau for the October Triumphs. The bureauwas given sweeping powers for "the requisitionand confiscation of all necessary materials andtechnical means."90 Should this seem an idle de-cree or the festival a trivial matter, it might benoted that the bureau was able to requisition allconstruction workers from the Petrograd regionand, when they did not suffice, additional work-ers from the Pskov, Novgorod, and Vologda re-gions.91 The Central Organizing Bureau re-turned the favor to those who had granted themsuch power with a gesture that set an unfortu-nate precedent: it commissioned hundreds ofbusts and portraits of Lenin, Zinoviev, Lun-acharsky, and other Bolshevik leaders.92

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Because Andreeva had already been appointedhead of the Theater and Spectacle Section of theNorthern Commune's regional Narkompros,93she was given effective control over the entirecelebration and did her best to prevent futuristparticipation.

The Civil War was in full swing by November.The Bolsheviks were engaged in a struggle forlife, and the holiday was seen by officials muchas May Day had been before the Revolution, asa day of solidarity and struggle. The officialmood was best expressed in one of the slogansof the day.

Both crying and singing are useless to dead men:Pay tribute to them differently.Step over their corpses without any fear,And bearing their standard march on.94

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Andreeva, whose preference for stately celebra-tion was evident in May, spurned the word fest-ival for the more official triumphal celebration,and in a September 25 speech to the PetrogradSoviet called for a solemn affair: "The an-niversary celebration will generate theproletariat's confidence in the final triumph ofits cause. But while celebrating the anniversarywe must not forget that the struggle continuesand that our holiday will be of an austere char-acter."95 And a decree issued by the MoscowSoviet backed official taste with a warning: "Inthe great days of the

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anniversary of the proletarian revolution, an ex-emplary proletarian order must reign in the RedCapital. Only the strict comradely discipline andself-restraint of the working masses will createsuch order." 96

Despite the organizers' austere intentions, theholiday mood was celebratory. On November 7,the second day of the long weekend, Moscowawoke early to the sounds of singing in thestreets. Although some might have preferred tosleep late, the sacrifice was rewarded bybolstered rations: two pounds of bread, a half-pound of candy or fruit preserves, two pounds offresh fish, and a half-pound of creamery butterper person, which were indescribable luxuries ina country on the brink of starvation.97 Cafés andrestaurants were kept open, and food was servedwithout charge; a free dinner was given to thechildren of Moscow. Similar privileges were ex-tended to the citizens of Petrograd and Sar-atov,98 and perhaps other cities.

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Lenin's monument plan was in full swing by theNovember anniversary celebration. Interpreta-tions and reactions to the work attested to theongoing stylistic debate. Punin's warning againststylistic passivity went unheeded whenDobuzhinsky's treatment of the Petrograd Ad-miralty met with official approvaldespite his re-cent antipathy to the Bolsheviks. Punin was notalone in objecting to revolutionary monumental-ism. Another critic, for instance, feared that "thenew revolutionary monuments will be made inthe same 'official-domestic' style as the statuesto 'the tsars and their servants.'"99 The alarmwas justified. On November 7 an Obelisk to In-ternational Revolutionaries was unveiled inMoscow's Aleksandrovsky Garden; the obeliskatraditional symbol of autocracyhad been erectedin 1913 as part of the Romanov dynasty's 300thanniversary celebration, but the two-headedeagle was removed and the names of revolution-aries were carved over those of the tsars.100

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Avant-gardists insisted that any style that har-monized with the old cities could not be revolu-tionary. They disdained the coward's evasion-covering statues with red bannersand attackedmonuments head on. Often the weapon was hu-mor. In Moscow Annenkov, assigned the distri-bution of slogans, told how "among the sloganschosen by the Party Central Committee wasMarx's well-known, ancient quotation: 'Revolu-tion is the locomotive of history.' In convulsionsof laughter, we assigned the slogan to railroadworkers and distributed enormous banners, onwhich a locomotive was drawn with a beardedportrait of Marx on its 'breast' over the cow-catcher."101

Theater Square, spread out before the ImperialBolshoi Theater, was transformed into a field ofcolor; trees were spray-painted in lilac, and

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bushes were covered with muslin of the samecolor. The grass was given a coat of paintthrough a fire hose. 102 Hunters' Row, an out-door produce and meat market, was also given aface-lift. Its booths, famous for abundance andvariety before the Revolution (and for privatetrading after), were never known for beauty. Abrother-and-sister team, the Alekseevs, coveredthe booths with bold geometric designs in brightreds, blues, oranges, and purples.103 A garlandof flags stretched over the row between twomastsa traditional decoration for Russian fair-grounds. In the Belorussian town of Vitebsk,house painters scandalized citizens by coveringtheir buildings with the designs of Chagall.104

An even more aggressive attack on the old city,and the biggest scandal of all, was raised byAltman's work in Petrograd. Legend claims thatfuturists used discord inside the Petrograd Cent-ral Organizing Bureau to slip their work into thefestival.105 Considering that Altman's work wasplaced in the city center, that similar work hadbeen hung on Palace Square for May Day, andthat it was made of 20,000 arshins (12,000yards) of bright material,106 the possibility thatit was slipped past anyone is doubtful. Morelikely, Andreeva, who disliked modern painting,refused to let futurists participate in the festival,and they had their plans approved elsewhere.

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Altman's rendering of Palace Square was a mix-ture of the moderate and the radical; he intendedto make its enclosed area suitable for popularfestivals.107 To begin, the autocratic associ-ations had to be removed, which he did by creat-ing a carnival atmosphere. Carnival refutes oldmeanings by mocking the framework or sur-roundings that create that meaning. Buildingslining the square were connected with geomet-rical banners of red, green, and blue. A row oftrees on the open side of the square facing theAdmiralty was covered with green shields; eachcarried a few letters that in series spelled "Pro-letariat of the worldunite!"

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Meaning was also attacked and exploded fromthe center. The center of autocratic Russia wasPalace Square, and its center was the most mo-numental of monuments, the AlexanderColumn, erected in honor of the European vic-tories of Alexander I. Altman took the ponder-ous column and translated it into the terms ofthe surrounding festival; he did a futurist par-ody. The heavy, three-dimensional masses ofthe column and its base were fragmented intoodd geometrical figures, which came out of theprocess flat. These figures were arranged in aswirl of fire around the column, which providedan axis that they seemed to spin around. Altmantook the muted reds and yellows of the Palaceand

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General Headquarters and intensified them; thenew square was ablaze in orange and red. Whathad a year and a half previously been the centerof an empire became a bright and splashycarnival.

The Reaction

The holiday was enjoyed by many celebrants.The futurist work and its carnival gaietygarnered most of the praise, from various semi-official papers and from the official organsPravda and Izvestiia. The official solemnitiesreceived little notice; the less official a paperwas, the less space it devoted to the "triumphs."As a young member of the Proletkult LiteraryStudio noted:

What was remarkable was that the "triumphs'"official sidethe passing of marching columns, theunveiling of memorial plaques and statuespaledbefore the universal exultation and immediatefeeling of joy. It was majestic, but the majestictook a back seat to carefreeness, solemnity togaiety. . . . It was not the celebration of an an-niversary, the memory of sacrifices, or the ec-stasy of a future victory and creative spirit, butthe joyful greeting of [the] revolution, the child-like merriment of the great masses' laughter thatmade the day of [the] Overturn great. . . . The an-niversary of the October Revolution became thefirst day of a new era. 108

The mood of the day and its peculiar sense oftime are captured admirably here.

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Articles of the time were in unanimous praise ofthe festival.109 Hostile reviews did appeartheseare the articles that scholars now quote most of-tenbut they were written long after the fact, in1919, when criticism of the futurists had gainedofficial backing and was somewhat fashion-able.110 Still, to call the exultation universal wasan exaggeration; those antagonistic to the Re-volutiona sizeable part of the populationdid notshare in the celebration and seem to have beenrather frightened by the whole affair. As TamaraKarsavina, prima ballerina of the imperial stage,commented, "One was safer indoors."111

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Oddly enoughand unfortunately since it was aformative event in Soviet artistic policymanyBolshevik officials agreed with Karsavina. InPetrograd, Andreeva expressed strong disap-proval of futurism and claimed the support ofthe Petrograd proletariat. At a rally of the"working intelligentsia," Andreeva took the po-dium and read what she claimed were excerptsfrom the letters of workers incensed by thefutur-

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ist decorations. 112 Initially, the PetrogradSoviet confirmed its support of the futurists, andthe brouhaha quieted down for a few months.

Meanwhile, the battle flared up in Moscow.Modernists were situated in the Moscow branchof IZO Narkompros, a national organization; theaesthetic conservatives (who were often politicalradicals) were in local soviets. In early February1919, Lunacharsky decreed that local branchesof IZO would be in charge of decorating citiesfor May Day.113 Friche, by now director of theMoscow Soviet's Department of People'sFestivals, whose control was threatened byLunacharsky's decree, initiated a long series ofantifuturist polemics in the soviet's Vechernieizvestiia (Evening News), for which he was artseditor. He set a mean-spirited tone in an initialeditorial,114 which was followed by articles byother authors, all under Friche's editorship. Thearticles, incidentally, inveighed mostly againstIZO futurists; Moscow futurists, many of whomworked with the Moscow Soviet's Arts Depart-ment, do not seem to have bothered the authors.Kameneva, a vocal advocate of futurists before

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November 1918, when they worked under her inTEO Narkompros,115 joined the antifuturistcampaign in February, when she was organizinga festival for the Moscow Soviet,116 andAndreeva initiated antifuturist polemics in Pet-rograd through her editorship of Zhizn' iskusstva(The Life of Art).

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Friche and Andreeva soon found official sup-port. Friche turned to the soviet, which, after theIZO commission had published its May Dayplans, met and decreed that the festivities shouldbe conducted under "the direct control of theMoscow proletariat"that is, Friche's department.The department vowed to pursue a policy of"neutrality" in matters of artistic taste, at thesame time stating that ''foolish, tasteless, and an-tirevolutionary artistic manifestations should notbe sanctioned by soviet authority or waste thepeople's money."117 In other words, anythingbut futurism was acceptable. At the same timeAndreeva, who stayed in close touch with Len-in, discovered that he was equally displeased: hethought the monuments ''outright mockery anddistortion" and was particularly miffed when thepaint did not come off the trees on TheaterSquare.118 Andreeva sent Lenin what amountedto a denunciation of the futurists and, for goodmeasure, blamed her rivals in TEO, Kameneva

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and Olga Menzhinskaia, who could hardly havebeen at fault.119

By late February, antifuturist sentiment was run-ning strong. When Petrograd painters when toMoscow on the 23rd to help with decora-

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tions for the Day of Red Gifts (to front-line sol-diers), they were criticized for being alien to theworkers; Kameneva's letter was the strongestbut not the only condemnation. Andreeva trans-ported the charge to Petrograd and in an un-signed article described the Petrograd painters ina way that stuck in Soviet criticism: "The driv-ing forces of the Revolution were accumulatedby degrees, in the depths of the same way of lifethat the futurists turned their backs on with dis-dain. . . . To create a work of art answering thedemands of the Revolution, to [make] a revolu-tionary work of art, can be done only bysomeone in a position to artistically interpret theRevolution. An absolutely necessary conditionfor that is a close connection with the authenticlife and psychology of the people." 120 This wasthe same argument anti-Bolshevik commentat-ors had forwarded on May Day 1918;121 and itsmelled strongly of prerevolutionaryconservatism.

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Andreeva's previous complaint to the PetrogradSoviet had met with no sympathy (she was car-rying on a notorious feud with Zinoviev's wife,Lilina).122 But now that administrative controlwas at stake, the antagonists rallied together;two months after the Narkompros decree waspromulgated, the Petrograd Soviet decreed that"in no circumstances shall the organization ofthe May Day festival be given into IZO futuristhands" and assigned organization to Andreeva,Antselovich, and Nikolai Tolmachev.123 TheMoscow Soviet soon put Friche and Kamenevain charge of its May Day celebration. Becausesoviets controlled the only available funds, IZOwas shut out of the celebration.124

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IZO made extensiveand ultimately uselessplansfor the May Day 1919 celebration. A commis-sion headed by Altman met on March 7 and de-cided that the holiday would celebrate interna-tional proletariat solidarity, a theme to be em-phasized by the decoration of important gather-ing points in harmony with the surrounding ar-chitecture.125 The futurists forsook the brash-ness and discord of November 1918. Projectswere drawn up for "obelisks, architectural barri-cades, and arches to be erected in squares,streets, and parks. The themes of these decora-tions will be: the arch of factory labor, the ob-elisk of farm work, arches and obelisks for thetrade unions, science, art, literature, and archesdedicated to revolutionaries."126

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These projects were far from the modernist "de-generacy" that had so offended Friche, but toomuch ink had been spilled for polemics to clear.In an article kicking off the February antifuturistcampaign, Friche had blamed the failure of pre-vious festivals on the fact that most were

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organized in a mere week's time. 127 The bur-eaucratic scramble preceding the May Day 1919festival, alas, had the same result: plans werenot completed until a week before the holiday.

Discussion of the social role of festivals in theBolshevik Revolution would be helped by in-formation on mass reception. Unfortunately themasses did not write newspaper articles, and theonly accounts we have are of suspect impartial-ity. The Russian intelligentsia's timeworn tradi-tion of using the people as a rhetorical fig leaffor partisan opinion was continued after the Re-volution. Officials steeped in the nineteenth-century academic tradition and speaking in thename of an imaginary people subsequently be-came the bane of innovative Soviet artists, so itwould behoove us to examine Andreeva'scharges closely.

The legend that futurism was rejected by themassesa charge repeated by Russian scholars(often understandable for political reasons) andby their Western colleagues (less understand-able)is unsubstantiated. It was certainly possiblethat the masses did not like futurist work(though I have seen group portraits fromNovember 7, 1918, taken in front of Altman'scolumn). Andreeva's distaste was not feigned,and it probably represented some portion ofpopular taste. In Saratov (one of the few well-documented provincial cities), officials weremortified by a tribune decorated, after HenriMatisse, with unclothed female figures paintedan unrestrained red.

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Nevertheless, we cannot simply declare thatpopular audiences disliked modernism, whetheror not we sympathize. Common Russians, afterall, did not share the intelligentsia's prejudiceth-at art must depict something. Folk art itself wasoften nondepictive (for example, the appliedarts); the simplified and stylized futurism mostcommon on November 7 was familiar to thepeople from lubki (woodcut illustrations); andabstract work like that of the Alekseevs fit inwith popular traditions of carnival decoration.Most of the Russian intelligentsia in 1918 wasunfamiliar with modernism, so that the popularaudience was in many ways better prepared toreceive futurist workeven if they did not under-stand it as painters intended.

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Few if any of the numerous press accounts ofthe time are reliable indicators of public recep-tion, and speculation on our part is unwarranted.Nevertheless, there is much to be learned fromthe stylistic debate of 1919. Although we cannotdistill a single meaning from the revolutionaryfestivals, we can discern many potential inter-pretations. The dynamics of revolutionary cul-ture are manifest in the ways that

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potential meanings were rejected by and othersaccepted into Bolshevik mythology. Perhapsmost important, we can watch the Bolsheviksreacting to a society that did not always act asexpected. Revolutionary Russia was filled withdiverse nations, classes, and factions whose di-visions did not always mirror the formulas ofMarxist ideology. Commentators of most everystripe agreed on one thing: each felt free to de-scribe the voice of the people as if there couldbe only one. That notion, shared by Wagner andIvanov as well as the Bolsheviks, was just oneof the authoritarian seeds latent in revolutionaryfestivals that would bear fruit within a decade.

Official reaction shows how difficult it was forBolsheviks (and not the Bolsheviks alone) todeal with dissenting views. They saw subversionin stylistic unorthodoxy and division in di-versity. Their trepidation was fully manifest inthe banishment of futurists, whose unorthodoxart actually expressed revolutionary fervor. Inhis Ode to Revolution, written for the 1918 an-niversary, Mayakovsky asked:

How else will you turn out, you of two faces?A well-balanced building,Or a heap of rubble?

Judging by their reaction, the Bolsheviks werenot sure which he preferred. Their anger at fu-turists resembled the fulminations of clerics an-cient and modern against the license of carnival:both saw beliefs and rules they cherishedmocked and defied, and both meant to put anend to it.

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Perhaps disapproving officials saw in the futur-ist decorations an unwelcome hint of anarchy.The year 1918 had seen acute conflicts betweenthe anarchists and the state apparatus; byNovember they were over but not forgotten.What to the futurists was displacement was todisapproving Bolsheviks anarchy. Alexei Tol-stoy, a novelist who never hesitated to informhis readers of the mood in official circles, madethe identification of futurism and anarchism ex-plicit in his Road to Calvary:

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Moscow under the black [anarchist] flag! We aregoing to celebrate our victorydo you know how?We'll announce a universal carnival, set up wine-booths in the streets and let military bands playin the squares. A million and a half men and wo-men all masked. There's not the least doubt thathalf of them will come stark naked. . . . We willput up hoardings to the full height of the housesalong the streets and paint them with architectur-al subjects of a new style never seen before. Weare going to repaint the treeswe consider naturalfoliage impermissible. 128

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Yet revolution was the message in 1918, and fu-turism told it well. This, at least, was the im-pression that German prisoners of war quarteredin Moscow got from the celebration. OnSunday, the final day of the festival, theystormed their own embassy and raised the redflag on its roof. Revolution had broken out inGermany.

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FourNew Uses for Popular CultureThe highest note comes oft from basest mind,As shallow brookes do yeeld the greatest sound.Sir Philip Sidney, The Lady of May

The restrictions on professional participationthat resulted from bureaucratic antimodernismand war-tightened purse strings encouraged pop-ular participation in mass festivals during 1919.The pressing matter of survival diverted offi-cials' attention from holidays, and the initiativesometimes made it to other hands. The popularspirit that had inspired Rousseau, Rolland, Lun-acharsky, Kerzhentseveven Wagnerfinally infilt-rated revolutionary festivals.

People's theater (narodnyi teatr) had been abeacon for nineteenth-century liberalizers; nomere artistic phenomenon, it was a rhetoricalicon for the creative energies that commonpeople would manifest once liberated from tsar-ist oppression. The passion of the advocacy of-ten obscured the phrase's muddled meanings. Itcould mean folk theater, specific to peasant cul-ture; theater where peasant amateurs performedthe classics; theater taken directly to the lowerclasses with the didactic strain typical of play-wrights like Leo Tolstoy; popular theater of theurban masses; state-run theaters like theprerevolutionary People's Houses (sponsored bythe imperial family or temperance groups), witha special "people's" repertoryfairy plays andoperetta; classics on the order of Sophocles,Shakespeare, or Molière, which some fancied to

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represent the spirit of an entire people; or evenpan-national theater, as envisioned by Ivanov.Proletkultists were joining a hoary debate, andtheir contribution was not the already-old notionof popular participation but an emphasis on itsclass nature and a rejection of precedent.

Intellectuals rarely acknowledged the existenceof a truly popular theater: the balagany and pup-pet booths of the holiday fairground. Russianpopular culture seemed too vulgar and too fa-miliar to most Russian intellectuals, and they ig-nored its distinct features in their sincere questfor a people's culture. The prejudice eludedpolitical pigeonholing. Most older Bolsheviksconsidered high culture good, popular culturepernicious. Lenin wanted to replace the popularblock prints (lubki) he despised with cheap re-productions of art classics. 1 Lunacharsky, whosaw a continuing role for fairground culture,preferred to co-opt its antiauthoritarian streak:

Long live the jesters of his Majesty the Proletari-at! Although jesters once told tsars the truth, . . .they were still slaves. The jesters of the proletari-at will be its brothers, . . . keen and eloquentadvisers.

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Why shouldn't Petrushka or another herald ofpopular opinion appear on the fairgrounds, urbansquares, or at our rallies as a beloved characterwho could exploit the inexhaustible resources ofpopular humor? . . . Surely [that humor] will bepermeated with the caustic humor that animatesthe revolution's destructive side.2

Even Blok, Meyerhold and Evreinov, who wel-comed popular culture, looked mostly toWestern variants: the puppet booth ofBalaganchik was inhabited by an alienated Pier-rot rather than the bawdy Petrushka of the Rus-sian fairground.

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Disdain for popular culture had several roots;the deepest root, perhaps, was an imprecise im-age of the "people" for whom so many struggleswere waged. The Bolsheviks often neglectedpopular culture because they confused it withthe folk (peasant) culture they despised so thor-oughly. Here they burlesqued the attitudes ofnarodnik populists who had distrusted popularculture because it seemed like an impure versionof the folk. The outcome was a failure to recog-nize that popular culture had strong and legitim-ate artistic traditions that could appeal to thevery people the Soviet state represented.

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Nevertheless, the vigorous process of assimila-tion proceeded. Although some forms of popularculture faded, others found new homes. Culturalforms are mobile; they move into new contextswithin a culture and assume different meanings.A particularly fruitful source for festivalsproved to be fairground culture. Gulianiia (car-nivals or fairs;

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from guliat', "to stroll") were distasteful to manyBolsheviks because of the sponsors: the Roman-ov family, with a more recent influx of entre-preneurial help. Yet the fact that carnivals werestate run and state sponsored made the traditionexploitable. The opinion eventually prevailedthat fairground culture should not be disavowed;rather it should be harnessed to the task of polit-ical education. Carnival culture was slowlytransformed from raucous entertainment to pi-ous proselytizer.

From the Fairground

Urban carnival culture in Russia thrived fromthe early eighteenth to the late nineteenth cen-tury. 3 Associated with Yuletide and Shrovetide,carnivals were bursts of color and celebrationthat bracketed the long Russian winter. Carni-vals were confined to particularbut varyingspotswithin the city: in Moscow, Novinskoe Field,Maiden's (Devichee) Field, and Khodynka; inPetersburg, Admiralty Square (next to thePalace), later the Field of Mars. The Shrovetideand Yuletide holidays occupied a special time inthe popular culture; as one saying had it:

Shrovetide comes only once a year;I drinks a bit, don't spare the changeFor holiday cheer.4

Shrovetide was the only time of year that theFinnish sleighs came to Petersburg; dancingbears would sometimes even appear in the city.

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Carnivals were the only time and place in Im-perial Russia where all classes could meet andmix. Early in his reign Nicholas I was known tovisit with the people on Admiralty Square; and aforeign visitor noted that during a fête, com-moners and courtiers met as equals.5 Decadeslater, merchants and officers still found the holi-days a fashionable time to promenade. Even thesheltered wards of the Smolny Institute forNoble Girls were known to circulate around theedges of the crowd in their carriages (or so theywere represented in popular lithographs). Bymid-century, however, the fashion had faded,and by the end of the century mixing was un-common.6

Up until the 1880s, when the socialist Interna-tional claimed May Day as its own, that holidaywas also celebrated with a carnival: for Peters-burgers, it took place in Ekaterinhof, a park out-side the city.

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Although the Ekaterinhof carnival was revivedfor May Day 1919, it lacked the splendor offormer years. 7 Carnival thrives on excess; in1919, Russia was starving and in the middle ofthe Civil War. Alcohol was forbidden as it hadbeen during the war years; and the rich bliny,thin pancakes dripping with butter, were also adistant memory. Gone were the huge woodenswings of the traditional gulianie; gone were theten-yard-high slides, coated with ice in thewinter, on which a young boy could slide halfthe length of the Admiralty.

Bolshevik celebrations never provided the li-cense of a true carnival; but this was due nomore to a censorious Red soul than to the in-roads of modernity. By the late nineteenth cen-tury traditional carnival amusements were beingchallenged by the products of the industrial age,the carousel and the roller coasterwhich most ofEurope called "Russian mountains," but whichRussians called "American mountains." Thevivid entertainments of the penny theaters werethreatened, if not tamed, by the edifying showssponsored by the People's Houses. Even whenthe old balagan master Lentovsky directed the1903 May Day spectacles in the Nicholas IIPeople's House, the show lacked the splash ofyesteryear.

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As holiday culture changed, the location it occu-pied within the city also shifted. From the earlyto mid-nineteenth century, the site of Petersburggulianiia was Admiralty Square, next to thePalace. In the 1870s the fair was moved fromcity center to the Field of Mars, and the end ofthe century saw the Shrovetide carnival movingfarther and farther toward the outskirts, comingto rest in the filthy Semenov Place. Carnivals ofa sort were established in the once-elegantMikhailovsky Manège near the center of town,where they resided until the First World War.The sponsor there was, at first, the Guardians ofthe People's Temperance; later, private enter-prise was the organizer. The Guardiansrepres-enting a Victorianism alien to the carnival spirit-saw the fairs as an opportunity to attract thepeople away from the harmful influence of li-quor.8

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By the twentieth century, carnival culture hadbeen redefined by the industrial city. Industrialculture, with its standardized sense of time, wasopposed to the erratic, intensified time of carni-val. No time or space was allotted for carnival inindustrial society. The essential change broughtabout by capitalism was the disassociation ofcarnivals from holidays; this link had madethem central to earlier cultures. The time frameof carnival was rendered obsolete by the adventof entrepreneurial financing; profits werehighest when the carnival ran every day.

Carnivals, which had once occupied a centralposition in an alternative, holiday, culture, werenow consigned to a peripheral role in a single

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cultureone without alternatives. Removed fromthe center of social life, the carnivals were re-moved from the center of the city. The Mikhail-ovsky affairs were designed strictly for simplefolk; no self-respecting officer or merchantwould be found there. The broad, open spaces ofthe central squares were replaced by an enclos-ure, a roofed indoor space. The program hadalso changed considerably since the advent ofthe gulianiia. Entertainment, confined to a vari-ety stage, combined balagan-type skits,vaudeville, and circus. Indoors there could be noice mountains, no fireworks; no longer didhawkers roam the crowd selling hot bliny.Drinking, obviously, was banned.

The Russian carnival should in no way be asso-ciated with a rebellious vein in the culture; as amatter of fact, the Baron N. N. Wrangel (brotherof the future White general) had led the prewarfight to revive carnivals on the Field of Mars. 9In a great city, arranging and sponsoring a carni-val is a complex process that can be accom-plished by only the most powerful institutions,such as the autocracy. Yet the system thatmarked a carnival a holiday could be translatedinto an aesthetic of upheaval.

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This transformation was what Mystery-Bouffeaccomplished and what Meyerhold planned forNovember 7, 1918 (the first day of Mystery-Bouffe), when he tried to revive the Manège car-nival as a celebration of the Revolution. Meyer-hold collected a remarkable organizing commis-sion of artists who had used popular art forms intheir work: Blok, Evreinov, Konstantin Mik-lashevsky (assistant to Meyerhold and Evreinov,expert on the commedia dell'arte), Lentulov,Sergei Prokofiev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky,and the choreographer Fedor Lopukhov. Alsoincluded were the finest performers ofvaudeville and circus.10 The program did notdiffer radically from earlier Manège carnivals:vaudeville, dance numbers, musical and circusskits, puppet theaters. The Manège itself wasdifferent; the huge statue of Nicholas II standingbefore it had been taken down for the holiday,and its bronze was given for reuse in the Leninmonument plan.11 Yet the essential difference

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was Meyerhold's aim to return carnival to itsformer place at the center of the culture and re-store the association with a holiday. The vitality,splash, and color dimmed by the Guardians andentrepreneurs would be restored. The commis-sion planned for carousels, swings, and even ex-travaganza/melodramasa balagan specialty.Alekseev-Iakovlev was hired to produce Song ofthe Merchant Kalashmikov (a repeat from theturn of the century), based on a Mikhail Ler-montov poem; and when the commission dis-covered that the amphitheater where The Takingof Azov once played was still standing, it votedto organize a new spectacle

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there. The planned revival was not entirelyfaithful: alcohol, an essential ingredient of theold carnival, was still banned, as were lotteries,a huge draw in prewar days. Strict censorshipwas to be enforced; but that too was part of theRussian carnival tradition.

Failure to realize the plan tells us more about theofficial side of Soviet culture in 1918 than aboutthe popular side. The work of the commission,pursued over two months of meetings, fell vic-tim to the bureaucratic skirmishes preceding thefirst anniversary. TEO, sponsor of the commis-sion, moved its headquarters to Moscow in mid-summer; PTO, which took over operation ofPetrograd theaters and spectacles, was run byAndreeva. She simply refused to recognize thecommission and its plan; when funding disap-peared, the commission dissolved.

Redefining Popular Culture

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Popular culture was a ready conduit of imagesto the mind of the demos, and the Bolsheviks,who relied on their ability to disseminate ideas,never completely neglected it. Although olderleaders such as Lenin and Krupskaia sometimesdisdained its baser tastes, others, like Lun-acharsky, saw considerable value and potentialin it. Performance in the circus and balaganywas of an extraordinarily high level of skill, andtechnique was frequently superior to that in thetheater of high culture. There was a great tradi-tion to be preserved, and great enthusiasm.Much of it belonged to younger, often anonym-ous workers in the political-education apparatus.Confronted by a vast, mobile, and often un-schooled audience, local workers used familiarformats to transmit unfamiliar knowledge. Bythe early 1920s, thousands of local propagand-ists had developed a broad array of agitationaland propaganda techniques, many of which re-lied on the legacy of fairground culture. 12

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Underlying the enthusiasm was a frequent dis-regard for the vagaries of communication. Theassumption was that old popular forms couldcarry new ideas without extra burden and thattheir symbols and rhetoric would suffice for thejob. Yet popular culture exerted an influence onthe message it carried; it had rules and traditionsof its own, many of which resisted new ideas.Conventions and types, for instance, which werethe essence of balagan theater, were often im-perfect expressions of Bolshevism and, as in thecase of The Legend of the Communard, couldthwart the intentions of sincerely revolutionarywork.

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Perhaps even more treacherous was the play ele-ment in popular entertainment. Plans forMoscow's May Day 1919 celebration, in whichtraditional May Day games such as tug of warand sack racing were to be used for propaganda,demonstrated the strain that political messagescould put on games. A Soviet version of theMaypole dance was entitled the Carousel ofCraft-Guilds: the title itself suggests how cho-reographed the dancea traditional show ofspring-inspired freedomwas to be. The Maypolewas topped by a female figure symbolizingSoviet power, and the dancers were arrayed intheir occupational costumes, one of which ap-peared to be Phrygian caps. 13 The traditionalclimbing of a greased pole was also changed byplacing on the pole not a pig but an effigy of theWhite admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, which thewinning contestant ''overthrew.''14 Assimilationwas clearly not an easy process. The fun of agame like pole climbing is in the effort and

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suspense, yet uncertain outcomes make propa-ganda an unreliable tool. Imagine the messageconveyed if contestants did not scale the greasedpole, and Kolchak rested atop it unassailed.

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One type of popular game that adapted well topropaganda was the dramatic game (igrishche).Dramatic games partook of both play and theat-er; the rules of dramatic progression, which reg-ulate free variation, helped dramatic gamescarry political messages. Dramatized trials werea particularly useful game; though popular inorigin, they were familiar to the intelligentsia asa prerevolutionary debate forum. The law, crim-inals, courts, and detectives were always a fer-tile topic for popular culture. They offered clear-cut situations and intriguing characters, sharplydrawn divisions, and action that generated end-less variations. Courtroom disputation fueled theplots of literature as diverse as Pinkerton (de-tective) stories and Dostoevsky's Brothers Kara-mazov, and it was also an integral element oftraditional peasant weddings.

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A common game in Cossack country was theTrial of Ataman Buria, which survived up to theFirst World War.15 Buria, a figure from popularErmak lore, sat in judgment over merchants,innkeepers, and landownersthe people's tradi-tional foes. The trial was improvised but only inthe sense that the commedia dell'arte had been-improvised from an inventory of ready speechesand situations. The conduct of the trial es-chewed legal precedent and substituted the con-ventions of popular and folk theater: accuserscame forward from the audience, and the ac-cused, when given a chance to speak, tended toincriminate themselves no less than their ac-cusers had. These self-incriminations were avariant of traditional comic self-introductions.

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Political-education workers of the SouthernArmy made a dramatic trial into an effectiveagitational skit, The Trial of Wrangel, per-formed in the autumn of 1919 before ten thou-sand spectators. 16 The performance took placein Crimea Village, Kuban regionCossack coun-try. The plot was simple.

The court session is declared open, and the sec-retary reads the allegations, in which BaronWrangel is accused of violating and murderingworkers and peasants, of associating with foreigncapitalism, of signing secret pacts with foreignpowers delivering Russia into slavery, of aidingWhite Poland, etc. Then the interrogation of thewitnesses begins. A turncoat from the VolunteerArmy tells of Baron Wrangel's career in Crimea.A worker from Novorossiisk describes the Vo-lunteer Army's "work"; then a Red soldier whofought in the Crimea speaks, then a port workerfrom Sebastopol; then a worker from Batum tellsof hydroaeroplanes transported on steamshipswith Russian prisoners. A wealthy merchant tellsof the charms Wrangel holds for the bourgeoisie.. . . Each witness represents a type, a particularsocial class, and gives a live picture of recentevents. Finally, following the concluding argu-ments of the prosecution and the defense, andWrangel's final speech, the sentence is an-nounced: Wrangel will be destroyed, a sentenceto be fulfilled immediately by the workers ofSoviet Russia.17

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The dramatic-game skeleton accommodatedtopical political material easily; and as the agit-trial (as the form came to be known) gainedpopularity, criminals as diverse as deserters andlice were put into the dock. Constant usebrought changes to the play format. Though or-ganizers claimed that the original agit-trial wasimprovised from a bare scenario, the scenariopublished was closer to a full text. The play ele-ment had to be disciplined if it was to become areliable vehicle for propaganda; in fact, thequestion of how spontaneous an agit-trial shouldbe became a hot item of debate among political-education workers in the 1920s.

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Dramatic forms of popular culture offered readyvehicles for a political message, and melodramawas perhaps most apt. Like courtroom drama, itoffered a simple skeleton that could bear unac-customed loads. Melodrama first appeared inParis in the wake of the French Revolution andwas originally a musical drama. Soon howeverthe term came to connote the unsophisticateddramatic convention by which good and bad arealways unalloyed, terror and pity are liberallyelicited, and the outcome is always happy (atleast for the hero or heroine). This was the ver-sion that reached Russian balagany in the latenineteenth century and ultimately became amainstay of the cinema.

Lunacharsky and Gorky were conscious of thegenre's power even before the Revolution. It in-volved constant action, a key to popular

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drama. When action was preserved as a primaryfeature, secondary characteristics of the melo-drama, which determined propaganda value,could be put to use. Following Rolland, they be-lieved that melodrama sustained in its audiencethe optimism needed for social renewal; 18 andits broadly drawn emotions and actions were es-sential for mythmaking. Melodrama was theseed of communist tragedy.19 The analogy mo-tivated a PTO commission chaired by Gorky tosponsor a melodrama contest in 1919, in whichthe style was defined as "psychological primitiv-ism" and authors were asked to "clearly under-line [their] sympathies and antipathies."20

The enthusiasm was not unadulterated. The me-lodrama had originally been a revolutionaryform, that chose middle-class heroes in contrastto tragedy's aristocrats. But its evolution made itthe preferred style of the Nicholas II People'sHouse, no revolutionary institution. So whenLunacharsky and Andreeva gained control ofthe People's House through the Petrograd Muni-cipal soviet in summer 1917, they replaced me-lodrama with the socially conscious plays ofGorky, Tolstoy, and Aleksei Pisemsky. Thishigh-minded decision attracted everyone but anaudience, which preferred entertainment.

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Message is a notion to be applied to popular cul-ture with only the greatest caution. Popular cul-ture can, of course, be interpreted, as can any-thing given the proper observer at the properdistance. But often popular culture that seemsfrom the outside like art, an ordered system ofsigns subject to interpretation, seen from withinbecomes play, an open-ended series of actionsrequiring no interpretation. Russian artists re-cognized that quality of popular culture and bentit to their own goals; in dramas like Andreev'sHe Who Gets Slapped and Blok's Balaganchik,it was a metaphor for meaninglessness.

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These distinctions are of import to propagand-ists as well as to artists. The distinctions determ-ine how ideas can be passed along and how theycan outlast the moment of performance. A mes-sage is conveyed by an artist through controlledselection; game playing is impossible withoutrandomness and risk. The controlling artisticconsciousness, and the reader or viewer, must tosome degree stand outside the work of art,aware of the conventionality of its rules; parti-cipants and viewers must temporarily immersethemselves in a game, forgetting that the rulesare conventional and arbitrary. Play is as eph-emeral as holiday culture; it occupies a specialplace and special time and generates its ownconventions. Once the game is over, and itsrules are again suspended, it loses itssignificance.

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Play's greatest taboo is to step outside its bound-ary during its progress. In revolutionary Russiathe use of popular culture as propaganda wasprecisely such a step, yet it had ample preced-ent. Popular entertainments like the carnival andcircus were traditionally associated in time andplace with holidays and fairgrounds. But by1917 they had long ceased to be associated withholiday culture; they had settled in permanentbuildings and consisted of patriotic pantomimesall through the Great War. Bolshevik propa-ganda violated popular culture's boundary, but itwas a boundary already rubbed thin.

In addition, popular culture had particular rulesof linkage that conditioned any attempt to con-vey a message. The circus, like vaudeville andother popular entertainments, was a string ofshort performances that, except for belonging toa single stage, had little structural connection.Animal trainer followed tightrope walker. Seg-mentation lent an emphasis to the parts, not thewhole, in popular culture. Characterization, forinstance, came from a single feature represent-ing the whole, as in Mystery-Bouffe; episodeswere the dominant building block of prose, as inthe picaresque novel or serial tale. Selection andordering of parts were quite often tenuous, de-termined more by tradition than by meaning.Circus and vaudeville acts were strung togetherin free order; pictures in the fairground peepshow (raek) were connected only by the barker'scommentary. In a lubok, diverse segments wereplaced side to side in timeless simultaneity,while "in the popular theater, episodes were

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merely juxtaposed, laid next to one anotherwithout reference to the movement of historicaltime." 21

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Time in popular culture, as expressed by theprogression of segments, is loose, accommodat-ing, and disjointed; yet within episodes drivenby action it is continuous and concrete. Constantaction keeps it from drifting into the timeless-ness of monumentalism. This dual time systemwas at the foundation of early attempts at massspectacles. The November 1918 festival was tofeature "the staging of [seventeen] lubki depict-ing scenes from the revolutionary past."22 Forthe same celebration, PTO's Repertory Bureausuggested a plan for an instsenirovka of six epis-odes: Spartacus, Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko's poem about the troubadour whothrew down the gauntlet before the king, theGerman peasant uprising, the uprising underWilliam of Orange, Garibaldi, and both Frenchrevolutions.23 This selection of episodes seemssomewhat abitrary, but it was not alien to popu-lar culture.

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Revolution was not the only subject to betreated in this way. In innovative Voronezh, theFree Theater began its life with Rus', a synthetic

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spectacle directed by Nikolai Forreger that sum-marized Russia's cultural history. The first playof the cycle consisted of five acts: "A PaganRitual," featuring priests, priestesses, andwitches; "Anna Yaroslavna's Departure forFrance"; "Market Day in Kudrino,'' with boyars,Tatars, and jesters; ''Theater under Aleksei I," inwhich a medieval débat was performed; and afolkloric performance of "Dances of PeasantWomen." 24

Such a simple collection of episodes was an ef-fective instrument of propaganda; the selectionof episodes alone dictated a particular conceptof history and its movement. Episodes had beenlinked thus in the medieval mystery cycles, asthey were in lubki. In the second year of the Re-volution this method, which originated in popu-lar culture, proved handy to established artists.In this time of great cultural shifts, popular cul-ture was a ready source of new models.

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The most ambitious project was Gorky'splanned History of World Culture. Conceived asan educational series, History employed some ofRussia's finest writers to illustrate key stages ofworld development.25 The monumental theaterGorky had formed with Iurev, Chaliapin, andAndreeva was devoted to great manifestationsof the human will; and History selected (some-what randomly) moments when civilization hadmade great leaps forward, revolutions of the hu-man spirit. It was a concrete conception of his-tory, if one not entirely consonant with Marxisttheory. Blok wrote or planned episodes onRamses (surely the worst thing he ever wrote),Tristram, and even the building of the first boat;Gorky planned one on the Norman Conquest;and in a patent allusion to the present Zamiatinwrote The Fires of St. Dominic, about the Span-ish Inquisition. Plays were written in prose dia-logue, in folk (bylinnyi) verse, and in fourteenth-century language; the only requirement was that

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subject matter be part of the humanity's logicalprogress in time. Professionals such asMardzhanov were invited to direct the epis-odesboth for film and for mass festivals.

The Circus

Partisans of popular culture could follow twopaths: remain faithful to tradition and develop atheater in which message yielded to action, thewhole to the part; or tie the disparate segmentsof popular entertainment into a unified artisticwhole. The ways that the new authorities usedthe circus provide illustrations of both paths.

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When the Soviet circus became a focus of artist-ic attention in 1919, it was a reservoir of un-tapped performance skills. The TEO Circus De-partment was staffed by talented artists: Ka-mensky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Ivan Rukavishnikov,the avant-garde artist Boris Erdman, Kuznetsov,and Konenkov, and the choreographer KasianGoleizovsky. 26 Artists fascinated by the circuswere not entirely new; the circus had been fash-ionable with the prerevolutionary artisticintelligentsia.

The Sovietization of the circus could not be ef-fected with the entire repertory. Some elementsdid not undergo transformation easily. Shk-lovsky suggested that only clown acts and pan-tomimes could be performed as art; acrobaticsand other skill-based performances, in whichplot, rhythm, and meaning-bearing structureswere marginal, could not.27 The more risk orchance in an act, the less suitable it was for thenew circus. Randomness resists a message orideology. The early Soviet circus shied awayfrom the risk factor, from trapeze artists andtightrope walkers, preferring the verbal perform-ance of clowns and the dramatic art of panto-mime.28

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The clown in the Russian circus was tradition-ally verbal; Lazarenko and the Durov brothers,supporters of the new regime, read verse theyhad written themselves as part of their routines.Lazarenko even performed a series of anti-White couplets written by his old friendMayakovsky, entitled The Soviet ABCs. Clownscould function as spokesmen for the Bolshevikswithout violating the traditions of their craft.Pantomimes, which had been popular during theFirst World War, could be assimilated, as theCinizelli Circus in Voronezh in 1918 hadshown. New figures could be grafted onto oldplots: the Turks and Germans of World War Icould be replaced by French and English inter-ventionists; the cops and robbers by Reds andWhites. The same traditions, however, madeclowns a double-edged sword. The most popularentertainment in Civil War Moscow was theclown duo of Bim and Bom. Their popularity,alas, rested not only on their wit but on its

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target, the Bolsheviks. Bim and Bom desistedfrom mocking the Bolsheviks only when theircouplets so offended Latvian Riflemen in theaudience that they shot up the circus andthreatened to do the same to the clowns.29

For some popular spectacles to carry the newpolitical ideas, they first had to undergo radicalrevision. Wrestling, a major circus attraction inthe early twentieth century, could be exploitedonly at the expense of its sporting qualities. Skilland strength determined the outcome of thesport, but propaganda demanded a fixed conclu-sion. Lazarenko per-

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formed a skit written by Mayakovsky entitledWorld Wrestling Championship, in which DavidLloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Wrangel, andJózef Pilsudski squared off unsuccessfullyagainst the Russian champion, Revolution (theRussian words for wrestling and [class] struggleare the same). 30 Combats of skill, which mighthave culminated in a bourgeois victory, becameinstead a symbolic battle in which Revolutioninevitably triumphed.

Circus spectators were unpracticed in the inter-pretation of wrestling. A wrestling match with aplota controlled sequence with an establishedendingwas unaccustomed entertainment; wrest-ling as a political language was unfamiliar; andmost alien of all was the notion that wrestlingcould be language. If the message was to find itstarget, the audience needed to be warned thatnew cultural functions were active. Propagand-ists had not only to create the message but tohighlight it and even supply the proper interpret-ationmuch as they had for May Day 1918.

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Popular culture provided a ready vehicle for thisfunction, the intermediary. Intermediaries wereessential to circus, vaudeville, and fairground-theater performances, which were filled withgaps as they passed from one skit or episode tothe next. Because dead air was the greatest sinimaginable, gaps were filled by the appearanceof an intermediary. The role allowed for greatfreedom of movement; it breached the time gapbetween skits, and the space gap between per-formers and audience. The role was filled by,among others, both the clown and ringmaster ofthe circus, vaudeville's master of ceremonies,and the compère of the artistic cabaret. Interme-diaries performed an invaluable function whenpopular entertainment moved to a lecture hall:continuing to provide a structural bridge, theyalso explained the action to the audience andguaranteed that the proper message was re-ceived. The intermediary was a carrier and ena-bler of meaning. In Championship, the role was

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filled by the ringmaster, who combined the du-ties of referee and announcer, and helped spec-tators along by providing narration and exegesis.

All these functions were featured in one of themost influential shows of War Communism,Annenkov's August 1919 production of LeoTolstoy's First Distiller. Performed in, of allplaces, the Heraldic Hall of the Winter Palace,the First Distiller used Tolstoy's antiliquor tractas the scenario for a concoction of circus,vaudeville, and balagan.31 Tolstoy's original in-tent, and much of the text, disappeared inAnnenkov's remake. The fable involved a de-mon sent to earth to tempt a peasant with liquor.It was a "modernized lubok,"32 and Annenkovused popular

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culture's loose time structure to insert clownacts, risqué folk ditties (chastushki), and othertidbits into the action. Although some of the in-sertions were justified by the text, many werenot: "Ditties were incorporated as the songs ofpeasants drunk on the 'devil's brew.' Accordionsand choral dances were also inserted into thedrunken scene. Acrobats appeared as demons; acircus was the model for Hell. And, lastly, aneccentric clown in red wig and broad 'formal'trousers appeared without the slightest motiva-tion. He simply showed up in Hell and strolledaround as though it was a nightclub." 33

Assuming that the skeleton taken from Tolstoywas still present (some critics claimed it waslost entirely), the insertions were essentially fullstops, moments when the progress of Tolstoy'splay was suspended. Most were performed bythe clown Georg Delvary, whose role was spe-cially created by Annenkov. The clown had noplace in the plot as such; rather he fulfilled anintermediary role traditional for clowns, stand-ing on the forestage and commenting on the ac-tion occurring behind him. Annenkov claimedthat his insertions could effectively carry themessage: "A five-minute number can with a fewphrases or gestures offer a joyful and convincingsolution to any problem and convert an unex-pected zigzag in the action into a weapon of pro-paganda, stronger than a public speech. . . . Itscreams, knocks, and burns a thought into thespectator's headinstantly, unimpeded by thought,at full swing."34 But the claim was doubtful.The devil's antics, similar to commedia dell'arte

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lazzi, were entertaining, but carried no message.Not only did the antics not correspond to theplay's specific message, they did not always as-sign the desired positive or negative value,which is a cardinal duty of propaganda.

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Directors of the popular school faced a consider-able quandary in propaganda productions likeMystery-Bouffe and First Distiller. Negative,anti-Soviet characters were depicted comically;positive characters were depicted monument-ally. But in popular culture (for example, thePetrushka puppet play) comic characters wereoften more praiseworthy (more entertaining ifless ethical) than the straight characters, usuallypompous boors. The bad guys were more funthan the good. Interpretation was further com-plicated by the lack of signals about what in theplay was significant (demanding interpretation)and what was not: insertions interrupted the in-tent of the play; halting the progress halted thetransmission of the message. Ultimately, FirstDistiller was well done and well liked; only theclaims to a message were unjustified.

Meyerhold, who had started the circus fashionin theatrical circles,

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warned against its going too far. "The circusmust not restructure itself at someone else's bid-ding," he said. "Reform must unfold within thecircus, initiated by the circus itself. There cannotand must not be a theater circus; each is andmust be a thing in itself, [although] the work ofmasters of the circus and the theater can drawclose to one another." 35 The distinction wentunheeded by the TEO Circus Department. Itsartists fancied circus the art form of the futureand were interested in it less as a popular enter-tainment than as a series of disconnected acts tobe formed into a unified drama. One of the firstreforms the department set about introducingwas the "elimination of separate circus numbersand the reduction of circus performance to asingle, unified action [deistvo]."36

This approach was not entirely contrary to cir-cus traditions; there were wartime precedents.At the Manège, for instance, popular attractionshad been allegorical processions and tableauxvivants celebrating tsar and country, and panto-mimes starring trick riders and special effects,such as Russian Herves in the Carpathians andThe Inundation of Belgium.37 Lazarenko, whowould produce many such spectacles for theBolsheviks, gained experience during the FirstWorld War. On December 16, 1914, before as-sembled diplomats of the allied nations, his cir-cus had presented The Triumph of the [Allied]Powers, a play in two acts, five scenes, writtenby A. V. Bobrishchev-Pushkin (who in 1919would denounce Meyerhold to White forces inthe South). The characters were Russia, France,England, Belgium, Serbia, Montenegro, Japan(played by Lazarenko), Breslau, Alladin, Sultan-Bey, two dancing girls, and a dervish.38

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Still, giving the circus new Soviet functions en-tailed some redefinition. Wartime pantomimesafforded spectacular action, but the Soviet pan-tomimes praised more abstract qualities. Thecircus was robbed of its dynamism; and the res-ulting spectacles, but for the fact that they tookplace in the circus arena, were indistinguishablefrom allegories like that performed in the Vor-onezh Opera House in 1918 or even baroquecourt spectacles. In fact, one TEO proposal,which was rehearsed for almost a year in the Se-cond State Circus, was a revival of Sumarokovand Volkov's Minerva Triumphant, first per-formed at the coronation of Catherine theGreat.39

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It seems that the greatest obstacle to imbuingcircus with a message was its essence, action.Circus action is simply unreliable. Perhaps forthis reason artists turned to tableaux vivants, anolder, less eccentric form. Tableaux are allegor-ical and static, and can be counted on to make

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their point. The sculptor Konenkov, who hadjust completed a group of wooden figures fromthe Razin lore for Lobnoe Mesto, was hired todirect a performance at the Second State Circusfor the November 1919 anniversary. His choiceof a theme, Samson and Delilah, was unfortu-nate (although he claimed it was a "song of thestruggle for freedom"). The performance was aseries of static tableaux, like a comic strip, por-traying the stages of the Samson legend: theslaying of the Philistines with the jawbone of anass; the seduction by Delilah; Samson's impris-onment; the final test of strength. 40 Konenkovemployed wrestlers as the material of his sculp-ture; he made wigs and costumes, and carvedwooden figures to encircle the tableaux. As thepapers reported, "A long series of rehearsals wasneeded to create muscular memory in the per-formers and to force them to portray the sculp-tures with super-balletic exactitude."41 The

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wrestlers, naturally enough, wanted nothing todo with it.

Another allegorical tableau presented that day inMoscow, Standing Guard for the World Com-mune, almost completely ignored the principlesof the circus. It was based on the pyramid, atumbling formation that had obvious social im-plications in revolutionary times.42 The skitcould have been played anywhere: "In the centerof the arena a red stage rises up into a rainbow-shaped tower. There, on a platform, is the sym-bolic figure of a woman, Freedom, aroundwhich are grouped a peasant, a worker, a sailor,a soldier, and an intellectual . . . . Below on thesteps are the corpses of Bavaria and Hungary,crushed by the imperialists. The figure reads po-etry, expressing . . . confidence in the impendingarrival of world revolution."43 During the read-ing, statues of Marx and Engels flanking thetower came to life.44

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Oddest of all circus presentations on November7, 1919, was Political Carousel. Written byRukavishnikov, whose wife ran the SecondState Circus, where it was shown, PoliticalCarousel was directed by Forreger, who by nowwas the director of the Moscow Balagan.45 For-reger should have known better. This massdrama was performed on a three-tiered stage de-signed by Kuznetsov.

On the top level is a monster depicting imperial-istic capitalism; near it are the Russian tsar, hiscourt, family, and ministers. On the second levelare bureaucrats . . . . On the third tier a prison isshown in which workers are imprisoned, guardedby soldiers and cannons . . . . The war with Ger-many is symbolically depicted, with the particip-ation of all the imperialistic countries. The panto-mime closes again with a symbolic representa-tion of the Russian Revolution: the people dragthe monster out of the tower onto the street, burnthe monster, then dance and make merry.46

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One could only agree with Shershenevich whenhe accused Rukavishnikov and the Circus De-partment of destroying the circus. 47

The Mobile-Popular Theater

Perhaps prerevolutionary Russia's finest ex-ample of popular theater was Gaideburov'sMobile-Popular Theater, located on the outskirtsof Petrograd. The Mobile-Popular Theater wasthe first to perform on the streets of revolution-ary Russia, in May 1917; and it was there, not inProletkult, not in Narkompros, not in the heartof Ivanov's imaginary demos that the first andstrongest impulse for mass spectacles arose inSoviet Russia.48

Founded in 1903 as the Popular Theater byGaideburov and his wife, Nadezhda Skarskaia, adaughter of the great Komissarzhevsky actingfamily, it was located in the Ligovsky People'sHouse, funded by a wealthy Social Revolution-ary, the Countess Sofia Panina. Its mission wasto supplement the thin cultural fare offered Pet-rograd workers. People's Houses sponsored bythe Guardians of the People's Temperance typic-ally featured melodramas, patriotic plays, and"extravaganzas"; others offered a "special" rep-ertory designed for the simple folk.49 To Gaide-burov, the gulianiia and other "people's enter-tainments" were the "greatest enemy of the re-birth of popular theater."50 He demanded morefrom his audiences; the first production of 1903was Ostrovsky's Storm, and the repertory con-tinued with a variety of Russian and foreignclassics.51

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Gaideburov was one of the rare members of theprewar intelligentsia who could bridge the abyssbetween educated and untutored Russia. He re-spected the potential of the people and deman-ded respect in return. Initially, the audienceneeded some training; at the conclusion of anearly performance, instead of the traditionalroses an enthusiast threw a bottle of vodka ontothe stage.52 But soon the theater had educated ageneration of viewers who appreciated drama.By 1907 the Popular Theater had merged en-tirely with its alter ego, the Mobile Theater,which, staffed by the same actors, spent summermonths touring the provinces with a modernrepertory aimed at the local intelligentsia (Fig-ure 10).

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Symbolist theater was gaining an audience inthose years, as were the symbolists' rather mys-tical notions of how to close the gap between thepeople and the intelligentsia. Although not al-ways evident in his practice,

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Figure 10.Emblem of the Mobile-Popular Theater, Petrograd

(P. P. Gaideburov, Literaturnoe nasledie, Moscow, 1977).

Gaideburov felt the influence of Ivanov. He be-lieved that true theater, like all true art, broughtthe spectator into contact with the universal. Itwas classless, uniting all classes and nationsthrough a common heritage. 53 Art was a doorfrom everyday reality into a world of ideals; thespectator, momentarily aware of the divine, leftthe theater stronger, ready to live creatively.54 Iftheater occupied a special, ideal position in cul-ture, it also occupied a special time; it was "aholiday in the life of man. After all, it is specialprecisely because it is different from the every-day."55 Theater was a festival.

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Although Gaideburov shared some of Ivanov'sbasic tenets, there were essential differences:Gaideburov saw symbolism as Lunacharsky orGorky did, as an art of dynamic change. Heavoided static plays like the Death of Tint-ageles; the mainstay of his repertory wasBjörnson's Beyond Human Might, which ran forover 200 shows. In Gaideburov's interpretation,the drama was a paean to the power of faith tochange human life.

When the theater's ambitions outgrew thebounds of spectacle, traditional forms became aconstraint; Gaideburov, like his contemporaries,found his faith limited by stage conventions.The theater was to be like a

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church; and the drama, a deistvo, a service inwhich "the people will be led to a pan-nationalcreative illumination of life, in conditions ofpanhuman brotherhood and love. Life itself willbe the object of creativity, and life will becomea perfect work of art." 56 The contemporarydrama, with long denouements, short climaxes,characters trapped hopelessly in the materialworld, and a passive audience, would notsuffice.

Like his contemporaries, Gaideburov sought atheater on the threshold between ritual anddrama. Early in 1918 he developed a hybrid the-atrical form which he called "Masses" (mèssa,as in ritual). These occasions bore some resemb-lance to the poetic "requiems" hosted by the lib-eral Literary Fund at the turn of the century.57The first Mass of 1918, the Turgenev Evening, amemorial to the great novelist and poet, was asmuch about its maker as its subject. The Mobile-Popular Theater's Turgenev was deeply mystic-al; the Evening, like a church ritual, was an as-cension to communion with his spirit.

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The first segment opened on a stage decoratedwith only a bas-relief of Turgenev carved on anobelisk. The figure was draped in black, as wasthe entire set. The stage design was borrowedfrom Meyerhold's symbolist period at theKomissarzhevskaia Theater; and the ritual styleof acting most probably had the same source.Figures came onstage chanting "the Great Pan isdead"; then figures entered the stage chanting anantistrophe, "the Great Pan lives."58 The per-formers settled themselves about the stage andshared personal recollections of Turgenev'sverse with the audience. The second section ofthe Evening was an oration illustrated by dra-matic fragments, followed by the final section, astaging of scenes from Turgenev's works. Theselection was mystically slanted: from KlaraMilich, Spirits, A Strange Story, and the death ofBazarov from Fathers and Sons.59 Like patrioticvariety shows of the Great War, the Mass

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concluded with an apotheosis, a reading of thepoem "The Russian Language."

The Mobile-Popular Theater's trip to the front inautumn 1917, immediately preceding theBolshevik takeover, was a first attempt at "ex-tramural" theater; and the Liberty Bond Daystreet production of Le vendeur de soleil showedhow well it could be received by the people. Butwhat Gaideburov really wanted, and what he ad-vocated in a series of articles in 191819, was"theatrical, popular festivals . . . . Let it be thecelebration of a national holiday, into which gospeeches, processions, and songs. . . . Let itrenew long-lost habits: Lenten celebrations,spring celebrations, celebrations of driving thecattle to pasture, of the arrival of a new car

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all this is theater that has been taken into thethick of the people, the theatricalization of life,artistic phenomena of a different artistic order,but still emanating from the nature of theatricalaction." 60

Clearly, he wished, like Ivanov, to take thetheater out of the theater and to the people; andthe Masses were a synthesis of theater and reli-gion. But in his calls for national festivals,Gaideburov remembered a third element of fest-ival performance, play, that Ivanov neglected.Here he was closer to Evreinov: "We must usethe theatrical instinct, characteristic of everyone,which once helped create the forms of nationallife: games [play], holidays, rituals. Today, too,it can create a new ritual of national life, newforms of holiday interaction."61

Gaideburov pursued this idea less in the Mobile-Popular Theater, where the classics were stilldominant, than in classes he and his actors con-ducted for the Adult Education Department (Ot-del vneshkol'nogo obrazovaniia) of Narkom-pros. The courses were based on a philosophydifferent from that which had inspired the intel-ligentsia to organize theaters for the people be-fore the Revolution: "We must depart from theprevious educational view of theater, which sawthe rationality of theatrical art in its literary side.. . . Play, specifically popular and specificallytheatrical play, the activity of the people them-selves, rich in artistic mysteries, will bring en-lightenment."62

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Acting, or play, was not to be taught; it was tobe released from the people, where it had restedlatent for centuries. The process involved a no-tion alien to Ivanov's ritual theater, improvisa-tion. The Adult Education Department used theSkarskaia method, step-by-step instruction thatintroduced neophytes to the essentials of theater.The Skarskaia method stressed instinct over ra-tional consciousness, inspiration and emotionover technique; the method was one of reveal-ing, not inculcating, as "creativity is more orless inherent in everyone."63

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Courses in improvisation were taught by NikolaiVinogradovMamont and Dmitry Shcheglov,members of the theater who would soon producethe first mass spectacles in Red Petrograd. Otherinstructors were Elena Golovinskaia, N. V.Lebedev, Viktor Shimanovsky, and VsevolodVsevolodsky-Gerngross;64 these teachers, alongwith Grigory Avlov, another member of thetheater, and Piotrovsky, who joined the group inlate 1919, would be (along with Meyerhold'sstudents Radlov and Soloviev) the most prolificproducers of mass spectacles and directors ofamateur theater in Petrograd until 1927.65

Gaideburov himself never took part in Bolshev-ik festivals. In 191819, relations between theMobile-Popular Theater and the new regime

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were acrimonious. In the difficult decade up to1917, the Ligovsky People's House had offeredshelter to many Bolsheviks, including Lenin.The party conducted meetings and lectures, andthe nucleus of what would become Proletkultopened its first circle there. 66 But after theBolsheviks took power, relations soured. TheCountess Panina, who served the ProvisionalGovernment as deputy minister of public educa-tion, was jailed by the Bolsheviks for refusing tohand teachers' pension funds over to theusurpers.67 Needless to say, Gaideburov andSkarskaia, who had the highest respect for thecountess, did not approve of the action.

Differences ran even deeper, to basic philo-sophy. Gaideburov abhorred civic violence, par-ticularly when it pitted class against class. Hisart had always strived to transcend class differ-ences. In a letter published in the Mobile-Popu-lar Theater's newsletter, Gaideburov defendedhis vision and roundly condemned the notion ofa distinct proletarian art.68 In 1919, those werefighting words. Rejection of class conflict meantrejection of the Revolution. The first ofGaideburov's disciples to object to the letter andto leave the theater was Vinogradov-Mamont.

The second half of Vinogradov's surname(which means ''mammoth'') was actually a nick-name coined by the famous operatic bassChaliapin to honor Vinogradov's infatuationwith monumental theater.69 Like Gaideburovand Ivanov, Vinogradov believed the theater tobe a universal art; and he modestly formulatedhis ideas in the following "Seven Points":

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1. The theater is a temple.

2. Universality.

3. Monumentality.

4. Creativity of the masses.

5. An orchestra of the arts [synthetic art].

6. The joy of labor.

Naturally, the last point of his plan was

7. Transfiguration of the world.70

Vinogradov worked with advanced students atthe Adult Education Department on this newtype of theater and planned a production ofAleksandr Pushkin's Boris Godunov as an open-air choral tragedy.71 After seceding fromGaideburov's theater, he took his plans to thePolitical Administration of the Petrograd Milit-ary District (PUR), which was

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sufficiently impressed to entrust him with 100soldiers and the task of creating a new art. Forthe next two years, PUR was sponsor ofPetrograd's most ambitious mass spectacles.

The Red Army Studio

The Theatrical-Dramaturgical Studio of the RedArmy, or Red Army Studio, as the PUR groupwas called, was awarded the status of a specialmilitary unit. 72 Though just about all thesoldier-pupils were amateurssuch was the selec-tion by designthe instructors were professionals.From the Mobile-Popular Theater came Golov-inskaia, Lebedev, Shimanovsky, and I. M. Char-ov; Shklovsky would later join the staff; Meyer-hold, Vinogradov's old teacher at Kurmatsep(Master Courses in Scenic Productions), wasprevailed on to help; Meyerhold's disciplesNikolai Shcherbakov, Soloviev, and Radlovjoined in; N. N. Bakhtin, Meyerhold's collabor-ator at the Instructor's Courses for Children'sTheater and Festivals, also assisted.

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Long before the Revolution, even before the in-telligentsia interested itself in the popular theat-er in the 1880s, the army had served to acquaintsimple Russians with theater. Soldiers had theirown special repertory: melodramas and the like,such as Kedril the Glutton and Filatka andMiroshka's Rivalry, which Dostoevsky noticedbefore anyone even suspected that Russian pop-ular theater existed.73 Most popular with thesoldiers were dramatic games (igrishcha), par-ticularly Boat (Lodka).74 As opposed to the ritu-al dramas common in folk culture, Boat, whichsurvived in cities up to the Revolution, was abare skeleton onto which action was attachedand improvised. The game was given a dramaticframework by "Down the Mother Volga" ("Vnizpo matushke po Volge"the song adapted byKronstadt sailors as they sailed into revolution-ary Petrograd), which was sung as accompani-ment and narration.

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Festival theater was born on the borders ofdrama, ritual, and play. If Gaideburov's ownMasses mated drama and ritual, Vinogradov fol-lowed another example, that of his other mentor,Meyerhold, and trod the border of drama andplay. Boat was an excellent model, with its ori-gins in mimetic play; there was no stage, noprops, and few costumes. Performance beganwith players arranging themselves as if in aboat, one player taking a position at the helmand singing "Down the Mother Volga," the oth-ers clapping hands in a rowing rhythm. It ended

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the same way. The song provided a frame ontowhich episodes from the lore of the great Russi-an brigandsErmak, Razin, and brethrenwereattached.

Boat was less a drama than a cycle of episodesjoined by a common theme and characters. Itstime was the time of popular culture, a loosestructure of stops and starts, which can expandand contract to accommodate new episodes.Like commedia dell'arte, Boat was improvisedfrom a pool of traditional spoken lines and ac-tions; and even more than in the commedia, con-nections between episodes could be loose. YetBoat shared the ability of popular culture to takethese disparate elements and unify them. Actionwithin episodes was continuous. Perhaps mostimportant to their new function within Sovietculture, dramatic games traditionally alternatedtragic and comic scenes. 75

The Red Army Studio's first production, per-formed March 12, 1919, was an igrishche on thetopic of the February Revolution, The Over-throw of the Autocracy.76 The first mass spec-tacle of Bolshevik Petrograd thus celebrated theFebruary Revolution the Bolsheviks had over-turned. The performance was a game in allsenses of the word; it was play at revolution, amake-believe revolt by soldiers who had parti-cipated in the real one.77 The performance,which would eventually be repeated 250times,78 was based on the Skarskaia method ofimprovisation. Most of the actors had taken partin some of the events and needed little directori-al prompting. This, however, is not to suggestthat improvisation engendered a deep, "element-al" understanding of historical events; norshould it suggest that the acting was necessarilyspontaneous, direct, natural. Game playing hasits conventions: the actors split off into twoteams and, like little boys playing at war,

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depicted the historical conflict through a seriesof skirmishes and battles. Yet the play wasabout a bloodless revolution!

Vinogradov claimed that the oppressed massesof The Overthrow of the Autocracy were equi-valent to the chorus of ancient tragedy and, be-cause the ideals of the Russian Revolution weresuperior to those of slave-owning Athens, thatthe production was superior to the dramas ofAeschylus.79 This analysis was perhaps over-stated; but it would be unwise to ignore theproduction's artistic ambitions. Vinogradov'sclaim suggests a dilemma running through theRed Army Studio's history: Was it to be a popu-lar undertaking, as the military theater tradition-ally had been, or was it to fulfill the great artisticambitions suggested by symbolist theory?

The play did provide solutions to problems firstpointed out by mod-

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ernists. The division between stage and spectat-or, so porous in popular performance, wasbreached by the studio; this had also been anaim of symbolists. Popular culture's free com-bination of episodes was subjected to dramaticdiscipline; yet the structuring elements of theperformance were taken from popular culture.Perhaps the similarities to simplified symbolistrealism were apparent and desirable to Vino-gradov; but the simplicity came from the exi-gencies of working with soldiers.

Whatever the cause, benefits were forthcoming.No decorations were used for the performance;real space was freely redefined by the action. Asin melodrama, characters were divided intorebels and oppressors, good guys and bad guys.The stage itself was broken up into two plat-forms, each at one end of the Steel Hall of thePeople's House, where the play was performed.Linking the two stages was a broad aisle thatpassed through the audience. 80 The game prin-ciple, which split the characters into two"teams," had accordingly split the stage into twoplatforms; individual scenes were performed onthe platforms; battles were conducted in theaisle. The aura of authenticity that brought spec-tators so close to the stage was intensified by theplacement of actors in the audience. There wereno costumes; dressed in army greatcoats, theywere indistinguishable from the audience, andwhen they stood to deliver their lines, it seemedto spectators that one of their own was sharing a

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spontaneous reaction. Nevertheless, it was notthe popular audience but the great artist Meyer-hold who recognized what his pupil Vinogradovwas looking for; when a young soldier, killed onthe barricades, was borne down the aisle to"You Fell Victim," a song of revolutionarymourning, Meyerhold took the soldier's riflefrom the ground and leapt to join the proces-sion.81 This was a sliianie, the merging of stageand audience the symbolist avant-garde hadawaited.

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The Overthrow of the Autocracy resembled apopular game, but it was supervised by profes-sional directors. Their influence was visible inthe formation of a unified play from discretesegments of improvisation. Episodes were notchosen at random, and neither was their order.The play comprised eight episodes chosen fromthe downfall of the Romanov dynasty: a pro-logue about the riots of 1905 was followed bythe arrest of underground students, a revolt in amilitary prison, the seizure of the arsenal byworkers, the sacking of Police Headquarters, theerection of barricades on the streets, the revolu-tion at the front, and the tsar's renunciation ofthe throne (later observers would find the ab-sence of the Bolsheviks unfortunate). The epis-odes were strung together in chronological or-der, with the dual platform providing a spatialmodel

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for temporal progression. One stage accommod-ated the primary action, with mass scenes of theproletarian struggle for freedom; on the otherwas the counteraction, the reaction of the con-servative camp. Later observers were correct inasserting that the split stage, free definition ofspace, and other features of Overthrow, whicharose naturally from its game-playing nature,laid the foundation for future mass dramas. 82

After several performances, young studio mem-bers found themselves praised to the stars byGorky, Chaliapin, Iurev, and others. This washeady inspiration, and for May Day anotherspectacle, The Third International, was de-veloped.83 Like Overthrow, Third Internationalwas an improvised igrishche. The stage was thesame, except for a symbolic globe placedcenter-stagea prop borrowed from Mystery-Bouffe. One thing was new about Third Interna-tional; it was played outdoors, in front of thePeople's House. The mobile stage used in boththe studio's works made outdoor performancefairly easy; any place could be made to fit theplay.

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As in Overthrow, improvisation in Third Inter-national tended to degenerate into simple fight-ing, to the point that the play was not dissimilarfrom its predecessor. In fact, most revolutionsdepicted in subsequent mass spectacles wouldlook similar, which had unanticipated politicalconsequences. In the case of Third Internation-al, the conventions inherited from Overthrowdistorted the historical picture. Fighting, whichmade up the bulk of action, had little to do withthe Third International, founded only twomonths before in a conference hall; and theproduction's thousand participants far out-numbered the International's roster. Art predictslife, as Vinogradov might have answered.

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Play-based Overthrow worked with a historicalreality familiar to players and spectators alike.The basic episodes were taken from this reality;and if improvisation departed from historicalfacts, its creative license revived the emotionalexperience of revolution more vividly than anaccurate re-creation could have. Third Interna-tional did not satisfy itself with mimetic playbased on a simple, concrete experience; it aimedtoward symbolic, universal truths, as the globein the middle of the stage signaled to spectators.The stage was not just a stage but the world bey-ond; people were not just people but allegoricaltypes. Mayakovsky had done the same to wrest-ling in his World Championship.

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The Red Army Studio, despite Meyerhold's tu-telage, was just not up to these additional re-quirements. There had been no characters inOverthrow, just masses. Characterization de-manded greater continuity between scenes, astronger focus on montage and its meaning, and,alas,

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greater acting skills. It demanded, in general,more art, less play. When studio actors began toportray characters and work from a text in Inter-national, it quickly became apparent that theywere poor actors. The sharp division of charac-ters into comic and heroic, pioneered by Meyer-hold in Mystery-Bouffe, did not work for the stu-dio; there was no one skilled in comic acting,which was much more difficult than Mgebrov-style heroic declamation. A need for profession-als was becoming apparent.

The Red Army players had run up against whatwas becoming a familiar problem: play-basedculture bore the burden of meaning poorly.Meaning-bearing structures were often ahindrance to play. When their ambitions shifted,those who devised the simple but fresh perform-ances praised by critics began to fancy them-selves the creators of a "new proletarian art,"and their work evolved toward allegoric ritual-ism. It happened in the circus; it would happenin Proletkults all over the country; and ithappened in the studio.

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The next development was a tragedyperhapsmore a baroque allegorywritten by Vinogradovand intended for performance by the studio, TheRussian Prometheus (1919). 84 Picking a com-mon theme (both Scriabin and Ivanov had writ-ten deistva of that name), Vinogradov wrote onthe conflict between Peter the Great and CrownPrince Aleksei. The central figures (along withPeter and Aleksei) were two choruses: a tragicchorus of raskol'niki (members of religioussects) and the comic chorus of Peter's MostDrunken Council of Fools and Jesters, led by thejester Balakirev. Tragedy, according to Vino-gradov, was the conflict and synthesis of equaland opposing principles.85 The conflict led tothe deaths of both Aleksei and Peter and, in thefinale, Peter's ascent to heaven on a bank ofclouds (perhaps Alekseev-Iakovlev could haveprovided the special effects).

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The play was never performed,86 and it wouldnot merit attention but for the strong praise ofsome very talented contemporaries: AlekseiRemizov and Blok.87 Lunacharsky took a moresober view: he noted that, yes, it did in many re-spects correspond to the theater of the future,but he also noted the strong and perhaps unin-tentional influence of decadent symbolism.88Lunacharsky's subtle criticism did nothing todiscourage Vinogradov, who next wrote a de-istvo entitled The Creation of the World.89

Graduates of Vinogradov's studio were sent toall parts of the country by PUR, and reports ofsimilar performances began cropping up in thepress. The Overthrow of the Autocracy was per-formed in Arkhangelsk;90 Third Internationalfound its way to Perm.91 Students sent toCossack

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country organized topical political games, TheTaking of Rostov and Novocherkassk and TheSmashing of Kolchak, using the same dual stageand the same acting methods. 92

One of Vinogradov's assistants, Shcheglov, leftthe Red Army Studio for a studio of his own atthe Petrograd Proletkult. Shcheglov, who haddirected the Red Army Studio on a trip to thefront, lost no time in applying the lessons ofGaideburov and Vinogradov. On May Day1919, in the Porokhovye factory district on theoutskirts of town, he produced the first (andonly) of Proletkult's mass spectacles, From thePower of Darkness to the Sunlight. As the titleindicates, Shcheglov too was guilty of allegoric-al excesses. The production, an "outdoor agita-tional show," was assigned to the Proletkult stu-dio by the Petrograd party leadership, whichkept a close eye on its creation.93 Shcheglovknew from his Red Army experience that un-controlled improvisation could not be allowed;he took the writing upon himself. But becausethere was little dialogue, which would havebeen lost in the open air, most of the perform-ance, including the gist of the plot, was

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conveyed by pantomime. Speech was mostlyslogans, delivered either by a worker chorus orby individuals with megaphones.

In popular culture, a bad script can always besaved by a good spectacle; From the Power ofDarkness was rescued by Alekseev-Iakovlev, inwhose hands heavy-handed allegories becamewondrous sights:

On a special platform, emaciated people smearedwith soot spun flywheels and spoke sad words . .. taken from the proletarian poet Tarasov. . . .Occasionally a colossal figure in black with awhip in its hand would rise above the group, pre-cisely in those moments when murmuring beganand voices of protest were heard. The figure'sfirst appearance was so unexpected, and its di-mensions so huge, that the public oohed and aa-hed. Alekseev was truly a master of his trade. . . .

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But then a red figure ran directly through the sur-prised crowd of spectators. . . . It stopped, raisedits hand, and a red Roman Candle flared upabove its head. Red "specters of communism"immediately appeared from all sides. Their ap-pearance halted the wheels' movement: they werefollowed by exhausted people, but the "specters"ran past and underneath a broad old tree, in thebranches of which appeared an "agitator.'' Heread Tarasov's poem, and the workers answeredfrom the stage: "We are here, we are ready!Battle approaches, and smoke spreads throughthe valley."

Hands raised hammers high to break the cursedchains; a woman with a child on her breast racedtoward the "red tree" [mahogany]. But suddenlysomething hissed and exploded in her path, andclouds of smoke began to spread. However, thisbarrier could not impede the laboring masses.Raising high their hands bound in chains, theworkers left the tribune for a place that

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augured freedom. But suddenly from all aroundthere appeared the "shades of evil," huge figuresin black. They cracked their whips, and the or-chestra began to play music from a long forgot-ten adaptation of Gogol's Terrible Vengeancethat Alekseev had once staged in the People'sHouse.

Bowed and tamed, the workers retreated withoutcasting away their age-old chains. And again thewheel began to turn with its sickening screech.The woman with the child returned to the action.Climbing the steps she read:

They laid there in the corner,In the dirt of the stinking police station,The blood thick like paint,A puddle congealed on the floor.My friends! The enemy won't yield,He will buy the sacred rights of an uplifted nationAt the price of new victims, a cruel price.

Having finished her reading, the woman rippedthe black shawl from her head. Underneath was abright red one. Others began to repeat her words,and the gray-black light on the platform wherethe wheel spun quickly turned red. The workersagain set to breaking the chains, but, the momentthe last chains were to be cast from a girl in awhite dress and broad red ribbon, the forces ofdarkness reappeared. To the pounding of kettle-drums a symbolic battle began. . . . Figures in tu-nics tumbled down to the enthusiastic cries ofsurprised spectators, and the performers them-selves in their excitement forgot that the "evilforces" were only young men from the factory,standing on each others' shoulders and holdingup yard-tall poles with capes and heads in tophats and "stupendous" yellow teeth bared for ef-fect. Boys from the crowd threw themselves withexalted howls and whistles into the "battle withevil"that is, they went to knock the giants over.The spectators applauded, . . . but suddenlyeverything fell quiet. One of the "forces of thepast" that had managed to save itself stole up tothe girl on stage who had not yet managed to freeherself entirely from her chains. A duel between

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the girl and the enormous figure began: the girlwaved a red cape; the black figure cracked itswhip, all the while getting smaller and smaller.The liberated workers approached them from be-hind and, crushing the last ''knight of darkness,''took his remains to another platform, where theyhoisted the head and cape and set them on fire.First there were hissing clouds of smoke"thestench of the past"the head caught fire andburned long and bright, throwing out multi-colored sparks. From all the trees where the "redspecters" had clustered bengal lights burned, andthe workers again stepped onto their old plat-form, where the machine wheel turned out to bedecorated with ribbons and flowers. The wholething ended with a collective reading of Glory toLabor. 94

From the Power of Darkness pleased the author-ities, and in November Shcheglov was invited toproduce another spectacle, From Darkness toLight, in the city center. The second spectaclecould scarcely be distinguished from the first.

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Late in 1919 leadership changes in the RedArmy Studio sparked changes in the plot ofOverthrow. A young poet, scholar, and play-wright, Piotrovsky, an enthusiast of the Revolu-tion and follower of Ivanov, took charge. 95 Pio-trovsky quickly spotted a major deficiency: al-though the play concerned historical change,little sense of history was conveyed. Perhapsmore damning was that the play, which celeb-rated the Revolution, failed to include theBolsheviks. If dramatic games like Overthrow,which featured continuous action and uniformepisodes, were to portray the sweep of historyand the Bolsheviks' sense of historical mission,changes were necessary, but not along the linesof Vinogradov's later plays. Recognizing thatthe Bolsheviks' mission was manifest not inevents but in the progression of events, Pio-trovsky portrayed the Revolution as a processbeginning in February and culminating in Octo-ber. He added two episodes: a comic interlude

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about the Provisional Government and a heroicfinale about the October Revolution. The wholething was renamed Red Year.

The introduction of discontinuous episodesbrought up the question of how they could beassembled into a whole. Piotrovsky took struc-tures characteristic of popular drama and as-signed them new functions, for which Mystery-Bouffe offered a ready model. The alternation oftragic and comic, which Mayakovsky had usedfor characterization, was used to stitch togetherepisodes in Red Year. Space operated on a simil-ar principle; in the final two scenes, Kerenskyand Lenin face each other from the two stages,and the final conflict occurs in the corridorbetween. This principle of simple oppositions,spatial, temporal, political, and moral, would bea rule for most future mass spectacles.

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Piotrovsky also introduced changes in the per-formance. The full-length Red Year was held to-gether by concrete historical figures and fiction-al characters, who replaced the faceless massesof Overthrow. Such characterization requireddisciplined acting and costumes to make figureslike Lenin and Kerensky identifiable, but it alsochanged an essential principle of Overthrow:actors were now separated from the audience.Improvisation also gave way to a scripted text,which fixed the proper message but suppressedthe playlike character of Overthrow. Improvisa-tion had been intended to release the soldiers'creative instincts, but true improvisation, liketrue play, is a risk. Improvisation had been to alarge extent desirable in Overthrow, which wasan emotional experience of the tension and un-certainty of revolutionary days, when the futurewas unknown. From a strictly Bolshevik pointof view, though, history was not uncertain. TheOctober Revolution was an inevitable

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conclusion to the events of 1917 and, for thatmatter, to a century of history. This was in factthe Bolsheviks' greatest claim to legitimacy, par-ticularly in opposition to the claims of other left-ist parties.

The changes were regrettable but perhaps inevit-able if the play was to fulfill the edifying func-tion that its sponsors intended. Much the samewas happening at Proletkult. Shcheglov, likePiotrovsky, attempted to discipline improvisa-tion in his next production, Popular Movementsin Russia. 96 Although improvisation was notentirely discouraged, the creative process wassubordinated to the director's will. For the firsttime, soldiers were portraying events unfamiliarto them; they had to study events, not relivethem emotionally.97 Themes were chosen by thedirector. Improvisation continued unhindered inrehearsal until it deviated from the plan, when itwas halted and corrected. The final result of allrehearsals was then treated as a fixed text.98

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The episodes, selected and assembled during re-hearsals, presented a new concept of revolution-ary history that would much later gain broadcurrency in Soviet Russia: the October Revolu-tion as the culmination of national history, ig-noring Western influence. Popular Movementswas something of a misnomer: it tied togetherthe Bolotnikov, Razin, and Pugachev peasantuprisings, the rebellion of the aristocraticDecembrists, the revolt of the tiny village ofBezdna (Bottomless Pit) in 1861, the 1905 re-volution, and the Bolshevik seizure of Moscowin December 1917. As the last episode of aseries, the Bolshevik takeover was the assumedheir of a great historical progression.

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The limits of the popular style were reached bythe Red Army Studio in February 1920, whenThe Sword of Peace was produced for thearmy's second anniversary.99 The play wascalled a "variation" on The Overthrow of theAutocracy, but the resemblance was distant. Toemphasize ties to the popular theater, it was per-formed in the Cinizelli Circus, yet Piotrovsky'stext was written in the blank verse of hightragedy. Radlov directed the play and employedthe dual-platform stage of Overthrow, but ofcourse, with a text in blank verse, there could beno improvisation. The plot was built from thebasic stages of the Red Army's history. The playopens with a soldier in a greatcoat and helmet,spotlighted center-stage, portraying Trotsky atBrest-Litovsk. Unrolling a long scroll (thetreaty) he declaims:

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Comrades! the workers and the peasantsAre neither murderers nor thieves! We don't needA predatory war. We need peace. . . .Red soldiers, you are the hope of peace!

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You are the sword of peace. The future of the CommuneIs on your banners. In bloody splendorThe Red Star ascends above the world.In truth, a new world has been born. 100

To Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique a shower of redstars rains down from the big top, and the Red Armyrushes into battle. Battle scenes, like those inVinogradov's productions, ensued; but an interlude, inwhich Three Wise Men crossed the stage in search ofthe Red Star rising in the East, separated the battlesinto episodes.

The Revolution prompted shifts in the cultural hier-archy. Popular forms once consigned to the peripheryof Russian culture moved to the center and were givennew responsibilities. These responsibilities could bemet only at the price of structural changes. The playelement that had been the essence of popular culturecould not always bear the messages thrust on it by theRevolution.

When popular theater began to serve official pur-poses, changes could be observed: the subordinationof improvisation to directorial design; a shift of em-phasis from episodes (most early amateur depictionsof the Revolution were one-act plays) to the way inwhich episodes were strung together; and the loadingof symbolic interpretations onto play-based actions.Individuals replaced mass characters and choruses;costumes were introduced to identify the new charac-ters; acting became increasingly complex. Thesechanges were an early example of a trend in SovietRussia: popular performance, an autonomous branchof culture with values and a style of its own, was re-placed by amateur performance, a secondary reflec-tion of high culture.

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Mass spectacles had caught the attention of Bolshevikleaders and had shown the potential to project a com-pelling view of the Revolution. Yet to realize theirsignificance within the new culture, they would haveto expand beyond the local audience. Greater organiz-ational skills were needed; and if an audience unfa-miliar with the actors and their locality was to be at-tracted, the full resources of the theatrical heritagewould have to be exploited. There was only one op-tion. Professionals would have to take control.

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Plate 1.Holiday fireworks display, Moscow, 1744 (A. F. Nekrylova,

Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniaa i zrelischa:Konets XVIII-nachalo XIX veka, Leningrad 1984).

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Plate 2.Lithograph of the carnival on St. Petersburg's Field of Mars, 1825

(A. F. Nekrylova, Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniia i zrelishcha:Konets XVIII-nachalo XIX veka, Leningrad, 1984)

Plate 3.Mariinsky Palace, Petrograd, November 7, 1918

(I. M. Bibikova and N. I. Levchenko, comps., Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo:Oformlenie prazdnestv, Moscow, 1984).

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Plate 4.Above: Demonstration in Red Square, November 7, 1918

(I. M. Bibikova and N. I. Levchenko, comps., Agitatsionno-masso-voe iskusstvo:

Oformlenie prazdnestv, Moscow, 1984).

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Plate 5.Decoration of Hunters' Row, Moscow, November 1918

(I. M. Bibikova and N. I. Levchenko, comps., Agitatsionno-massovoeiskusstvo: Oformlenie prazdnestv, Moscow, 1984).

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Plate 6.Tribune covering Pavel Trubetskoi's equestrian statue, Uprising Square,Petrograd, May Day 1919 (I. M. Bibikova and N. I. Levchenko, comps.,

Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo: Oformlenie prazdnestv, Moscow, 1984).

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Plate 7.Boris Kustodiev, Celebration for the Second Congress of the Third International,

Petrograd, July 1920 (Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu. Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria,Leningrad, 1980).

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Plate 8.Toward a World Commune, mass spectacle, Stock Exchange,

Petrograd, July 1920 (Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980).

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Plate 9.Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, Petrograd, 1920

(Camilla Gray-Prokofieva, The Russian Experiment in Art, 18631922, Lon-don, 1971).

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Plate 10.The Red stage, Storming of the Winter Palace, mass spectacle, Petrograd,

November 1920 (I. M. Bibikova and N. I. Levchenko, comps.,Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo: Oformlenie prazdnestv, Moscow, 1984).

Plate 11.Liubov Popov and Alexander Vesnin, design for a theatricalized mass maneuver

in honor of the Third International, Moscow, 1921 (Angelica Rudenstine, ed.,Russian Avant-Garde Art: The George Costakis Collection, New York, 1981).

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FiveTransformation by Festival MassFestivals as PerformanceOur revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air,And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itselfYea, all which it inheritshall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.Shakespeare, The Tempest

Holidays, festivals, and spectacles rapidly ac-quired overriding substance in Russian politicalculture. In 1919 crises and landmarks were man-ifold: the White general Iudenich's approach tothe outskirts of Petrograd; the Allied blockade;the founding of the Third International. WhenPetrograd Pravda printed a New Year 1920chronicle of the past year, accompanied by a fullpage of photographs, events that had placed theSoviet republic's fate in jeopardy were strangelymuted. Instead, leading items were the Novem-ber 7 anniversary celebration; Soviet Propa-ganda Day; the May Day burning of a dragon(of counterrevolution) in effigy. Readers mighthave surmised some of the year's axial mo-ments, but the moments themselves went un-mentioned. Accounts of pivotal battles weresupplanted by victory speeches; legislative bod-ies were noted not for the laws they passed butfor their convo-

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cations. The only reference to the winter's direheating crisis was the following paragraph:

Battling the fuel crisis: On November 15 the Pet-rograd Soviet met to discuss the question of thestruggle against the fuel crisis. 1

Ivanov's dictum was being realized: the showwas becoming the event.

The ''show become real,'' Ivanov's notion of de-istvo, seemed increasingly prescient during theRevolution. Ivanov, like the socialists Sorel,Lunacharsky, and Gorky, understood myth as acontemporary, living phenomenon; and he sawit not as a remote narrative but as flesh-and-blood dramatic action. He surpassed his contem-poraries in grasping the mechanics of myth.Deistvo amalgamated several elements,drama,ritual, and mythinto a single festive perform-ance. Ivanov anticipated modern anthropolo-gists, such as Victor Turner, in seeing celebra-tion as a dynamic symbolic field transformingthe past it commemorates.

Mass Drama and the Professionals

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Deistvo was at the heart of the debate over ama-teur and professional participation in festivals.Remuneration was not ultimately the issue: "am-ateurs" were often paid to perform, while "pro-fessional" participation was often voluntary. Theissue was rather the relationship of the artist toart, and the relationship of both to the audience.The optimistic assumption underlying someearly festivals was that if the working classsponsored a festival and if participants werefrom the working class, then the working classwould identify with the festival. Deistvo theorysuggested alternatives to such overly directformulations.

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In early 1920, a few professionals expressed theheretical thought that the director's skill, notclass origin, was most critical to a mass spec-tacle. According to Tairov (who also began hiscareer with Gaideburov), much of the rhetoricsurrounding mass festivals was utter nonsense."We are going through a period of amateurism,when everyone fancies that he can create newforms of theater." Only skilled professionalscreated new forms; only they could elevate massfestivals to the artwork of the future. Tairov ad-dressed a root paradox: "Popular festivals, assuch, are not theater, but when they have beencreated by directors and producers, they losetheir popular character and become nothingmore than an expanded application of the direct-orial art of

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'mass scenes.' " 2 The gist of the paradox wasthat revolutionary festivals could be popular orthey could be the grand artwork of the future en-visioned by Wagner, but they could not be both.

Tairov was attacking a premise cherished in oneway or another by Ivanov, by Lunacharsky,even by many Proletkultists. The controversyaroused by his jibes gave proof to the rule thatany exchange concerning festivals, in particularthe question of popular participation, pertainedalso to the politics of revolution. Let the readersubstituteas did many contemporariesuprisingfor festival, country for theater, politician fordirector, working masses for audience, andTairov had provided a critique of Leninism.Bolsheviks declared soviet power in the name ofthe people, and their ultimate goal was a societyarising from the people; but they did not trustthe people to choose their own route. The con-tradiction underlay the notion ofsamodeiatel'nost', which inspired mystic rever-ence in many revolutionaries and meantsomething different to each of them. It inspiredLenin's understanding of the revolutionaryparty, which represented the working class and

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guided iteven against its own immediate inclina-tions. As might be expected, Lunacharsky, facedwith the same paradox as Tairov, suggested amore Bolshevik solution: "Many think that col-lective creation denotes a spontaneous, inde-pendent manifestation of the masses' will. But . .. until social life attunes the masses to an in-stinctive observation of a higher order andrhythm, it is impossible to expect anything butmerry noise and the multicolored flux of holidayclothes from the masses."3

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Similar motives instigated the subordination ofpopular theater and festivals to bureaucraticcontrol in 1919. The people's culture could notbe trusted to the people. The TEO Subsectionfor Worker-Peasant Theater was created, and itconvened at the end of 1919 to establish policyguidelines.4 Though theater professionals werebanned from the conference, administrators,professionals from other arts, and professionalcritics were not.5 In fact, amateur participationwas minimal, and no nonprofessional opinionwas recorded in the conference minutes.

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Ivanov delivered the keynote address. Althoughhe had adopted some of the new political vocab-ulary, his ideas had changed little in fifteenyears. His message, that revolution could begetthe pan-national art of mass festivals, was re-ceived warmly by delegates.6 Vsevolodsky-Gerngross made a similar appeal. The old stagestructure had rendered spectators passive. A newdrama, in which people were active participants,would bridge the abyss between actor and spec-tator. Russian

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holiday games and rituals had once providedsuch a drama, and Vsevolodsky claimed that"the people must create a theater from its culticrituals. . . . The foundation of the theater of thefuture will be the drama of the choral dance." 7V. V. Tikhonovich, who presided at the con-gress, claimed that theater's highest purpose wasto "aestheticize life"; artistic discipline wouldhelp participants transform their everyday exist-ence.8

Two tendencies were evident: debaters ignoredurban popular traditions, and they viewed thetheater as anything but theater. Their ideal was amerging of ritual and drama that expressed andinstigated national unanimity. Kerzhentsev, whocame to the congress as a Proletkult delegate,gave a speech, "On Festivals of the People," inwhich he defined their purpose. Mass festivalswere to be:

1. a means of political education, a rallying pointfor the slogans of the day, . . . and a means to in-troduce the masses to all manifestations of art

2. creative samodeiatel'nost'

3. a theater school for the laboring masses . . .

4. collective creative activity preparing the wayfor socialist theater, where actor and spectatorare not separated, where drama (deistvo) will beimprovised by the laboring masses

5. a means to combat religion in the countryside.. . . The influence of the church has been strongto a significant degree because it offers sumptu-ous theatrical spectacles, often with the participa-tion of the believers themselves

6. . . . closer to forms of drama, which give themconnected dramatic unity, . . . and aim for thedirect participation of those gathered in a holidayritual.9

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The congress mandated a national body formass-festival organization. Oddly, Ivanov,Kerzhentsev, Vsevolodsky-Gerngross and Tik-honovich were not included on its staff. Meyer-hold and Evreinov, trapped in the South byfighting, and other professional directors werealso absent.

Plans for the TEO Section for Mass Presenta-tions and Spectacles predated the congress. Itwas formed in October 1919 from representat-ives of the Association of Worker-Peasant andRed Army Theater, the subsection of the samename, and the TEO Subsection on Repertory; itwas mandated to be a theoretical group con-cerned more with planning than with practice.10Members were chosen from the various arts, inline with the belief that festivals were a synthet-ic art form: Smyshliaev from

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the theater, P. S. Kogan (a literary scholar soonto be director of the Academy of ArtisticSciences) from literature, Sofia Kogan from mu-sic, and M. V. Libakov from the plastic arts.Aleksei Gan, a former colleague of Malevich, soradical that he considered Proletkult conservat-ive and Lunacharsky counterrevolutionary, andN. I. Lvov were also added. 11 The section didnot meet until December; by that time, accord-ing to Gan, it was controlled by its radical Com-munist faction.12

In the section's "Appeal" for members, festivalswere described as "an organic need lying deepin the popular consciousness," to be "createdonly by the masses themselves in the process ofcollective creation."13 This description, ofcourse, made the section superfluous. Despitethe rhetoric, plans (never realized) were madefor May Day 1920.14 Kogan provided a bal-anced formula for the contributions of artist andpeople: the people were to supply raw energyand enthusiasm, which artists would guide intothe finished forms of art. Mass festivals were,following Nietzsche's Hellenic tragedy, aproduct of the dialectic of Dionysian people andApollonian artist:

We must invite on the one hand proletarian col-lectives . . . and on the other hand individualartists . . . whose ideology inclines toward theproletariat, who can merge [with the proletariat]in a single creative impulse.

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These people of art are the masses' artistic lead-ers, who arouse the creative urge[samotvorchestvo] of the masses and find the ap-propriate forms to express their enthusiasm.

On their part the proletarian collectives contrib-ute to the festival their internal contenti.e., the re-volutionary pathos, their intoxication, orgias-mwithout which a mass theatrical drama cannotbe created.15

Kogan's formulation, which found commonground roots in Nietzsche with the ideas ofIvanov and Lunacharsky, showed the tangledlegacy of the popular-participation issue and,moreover, its kinship with the pairing of ritualand drama.

Ritual, Drama, and Myth

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The desire to merge ritual and drama into asingle notion, deistvo, reflected the theaterworld's confusion about the Revolution. Evenartists and intellectuals who embraced thepeople's seizure of power and welcomed theirparticipation in social governance were not al-ways prepared for the tumult that resulted. Theintelligentsia had

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often imagined the people to be a homogeneousmass waiting to receive its directions. Such wasthe audience of the imaginary deistvo.

There are, however, essential distinctions to bemade between ritual and drama that concern therelationship between the stage (and, by analogy,intellectuals) and the audience. Ritual and dramause symbols in different ways, mostly becausethey address different audiences. They also nar-rate their stories differently. Ritual, whichspeaks to a united community, can assume theaudience comes acquainted with its conventions,while drama can create and define its own. Yetdrama, because it makes its own language, canaddress a large and diverse community, and helpit identify with unfamiliar ideas. As the Russi-ans increasingly understood the nature of theirdivided audience and felt the need to reach bey-ond a narrow partisan group, they came to re-cognize the merits of drama in festival perform-ance. It would enable them to create a new mythof revolution that could unite large segments ofsociety.

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These questions, and the solutions we are aboutto see the Russians try, are being probed now bymodern anthropologists, foremost of which isTurner, who have described the discursive fea-tures of festival performance. 16 Correcting afunctionalist inclination that narrowed celebra-tion to a socializing agency, the anthropologistshave discerned complex mechanisms of conflictresolution. Festivity's power to mediate tensionis predicated on its separation from everyday so-cial intercourse. It is defined not by the attitudesor beliefs expressed but as a discursive environ-ment, which is symbolically isolated and mustbe entered across a threshold.

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The festival threshold takes many forms: intime, it can be a special moment in the natural orcosmic cycle, or the anniversary of a moment inthe past; in space, it can be a sacred place, acave deep in the womb of mother earth or a con-secrated house of worship. Participants in a ritemust prepare themselves for crossing into theenvironment: they paint their faces, performablutions, enter the dream state of the shaman.Within the environment, their behavior is highlyconventionalized; each movement, if it is tohave symbolic significance, must accord with apreestablished and sanctified pattern. The lan-guage of festival performance is compact, sym-bolic, and mysterious. It segregates the environ-ment from its surroundings and is meaninglessoutside the celebration, which enables societiesto enact their fundamental myths and contradic-tions safely.

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The language, symbols, and environment of afestival preselect and govern its audience. Ahighly conventionalized environment implicitly

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relegates outsidersthose unfamiliar with the lan-guageto the role of spectator. Members of thecommunity, who are familiar with the languageand perceive its significance (which they cannotalways express in everyday language), are notsplit into spectators and performers. Societyorthe members admitted to a ritualparticipates as awhole and finds its wholeness in theperformance.

Societies confronting periods of rapid changeuse myths of tradition for internal consolidationand structuring. 17 The reassuring presence ofthe past can help a society move into the futurewith confidence, while the selective presence ofthe past can be manipulated for political advant-age. Revolutionary festivals in Russia were, asthey had been in France, a way of choosingwhich future to pursue. Each past that was cel-ebrated in the festivalsand there were many tochoose fromsuggested a different path forward.

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It would be wise at this point to investigate pre-cisely how myths are made and why some findmore popular resonance than others. The as-sumption that the content of myths determinestheir fate is perhaps unwarranted. Myths are notcreated intuitively; like dramas, they followformal conventions. Turner's work is valuable inthat it provides tools for examining these formalaspects. It also shows a particular affinity toRussian ideas. When Turner conflates ritualwith drama and claims that they are "making,not faking," he is very close to Ivanov.

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Turner ascribes to festival performance the samefeatures that tantalized Ivanov, Meyerhold, andtheir peers. For them, the deistvo was drama re-stored to its ritual origins. Deistvo drama occu-pied a special environment, the temple stage;performers prepared themselves with masks inorder to inhabit a new personality. Dramatic lan-guage was conventionalized and deeply symbol-ic, and could thus address universal truths thattranscended ordinary language. Drama parti-cipants (actors and spectators were not differen-tiated) were initiates sharing a language, setting,and beliefs. The deistvo brought them togetherand provided a common experience throughwhich they merged into a united whole.

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That Russians, whose society was rent by in-ternal division, should feel the need for healingrituals is no surprise; the belief in merging(sliianie is the Russian term) was begotten bywishful thinking and historical habits. Bolshevikmass festival advocates, including feisty classpartisans like Kerzhentsev and Friche, dreamedof the fraternal masses dancing and singing oncity streets bathed in communal togetherness.They would in coming years occasionally fancythey had seen such a

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thing. They had not. Russia was torn by interne-cine war. The Bolsheviks, in fact, were largelyresponsible for the fighting, and class strugglewas a foundation of their program.

The illusion was spawned by a refusal to dis-criminate between drama and ritual. Ideally,festival dramas would commemorate revolution-ary history, generate socialist myths and a newsocialist culture, and unite the people under so-cialist ideology. Each potential was, in theory,latent in festivity. However, the three could notbe realized together. There were, as becameevident, differences between drama and ritualthat had been ignored by Ivanov, were ignoredby Bolshevik commentatorsand are often ig-nored by modern anthropologists. 18 The differ-ences were of broad consequence and should notbe dismissed as marginal. Blurring the boundar-ies of ritual and drama obscured the contours ofthe historical events depicted and negated polit-ical distinctions essential to Bolshevik ideology,including some that had justified the OctoberRevolution. Ultimately, the confusion revealedan underlying uncertainty about the nature of the

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Revolution and ambivalence about the creativecontribution of the masses.

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Drama and ritual should be viewed as poles of asingle phenomenon, the symbolic activity offestivity. The differences lie in how ritual anddrama create symbols and how the symbols con-dition audience composition and response. Sym-bols are more cohesive in drama than in ritual,where the kinship can be more conventional-ized. The symbols of drama are created withinthe narrative structure and are interpreted ac-cording to its framework of meanings. Dramacan yield many meanings to many interpreters,who can belong to many cultural communities.Rituals are celebrated by a community of shareddiscourse, usually of shared belief. Symbols canbe imported into the ritual environment and donot need to harmonize with the ritual scenario orsurrounding symbols. Participants are alreadyaware of the proper interpretation and need notpostulate new ones. Few people object, for in-stance, when the president of the United Statesswears on the Holy Bible to uphold the

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Constitution; nor did Communists object whenthe visage of Karl Marx was borne on a gonfa-lon of ecclesiastic origin or, more jarringly,when a "Red star" rose over a "tree of freedom"seen through "golden gates."

The symbols of a festival shape audience com-position. Symbolic language stipulates a greateror lesser degree of foreknowledge, and the per-formance solicits or deters audience participa-tion. Ritual dramas, which spoke a hieratic lan-guage, often made poor propaganda. The spon-sors were preaching to the converted, fornobody else could under-

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stand the symbols. A more common strategy, asis already evident, was to assign new values tothe prerevolutionary lexicon of ritual. Audienceswere conscious enough of ritual conventions tosense the air of solemnity summoned by thesymbols; and with timely prompting they readnew messages into them.

The May Day 1920 celebration in Samara illus-trated both the adaptability and the incoherenceof ritual symbols. The holiday was observedwith a demonstration, speeches by various dig-nitaries, and the unveiling of monuments. Thedemonstration was the main event. An assemblyof people of different ages, professions, andclasses presented the audience with an image ofsocial solidarity and was meant to reflect theaudience itself. At the center of Samara's mainsquare, through which the demonstration passed,was a huge globe, emblazoned with the slogan"Long Live Labor."

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At its base along the sides stood two trucks: oneheld children with flowers, the other, boys withgarlands. To the side stood various workers withthe attributes of their industries: machine tools,hammers, etc., and a group of peasants with agri-cultural emblems: plows, harrows, seed drills,etc. Before the globe in the middle of the square .. . was the Altar of the Proletariat, an anvil andhammer garlanded by flowers. Here stood rep-resentatives of Soviet power and the municipaladministration. They symbolized the matureyears of the children surrounding them. A pro-cession of thousands of people was routed pastthe group. The marchers were divided by cat-egory; a representative of each pronounced agreeting and presented an emblem of labor asthey approached the altar. The children wouldthen decorate the emblem with flowers, the boyswith their garlands. The emblem was returnedwith a reciprocal greeting, and the group contin-ued on to music. Amongst the groups were rep-resentatives of aviation, of the typesetters thathad printed the slogans of the day and tossedthem to the crowd along the parade route,

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firemen, metalworkers (with a flaming forge),and the band of Stepan Razin. 19

If the Altar of the Proletariat was not suffi-ciently ambiguous, the demonstration was fol-lowed by the Coronation of the Revolution.20

Russians of the Civil War period were quiteaware of the kinship of drama and ritual.21 Ritu-al and drama both arrange symbolic events intime with dramatic plot serving a function ana-logous to the ceremony of ritual. Rituals, likedrama, mark transitions: a change in season, achange in status, a key moment in history. Ritu-al consists of three distinct phases: the before-stage, the middle time of transition (thethreshold, or limen); and the aftermath; dramaevolved from the threshold phase. The Russians,like their anthropologist descendants, preferredto observe the similarities and ignore the differ-ences. The key

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distinction lay in the dynamic middle phase.Ritual focuses on the initial and final phases,which represent concrete stages in the life of aperson, society, or nature. Transitions betweenphases can be abrupt and discontinuous. Themiddle phase is a symbolic, often brief, acknow-ledgment of transition. Drama, however, is bornof the middle phase, the dynamic and often ar-duous passing between two phases of life.

This rather abstract discrimination had implica-tions for mass drama; it determined how revolu-tionary events were depicted and how spectatorsperceived them. The phases of festive perform-ance corresponded to three distinct historicalperiods; the before and after phases representedpre-revolutionary oppression and postrevolu-tionary salvation, while the transition phase inthe middle represented the October Revolution.The outcome was that revolutionary rituals,which highlighted the before and after, never ac-tually depicted revolution. They were static rep-resentations similar to the basic performancesKerzhentsev recommended for beginning actors:"[Show] a proletarian children's colony housedin a former lords' manor house. Show what sortof people used to live there, the savage scenes ofviolence that were played out. . . . Such con-trasts . . . can be drawn in all fields. Before, the'gentlemen' drank and partied; now they sellnewspapers and haul lumber. Before military

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discipline was based on slavery; now it's builton a feeling of comradeship." 22

For Ivanov, Lunacharsky, and many contempor-aries, drama and ritual were inseparable frommyth. All three were subsumed by deistvo: therepresentation of a crucial transformation in thelife of an individual that spoke for the whole ofsociety through its symbolic essence. The ter-minology was foggy, as nineteenth-centuryidealism could be, and it was more likely to syn-thesize than to analyze, yet it harbored a truth ofpractical significance to poets and propagandistsalike. Myths are dramatic; Greek drama evolvedfrom ritual as the enactment of a mythic past.The ultimate ambition of many festival plannerswas to create a myth of the October Revolution.If they were to succeed, they would have todramatize it.

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Myth shared two features of drama that werelikely to appeal to a mass audience. The firstwas its symbolic language; mythic symbols, likethe dramatic, must be cohesive. Symbols carry acontinuous meaning throughout a drama ormyth, and they share a common source with oth-er symbols in the narrative. Any transformationor conversion undergone by a symbol must beexplained by the narrative. Dramatic symbolscan be viewed by a diverse audience, not onlyinitiates, because they are less conventionalizedand are construed by the course of the drama.

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Ritual is celebrated by a community, in whichparticipants and spectators share beliefs; dramais performed by a specialist for any spectator.

Of equal import to a mass audience was thesecond shared feature of myth and drama, theprocess of identification. This process was notthe same in ritual. Myth and ritual might celeb-rate similar experiences; but myth assigns spe-cific identities to person, place, and time. Ritualplace and time are indeterminateas Meyerholdnoted in his Maeterlinck productions. They as-sume a broad applicability: rituals can be usedby many people to observe birth, marriage, ordeath. The indeterminacy of ritual allows all eli-gible members of a social group to celebrate.The identity of the participant is irrelevant to theceremony; the role and the performer are one. Inmyth, space is identified, and time moves by therules of narrative progression. The leading roleis assumed by a single figure, the protagonist,and cannot be transferred to another person. Ac-tion, linked by a single figure, is assembled intodramatic plot.

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The paradox of dramatic identification, whichruns against basic instincts operative during theRevolution, is that the collective identifies withthe individual. The audience of a ritual consistsmostly, often exclusively, of those who haveperformed or will pass through the ritual. Theyare initiates. Yet most rituals begin with celeb-rants separating themselves from the communityby a symbolic act of cleansing or distancing.The transition phase is passed alone, after whichthe celebrant can reenter the community. Indrama, the actor and audience stand apart fromthe role of the protagonist. Yet both identify in-tensely with the protagonist's experience, whichgenerates drama's emotional impact.

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There were complexities to myth that had notbeen foreseen. Many Bolsheviks had a grasp ofits social implications, but a tendency to equatemyth and ideology blinded them to its mechan-ics. Smyshliaev developed a plan for May Day1920 that was a patent attempt to create a mythof revolution. Smyshliaev proposed using themyth of Prometheus, which had traveled a longroad through Russian social thought. Marx wasthe most frequent holder of the Promethean title,while Ivanov and Scriabin had seen it as a mythof Western civilization. Vinogradov was attrac-ted by the myth; and sovietization was consum-mated in the Golden King, a synthetic produc-tion about the battle of labor and capital, per-formed to Scriabin's Prometheus theme. 23 InSmyshliaev's socialist version, Prometheus sym-bolizes the "proletariat, bound to the rock ofcapitalism," and the Red Army effects a revolu-tion by freeing him from his chains.

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At sunrise heralds . . . spread out through thesleeping city and with a loud fanfare summoncitizens to previously announced squares andstreets. . . .

The square is surrounded by smoking torches,near which stand people with strange, night-black posters, black masks, holding rods of gold;these are pompous, bombastic figures, cretinous.. . . They let the citizens file by [and] assemble inthe center of the square by the black figure of adeity, monstrous and oppressively large. . . . Thecitizens see that a man in a blue workers' shirt[Prometheus] is bound to the idol with a steelchain. . . .

Dawn arrives and the people with the rods ofgold turn restless; they try to block the sun fromthe crowd with their black shields. But from thethick of the crowd emerges a Red Army detach-ment, which makes its way to the pedestal of theidol, unchains the man in the blue shirt, andtopples the idol. The liberated man raises a redbanner, at which time a tremendous choir, dis-persed among the crowd itself, begins to singPrometheus a hymn written specially for the oc-casion. 24

The plan concludes with a call for the obligatorymerging of audience and actors.

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Both drama and ritual make assumptions aboutthe audience that determine their symbolic lan-guage and its interpretation, and ultimately con-dition their ability to create myths. Soviet festiv-al planners, and not Smyshliaev alone, failed toimagine their audience fully. They made an em-inently Bolshevik miscalculation; they assumedthat, confronted with a properly proletarianmyth, the proletariat would adopt it as theirown. Lunacharsky's prerevolutionary writingsleft little doubt as to his unabashed wish to givethe masses a myth of revolution. But ideologyalone does not create myths. As we have seen,myths must be structured like myths, their sym-bols must be mythic, and they must account forthe audience and its culture. Smyshliaev, for in-stance, failed to note that his audience was unfa-miliar with the Prometheus myth. If the Russi-ans wished to create a myth of revolution, theywould have to feature the Revolution itself, anexperience shared by all Soviet Russiaand

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interpreted differently by its variousconstituents.

As Emile Durkheim suggested in The Element-ary Forms of Religious Life, ritual needsand ismeant to createan atmosphere of unanimity.Spectator-participants cooperate with their com-munity. The tendency of festival planners to as-sume unanimity and to fabricate myths for thewhole nation was inspired ultimately by a dis-regard for spectator autonomy.25 They blithelyforesaw revolutionary fervor and symbolic iden-tification. That this assumption did not corres-pond to the popular mood was noted by youngmembers of Moscow Proletkult who were askedto

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judge Smyshliaev's proposal. They first pointedout the obvious: it was much too expensive forwartime. More telling was the criticism that ifthe masses were to participate, they needed tohave the same intentions as the planners: ''Draw-ing the masses into the action is technically im-possible: how can thousands of participants beinspired [to the same purpose]? How can the de-sire be aroused in them to take part in thedrama? And, finally, how can the masses' move-ment be led or guided if they do not go as theinitiating groups intend them to?'' 26 Bely, bynow an instructor at the Moscow Proletkult, hadmade the same objection fifteen years before inreference to Ivanov's theories.

Like the antagonists in the antimodernist cam-paign of 191819, festival planners had troubleacknowledging spontaneous mass reaction.Herein lay the paradox of samodeiatel'nost'.Participation by the untrained masses was wel-come, but their creativity had to be controlled,even instigated. Several strangely contrivedsolutions showed the depth of the organizers'discomfort. Smyshliaev suggested putting barri-ers in the path of the demonstrators; the effort toovercome them would force the marchers tomanifest self-activity.27 Another suggestion,which in a few years would become generalSoviet practice, was to distribute among thecrowd "cells of fomenters" (iacheiki zazhigate-lei), whose premeditated enthusiasm would in-spire spontaneous emotion.28

Play and Imagination

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Overlooked has been the third element of theperformative triad: play. The Hellenic Olympicsconsisted of rituals to honor the gods of Olym-pus, dramas for the tragic competition, and ath-letic contests to glorify national heroes. A simil-ar interweaving of ritual, drama, and play is fun-damental to festivals and performative theory.

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Play takes many forms: there are competitionsof skill, like sport; mimicry, the habitation of anew personality; and games of risk and ver-tigo.29 The first two are most relevant here. Playexhibits features of festive behavior found inritual and drama: a special environment, wheth-er the playing field of games or the attitude ofmimicry (the shaman's or oracle's possession);behavior distinguished from everyday conductby conventionsthe rules of the game or the"what-if" of make-believe. In game playing,these conventional, even artificial, traits free be-havior from social constraints and allow creativelatitude.

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Mass spectacles developed from the tension ofall three performance types, in which playoffered a potential for spontaneous participationand creativity. The Overthrow of the Autocracywas an igrishche, a game; it was a replaying ofthe Revolution. Play acting stimulated a feelingof revolution that was otherwise missing. YetOverthrow, which was performed for armyunits, played to a limited audience associatedwith the players; either they were directly ac-quainted, or they were, like Vinogradov's stu-dents, soldiers. The barrier between stage andaudience was breached, which Russian theoristshadperhaps mistakenlyassumed was the essenceof a mass deistvo; but it was breached becauseof previously shared experiences, the Revolu-tion and Civil War, that lay outside the perform-ance. If the performance was to be a unifyingmediumthat is, if mass spectacles were to unite adivided societyit would have to fabricate a

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common experience that carried symbolic mo-ment beyond the performative environment.

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Play is not essentially symbolic, although it canbe symbolic because it can be interpreted. Mostanthropologists would in fact take strong excep-tion to the idea that play is nonsymbolic, and the"meaning" of play is described in great detail inJohn MacAloon's work on the modernOlympics. The contradiction though is not sogreat. Play as such is not meaningful; but it cer-tainly can be a carrier of meaning. Placed in aproper context, like the Olympics, play can be-come highly symbolic. But in another context,the same game will have entirely different con-notations or none at all. Significantly, the samecultural system that reads political meaning intothe Olympic Games also senses that politics de-tract from sportsmanshipa notion that elevatesgame playing to noble stature. Vinogradovseems to have sensed the limits of Overthrow.The dramatic game provided a dynamic prin-ciple for depicting the Revolution, yet lacked ageneralized, symbolic setting to transport the

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soldiers beyond immediate experience. Thus, inthe next spectacle, Deistvo of the Third Interna-tional, the overtly symbolic globe was placedcenter-stage.

Play could make several contributions to revolu-tionary fêtes. Dramatic games like Overthrowwere capable of depicting revolution dynamic-ally, a welcome contrast to the ostentatiousrituals sweeping Soviet Russia. Of greater im-port was a quality that had been neglected, evenby Vinogradov: make-believe. Although the ma-terialist Bolsheviks, who were often guilty ofexcess sobriety, left no room for play in theircultural theories, there was a role for it in anevolving socialist culture. Makebelieve asksparticipants to imagine themselves in new sur-roundings and to create behavior appropriate tothat environment. The setting and rules

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of behavior can be strictly defined, as in a boardgame, or freely generated, as in child's play.Make-believe shares essential features withdrama and ritual: conventionality and the as-sumption of new identities by participants. Itlent revolutionary festivals a lightness that wasdistinctly lacking; moreover, it encouraged par-ticipants to act as they might under communismand to create new types of behavior.

The role of play in festivity, is perhaps the bestexplanation of why Evreinov, so unmaterialist,so unserious, and, finally, so un-Bolshevik,should have directed the most powerful andmost mythic of the revolutionary festivals. Inopposition to the symbolists, who returnedtheater to its ritual origins, Evreinov took theateralong the axis of play. For Evreinov, theatrical-ity was the essence of theater. Theatricality,theater for theater's sake, meant to him the ele-ment of play, of make-believe, a preaesthetic in-stinct in all life. Play was the principle of eternalcreation. Children make a theater from their fivefingers; dogs chase their own tails; adults cease-lessly don and doff social masks: life is a seriesof transformations. Play is a release from every-day exigency, a time when the imagination cantransform and beautify life. 30

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Evreinov saw great therapeutic value in inhabit-ing new personalities. His idea was best illus-trated by The Main Thing, a comedy written byhim and directed by Nikolai Petrov at the FreeComedy Theater in 1921.31 It was a simple playof changing masks. Paraclete, the protagonist, isan amalgam of goodwill, deceit, and boundlessfantasy. He convinces a troupe of talentless pro-vincial actors to deceive a group of unfortu-nates. The troupe's romantic lead feigns love fora fading spinster; the dancer convinces a dis-heartened student of her infatuation. Despite set-backs, the illusion serves its purpose; the objectsof the deception are given reason to live, the act-ors learn the value of charity. The lives of all aretransformed through art and artifice.

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Evreinov believed that play was carefree; but itsimaginative capabilities could have more prac-tical uses. Play posits a conventionalized situ-ation in which participants assume new identit-ies and behave according to new rules. The en-vironment imagined by play can be entirely arti-ficial, as in sport, but it can also parallel real-lifesituations. Participants can perform duties theywill later have to perform in a real environment;play is a form of practice in which mistakes arenot followed by dire consequences.

The benefits of play were evident in attempts in1920 to experiment with and even create social-ist forms of culture in festivals. After three yearsof socialism, the most attractive models for so-cialist culture still

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came mostly from utopian novels and tiny,short-lived communes. There was however atremendous enthusiasm waiting to be harnessed,and some intriguing ideas. They were tried outby various organizations, with varying success,in mass festivals.

The army, which had already sponsoredVinogradov's studio, sponsored play as well in1920. The military has frequently used play toprepare soldiers for war: they can learn tacticsand maneuvers without the immediate dangersof the battlefield. Not only was Waterloo won,as Wellington claimed, on the playing fields ofEton; Indian warriors trained for battle by play-ing lacrosse, and modern armies train with wargames. The military parade, like its cousin thedemonstration, trains a military body to be per-fectly organized. It is not just a spectaclethougha stirring spectacle it can beit is a form of dis-cipline without immediate utility. An army thatmarches well fights well; or so the theory runs.As leaders of the nascent Red Army knew, thebirth of the first great Russian army had been inthe spectacular war games, the instsenirovki, ofyoung Peter the Great. In one instance a mockfortress of huge proportions, Pressburg, wasbuilt on the river Yauza; Peter's soldier-

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playmates bombarded it with cardboard bombsand stormed the walls with play guns in theirhands. The weapons might have been fake, butthe wounds received in battle were often real.Furthermore, from these games Peter acquired avery real knowledge of military technology, andfrom his boysoldiers emerged a generation ofcompetent commanders and disciplined soldiers.

Red Army leaders went further; they conductedexercises as dramatic performances. On August26, 1919, the reserve army delivered two thou-sand young recruits to Piotrovsky for theatrical-ized maneuvers. 32 The aim of the productionwas to give the recruits, who were preparing toenter the war with the Poles, "an emotional con-ception in images of the fundamental stages ofthe revolutionary movement and the goals of theCivil War."33

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The Krasnoe selo camp where the tsar and hisretinue had often retreated for military man-euvers during the First World War housed a nat-ural amphitheater: a slope opening onto a largepatch of flat ground. On a small stage set in themiddle of that patch, actors enacted the basicplot. The maneuvers were based on the scenarioof a mass spectacle performed July 19 for deleg-ates of the Third International. It included thestruggles of the First International, scenes fromthe First World War, and the struggle of the RedArmy against its internal and external enemies.The enactment culminated in the triumph of thesocialist republic.

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At its most ambitious, play could propose mod-els for life under socialism. Here, Soviet festivalorganizers struggled with an unfortunate prop-erty, of play; it is impermanent. Gan's plan forMay Day 1920 was to create within Moscow atemporary socialist city: an environment, like afestival, in which the socialist culture of the fu-ture could be fashioned. Gan had grand ambi-tions for his festival city; it was to be a realthing, a form of activity that could transform thecourse of life. Gan was of the deistvo school thatwanted to provoke permanent change. As he re-monstrated, "Play has no place in the theater." 34His stern-faced, "materialist" vision of revolu-tionary drama did not allow for makebelieve;yet he too expected its magic to conjure the fu-ture: "Our everyday is a day of great struggle,and at this time there is nothing more importantthan intense revolutionary labor directed towardcommunism. . . . [We must] infuse performative[deistvennyi] content for the unfolding of new

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social relations, a new discipline for sociallabor, a new world-historical structure for theentire national and then the international eco-nomy.''35

Constructivism, which Gan claimed first de-veloped in 1920 among the ideologues of massdrama,36 was art designed to have a specifiedeffect on the social and cultural consciousnessof its consumers.37 It was a belief that properenvironment makes for proper culture; con-structivists engaged in devising things for so-cialism. In its emphasis on total environment,constructivism was related to mass festivals, butconstructivism intended to create permanent en-vironments. Festivals prefer the temporary to thepermanent, the illusory to the real, a choice thatGan would not make.38 He insisted that noprops be used in his city; everything must be areal thi ng. Communal rest and eating were the-atricalized; a socialist society, both make-be-lieve and real, was created.

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All the squares where action occurs are to benamed for the arts and sciences. . . . GeographySquare [on Agitation St.] [is to have] an enorm-ous globe, the land sections of which will becolored red for the smoldering world revolution.. . .

Outside the city (perhaps Khodynka Field) aField of the International will be set up with awireless station and an aerodrome. On this fieldthe main drama of the festival unfolds.

In the early morning prologue . . . a powerfulsiren calls from the Sparrow Hills and isanswered by the whistles of all of Moscow'sfactories.

On that signal cavalry detachments, motorcycles,and cars ride from the seventeen city gates tolocal squares, summoning citizens into the streetsalong the way. On neighborhood squares, groups[of agitators] await them . . . to

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involve them in the active deistvo of the holiday.Here the drama of the First International unfolds.

When this is over the masses move to the citycenter, . . . where the Second International iscelebrated.

Finally citizens move on to the Field of the Inter-national where the fall of the Second Internation-al and the rise of the Third unfolds, as well as thetransition to a socialist society. 39

Play, in the end, requires a light touch, likeEvreinov's; it tends to be irresponsible. It doesnot obligate its participants and makes no claimto permanence. Ironically, for all his rhetoricalpracticality, Gan did not take into accountMoscow's dilapidated public transport. AnyMuscovite wishing to watch the drama, muchless participate, would have walked across thecity twice that day.

In the end, Gan never had the chance to confrontthese problems. As had been the fate of earlierNarkompros projects, plans formulated by theSection for Mass Presentations and Spectacleswere never realized. May Day 1920 was insteadgiven over to a nationwide subbotnik, a day ofvoluntary community labor. In this festival,workthe foundation of socialismwas trans-formed into play by the special rules of holiday.

Labor Transformed

Revolution introduced socialism to the state be-fore it did to the workplace. Socialist labor wasa term as vague as it was common. To radicals,it meant worker control of factories, which theBolsheviks tried briefly and disastrously. To Bo-gdanov, it meant voluntary work of the utmostefficiency and variety. To Gastev, it meantrhythmic labor movements that seemed poetic tohimand robotic to others.

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The Civil War did not leave much room for ex-periment. Capital assets were destroyed, and re-sources that might have gone to repair the de-struction were reallocated. Industrial labor wasabsorbed into the new Red Army; displacementsin the work force and the aging of the industrialplant led to a sharp drop in productivity. Theemergency led to a command economy in whichlabor conditions were not so different fromthose of capitalism: workers were compelled towork long hours for low pay. There was no realopportunity to try out new principles. Mass fest-ivals offered a chance, albeit temporary andnonbinding, to establish

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an ideal setting and let participants act as if thesocialist economy were a reality.

Revolution can blur the distinction between hol-iday and everyday, but even before the OctoberRevolution there was a strong tradition thatlabor would become one with leisure: it was oneof many differentiations to wither away. InNews from Nowhere, Morris depicted labor asits own reward and relaxation; Gastev thoughtof socialist work as a festival, an experience ofbeauty, joy, and unity. Lunacharsky went evenfurther: he saw festivals as an organized envir-onment in which normally "unorganized masses. . . merge into the organized." 40 This was theconverse of Morris's inversion. The hope wasthat festivals would serve as "shock-moments[udar-momenty] that will compel a more seriousattitude [toward labor], greater discipline, andthat gradually these 'abnormal' methods will be-come normal, everyday."41

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Industrialization introduced a new concept oftime to culture: standardized and regulated,without the irregular bursts of the natural, agri-cultural clock. Industrialization was impossiblewithout standardized time; but in 1920 standardtime was not enough. A superhuman effort wasneeded, what Lenin called "revolutionary-style"work (rabota po-revoliutsionnomu). Work wassubject to compressed, intensified holiday time.If work conditions could not be changed, thespace/time environment around it could.

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Work was introduced to festive culture by meas-ures such as honoring outstanding laborers withthe title of "shock worker" (udarnik truda) andby the introduction of subbotniki and voskres-niki (Saturday and Sunday workdays). "Shockwork," a concept forgotten during NEP and re-vived by the Cultural Revolution, was in factproposed for May Day 1920 by Kogan, chair-man of the national Bureau of Mass Festivals.42He suggested that productivity could be spurredif labor was performed in bursts. There werecorresponding proposals to bring labor into ce-remonial culture: on May Day, outstandingworkers were honored throughout the country.The ritual recognition of labor quickly spread;workers were thrilled that "their everyday lifehad become an object of ceremonial recogni-tion."43 The movement culminated at theDecember 1920 Congress of Soviets, which cre-ated a medal for outstanding labor: the Order ofthe Red Banner of Labor.

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The most radical manipulation of labor time at-tempted in Soviet Russia was the subbotnik.Subbotniki were begun on the initiative of rail-road workers of the Moscow-Kazan line on May10, 1919, and a week later the initiative wastaken up by Communists and "sympathiz-

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ers" of the Aleksandrovsky railroad. Becausetransport was damaged horribly by the war, theworkers contributed five hours of free labor to-ward restoring rail lines. This was not just over-time; it was a "special" time for special effort,and productivity for those five hours was two tothree times the norm. One of the first legislativeactions of the Soviet government in 1918 hadbeen to establish the eight-hour workday; andsubbotniki could be seen as a reasonable attemptto correct that wellintentioned but impracticalact. In the months following the first subbotnik,Communists and sympathizers sporadically ar-ranged their own, each chronicled with greatpraise on the pages of Pravda and Izvestiia. 44

The first subbotniki seem to have been both loc-al and voluntary; and the participants viewedthem as economic contributions. But the atten-tion of central party organs was quickly attrac-ted; and subbotniki acquired symbolic value tocomplement the economic. A signal momentwas the publication of Lenin's article "A GreatBeginning."45 Lenin paid little attention to theeconomic aspects of subbotniki; for him theyrepresented "a cell of the new, socialist society,"where workers accept voluntary discipline andlabor for their own benefit. Festivals act as tem-porary environments in which new social struc-tures can be created; and Lenin charged the sub-botniki with "the creation of new economic rela-tions, of a new society." Subbotniki were not ad-ditional time spent on everyday labor; they weremoments of "exemplary communist work'' thatcreated a model for every day.

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As party attention focused on the subbotniki inearly 1920, the voluntary nature of participationbecame more dubious. Nonparty workers wereencouraged to enlist;46 and, judging from an-nouncements published regularly in the centralpapers, many railroad workers of the Moscowregion were so consistently working subbotnikhours that the pre-1918 workweek was restored.The Moscow Party Committee even formed aDepartment of Subbotniki; in September of1920, the department claimed that attendance atsubbotniki was good, but it also noted that Com-munists were taking part with great reluct-ance.47

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The rhetoric generated by subbotniki becamethicker as the snow of winter 1920 grew deeperon the streets. A front-page article in Pravdaproposed transplanting subbotniki to the Sovietvillage;48 but the very concept of subbotnik wasunthinkable without urban industrial time.Saturday work was even proposed as an educa-tional tool for children.49 Holiday subbotnikiwere becoming the norm, a reversal of the so-cialist promise that "labor will become a holi-day." The pages of the Moscow

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press would announce a series of subbotnikievery day; and in Odessa, for example, Marchthrough June witnessed thirteen straight subbot-niki. 50 When the Central Executive Committeeof the Russian Republic decreed May Day asubbotnik, it came as no surprise.

There were merits to introducing work into holi-day culture as a production incentive, but therewas also a disadvantage. In March through earlyMay 1920, Soviet Russia was swamped withholidays. There were Lent and Easter; and theSoviet anniversaries of the Overthrow of theAutocracy, Paris Commune Day, InternationalWomen's Day, and May Day. The latter threewere observed with subbotniki, and in Marchand April, special week-long (!) subbotniki wereheld for the newly christened Cleanliness Week,Transport Week, Labor Week, and Labor-FrontWeek. There was even a subbotnik to celebratethe anniversary of the first subbotnik. This work,incidentally, supplemented the compulsory, un-remunerated work done by most citizens inshoveling snow off the streets. Even if workerswere given no better hours than they had beforethe Revolution, the mental division of thosehours was different. Eight hours a day was ob-ligatory, everyday work, which no name could

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transform; but the rest of those hours were free,holiday labor to be performed voluntarily. Astenuous as this claim might seem, and howeverexaggerated the rhetoric in the central press was,productivity was much higher on those days,and work was performed more willingly duringsubbotnik hours.51

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The leaders of Petrograd went to tremendouslengths to ensure that the May Day subbotnikwas conducted in a holiday environment. Itsmood, which contrasted with the grimness of theprevious two years of war, resembled more theatmosphere and intent of Parisians' splendidChamps-de-Mars cleanup for the 1790 Fête ofFederation.52 Petrograd's Summer Garden, situ-ated between the two work sites (Field of Mars,Palace Square) offered an ideal festival site; itwas first plotted in the mid-eighteenth century,when festive culture was at its apogee. Distrib-uted around the gardens in 1920 were classicalorchestras, puppet theaters, folk musicians; aphonograph played revolutionary speeches;mandolin music filled the central canals frompassing gondolas; and Euripides's Hippolytuswas performed on the steep staircase of theEngineers' Castle.53

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Previous subbotniki had been dictated by eco-nomic need and were focused on the transportcrisis. Some critics, particularly the Mensheviks,felt that by grafting the May Day and subbotniktraditions together, the Bolsheviks "made a holi-day into everyday." But the Bolshevik leader-

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ship countered by placing the subbotniki withinthe "intensified, compressed time of holiday: be-fore the Revolution May Day had been a time ofintensified effort [struggle] and now too MayDay was a period of intensified effort [pro-ductivity]." 54

This was more than a rhetorical flourish. Thelabor assigned on May Day was overwhelm-ingly symbolic.55 Palace Square and the Field ofMars were the last places in Petrograd thatneeded repairs. The subbotnik was designed notto rehabilitate the city's economy but to renovateits primary ceremonial spaces. Being a nationalfestival, it could not enlist just a segment of thepopulation, only the whole: a great effort wasmade to get the entire city out, and huge attend-ance was claimed.56 News coverage was thor-ough, and the central press ensured that ordinaryfolk knew even Lenin had done his share, byclearing the Kremlin courtyard of loose tim-ber.57

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The symbolism of this May Day, whether or notit was acceptable to the populace, went deep;like the Easter that would soon follow, it sym-bolized a "new beginning," a resetting of timefor a fresh start.58 Much of the day's work wentinto symbolic groundbreakings for office build-ings, factories, even new cities; in Orel, two-story apartment buildings were reportedly builtin the course of a holiday spectacle.59 The dirtof the past was to be washed away, forgotten: asan official slogan proclaimed, "The garbage youare picking up was left by capital[ism]." Withthe dirt, the unnatural, doglike attitude towardwork that the tsarist regime had inculcated inRussians would also be swept away.60 Khleb-nikov, of all people, gave the clearest idea ofwhat the holiday should be in his poem "LaborHoliday":

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Scarlet afloat, scarletHeld up by the lances of the crowd.That's labor passing by, scamperingA flick of the heel in stride.Workweek! Workweek!The skin of shirt fronts glistens.And a song flows onOf yesterday's slaves,Of workers, not slaves.61

Work in Petrograd was directed at cleaning thevestiges of tsardom from the symbolic centers ofPalace Square and the Field of Mars, corner-stones of the baroque city. The subbotnik, whichthe newspapers dubbed "the destruction of theold world,"62 was designed to break down thesymbolic separation of the palace from the citywhose center

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it occupied: a graphic illustration of festivals'ability to cross impermeable thresholds. Thatmorning, as a cannon roared and a military bandplayed, tens of thousands of citizens charged thefence enclosing the square and began to tear itdown. 63 The Field of Mars had hosted displaysof military might under the tsars; but after yearsof war and revolution, it had been pounded intoa huge dust bowl. The architect I. A. Fomin wascommissioned to convert the square into apark;64 a miraculous transformation from desertto garden, as in ancient tales, was to occur in thecourse of the holiday.

There was little spontaneity to the subbotnik andlittle of the play that might have sparked a creat-ive attitude to work. Organizers viewed thework more as a ritual. Gan saw the subbotnik asthe forerunner of his ideal deistvo.65 It was''real" work; but it was also symbolic work, awork performance breeding new social attitudes.Movement, inspired by orchestral music, wastheatricalized and ritualized: marching to thesquare and planting in time with the music.66Piotrovsky called the holiday the "birthday oflabor," in which art and work became one;67 andthe May Day headline of Pravda proclaimed itthe "great new ritual of the Red holiday."

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Subbotnik labor was absorbed into holiday cul-ture. A holiday is a discrete unit of time set offfrom the everyday, yet revolutionary festivalsfrequently featured attempts to fuse holiday andeveryday, to have cake and eat it too. Introducedinto holiday culture, labor was subject to holi-day time: bursts of intense effort, followed bytimes of slack when that effort is forgotten. Suchwas the fate of the work of May Day. The fencewas successfully removed from Palace Square,but not enough time remained to clean up thedebris. The twisted fence and massive stonessupporting it were left on the Palace Embank-ment, where they could be seen for years. Thefate of the Field of Mars was even sadder; theholiday had not allowed time for careful plant-ing of the trees, and afterward nobody came totend them. All sixty thousand trees and busheshad died by mid-summer.68

History as Mystery

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By the spring of 1920, the Bolsheviks weremore confident of their power than ever. MayDay, as is already evident, was celebrated withgreat pomp and pageantry. One of the centralactivities

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in Moscow was the unveiling of a monument toLiberated Labor (on a pedestal formerly occu-pied by a statue of Alexander III). The exultationof participants was captured, perhaps even em-bellished, by the Proletkult poet MikhailGerasimov:

By the temple of Christ, on the bloody granite,When the cannons' salute had fallen silent,And the sun had halted at its zenith,Lenin unveiled the monument to Liberated Labor.69

In Petrograd the theme of liberated labor was ob-served even more grandly with the first of thegreat mass spectacles, The Mystery of LiberatedLabor. This spectacle was performed by sometwo thousand people, mostly army conscripts,organized by PUR in the person of Tiomkin.Tiomkin, who some forty years later would bethe proud holder of four Oscars for film scores(including the score for Old Man and the Sea),was in 1920 a young pianist just graduated fromthe Petrograd Conservatory.70 He solicited theservices of some of Petrograd's finest directors:Annenkov, Kugel (owner and director of theCrooked Mirror cabaret), and S. D. Maslovskaia(director of a school for opera extras); Annen-kov, Dobuzhinsky, and Vladimir Shchukoa fam-ous architect working as a designer for theBolshoi Dramatic Theater (BDT)were put incharge of the set. The scenario, in keeping withthe nature of "collective creation," was writtenby a "collective author," which included

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Annenkov, Shchuko, Dobuzhinsky, A. A.Radakov (BDT), Hugo Varlikh (conductor, until1917 director of the court orchestra), Kugel,Granovsky (a Max Reinhardt student), L. N. Ur-vantsov (playwright), Lopukhov, and N. I. Mish-eev.71 This was a mostly non-Bolshevik but verycompetent crew.

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The former stock exchange was chosen as thesite of the performance. It was a highly theatricalbuilding; the classical portico, framed into a nat-ural stage by white columns, made the tip of Va-silievsky Island, at the confluence of the Greatand Little Neva rivers, its gallery. The square be-fore the exchange would soon be renamedPeoples' Festival Square. The building and thesquare could be used two different ways: as realspace or as conventional, theatrical space. Thesquare was a part of revolutionary Petrograd; butthe stock exchange, with its capitalist functionand imperial architecture, was not, and the dir-ectors chose to create a purely conventionalspace. Canvas backdrops were painted, effect-ively turning a three-dimensional real space intotwo-dimensional conventional space; and thearea surrounding the building was cordoned off.

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The play did not transform the space; rather, thearchitecture of the exchange became a guidingmetaphor for the depiction of revolutionaryevents. 72 The stock exchange was something ofan anomaly; a neoclassical building used in thenorthern capital of an autocracy for capitalistcommerce. It was never fully integrated into thecity or its culture: not really part of VasilievskyIsland nor of the imperial center nor of the Pet-rograd River bank, which flanked it, the ex-change was one of the few parts of Petersburgthat never made its way into national literatureor mythology. It was perhaps the most artificialpoint in that unnatural city; and it did not havethe strong associations that an established space,such as Palace Square or the Field of Mars, had.That it should be used as a conventional ratherthan a real space is no surprise. The columned,open porch, with its sweeping staircase and thecobbled "pit" at its base, created a natural stagefor mystery plays. The threeleveled space, as

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described in the scenario, was populated at itslowest rung by the "oppressed peoples" of his-tory; the porch was the ''paradise" of the power-ful; and the staircase was the field of their battle.

ACT I

Scene i. Workers' Labor. Scene ii. Dominion ofthe Oppressors. Scene iii. The Slaves AreRestless.

From behind a blank wall come strains of en-chanting music and a nimbus of bright, festivelight. The wall hides the wondrous world of thenew life. There liberty, brotherhood, and equalityreign. But the approach to the magical castle offreedom is guarded by threatening cannons.

Slaves on the steps are weighed down by incess-ant hard labor. Moans, curses, sad songs, thescrape of chains, screams, and the laughter ofoverseers is heard. Occasionally the burdenedgrief of the prisoners' song quiets down, and theslaves stop their work to catch strains of captivat-ing music. But the overseers return them toreality.

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A procession of oppressive rulers comes intoview surrounded by a brilliant suite of their un-derlings. The rulers climb the steps to the ban-quet hall. Here oppressors of all times, allpeoples, and all forms of exploitation havegathered. The central figure[s] . . . [are] an east-ern monarch in sumptuous dress, covered in goldand jewels, a Chinese mandarin, an obese king ofthe stock market, . . . and a typical Russian mer-chant. . . . The finest fruits of the earth gracetheir table. Music plays. Male and female dan-cers amuse the rulers, who have no interest in thewonderful, free life hidden by the gates of themagical castle. They have given themselves overcompletely to the drunken orgy, drowning themoans of the slaves with their shouts.

But the enchanting music has its own power. Itsbewitchment makes the slaves feel the first glim-merings of the natural urge for freedom, and

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their moans gradually become mutters. The ban-quet is seized by alarm. The music of the bac-chanalia and the music of the kingdom of free-dom clash. Finally there is a deafening thunder-clap. The revelers jump up from their seats, terri-fied by their impending demise. The ecstaticslaves stretch their praying hands toward thegolden gates.

Act II

Scene i. The Battle of Slaves and Oppressors.Scene ii. The Slaves Defeat the Oppressors.

The carefree, happy mood of the banquet isspoiled. . . . The slaves are abandoning theirlabor; . . . the isolated flames of rebellion areflaring and gradually merging into a great redbonfire. The slaves try to storm the banquettable, but their first attack is easily repelled.

Spectators are shown individual scenes from thelong history of the proletariat's struggle. Romanslaves led by Spartacus race under a canopy ofred banners; they are spelled by mobs of peasantsled by Stepan Razin, raising the red flag of rebel-lion. Threatening and grand sound the strains ofthe Marseillaise and the carmagnole. The forestof red banners grows thicker and thicker. Thesovereigns are seized by terror; their underlingsflee in panic. Drums beat victory. A huge redbanner, held aloft by the crowd of rebelliousslaves, approaches the sovereigns. The potentatesflee, dropping their crowns. Yet this is still notthe final triumph of the slaves: again the bronzethroats of cannon roar, and again a spirit of des-pondency seizes the workers. But the star of theRed Army rises in the eastern sky. With rapt at-tention the crowd follows its ascent. The din ofdrums and Red Army songs combine into tri-umphal music. The ranks of the Red Army grow,and the crowd is exultant. Revolutionary musicreaches a crescendo. One more effort, . . . and thegates of the magical castle crash down.

Act III

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The Kingdom of Peace, Freedom, and JoyfulLabor

The final act is an apotheosis of the free, joyfullife that begins for the new humanity. A choraldance of all nations forms around the symbolic"tree of freedom." The powerful stanzas of theInternationale are heard. The Red Army laysdown its weapons for the tools of peaceful labor.The spectacle ends with a fireworks display thatpours joyful, festive light on the scene as the newlife begins. 73

The traditionalism of holidays was evident inthe socialist paradise. It was introduced by theleitmotif of Wagner's Lohengrin and symbolizedby the tree of freedom, borrowed from theFrench Revolution and going back to the pagan"tree of life." The socialist city was itself de-scribed as a festival: a special, magic place.74

The greatest innovation of May Day 1920 wasto combine drama,

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ritual, and play into a single, mass festival. Eventhe French fêtes, which had incorporated con-temporary spectacle culture, never featured dra-matic art. The fêtes had been oddly ahistorical,preferring allegoric tableaux to the high arts oftragedy and comedy, or the low art of boulevardtheater.

Dramatic presentation gave the Bolshevik fest-ivals a new dimension: history. The narrativerules of drama were translated into the laws ofhistory. The mystery play provided the directori-al collective with a historical model, as it hadMayakovsky and Meyerhold. The "before" stagewas the time before revolution; after came thestate of grace; on the threshold humanitystruggled for salvation with the dark forces ofcapitalism. The scenario of Mystery was, in fact,one of the earliest Bolshevik creation myths.

Mythic time, like festival time, is remote, a re-mote past isolated in the festival's remotepresent. Creation myths rely on both festivetime frames: continuity to link the past to thepresent; discontinuity to subdivide it into his-tory. The monumental or linking principle inMystery was provided by a vast chorus with anidentity that shifted but always represented thepeople. The chorus were unnamed slaves in thefirst act, then the rebels of Spartacus, and finallyrevolutionary Russians; their history was sub-divided into progressive moments of revolt. Inthe crucible of the May Day presentation,Bolshevism became, contrary to its own dogma,the last in a series of spontaneous, leaderless re-volts against the oppression of capitalist auto-cracy. The "oppressors" included Napoleon, thepope, a sultan, and a merchant; "struggle" in-cluded the rebellions of Spartacus, Razin, the Ja-cobins, and the Red Army.

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The shift from ritual toward drama forced thedirectors to contemplate the new roles to be as-sumed by the audience. A ritual is a real thing,meant to mark and instigate changes in the out-side world. Rituals make certain assumptionsabout spectators. They share a cultural and so-cial background with participants and otherviewers; they are acquainted with the symboliclanguage; perhaps they might, at sometime intheir lives, become participants. Ritual, in otherwords, assumes an audience predisposed to un-derstand and even accept its content. Drama,which creates and defines its symbols in thecourse of performance, can reach a diverse audi-ence, including outsiders. Spectators are linkedtemporarily by their common viewing of theperformance, but they are invited to interpret itaccording to their own experience. There was atrade-off: drama had a terrific power to depicthistory and address a broad audience, but it

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sacrificed ritual's hold on the community ofparticipants.

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The sponsors and directors of The Mystery ofLiberated Labor seemed to court the benefits ofboth, the potentials of mythmaker and propa-gandizer. Their ambivalence was confirmed bythe impulse to make Mystery a "real thing" andby indecision over whether to bring spectatorsinto the performance. Ivanov's claim of realityfor a deistvo was taken literally: there was realnoise from real explosions; real battleships litthe stage with their floodlights; and real troopsexecuted real maneuvers on the square. Butclearly the producers, all theater professionals,had no intention of allowing the spectators, allthirty-five thousand of them, to participate; norwere the thousands of actors encouraged to im-provise. Spontaneity would have been a licensefor pandemonium.

A trend away from free participation toward dir-ectorial control, discernible in Third Interna-tional and pronounced in From the Power ofDarkness, became emphatic in Mystery.Newspapers announced that "preventive meas-ures will be taken against the accidents normallyassociated with large crowds"; the militiaformed a cordon between stage and audience,while government officials and foreigners in at-tendance were segregated from the masses. 75There was nevertheless a desire to see the per-formance as the long-sought deistvo; andKerzhentsev claimed to have seen a merging ofstage and audience.

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The entire spectacle concluded with brilliant fire-works display, which cascaded joyful holidaylight on the birth of a new life. . . . During the fi-nale of the spectacle, an enormous chorus ofworkers from the entire world sang the Interna-tionale against the background of a rising redsun. The electrified masses broke through thecable barrier separating the spectators from theplace of action, surged toward the portal of thestock exchange, and joined the common singing.A grandiose choir was formed, with the spectat-ors mingling with the actors.76

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Kerzhentsev was in Moscow on May Day, so hecould be excused for this misrepresentation.Others who saw the merging that neverhappened, and provided the reports Kerzhentsevrelied on, had fallen prey to the old refusal tosee the peoplewhich the audience was assumedto representas it was, a variegated and idiosyn-cratic viewer. Spectators themselves seemed tosense the ambivalence of the performance; theyburst through the cordon to join the final chorusbut stopped dead when they reached the steps ofthe exchange, the beginning of "theatricalspace."77

The legendary deistvo had a profound synthesiz-ing capacity: it merged different arts, differentideas, different symbols, and different classesand races. Yet the expressive power of Mystery,as of all subse-

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quent mass dramas, was in the ability to differ-entiate. The ability to differentiate was as essen-tial as the ability to unite; both would be part ofa myth of revolution.

The need to differentiate and divide elements ofa spectacle was increasingly evident when com-plex historical topics were raised. These changesin content entailed changes in form. Professionaldirectors began tackling the enormous technicaldifficulties of mass theater. The use of a detailedscenario was a major innovation; it allowed dir-ectors to break the performance into separateepisodes and thus divide revolutionary historyinto individual events. Yet the production of thisfirst full-scale mass spectacle revealed moreproblems than it solved. Comparing early scen-arios with the final draft, one can see how muchexpressive material was lost in the vast expanseof the square. 78 The potentates of the first scen-ario were characterized by facial expression:one face "reflected haughtiness and a conscious-ness of its own divinity"; another was "markedby the stamp of debauchery and depravity." Thisat a distance of 100 yards. A more serious im-pediment involved the various rebellions and

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revolutions, which had to be differentiated ifhistorical change was to be portrayed. Early re-bellions were the work of a leader: "not every-one in the oppressed crowd of slaves . . . raiseshis voice; no, only the leaders do." Each revoltwas also supposed to appear more organizedthan the lastas Leninist historicism would haveanticipated. Thus, the first occurred when a "dis-organized crowd stormed the staircase," while inthe final the Red Army ''headed for the [golden]gates in an orderly march.'' These differenceswere not visible in the performance. Each revoltwas a swirling mass of bodiesno leader couldstand out in their midst; and each revolt wasequally unorganized as it stormed the stair-case.79 The acting mass was not subdivided;movement was choreographed for groups of afew hundred, which made all but the most ele-mentary maneuvers, such as storming the stair-case, impossible.

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The inability to break elements of the spectacleinto small units made the show ungainly and in-expressive, and led to contradictions betweenthe intended message and the actual message.Without recourse to the fundamental expressivemeans of a mass spectacle, the directors wereforced to rely on the spoken word, which wasdrowned in the outdoor vastness. Space was di-vided vertically (the lower classes below; therulers above) but not horizontally (left and righthalves of the stage mirrored one another). Theepisodes of the scenario were selected and as-sembled on a principle of similarity, with inter-vening time being elimi-

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nated; along with the use of the chorus, thismeant that episodes, the basic components ofthe production, all resembled each other. His-tory seemed to be cyclical.

The Influence of Popular Theater

The leaders of Petrograd were so impressed bythe performance that they decreed that "thestock exchange will be used this winter for theproduction of mystery-type spectacles." 80 Anentire series was planned, including: Waragainst White Poland, on the steps of the Engin-eers' Castle; The Taking of the Bastille, in theSummer Garden; The July Days, at the NarvaGate; and the Holiday of the Defense of Petro-grad, in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral.81

Calmer heads and more critical minds counseledmodesty. One person objected entirely to the ap-propriation of the noble title of mystery for theproduction: "I remember The Taking of Azov, acannonade in three acts with artillery pieces, thenavy, and the destruction of fortresses. . . . Theproducers of that show called it an extravaganza[feeriia]. That, at least, was honest."82

But, pretense aside, Mystery had been entertain-ing. Shklovsky, for instance, was impressed bythe ability to incorporate "real" thingsfor ex-ample, a military parade.83 His was a common-sense approach that said the spectacle was won-derfulit just was not art. He proposed anotherperformance in which two sections of Petrograd,the Vyborg and the Petrograd sides, be pittedagainst each other in mock battle.

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Not everyone had Shklovsky's sense of humor.On May 3 Radlov and Soloviev directed an am-ateur production, The Fire of Prometheus, andsome rather grandiose claims were made. Theplay was performed by Red Army dramaticcircles, which led some to proclaim the "cre-ation of a proletarian Red Army theater."84 Pio-trovsky was even less restrained. He announcedthat socialist society would be "theatrocratic."The lifting of financial considerations fromtheater circles had returned the element of "freeplay'' to their performances.85 Play would givebirth to a new theater; and the theater wouldgive birth to a new society. The theater shouldnot be illusory, but a real thing; and there shouldbe no spectators, just participants. Theatricalperformance would lead to the creation of greatfestivals; and everyday life (byt) would be re-made there.86

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Produced in the Bolshoi Opera, The Fire of Pro-metheus matched the pomposity of its locale.Piotrovsky and Radlov had learned little fromtheir earlier collaboration on The Sword ofPeace. The only extant description comes froman unsympathetic critic: "The first scene fea-tures Samson and Delilah; . . . the second fea-tures the Spartacus uprising; following this is ahigh-society ball in a setting that suggests thecourt of Louis XIV, mixed up with suggestionsof other styles, including the . . . foot wrappingsof one of the marquises. In the final act, after theheavens have parted, an amateur pair . . . dancesa sultry Argentinian death tango. 87

The Fire of Prometheus was a victim of its ownambitions. Amateur performances could not cre-ate both a new society and a new theater (as-suming they could create either one). KonstantinDerzhavin, alluding to some of Kerzhentsev'sclaims, said that however wonderful "collectivedrama" was, it was not theater. Play is real; art isillusion.88 Shklovsky conceded the value of playbut added "such games [igrishcha] have alwaysexisted, but nobody has called them theater.Theatricality [artifice] is essential to the theat-er."89 Kuznetsov made perhaps the most tellingobservation on the limits of the form; play was ahealthy sign in theater circles, but it could be ofinterest only to friends of the players. Such apresentation could not go beyond a limited audi-ence.90

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After the failures of The Sword of Peace andThe Fire of Prometheus, Radlov rethought twotheses that had thwarted mass productions: first,that "a spectacle performed for the broad massesmust be a 'mass' spectacle in that a tremendousnumber of performers take part"; and, second,that "historical events instigated by a greatquantity of people (such as a revolution) shouldbe depicted in theatrical action by another greatquantity of performers."91

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Like other mass-spectacle directors, Radlov hadreached the genre by a circuitous route. Hisbackground and education, which he sharedwith Piotrovsky and Soloviev, was in the an-cient theater. Radlov was the son of Ernst Rad-lov, a renowned classicist and friend of thephilosopher Soloviev; Piotrovsky was the son ofanother great classicist, Tadeusz Zielinski.92Radlov and Soloviev also shared years of ap-prenticeship under Meyerhold, where they stud-ied Zielinski's ideas about ancient Greece. Theyalso studied the renaissance theater with Meyer-hold; and in fact, Soloviev co-wrote with Mey-erhold the 1913 mass production Fire based oncommedia dell'arte principles. Radlov spentsome time as well with Evreinov, writing pro-logues for the Ancient Theater's Spanishproductions.

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Their first postrevolutionary collaboration wasat the Petrograd Theater-Studio, organized byMeyerhold; participating were, among others,Radlov, Soloviev, Piotrovsky, and Annenkov.The studio's first production, Nikolai Gumilev'sMagic Tree (Derevo prevrashcheniia), was achildren's play. The production introduced whatwould become staples of agitational theater:stage business involving devils, acrobats, and soforth. 93 The studio directors intended to revivethe intimacy of high theater and popular culture,and they preferred writers like Calderón,Shakespeare, Molière, and styles like commediadell'arte that addressed broad audiences. Theysought a theater that, but for its size, was asplendid model for mass spectacles.

Popular mobile theater, . . . like the wanderingtroupes of old France and England, can serveboth city and country [and] is based on genuineshowmanship and healthy humor. [The troipes]will be able to give a show at any moment andany place . . . at the asking, meeting all the re-quirements of artistic theatricality. Easily moun-ted, with new actors . . . experienced in panto-mime and verbal improvisation, . . . freed froman overload of psychologism, with a repertoryand acting techniques close to the popular under-standing, the new theater will revive collectivetheatrical creation. . . . We must forget aboutpsychological subtleties and work toward scenichyperbole and catching the spectator's eye.94

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The Theater-Studio was soon dissolved, andmany of its staff moved on to the new Theaterof Popular Comedy directed by Radlov. ThePopular Comedy was one of the first Sovietagitational theaterstheaters performing topicalskits with a strong political slant. The staff ofthe Popular Comedy included Miklashevsky andGolovanskaia; leading members of the cast wereDelvary and Konstantin Gibschmann, the clownand vaudevillian who worked in Annenkov'sFirst Distiller. "Serge" and other clowns filledmany other important roles, as did prerevolu-tionary Meyerhold students.

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Radlov, like Blok and Meyerhold, Mayakovskyand Annenkov, believed that the new theaterwould evolve from forms of popular theater,such as the commedia dell'arte or the circus, thatbordered on play. Precedents were the theater ofShakespeare, in which the clown Will Kempplayed a leading role, and the comedies ofMolière, which were influenced by Italian fair-ground comedies.95 Radlov's was not a theaterof excessive sobriety, as symbolist dramas hadbeen, nor was it a theater given to psychology.Action, not the word, was the medium of ex-pression. It was a compromise betweenEvreinov's pure theatricality and Meyerhold'sconventional theatricality.

In the People's House that had once featuredmelodramas and ex-

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travaganzas, that had seen melodramas banishedby Lunacharsky and Andreeva, that had hostedVinogradov's The Overthrow of the Autocracy,Radlov orchestrated the triumphal return of me-lodrama and the Pinkerton genre. Radlov gavepopular forms a new function appropriate to re-volutionary Russia: agitation. Popular Comedyperformances were mobile, funny, coarse, andtopical. They were based on rough scenariosthat could accommodate a variety of outside ma-terial and employed a troupe of exceptionallyskilled players, who were equipped to handleany contingency. If Lord Curzon made the head-lines, he would wind up in the next day's skit.

Festivals, which encouraged give-and-takebetween actors and spectators, were particularlysuited to Radlov's style. On May Day 1920, thetroupe broke up into five groups and toured thecity on tram platforms, giving short perform-ances at each stop. The scenarios were writtenby Radlov. His group performed a skit, The Par-tition of Russia; another performed the MagicalAccordion and The Good Men of Versailles(Capitalist Intrigues); Soloviev and Piotrovskydirected other groups; and a Popular Comedytroupe under Vladimir Voinov (trained as ascenario writer in the Cinizelli Circus) per-formed a skit entitled Blockade. 96 Also shownthat day was The Monkey-Informer, based onanother Radlov scenario, which adapted theancient concealed-identity plot to the purposesof anticapitalist propaganda. The traditionalcommedia figure Pantaloon was replaced by J.P. Morgan, who introduced himself to the

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audience in the manner expected of fairgroundbuffoons:

In Vienna, New York, and Rome,They esteem my full pocket.They esteem my loud name.I am the famous Morgan.97

The lead player was the monkey Jimmy, whoseefforts to foil the capitalists took him over theheads of the audience on a high wire.

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Radlov was disingenuous when he claimed thatpopular conventions had been adapted smoothlyto new purposes. Rather, he performed adeptly atask performed ineptly by his predecessors: heintegrated the play element of popular spec-taclesfor example, clowning or acrobaticsinto aunified dramatic style. As noted by his col-league Derzhavin, Radlov accomplished this in-tegration in three ways: the acting of actors andcircus performers was reduced to a common de-nominator (a single style); the circus numberswere woven into the

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action; and a harmonic pattern was created fromtricks specific to the circus. 98

The key was fusing the time structures of playand drama. The Bolshevik notion of history wasinherently dramatic. Like drama, it featured anordered progression of events through time,which fit into a pattern of cause and effect. Dra-matic time is continuous; the clock set in thefirst act winds down to an inevitable conclusion.Action is divided into episodes, and the prin-ciple by which they are strung together conveysmuch of the meaning. A diversion of dramaticaction is a breach of its structure.

The depiction of protracted historical develop-ments like revolution stretched fairground theat-er. There, time was closer to the inconsistent,expandable time of play. Play is action gener-ated not by the inevitability of its resolution, likedrama, but by a set of rules. These rules cangenerate new actions eternally and are notdefined in time. Typically, most games need ar-bitrary limits, either a set amount of points or atimespan. Popular theater, particulary Radlov'sbeloved commedia dell'arte, used a scenariomore often than a text. The scenario was a shortseries of events: an initial situation, an intrigueto fuel the action, and a resolution. Around theseevents speech and action (for example, acrobaticescapes from jealous husbands) were impro-vised. The structure was flexible; its events wereonly required stopping points along a circuitousand varied route.

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Radlov saw flexibility as opportunity; if time inpopular theater could be stopped, then currentevents could be worked in at the juncture. Scen-arios were used by the Popular Comedy as aformat to introduce current events. The popularaudience was already accustomed to dramaticstops and starts, and never rebelled against theintroduction of propaganda; and the comic act-ing of the clowns was ideal for satirizing en-emies. Radlov coupled these elements with con-ventions he uncovered in his experiments withrenaissance theater that facilitated "continuousaction . . . founded on the subtle use of con-trast."99 These conventions offered great latit-ude in moving between local and universal, eph-emeral and eternal themes.

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Radlov's hybrid theater was a powerful vehiclefor propaganda, and it was a good show. Itsgreatest merit was the respect for and considera-tion of the spectator. Deistvo, the model for pre-vious mass spectacles, invited spectators to par-ticipate but discouraged their autonomy. Therewas only one outcome, one meaning, one pos-sible audience. Theater as

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play had little pretense to meaning, yet it gavespectators the illusion of an active experience.Genres like the detective story allowed severalpotential resolutions for each performance. Con-vention dictated a certain outcomethe crook iscaughtbut this ending was more like the timelimit of a game than the death of a tragic hero: itwas not an inevitable conclusion giving mean-ing to the action but a way to draw it to a close.The twisting, not the closure, of a plot was thepurpose of popular theater because it created thefeeling of suspense. Suspense was not really theresult of an unknown conclusion; the outcomewas highly conventionalized. Rather suspensewas a way for the spectator seated outside theplay and aware of its conventions to experiencethe action as if it were open-ended.

Vacation Island

Radlov believed that his work at the PopularComedy was similar to directing a mass spec-tacle; both were forms of popular theater, andboth were subject to the same laws of composi-tion. The spectator of a mass production couldderive its full benefit watching from a seat; themerging of stage and audience was not at all ne-cessary and would ruin the aesthetic whole. 100

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Success inspired his players to venture outside.On June 17, a group of actors and clowns per-formed a short play outside the People's Houseto celebrate the first graduation of students fromthe new Soviet Literacy School. The directorswere Voinov and Annenkov. Although the re-viewer was not entirely clear how the perform-ance was tied to the theme of literacy, he knewthat the play had been entertaining. The audi-ence was passive in the sense that it took no partin the action, but the text was improvised byjesters planted in the crowd. For the first time inan outdoor spectacle, locale was exploited well:the topography of the building was brought intoplay. Acrobats escaped up vines growing on thefacade, and scenes were played on the bal-cony.101

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Three days later, Radlov directed The Blockadeof Russia on the newly christened Vacation Is-land (Ostrov otdykha). Formerly called Rock Is-land (Kamennyi ostrov), this had been the site ofthe opulent dachas of wealthy Petersburg. TheRevolution had driven away many occupants;the rest were evicted. During the Civil War thisneighborhood on the outskirts of town was neg-lected, and by 1920 there were gaping

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potholes in the road and rusting automobileshells in the thicket. Expropriated by the state ina doctrinaire fit, the properties had been left torot.

The Petrograd Soviet finally decreed that sever-al mansions be converted to worker spas, withthe opening set for May Day, the holiday of Lib-erated Labor. As of late May nothing had beendone, and a troika was appointed by the muni-cipal soviet to speed things up. One of thetroika's assistants was Emma Goldman, theAmerican anarchist, who later detailed the cor-ruption and shirking that went on at the worksite. 102 Somehow, toward the end of June workwas completed, and the rest homes were readyto receive guests.

A decision was made to inaugurate the resthomes with a festival. Festivals celebrate mo-ments of change and transformation; sometimesthey even instigate the change. Such had beenthe May Day subbotnik, and such was the Julyfestival on Rock Island; it was to embody "awindow into tomorrow, a slice of the new life[byt], . . . the new order of transformedthings."103 Vacation Islanda holiday islandwasto be a model of the socialist city. Ironically, ina culture where work had been absorbed into theholiday schedule, relaxation merged with work:"As heirs conscious of our lawful right to joy,happiness, and rest, we turn Rock Island into aplace of repose for laborers. Here along lilacpaths, here by beds of flowers, . . . they willgather the strength for new feats, for newstruggles."104

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Decorations temporarily transformed the de-crepit island into a city reminiscent of the "an-cient urban democracies."105 Athens, perhaps,or Florence might have been graced with a neo-classical arch like the one built by Fomin alongthe central avenue leading onto the island.106The avenue ended in a large Square of People'sGatherings, the center of which was dominatedby a monumental sculpture intended to continuethe tradition of Phidias: Mikhail Blokh's Metal-worker (Figure 11). Ten meters tall (and tem-porarily made of gypsum), this figure was sup-posed to rival Michelangelo's David. It sur-passed its model in all respects but one, quality.Monumentality had become something of amania in Petrograd, and the leaders of the sovietwho attended the celebration would have beendelighted had not every single part of the figurebeen monumental; as it was, the dignitaries in-sisted that the gypsum proletarian be given a figleaf and, when that did not suffice, an apron.

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The apron would fit only after "a couple partswere knocked off"; and the next day Blokhsuffered a heart attack.107

Blokh was a humorous case of a serious prob-lemthe passion for

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Figure 11.Mikhail Blokh, The Metalworker, monumental sculpture, Petrograd,

July 1920 (Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstva pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980).

Photo courtesy of Aurora Publishers.

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Figure 12.Amphitheater, Rock Island, Petrograd

(Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, Leningrad, 1933; image is computer-enhanced).

monumentality. Mayakovsky had been sacrificed to that pas-sion the year before; and even Annenkov had succumbed to itslure in Mystery. If a purely monumental art was to mark achange for the better, it could only get bigger and bigger.

Radlov chose another route: he divided monumental space andtime into manageable units. He broke with the mystery-playparadigm and its constricting conventions of time and space.The stage itself solved many of the difficulties. 108 On Rock Is-land was a small lake with steep banks; and on the lake was asmall island. Radlov, Valentina Khodasevich, and Fomin con-structed a special amphitheater there; boards were placed onthe island for a stage, and benches were built up the slope ofthe bank. In this outdoor theater, the orchestra pit was filled inwith water, creating a proscenium that no spectator would thinkof crossing. Radlov had chosen a place where real topographydefined theatrical space (see Figure 12).109 Space was dividedand given definite, if highly conventional, values. The islandrepresented the Russian republic; the water around it heldblockading navies; and a bridge joining the island

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to the shore was used by various capitalists andcapitalist lackeys to infiltrate Russia.

From four thousand to twenty thousand people,depending on whom you believe, saw that nightperhaps the finest, certainly the funniest, of theSoviet mass spectacles. The presentation beganwith a brief tableau of peaceful labor. Itsserenity is broken by the appearance of a skiff,decorated with the attributes of a battleship, car-rying Lord Curzon, who surveys Russia througha spyglass. (The good Lord Curzon was playedby Gibschmann, the clown from the PopularComedy.) The workers, annoyed by his spying,open fire with roman candles (a trick from TheTaking of Azov, which had been produced byAlekseev-Iakovlev in a similar amphitheater),and Curzon, after suffering various acrobaticfalls and contortions, fails to escape and isplopped into the water by a volley that destroyshis vessel.

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The simplicity of the scene belied the complex-ity of its conventions. Characters were treatedlike the masks of commedia dell'arte: lackingpsychology, they were flattened. The reductionof the enemy to a simple label made for effect-ive propaganda; but it was motivated by artisticconsiderations. A mask can replace a mass char-acter; and where in Mystery the potentates wereportrayed by an unwieldy mass of gluttons, theenemy in Blockade was a dynamic, single fig-ure. Parts requiring a great deal of action wereplayed by an individual, others by groups; thesame vessel could be a toy boat and the Englishnavy.

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Time too was flexible; it alternated between themonumental time of ''peaceful labor" and theepisodic comic pacing of clown interludes. Timeadvanced easily because episodes were clearlydivided; the clumsy progression of The Mysteryof Liberated Labor was replaced by the rapidshifting from island to water and back, each ofwhich corresponded to a change in time. Timewas associated with space; a shift in one indic-ated a shift in the other. Episodes in Blockadewere also marked clearly in space; segueing wasswift and simple. In Mystery, where successiveepisodes occurred in the same space accordingto the same pattern, these transitions were res-isted by the very bulk of the production.

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Following Curzon's demise, action shifts back tothe island for an interlude of peaceful labor andthen to the bridge, where a Polish spy (playedby "Serge") is infiltrating the country. A chasebegins, with the spy escaping through treetops,branch to branch, and concealing himself inbushes. This was a smooth way to introduce cur-rent events into mass spectacles. Certainly, theagit-trials had used current events; and in

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Figure 13.Stereotypical Polish nobleman of Civil War posters

(Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980).

Photo courtesy of Aurora Publishers.

the small front-line town of Berezovye Rudki,there had even been a mass production of TheNegotiations of Krasin and Lloyd George. Butthese were actionless events, based solely on theword. Radlov portrayed current events by actionalone. The evil intentions of the British and theirinstigation of the Polish invasion were conveyedby a simple juxtaposition of episodes; and forspectators who could not identify Curzon by hisplumed hat, it was still clear who were the goodguys and who the bad.

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When ''Serge" has safely concealed himself inthe bushes, attention shifts back to the bridge,where the Polish invasion is beginning. Thebattle was portrayed by small troop formationsand accompanied by lots of noise and fireworks;but when the battle ends in Polish defeat, thePolish side is once again personified by its gen-eral, played by the acrobat Delvary. Delvarywas dressed as the quintessential Pole, familiarto any Russian spectator from propagandaposters: arrogant, pompous, in a nobleman'srobe and plumed, four-cornered cap (see Figure13). 110 Defeat is signified by a double flip-flopfrom the bridge into the water, and the war iscontinued out on the lake. Two fleets of skiffs,identified by their flags as the Western alliesand the Soviet Navy, clash between the islandand shore. All of Alekseev's technical masteryfrom wartime battle plays was employed: boatsmaneuver between rocket flashes; and the battleis decided when the imperialist warfleet is taken

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by Russian marines in hand-to-hand-battle. Thevictors move to the island to view

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the apotheosis. From behind the island anotherfleet of ships with bright, decorative sails goesby; these are representatives of the nations ofthe future, come to recognize and greet the vic-tory of the Russian republic. All are dressed intheir national costumes.

Later that summer, the stage was reopened for aperformance of the ballet Swan Lake.

Page 175

SixMarking the Center Festivals andLegitimacySince Copernicus man has been rolling from the cen-ter toward X.The nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking inpolitics and economics, where all "principles" arepractically histrionic: the air of mediocrity, wretched-ness, dishonesty, etc. Nationalism. Anarchism, etc.Punishment. The redeeming class and human beingare lackingthe justifersNietzsche, The Will to Power

The Bolsheviks seized power in the name of anideology that deplored centralism. Yet after thecoup an attack on central authority constitutedan attack on their own power. Root contradic-tions that underground existence had leftdormantfor example, party discipline and popu-lar initiative, revolutionary iconoclasm and cent-ral authoritycould no longer be ignored. Revolu-tion and Civil War were not times to wallow inmoral vacillation, nor were the Bolsheviks givento public introspection. Yet the question of justwhat the party represented demanded debate andresolution. In the end principles that had unitedthe prerevolutionary party and inspired the Re-volutionfor example, egalitarianism and pacifis-mwere discarded. How could this be the sameBolshevik party? How could it maintain author-ity when it violated the ideals that first legitim-ized its power?

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The Bolshevik identity was woven of manystrands. There was Marxist ideology, whichLenin and his colleagues had digested and adap-ted to Russian conditions; it proclaimed the pro-letariat the class of the

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future. There was the revolutionary under-ground, where a core of elite revolutionaries hadformed and developed a conspiratorial modusoperandi. There was the Civil War, when manywhose allegiance to Marx and the party seemedtemporary had joined. Revolutionary exigencyheld these strands together, but many alliancesformed during the Civil War could not be per-manent. In the summer and fall of 1920, whenvictory seemed closer than it ever had, theBolshevik leaders began reinstating the tightdiscipline essential to a stable party identity.They had to choose, by calculation or by reac-tion to onrushing events, what the Bolsheviksultimately were: what was incidental to the partyand what lay at its center.

Revolution had fragmented Russia's centers ofpower. The mythic sources of Romanov author-ity were cast in fatal doubt; the ProvisionalGovernment was torn apart by a duality ofpower. Even the Bolsheviks' first social modelsseparated the political from the cultural centers.Ideology, power, culture, and society stoodapart. The centerthe source of powerwas adrift,waiting to be seized; if the new regime was tostake an uncontested claim to the country's des-tiny, it would not only have to drive opposingforces from its soil, which it was about to do, itneeded to claim the symbols of the center.

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Finding the centerthe coreof the party's identitywas made all the more critical because it was in-strumental to maintaining political power.Authority, as Edward Shils notes, is deemedmost legitimate, and is most secure, when it ra-diates from a society's "central value system." 1It can then claim an inviolable sacredness (or itssecular equivalent), which exacts the uncondi-tional subordination of all other values andclaims to power. Shils and Clifford Geertz, fol-lowing Max Weber, find "charisma," the in-eluctable impression of "standing in a privilegedrelationship to the sources of being," the mainattribute of the center.2 Charisma is concen-trated in a place, institution, or person that em-bodies and projects the structure of power.

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Several emendations must be made to the notionof center before it can describe the fluidity of re-volutionary Russia. According to Shils andGeertz, the center is expressed by rituals andsymbols, which embody root "values and be-liefs" (Shils formulation). The assumption ofconsonance among symbol, entity, and values,which is often justified, did not hold during theRussian Civil War. The symbolic center couldbe the true seat of power, as the Kremlin underStalin would be, but it could also stand apartfrom the institutions of political control. Thesymbolic center was a separate dimension ofpower that supplemented institutions and ideo-logy. In fact, in Civil War Russia it was ofteninconsistent

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with them. A profound ambivalence animatedrevolutionary symbols and spectacles. Atheismand sacredness, egalitarianism and hierarchymixed freely; worker holidays were celebratedby marching from the proletarian outskirts to thegovernment center; a regime seated in Moscowprojected its mythic origins to the heart of im-perial Petersburg. 3 The center was dynamic,mobile, shifting; the Bolsheviks did not so muchhave to attach themselves to the center as to fixit in one spot.

The elusiveness of the center comes from aparadox of origin: power is conferred by thecenter; yet the center is created by power. Powergenerates a logo-center, the illusion of origin, afixed point that prevents the onset of chaos andallows for meaning and hierarchy. This essentialattribute of the center, noted (ironically enough)by Jacques Derrida, creates the right to name, tofix the principles of a society.4 The Bolsheviksdemonstrated some awareness of the problem in1918, when they expended considerable effort toensure the proper interpretation of their fest-ivals. They understood what this relativelyminor issue represented: the right to speak forthe nation and thus to govern it. To rule thecountry, they had to speak for it; to speak for it,they had to project a common origin.

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The Bolsheviks' program did not mandate theabsolutism that had become standard practice by1920. They had come to power as egalitariandemocrats who promised to convene the Con-stituent Assembly and end the war. They con-sequently dispersed the Constituent Assemblyand plunged the country into a civil war thatdestroyed its economy and killed many of itscitizens. The traditional source of party identity,Marxist ideology, did not justify such a pro-gram, which actually isolated the party from themasses. Only the growing sense of historicalmission that animated the party could serve asjustification. It made the most despotic policiesseem the instruments of divine ordinance, separ-ated the Bolsheviks from all other parties onRussian and foreign soil, and embraced classesand groups that other sources of identity wouldhave led the party to exclude. The legitimacy ofthe October Revolution rested most firmly onthe myth of historical inevitability.

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The great festivals and spectacles of 1920helped create a foundation myth of the Revolu-tion. Festivals can attack the centerthe sacra ofreligion or the monuments of the statebut theycan also raise new monuments and create newidentities. They arrange time and space aroundmoments of origin and embody its principles inthe flesh and blood of myth. A nascent mytho-logy of the October Revolution was discerniblein Lenin's monument plan, in the dramaticgames of the Red Army Studio, in holidayspeeches and presentations, but they were

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all lacking. The flaw was less in the content ofthe myths than in their form; they were diffuseand inclusive. Myth is compact and concen-trated; it is embodied by individual people, insingle places, and in concrete times.

In 1920, directors finally conquered the mass-spectacle form. They faced issues similar tothose confronting the Bolsheviks: how to har-monize mass participation with efficient admin-istration; how to include many origin taleswithout unraveling the thread of narrative. Thesolution was a strengthening of organizationalhierarchy and a reduction of the chaos of revolu-tionary events to a compact narrative focused ona single time and place. Just as the Bolshevikssacrificed old principles in the interests of a newidentity, directors sacrificed historical veracityin the interests of myth. The results were strik-ing. The mass spectacles of 1920 were dynamic,gripping, moving; through them, the Bolsheviksclaimed an inalienable right to direct the fate oftheir country and the worldwide proletariat.

The Third International

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If ever an organization was created by its ownpomp and circumstance, it was the Third Inter-national. Barely fifty people attended its FirstCongress in Moscow in March 1919. Of thosefifty, only twelve held credentials from anypolitical group; of those twelve, eight were Rus-sian Bolsheviks. Yet the Third Internationalclaimed to embody the aspirations of the worldproletariat.

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Perhaps it was fitting that some of theorganization's funds were raised in subbotniki;the symbolic work of the holiday financed asymbolic proletariat. 5 The International, and theRussians who constituted the bulk of its Execut-ive Committee, were in 1919 acutely aware ofhow tenuous their claim to world leadershipwas; so they complemented their political ef-forts with a series of symbolic gestures that laidclaim to the center. The Red Army Studio'sThird International was just one example. Mostof the gestures were directed toward claimingthe retired mantle of the First International;Marx's famous slogan, "Workers of the WorldUnite," was adopted as a motto. In the next fiveyears the symbolic merging of the Russian stateand the international revolution, exemplified bya 1921 poster linking the Paris Commune andthe Russian Soviets (Figure 14), would receiveprominent attention. In 1924,

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Figure 14.The Bolsheviks claimed the heritage of the Paris Commune,

as illustrated by this poster, captioned "The martyrs of the Paris Communewere resurrected under the red banner of the Soviets" (1921).

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Zinoviev presided over a ritual in which a "holyrelic" of the Paris Commune, one of the lastbanners to fly over its barricades, was presentedby French Communists to the Russians and laidon Lenin's tomb. 6 But in 1919 claims weremore modest. Moscow was meant to be only atemporary headquarters; a permanent nerve cen-ter would be established in Berlin once com-munist revolution had swept Germany.7

The year between the First Congress and the Se-cond in July 1920 brought an unpleasant sur-prise: world revolution did not break out. Mo-scow became the permanent center of world re-volution by default. The Executive Committeeof the International, mandated to direct opera-tions between congresses, was an essentiallyRussian body, and its control of the movementsolidified. The publication of Lenin's polemic"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorderwas a first attempt to impose Russian standardson foreign parties; and the Twenty-One Condi-tions for admission to the International, promul-gated at the close of the Second Congress, estab-lished Moscow as model and center.

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The magnificent complex of church and palacethat is known as the Moscow Kremlin was givenits present shape in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies under the first great Muscovite rulers,Ivan III and Ivan IV (the Terrible). Set atop ahill in the middle of the city, surrounded bymassive walls, it is an architectural apotheosisof the medieval Russian autocracy: the center assource of power (state) and ideology (church).The creation of the Kremlin and its symbolic as-pect coincided with the birth of the most power-ful myth of Russian autocracy: Moscow as theThird Rome. The Russian state claimed throughits church the mantle of the early Christians, for-feited first by Rome when it strayed from Ortho-doxy and then by Constantinople when it wascaptured by the infidel Turks.8 The Second Con-gress of the Third International, held in 1920,when the Soviets claimed the leadership of theworld proletariat, convened in the Kremlin. Asone of the delegates commented without irony:

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Its architecture is supposed to symbolise atemple of honour of the sacred dignity of imperi-al power. A series of gilded columns run downthe hall, but these were now swathed with redbunting in honour of the new power. Where oncestood the throne now stood the platform for thepresidium of the Congress. Over the throne, un-der the sweep of an arch, the "All-Seeing Eye"looked down. Long rows of desks stretchedacross the hall and red carpet covered the parquetfloor.9

For the first time since the Revolution, the im-perial eagles atop the Kremlin towers were re-gilded.10

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Literature and posters issued for the congressemphasized the theme of Moscow as center. Thecover of the publication of the First Congresshad depicted a worker beating the chains off aglobe; 11 but a poster of the next year, DmitryMoor's "Long Live the Third International,"showed the same worker hailing the Kremlin(see Figure 15). A commemorative plate byMaria Lebedeva pictured the world movementas a series of concentric circles: on the outerring, the world proletariat; next, the first stanzaof the Internationale; then the city; and, in theinner circle, a red star radiating the bolt of lifefrom the heavens like Jehovah in the SistineChapel (see Figure 16).12 Vladimir Narbut pub-lished a poem for the occasion:

Mongols, Negroes, and Arabs,And you too, West of fiery aspect,Use the wisdom of Socrates to createThe unhewn featuresOf a Proletariat Atlas.And may he, tremendous, made-of-steel,Tense his muscles, as beforeAnd take the Heavens on his shoulders,Feet planted in Moscow and Resht.13

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The Congress was first transported to Petrogradfor a ceremonial opening in the Tauride Palace(built for Potemkin by Catherine II on her returnfrom the Crimean tour). The Russians used thatcity's ceremonial center to receive their guests.The British and Italian delegations, who showedsigns of cooperating with Bolshevik designs,were fíted with magnificent demonstrations bythe army and trade unions through PalaceSquare; Zinoviev addressed the gathered multi-tudes from the same balcony once used by thetsar to address his people. (The French, whowere intransigent, were given no such greet-ing.)14 On the Field of Mars a Red Mass wasperformed, a requiem at the memorial grave ofthe "victims of the Revolution"; a brass orches-tra and choir performed Wagner's Götterdäm-merung.15

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The foreign delegates could not have failed tonotice the political irregularity of some of thesymbolic gestures. Two monuments were erec-ted in Petrograd: the one devoted to the ParisCommune was appropriate for a group thatclaimed the mantle of Marx; but the monumentto Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, whoone year before had objected strenuously to thefounding of the Third International, was not.16Nor is it clear whether the visitors appreciatedthe Trial of the Yellow [Second] International,an agit-trial produced for the benefit of

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Figure 15.Graphic representations of the Third International, 1919 and 1920

(Mikhail German, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu. Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria, Leningrad, 1980).Photo (right) courtesy of Aurora Publishers.

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Figure 16.Maria Lebedevo's commemorative plate for the second Congress

of the Third International. Photo courtesy Aurora Publishers.

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delegates who had yet to break with that organ-ization. 17 But most outrageous was surely thefact that the Internationale, Pierre Degeyter'shymn of the workers' movement, was sung tonew music; a competition for its compositionhad been held to which no foreign composerwas invited. The jury was headed by Glazunov,ex-director of the Imperial Conservatory ofMusic.18

Any censure was quieted, though, by the magni-ficent spectacle Toward a World Commune,presented at the Stock Exchange from 10 p.m. to4 a.m. on July 19.19 Modeled on The Mystery ofLiberated Labor, this production by four thou-sand soldiers and theater-circle members en-acted the history of the Third International forforeign delegates and the citizens of Petrograd.Presented in the form of a mystery play, it por-trayed history as cyclical; and the Russian Re-volution, the dramatic climax of the perform-ance, took on an inevitability it might not other-wise have had. The fact that the directors weregiven only ten days to prepare the performancecould explain why they relied on tried-and-truemethods.

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Andreeva once again was the organizer of theevent. She delegated directorial duties toMardzhanov, just returned from Kiev (where,after his success with Fuente ovejuna, he hadplanned a mass spectacle entitled King Saul).20Mardzhanov further delegated authority for sep-arate episodes to young assistant directors. Pet-rov, of BDT and the Crooked Mirror, was as-signed the first act; Radlov, the second; and So-loviev and Piotrovsky were given the third. Forhimself, Mardzhanov reserved the coordinatingduties of the main director.

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The preliminary scenario projected three acts:mankind's pasthis enslavement; the present-struggle and victory; the futurethe good life. TheThird International was shown to be a by-product of European revolution.21 Yet if theRussians were to be at its helm, they would haveto claim its historical source. At Andreeva's in-stigation the play was changed to reflect thecentrality of the Russian Revolution to the inter-national, and to show that the Third Internation-al was the rightful heir of the First. The myth ofthe International was thus rewritten, and theRussians were at its center.

ACT I

Scene i. Communist Manifesto.

The rulers of the world, kings and bankers, erecta monument to their own power with the handsof the workers. . . . On top, a sumptuous celebra-tion of the bourgeoisie; below, the workers' in-voluntary labor.

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The laboring masses bring forward . . . thefounders of the First international. The Commun-ist Manifesto.

Only a small group of French workers answersthe call to battle. They fling themselves into anattack on the stronghold of capitalism. The for-ward ranks, met by shots, fall. The red banner ofthe commune flies. The bourgeoisie flees. Theworkers seize its throne and destroy the monu-ment to bourgeois power. The Paris Commune.

Scene ii. The Paris Commune and the Death ofthe First International.

A merry holiday for the Communards. Workersdance . . . the carmagnole. The Paris Communedecrees the foundations of a socialist order. Newdanger. The bourgeoisie . . . sends the legions ofPrussia and Versailles against the First Proletari-an Commune. The Communards build barri-cades, defend themselves bravely, and perish inunequal battle, without having received helpfrom the workers of other nations. . . . The vic-tors shoot the Communards. Workers remove thebodies of their fallen comrades and hide thetrampled red banner for future battles. . . .

ACT II

The Second International

The reaction. The triumphal celebration of thevictorious bourgeoisie. Below, the involuntarylabor of workers reigns. Above, the leaders of theSecond International, . . . noses buried in booksand newspapers.

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Call to war in 1914. The bourgeoisie shouts:''Hurrah for the war. Death to the enemy.'' Theworking masses murmur: "We don't want blood.". . . Again the red banner flies. Workers pass thebanner from hand to hand and want to present itto the leaders of the Second International.

"You are our leaders. Lead us," shout the masses.The pseudoleaders scatter in confusion. Gen-darmes . . . exult and tear apart the hated red ban-ner. The horror and moans of workers.

The graveyard silence is broken by the propheticwords of the people's leader: "As that banner hasbeen rent asunder, so shall the bodies of workersand peasants be torn by war. Down with war!" Atraitorous shot strikes the tribune. Triumphantimperialists suggest a vote for war credits. Theleaders of the Second International raise theirhands after a moment's hesitation, grab their na-tional flags, and split the previously unified massof the world proletariat. Gerdarmes lead workersaway in different directions. The shameful end ofthe Second International and the beginning offratricidal world war.

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ACT III

The Russian Commune

Scene i. World War.

The first battle. . . . The tsarist government herdslong rows of bleak greatcoats to war. Wailingwomen try to hold the departing soldiers back.Workers, exhausted by starvation and excessivelabor, join the women's protest. The wounded arebrought back from the front. . . .

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The workers' patience is through. Revolution be-gins. Automobiles, bristling with bayonets,charge by with red banners. The crowd, swept byrevolutionary wrath, topples the tsar, then stopsdead in amazement. Before the crowd are thenew lords: the ministers of the ProvisionalGovernment of appeasers. They call for a con-tinuation of the war "to a victorious conclusion"and send the workers into attack. A new cour-ageous blow by the workers returning from thefront, supported by a stream of unleashed work-ers, sweeps away the . . . government. Over thevictorious proletariat flares the red banner of theSecond Commune with the emblems of the Rus-sian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. . . .

Scene ii. Defense of the Soviet Republicthe Rus-sian Commune.

Workers and soldiers, having shed theirweapons, want to begin building a new life. Butthe bourgeoisie does not want to accept the lossof its supremacy and begins an embittered fightwith the proletariat. The counterrevolution hastemporary successes, . . . and only the greatestsurge of heroism by the workers' Red Guardsaves the Commune. Foreign imperialists sendthe Russian White Guard and mercenaries. . . .The danger increases. To the leaders' summons"To arms!" workers reply with the creation of theRed Army. Fugitives from areas razed by theCivil War appear. After them come workers fromthe smashed Hungarian Soviet Republic. Theblood of the Hungarian workers calls for re-venge. . . . The Red Army leads the heroic battlefor the Hungarian and Russian workers, and forthe workers of all the world.

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Red labor befits the Red Army: it battles againstthe dislocations of war. The Communist subbot-nik. Allegorical female figures of the proletarianvictory issue a clarion summons to the workersof the world to the banner of the Third Interna-tional for the final and decisive battle with worldcapitalism. The first lines of the workers' hymn.

APOTHEOSIS

The Third International. World Commune

A cannon volley heralds the breaking of theblockade of Soviet Russia and the victory of theworld proletariat. The Red Army returns and isreviewed by the leaders of the Revolution in aceremonial march. Kings' crowns are strewn attheir feet. Festively decorated ships carrying theproletariat of the West go by. Workers of all theworld, with emblems of labor, hurry to the holi-day of the World Commune. In the sky flaregreetings to the Congress in various languages:"Long live the Third International," "Workers ofthe world unite."

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A general triumphal celebration to the hymn ofthe world Commune, the Internationale. 22

As it had in Mystery, a holiday acted as the sym-bol of revolution and political ascendance inToward a World Commune. The scenario as itstood differed little from the scenario of Mys-tery; the abstract scheme of oppression and re-volution was the same, with the roles assignedto

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more contemporary rebels. The apotheosis alsodiffered little. As in previous mass spectacles,the Russian Revolution was the inevitable cli-max to the human drama.

The Craft of Mass Spectacles

Commune went beyond its predecessors,however, in production methods. Mardzhanovdivided and delegated authority to his assistants;the cast was divided into smaller, more manage-able groups, and the stage space was divided in-to sections, each with a distinct spatial value.(See Table 1 for a sample of the organizationalchart used for the production.)

Marking the center was dependent on these newproduction skills. A center is a point alone,marked off from the rest of space and time; fromit connections radiate out. It is created by bothdifferentiation and unification. In Commune amyth of revolution was made by linking separ-ate moments in historical progression. New pro-duction techniques enabled Mardzhanov to de-pict each moment distinctly and to shift rapidlybetween them. Mastery of the artifice of theatermade the myth compelling and real.

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Designs for the stage were done by Altman. Alt-man planned to do for the Stock Exchange whathe had done for Palace Square in November1918: subdivide the space by the use of colorand shape. The outer three columns on each sideof the portico were to be wrapped in red, and themiddle six, uncovered, were to open up onto thecentral stage. The contrast between the two setsof columns would create an illusion of recessedspace in the center. For this space Altmanplanned a dynamic composition, a "garden" ofgreen triangles, before which was to be set afiery red prism. At the back of the stage, on thesecond facade of the building there was to arisea huge golden sun, the "sun of October." 23 Alt-man redesigned the space of the Exchange forincreased dynamism and flexibility. Andreeva,however, never forgot an old grudge, and she re-jected the plan: green, she insisted, was theparty color of the Constitutional Democrats.24Instead, the front cornice of the Exchange was

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hung with banners proclaiming "Long Live theThird International," appropriate more for arally than for a spectacle.

Toward a World Commune was, more emphatic-ally than Mystery, a theatrical spectacle. Curi-ously, when the theatrical, conventional use of a

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property was most clearly underlined, that ob-ject could be used most easily in its "real" state.This was a paradox Radlov had discovered inThe Blockade of Russia and that the directors ofMystery had failed to fathom. In that production,music was limited to providing an inexact them-atic consonance: the rise of the proletariat wasaccompanied by the leitmotif of Wagner's Lo-hengrin and Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko. Musicin Commune was used as a real part of theeveryday culture depicted: the privileged classesdance to Strauss's Vienna Waltz; the Paris Com-mune sings a carmagnole and buries its dead toChopin's Funeral March. The stage was lit bythe floodlights of a minesweeper moored on theNeva. 25 Battles were conducted by real soldiersand sailors firing from real guns and cannons(they fired real blanks, as had the Aurora onOctober 25, 1917) . The apotheosis was a paradeof the victorious army, represented by troops ofthe Petrograd garrison, with armored cars and

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cavalry. Above the parade floated a dirigibletrailing a banner that proclaimed, "The King-dom of Workers Will Last Forever."26 Ofcourse, none of the fortyfive thousand spectatorswould have noticed the difference had actorsand props replaced the real things, and, accord-ing to Radlov, the soldiers would scarcely haveminded missing the march.27 "Real," it seems, isa highly conventional notion. Spectators werealerted from the start that the spectacle wastheater. They were summoned to the perform-ance by heralds galloping down the city streets;but when they reached the Stock Exchange, theyfound a cordon of soldiers protecting the build-ing and square (no protection had been providedfor Mystery).28

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The differentiation of real and artificial, and thesubdivision of the cast and acting space, offeredthe directors new opportunities and allowedthem to gain control over an ungainly perform-ance. In Mystery, the masses were led by a dir-ector placed in their midst. By the July 19 spec-tacle, the crowd of actors had become too big tocontrol, and it was broken up into basic units:potentates, rebels, "yellow socialists." Theseunits, defined by character and plot, were thensubdivided into units of ten. Each united electeda leader; thus, a group of ten potentates wouldhave a representative, who took commands fromthe chief of the potentate group. This numericalpyramid worked its way up to Mardzhanov atthe tip. For rehearsals only the representativeswere present; they in turn were to instruct theten members of their cell and be responsible fortheir movements during the performance. Withthe moving crowd broken up into smaller units,the creation of patterns and rhythms was

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feasible. Crowd movements could be contrastedin geometrical patterns; individual movementslike the lifting of a hand could trigger a contrast-ing mass

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Table 1. Segment of production chart from Toward a World CommuneNo.Action Players Leaders Costumes Props Enter from Toward Music

groupMusic Light

effects35 Appearance of Hungarians fleeing reac-

tionary horrors.50 men,50 wo-men, 25children

Cherkov, Fe-dorov, Zueva

100 fugit-ives, 25children

Householdutensils, a"Hungary"poster

Below,from leftcorner ofExchange

Extremerightparapet

Fanfares

36 A new wave of workers appears frombehind a column.

300workers,100 fe-maleworkers

Beliavsky,Semenova

300 work-er blouses

Below,from rightside of Ex-change andfrom be-hindcolumns

Centralstage

Centralorchestra

37 Leaders appear in the middle. "To arms."The crowd responds, "To arms." A redstar flares. Red soldiers enter. Leadersscatter red stars. Soldiers raise theirweapons. An oath. They leave the stepswith weapons leveled.

500 sol-diers, 15leaders

Pakhomov,Smirnov

500 over-coats, 15leatherjackets

200 red stars,500 rifles,poster: "TheWorkers' De-fender Is theRed Army"

Leadersand sol-diers fromthe middle

Scatterbelowto leftandright

Fanfares,choir

''Bravely For-ward,Communards"

Red starlights up

38 Workers and children remain on thesteps. Sirens. Female Victory figures ap-pear on the parapets. "Workers of theworld unite" is on the pediment. The

10 fe-malefigures

RightIazykov.LeftMamaeva

10 alleg-orical cos-tumes, 10wigs

10 gold horns Behind thecolumns

5 to theleft, 5 tothe rightparapet

Flankingorchestras,minelayersirens

A summonsand sirensounds

"Workersof theWorld . .

arms and eyes of everyone are turnedahead.

ofVictory

." writtenin fire

39 Figures of Victory maidens appear onthe rostral columns. Pause.

10maidenson thecolumns

RightNikolaevLeftArkhipova

10 alleg-orical cos-tumes, 10wigs

10 gold horns Behindboth rostralcolumns

Tops ofleft andrightrostra

Orchestraby rostra

Summons Signalfires onrostra,torches

(table continued on next page.)

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Table 1. Segment of production chart from Toward a World CommuneNo.Action Players Leaders Costumes Props Enter from Toward Music

groupMusic Light effects

40 Cannon salvo from the Fort-ress. The square is crossedby an armored car carryingallegorical figures of Vict-ory, scattering crowns andsacks of gold.

15 men, 10women on thevehicle

Freidin 25 alleg-oricalcostumes

Armored car,crowns, andsacks of gold

Around theExchangecorner, fromthe right

Drive leftacrosssquare

Centralorchestra,salvo fromfortress

Internationale

41 Parade of the Red Army. Mil. band,cavalry, artil.,cadets, inf.

Garrisoncommander

The em-bankmentnear Ex-changeBridge

AcrossExchangealongUniversityEmb.

Militaryband, sa-lute fromfortress

42 Smoke screen on the Neva.Disperses. Contours of ships.Skirting the columns fromthe jetties, representatives ofthe world's workers appearwith emblems of labor andposters.

100 represent-atives ofEurope, 100from othercountries

Decadecommanders

100 male,100 fe-male eth-niccostumes

Emblems oflabor

Left andright rostralpassages

Exchangestaircase

Rostralchoirs

InternationaleSmokescreen onNeva

43 Closing group of everyoneon Exchange pediment.Large hammer and anvil inthe middle. Small anvil onthe parapets.

All Large hammerand anvil, twosmall ham-mers andanvils

44 Rockets fly from ships onthe Neva. Airplanes scatterproclamations. A dirigibleunfurls a banner "Long livethe III International."Searchlights from thecolumns and fortress.Fireworks.

Minelayercommander,Fortresscommander

Two air-planes,bundles ofcolored pro-clamations,dirigible,poster

Group on the Ex-change pediment

All or-chestras,all choirs

Internationale"The king-dom of work-ers and peas-ants is etern-al" written infire, search-lights,fireworks

SOURCE: Massovye prazdnestva (Leningrad, 1926).

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response, a charge. Sound, which had beendrowned in Mystery, once again became an ex-pressive component. Choral readings andsinging were the main applications of the humanvoice; but voices could also be used in contrast,as when the thousand-throated groan greetingthe declaration of the First World War was fol-lowed by a measure of silence, then a singlevoice: "As this banner is rent asunder. . . ."

To better control the massive spectacle, the dir-ectors removed themselves to a platform aroundone of the rostral columns that loomed acrossthe square from the exchange. The platform wasequipped with a bank of telephones and coloredlights and flags that relayed signals to the mine-sweepers and Petro-Pavlovsk Fortress, and tothe performers on the stage. 29 When the direct-ors were distanced from the performers and thedivision between participant and spectator wasexplicit, there was little room for the creativeparticipation of the masses. The performers, infact, were mostly army conscripts, tired andhungry like the rest of Russia, and "mobilizedby force."30 Yet the changes did make for clear-er expression.

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The production's power was in the articulationof time and space. As in Mystery, the tripartitestage was used, but this time its conventionsonly abetted the sponsors' intentions. TheBolsheviks saw the history of the three Interna-tionals as a cycle, with the Russian Revolutionits rightful culmination. But this convention didnot prevent the artistic categories of time andspace from being subdivided. The stage wingswere not removed from the action, and opposingsides did not necessarily mirror each other. Thebourgeoisie could attack from the right, theworkers from the left. Actors did not operate asa mass; they were divided into sections, staticchoruses, and moving groups.

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Stage space was easily broken up and given def-inite identity. It could come, for instance, fromthe group occupying that space or from a simpleemblem: when the tsar was toppled, the double-headed eagle fell and a banner proclaiming thesoviets was raised. In the third section of thescenario the Allied blockade was depicted. Atthis point battleships on the Neva laid down athick blanket of fog that enveloped all but theexchange and audience. The square, enclosed bythese temporary walls, operated as a theater andwas assigned a new value as conventional space.It represented the blockaded, isolated Russianrepublic. On the river beyond the fog the battle-ships, representing the Allies, blew their fog-horns and fired cannons. The lighting of thehuge flames of the rostral columns broke the fogand signaled the lifting of the blockade. The fogdefining the theatrical enclosure melted away,and armored

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trucks came driving through real space, acrossthe bridge from the Petrograd side, to repel theenemy.

Staging historical material was a matter of se-lecting the proper episodes and assembling theminto an artistic whole. In Commune, the basic in-cidents of the play were divided into 170 epis-odes, each defined by an exit or entrance. 31Such a fine division was made possibly only bythe system of cueing and signaling and the sep-arate directorial platform. The Spartacus rebel-lion and the October Revolution had differedmainly in the uniforms worn by their parti-cipants in Mystery. Adding episodes to Com-mune allowed for more details so that successiverevolutions looked less and less like each other.Historical progress could be detected.

Problems remained. The additional episodes re-quired speedier transitions than could be made,and Commune was plagued by dead timeit wassix hours long! The episodes also made thespectacle more complex; it is doubtful that mostof the forty-five thousand spectators understoodwhat it was about. The hundred or so delegatesof the International, who were given pamphletscontaining the plot in their native languages,could follow, and the performance, in any case,was directed at them, not at the spectators or theparticipants. To those people without a scenarioin their hands, however, Toward a World Com-mune was "brightly colored, full of variety,majestic, but utterly incomprehensible."32 Spec-tators probably saw little anyway; the directors'platform blocked part of the view, and a review-ing stand for foreign delegates was built up inthe air, front-row center. Most of the Russiansalready had the suspicion the performance wasnot for them anyhow. It was initially scheduled

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for July 18, and the performers and spectatorsarrived hours early. At performance time all wasready, but the delegates of the International, stillin conference, had not arrived. Rather than dothe play without them, Andreeva dismissed theplayers and asked them to return the next day.Same time, same space.

Finding the Symbolic Center

At the advent of Bolshevik rule, there was a pro-found ambivalence toward Russia's symboliccenters. The ceremonial centers of Petrogradwere inherited from previous regimes and had tobe symbolically reoriented, which had been oneobjective of Lenin's unsuccess-

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ful monument plan. Parade routes were anotherinstrument of reorientation. Parades can be lin-ear, with each place and spectator along theroute being addressed equally; or they can becentripetal, with a central point being servedabove others. American towns usually define thetown center as a street; the linear Veterans' Dayparade marches down Main Street. Russian cit-ies have always defined the city center as apoint, and their parades have been centered. Mo-scow of course offered an ideal central point,Red Square, which had the additional advantageof centralizing celebrations in front of the seatof government. Postrevolutionary Petrograd wasa more difficult problem. There were many po-tential central points: Palace Square, whichwould have been appropriate but for associ-ations with the old regime and ProvisionalGovernment; the Field of Mars, centrally loc-ated yet a "neutral" site associated with both re-volutions; and Smolny, the source of the

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Revolution and seat of the party yet located atthe edge of town. May Day 1918 was focusedon the Field of Mars (as had been May Day1917); November 7, 1918, was celebrated atSmolny. And for the 1919 anniversary celebra-tion, Uprising Square (formerly Znamenskaia),"where the first revolution began," was chosen.33

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Parades also signal centers of power by whetherthey are made to see or to be seen: the firstmakes the marcher the center, the second theviewerusually the VIPs on the tribune. On MayDay, the marchers were taken all around Petro-grad to see the fine decorations put up by artistsand to let the marchers be seen by the city.34Afterward all gathered on the Field of Mars forsome speeches, but this part of the festival wassecondary, almost impromptu.35 The WinterPalace was also deliberately assigned a "demo-cratic" value; it was renamed the Palace of theArts and was opened to the general public forthe first time. Lines were tremendous, and thegesture was the most successful of an otherwiseequivocal holiday. On November 7, a centraliz-ing tendency absent on May Day was notice-able. A hierarchy of places and symbols de-veloped, and with this a new centeredness, ahierarchy of participants. All parade routes ledto Smolny; maneuvering the marchers past a

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single point led to the long periods of standingand to the human traffic jams that became alamentable tradition.36 Perhaps the most criticalinnovation was the tribune; leaders were segreg-ated from the people and marked as the primaryspectators.37 The marchers filed through aseventy-five-foot temporary arch decorated withthe new Soviet seal and past a smoke-currtainedaltar. Around the arch were placed obelisks, onwhich rested

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busts of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Volodarsky,Uritsky, Lunacharsky, Kamenev, and Sverdlov,as well as Marx and other socialist heroes. 38

Palace Square would have to wait until 1920 forits time. Like Red Square, Palace Square wasideally suited to project an image of strong cent-ral authority. Marking the center of the city, oc-cupying and imposing on its most valuablespace, Palace Square also offered an opportunityfor the central review of a parade. Only thoseunfortunate associations interfered. If the festiv-al wanted the square for its own purposes, theimage of the square would have to be "cleanedup." Renaming it Uritsky Square, after the slainChekist, was an important change; and Altman'sNovember 1918 decorations had subverted itsold values; but symbolic reorientation was mostfully effected by the May Day 1920 subbotnik.In the early eighteenth century the square beforethe palace had been a tree-lined park for publicuse; but it was gradually transformed by thedynasty into a appendage of the palace, a pro-cess completed in 1990, when Nicholas IIordered it enclosed by a massive iron fence. The

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subbotnik reopened the space to public circula-tion and linked it to the surrounding city. Still,though it was suitable for a review of thedemonstration for the Third International inJuly, the square was not yet the mythic PalaceSquare, "center of the Revolution." That honorbelonged to Smolny, as it should.

Agit-Prop, the state propaganda agency, issued adecree for the third anniversary forbidding largeexpenditures,39 which essentially removed theoutskirts and peripheries from the festival. InPetrograd only the central places, Smolny,Palace Square, and the Field of Mars, plus thegraves of fallen revolutionaries in Lesnaia wereto be decorated.40 In that same spirit of frugal-ity, Mayakovsky did a series of Russian Tele-graph Agency posters condemning sumptuouscelebrations:

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He celebrates [the anniversary] correctlywho forgets all sort of carnivals,andtirelesslyfixes the railroads.41

But the message never made it to the PetrogradSoviet and the Northern Army. With victoryclose at hand, they ordered a magnificent festiv-al, one thatif all plans had been realizedwouldhave restructured the center of Petrograd. Petro-grad was a city of long, broad avenues andyawning spaces embodying the values of orderand power.

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Festivals have often had a hand in determiningthe growth of a city; ancient Olympia was builtentirely to the specifications of a festival, andthe modern Olympics usually change the face oftheir host city. In fact Lazar Kaganovich, leaderof Moscow in the 1930s, justified tearing downthe jumbled alleys and churches of the capitalby saying, ''My aesthetics demands that thedemonstration processions from the six districtsof Moscow should all pour into Red Square atthe same time." 42 But in 1920 Petrograd wasfar from its former imperial splendor; as OsipMandelstam noted in an image of both degener-ation and regeneration, grass was sproutingthrough the pavement.43 There would be no ma-jor construction in Petrograd for many years;and the festivals, by gestures such as the place-ment of monuments, could define the city onlyby reorienting extant symbols.

That is not to say there were no plans for thephysical reworking of Petrograd, just no funds.The third anniversary of the Revolution led tothe formulation of one of the first postrevolu-tionary plans for altering the face of Petrograd.A massive spectacle was envisioned as thecenterpiece of the festival; and had it been pro-duced, the performance would have requiredgreat changes in the city. The performance wasto stretch from Semenov Place to the Admir-altyabout a mile altogether. Because the spacebetween was not completely open, planners de-cided to clear several buildings to open aview.44 On Semenov Place a monument was tobe erected (as a model) that would have fixed anew center for both Petrograd and the world re-volution: Tatlin's Monument to the ThirdInternational.

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Tatlin's monument was designed to remedy theobvious deficiencies of the Lenin Plan. Hisworking group was assembled in 1918 to draftplans for a monument that could change withtime,45 which would overcome the basic contra-diction noted by Shklovsky: "I'm always sur-prised . . . by the intention to erect monumentsto the Russian Revolution. It seems the Revolu-tion hasn't died yet. It's somehow strange tobuild a monument to something still alive anddeveloping. . . . The attempt to create this re-volutionary art leads to the creation of falseworks of art."46

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The Monument to the Third International restedon the tradition begun by Altman's restructuringof Palace Square for the first-anniversary celeb-ration. Tatlin's monument, however, was de-signed to be permanent. Using the materials andreflecting the dynamics of the new (as yetnonexistent) urban environment, it was to con-sist of three great glass chambers connected by asystem of vertical axes and spirals.

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These chambers are arranged vertically aboveone another, and surrounded by various harmon-ic structures. By means of special machinerythey must be kept in perpetual motion, but at dif-ferent rates of speed. The lowest chamber is cu-biform, and turns on its axis once a year; it is tobe used for legislative purposes; in the future,conferences of the International and the meetingsof congresses and other bodies will be held in it.The chamber above this is pyramidal in shape,and makes one revolution a month; administrat-ive and other executive bodies will hold theirmeetings there. Finally, the third and highest partof the building will be used chiefly for informa-tion and propaganda, that is, as a bureau of in-formation, for newpapers, and also as the placefrom where brochures and manifestos will be is-sued. Telegraphs, radio-apparatus, and lanternsfor cinematograph performances will beinstalled. . . .

The use of spirals for monumental architecturemeans an enrichment of the composition. Just asthe triangle, as an image of general equilibrium,is the best expression of the Renaissance, so thespiral is the most effective symbol of the modernspirit of the age. The countering of gravitation bybuttresses is the purest classical form of statics;the classical form of bourgeois society, aiming atpossession of the land and soil, was the horizont-al; the spiral, which, rising from the earth, de-taches itself from all animal, earthly, and op-pressing interests, forms the purest expression ofhumanity set free by the Revolution. . . .

Most of the elements of architecture hitherto inuse possessed no practical importance, and re-mained unorganized. To-day the principle of or-ganization must rule and penetrate all art. 47

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Monuments define the symbolic center of a city;but dynamic constructionslike Altman'stend tonegate symbols and move to the periphery.There was some ambivalence about where themonument should be placed: in Moscow or Pet-rograd; in the center of the city or in the factoryzone on the outskirts.48 The issue was decidedin planning for the third anniversary, when thePetrograd Party Committee decided to build themonument in Petrograd.49 The model was to beexhibited as the center of the festival, and thespace cleared would afford a view of the newcenter once it was constructed. The model,however, was never exhibited on the square; andthe buildings were never knocked down. Petro-grad would have to content itself with the oldcenter of town, a center symbolically redefined.

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In 1920 the center of Moscow was set firmly inRed Square. Previously, there had been ambi-valence. The first-anniversary celebration ofNovember 1918 provoked some controversy asto what the center of revolutionary Moscowwas: organizers proposed creating an artificialcenter, a "Red city," extending from Red Squareto the Metropolitan Hotel. The March-RouteCommittee thought Red Square should be thecenter, but the Central Organizing Committeepreferred Theater

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Square. Furthermore, as one delegate noted;"Those who will appreciate the entire majesty ofthe holiday with their hearts live, after all, on theoutskirts. Why should they march to the centerto amuse the bourgeosie?" 50 On May Day1919, the demonstration was routed to RedSquare; and it was there that Lenin addressedthe masses. Yet even Red Square was not a uni-form space; the placement of Lenin's Mauso-leum by the Kremlin wall in 1924 would con-nect it to the center of power, but in 1919 Leningave his address from Lobnoe Mesto, located onthe opposite side of the square and associatedwith Razina subverter of power.

The International Congress of 1920 helped fixthe point. The Russians centered the Internation-al in Russia, in Moscow, in the Kremlin; and ahuge military demonstration through RedSquare marking the conclusion of the Congresson July 29 emphasized the symbolic claim to thecenter. Judging by their memoirs, the delegateswere susceptible to the symbolic assault. Trot-sky, the organizer, pulled out all the stops toshow off Soviet power. Mayakovsky wrotestriking verses that caught the spirit of thedemonstration and the rhythm of its march.

We sally fortha revolutionary charge.Above the ranksthe scarlet flag of fire.Led by the million-headedThird International.

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We advance.No beginning to the flood of our ranks.No end to the Red Army Volgas.A belt of red-armiesto the Westfrom the East,encircling the Earthfrom the poles.51

Trotsky, flanked by delegates atop a tribune, re-viewed the demonstration from noon to 5 P.M.The tribune, set by the Kremlin wall for the firsttime, was a mark of the center, concentrating thesymbolic and political center in one. Around itwere arrayed trophies seized from the allied in-tervention forces: cannons and transport, tanksand "other useful inventions of the bourgeoismind."52 Buildings surrounding the square werehung with slogans stenciled on linen; marchersgreeted the delegates with gold-lettered placardsthat sparkled in the sunshine. Sausage-shaped

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balloons, trailing red pennants and streamers,were anchored to the crosses of St. Basil's oniondomes.

The real show was the people. All of Moscowwas turned out to march in the parade, thoughcitizens were not allowed onto the square asspectators. 53 Boy Scouts trooped by and salutedthe tribune; Caucasian tribesmen in native dressrode by. Athletes clad only in swim trunks madea particular impression. According to the pressthis was a perfect example of the potential offestivals to "create the new Soviet man." Ex-hausted workers had only to pass through thesquare with the rhythmic columns and they weretransformed from "decrepit old men into hand-some youths."54

Perhaps, but the political message sent to theforeign delegates was surely of greater con-sequence. Karl Radek's claim that "the demon-stration . . . meant more than all the theoreticaldiscussions [of the Congress]" was probablyclose to the truth. It established the claim of theRussians to be the source of internationalsocialism's strength. A foreign delegate wasoverheard observing that it was "absolutely clear[!] that nobody could force such a mass onto thestreets," a comment Radek used to refute KarlKautsky's claim that the Russian workers' initi-ative was not manifest in the Revolution. But itwas the pounding rhythm of marching feet, thetremendous organization of the demonstrationthat transmitted its message. The delegates,some of whom had been in Soviet Russia nowfor months, had not been impressed, to say theleast, by the organization they had encountered.The Bolsheviks arranged the festival as a specialshow of organization, five hours of

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demonstration to erase months of contrary ob-servations. The event seems to have made theproper impression. When Trotsky turned to aFrench Syndicalist and asked, "With all this,won't counterrevolution be impossible in Mo-scow?" the French comrade only silently noddedhis head.55

The Myth of the Revolution

The Bolshevik claim to the center was beststaked by a myth of origin: a myth that distilledthe Revolution to a single moment. It was theinstant of transition: the moment when historybegan and from which the future unfolded.Marx and ideology were irrelevant to this centerof revolutionary history: it was the storming ofthe Winter

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Palace that became the central theme of the Petro-grad celebration after the plans for Semenov Placewere jettisoned.

How was it possible to propagate a myth in thevery city that had witnessed the event itself onlythree years before? Myths, contrary to what somesymbolists and the ''God-builders" thought, are notconstructed at will. They are a function ofmemory: the more remote the memory, the moreextreme the mythologization. Perhaps the Revolu-tion was not very old, but already the recollectionwas slipping away from the facts and surrenderingto art. Symbolically, John Reed, who left a distinctrecord of the events of October 25, 1917, died onOctober 24, 1920; and Podvoisky (one of the com-manders of the palace storming), who was alwaysconsulted for productions of this kind, would lateradmit that he "could not remember how [he]crossed the barricades" (he hadn't!). 56 The RedGuardsmen remembered even less. Not that any-one forgot altogether; their recollections were ifanything more vivid. It was just that some parts ofthe event were gradually neglected and forgotten,

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some were magnified, and the whole wasrearranged.

History itself provided an outstanding example ofsuch revision: the storming of the Bastille, which130 years before had been made the center of theFrench Revolution by the popular imagination.The directness of the influence, and the inspirationit provided the Bolsheviks, was evident in a posterreleased for the anniversary:

Three years ago, comradesdo you remember? . . .The Winter Palace fellcapitalism's Bastille.And now Soviet Russia has become the centerOf the whole Laboring worldand with usThe peasants and workers of all countries are raisingThe Red Banner of the Proletariat Revolution.57

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A festival is not a neutral or "transparent" system;it is an artistic system in and of itself, with its ownrules of aesthetic construction that it imposes onthe material at hand. In this process rememberedevents are changed. Such a reformation of recol-lection was publicly enacted in The Storming ofthe Winter Palace, a mass spectacle presented forthe third anniversary celebration of November 7,1920.58 The directors created a dynamic center forthe Revolution, the moment of creation essential toany foundation myth.

The performance was sponsored by PUR. Tiomkinwas again chosen to produce the festival, and he inturn chose Evreinov as directoran

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odd choice indeed for the epitome of politicaltheater: a director at best indifferent to the newideology, who with his producer and designerwould soon end up in the Paris emigration. ForEvreinov the Revolution served the purposes ofthe performance, not the performance the Re-volution. The facts were given an explicitlyartistic organization. The Storming of the WinterPalace was a step beyond his "theatricalizationof life"; it was a theatricalization of history, his-tory as it should have been: "Historical events,serving as material for the creation of this play,are reduced here to a series of artistically simpli-fied moments and situations. The directors didnot consider reproducing exactly a picture of theevents that took place three years ago on PalaceSquare; they could not because theater was nev-er meant to serve as history's stenographer." 59

But the storming of the Winter Palace, of allevents commemorated by mass spectacles, washistorically the most concrete. It was a localizedevent, one that had occurred at the same spot onwhich it was reenacted. Palace Square was at thesame time a stage and a real historical place (seeFigure 17). The directors went to great lengthsto make the performance seem actual: trucksbristling with bayonets roared across the square,machine guns chattered, and out on the river thecruiser Aurora, which three years before hadfired the (blank) "shot heard round the world,"repeated the signal for the performance.Evreinov enlisted participants of the 1917takeover as performers. The production staffeven rebuilt the wooden barricade that had pro-tected the palace's front gates and manned itwith the Women's Death Battalion, which le-gend claimed defended the gates to the end. Thehighly theatrical gesture was not dimmed by thefact that the Death Battalion had, in 1917,

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wisely abandoned its position. Obviously, a dis-tinction must be made, one that in a theater suchas Stanislavsky's never received recognition: thedistinction between "real"-ness and authenticity.

The mass performance would distill and im-prove the historical event. According to the dir-ectors, participants and spectators would in thecourse of an hour experience what in 1917 hadbeen experienced in the course of manyhours60or, more accurately, it might be said, hadnever been experienced at all. The event of 1917had, after all, been something of an anticlimax,occurring a day after the seizure of power. Moreimportant to the transfer of power had been at-taining a majority in the Petrograd Soviet andthe slow process of propagandizing the Petro-grad garrison. On the actual day of the Revolu-tion, Palace Square was one of the few peacefulpoints in the city: the Bolsheviks rightly thoughtthe train stations and post offices of more im-port, and that was

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Figure 17.Layout of Palace Square, Petrograd, for the November 1920 mass spectacle;

image computer-enhanced (Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, Leningrad, 1933).

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where conflict, what little there was, occurred.Winter Palace was surrounded, and Lenin des-parately wanted it taken, but the commanderswere in less of a rush. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, Podvoisky, and Grigory Chud-novsky, directors of the operation (in the pro-duction the trio was replaced by the single fig-ure of Lenin), preferred to avoid senselessbloodshed and waited for a surrender. Thetroops defending the palace surrendered unit byunit over the next day, until finally the numeric-ally superior Red Guard charged the buildingwith scarcely a shot being fired. The eight thou-sand participants in the 1920 spectacle far out-numbered the attackers of 1917.

Although one hundred fifty thousand spectatorswere expected that night for the performance,because of dampness, chill rain, and slush, onlyone hundred thousand showed uparound one-quarter of the entire city. The spectators werewell prepared; newspapers warned that theevents would all be theatrical and requested thatthe audience not panic at the gunfire. Therewould be no reason to move during the perform-ance; the stages were placed so that everyonecould see. 61

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Spectators were placed right in the middle of theaction (as they had been in Evreinov's AncientTheater). Built against the facade of the GeneralStaff Headquarters across the square from thepalace was a huge stage designed by Annenkov.On the left side he constructed a Red city; dy-namic, vertical buildings of red, factories, alarge square, and even a memorial obelisk. Ac-tion on the Red platform was directed by Petrov.To the right (naturally) was the White platform,directed by Kugel and Derzhavin. Evreinov re-mained in charge of the entire production. TheWhite platform was a horizontal constructionmade up of smaller platforms, none of whichrepresented a specific place. On its left side,ladies and gentlemen in evening clothes cam-paigned for the Liberty Loanhere, Evreinov par-odied an earlier mass festival. To the right, min-isters of the Provisional Government, wearingtop hats and sitting behind a long table, listenedto Kerensky give a hysterical speech. Between

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the two platforms was a gangway, an architec-tural duplicate of the Headquarters Arch behindit, along which the two worlds met and didbattle. The directors were placed on a large plat-form encircling the Alexander Column,equipped with a complicated network of electricsignals. Spectators were cordoned off in largesquares on both sides of the column andbetween the palace and headquarters. A fewlucky ones watched from windows of the palaceand surrounding buildings.

The Storming of the Winter Palace was conduc-ted with a masterful sense of theatrical timing.At the stroke of ten, Palace Square was

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plunged into darkness. A cannon shot shatteredthe silence, and an orchestra of 500, placed un-der the arch and directed by Varlikh, struck upHenri Litolff's Robespierre overture, introducingthe White (!) platform. One hundred and fiftysearchlights mounted on the roofs of surround-ing buildings were switched on at once, illumin-ating the Whites, who opened the action. TheMarseillaise, orchestrated as a polonaise, wasbegun as the ladies and gentlemen of high soci-ety awaited Kerensky's arrival. The prime minis-ter, whose appearance caused some stir amongthe crowd on stage, was parodied brilliantly byan actor dressed in his characteristic khakis. TheWhites formed a chorus, with Kerensky in therole of the coryphaeus (the figure who initiatesand leads the chorus's response).

Directors of previous mass spectacles hadavoided using individual actors, preferring touse masses of bodies to represent mass move-ments. The directors of Winter Palace reasonedcorrectly that in a large square filled with humanbodies it would not be the huge mass that standsout but the single figure, particularly when thatfigure is spotlighted. 62 The proposal of Annen-kov and Kugel to have twenty actors moving inunison play Kerensky was turned down. The ad-vantages were immediately apparent. Kerensky,like the rest of the Whites, was played in thestyle of the opera-bouffe and the circus. The act-or caught his histrionic gestures perfectly as hemimed a speech. The response of the Whitechorus was performed in the same style: Ker-ensky was showered with roses and ovations (allthis had occurred during his Moscow LibertyBond tour). Bankers, pushing money bagsacross the stage, volunteered their services forthe Liberty Loan. Bureaucrats, backs bent in

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humility, vowed fealty to the first minister. Andofficers in cocked hats, monocled and bedeckedwith medals, held posters proclaiming "War to aVictorious End!"

Previous mass spectacles suffered most from aninability to transfer action from one episode tothe next. This difficulty was similar to that ex-perienced by writers of the medieval annals. The"syntax" of events was a coordinate system: thishappened, then that happened. The subordinatesyntax of events that underlies historical under-standing was not truly available to the directorsof the first mass spectacles, just as it had notbeen available to the annalists. In Mystery, thescenario might have specified that action shift ata certain point from the failed Spartacus rebel-lion at the top of the steps to renewed popularunrest, led by Razin, at the base of the staircase.The spectators, however, would see it differ-ently; several hundred people in togas wouldstill be milling about at the top of the

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steps, and viewers would have to wonder whatRomans were doing in Razin's Russia. The dir-ectors, then, had to take time out to clear thestage of the previous scene, as if erasing ablackboard. As a result these early performancestook from four to five hours to complete.

Winter Palace, uniquely, was produced simul-taneously as a drama and a film. 63 The analogyto film provided a solution to the time problem,which reduced Evreinov's production to onlyone and a half hours. In film, scenes can shift in-stantaneously; the time wasted in the theater oc-curs while the movie camera is turned off. InWinter Palace, action was moved not by shift-ing its location, but by shifting spectators' atten-tion. The 150 searchlights were the solution:after Kerensky had made his speech and heldcourt, and the scene shifted to the Red stage, adirector on the column platform simply flicked aswitch, plunging Kerensky and retinue intodarkness, and another switch, lighting the Reds.

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Lighting for the first time allowed for the divi-sion of a mass spectacle into distinct episodesand sharp contrasts. The dramas would nolonger operate on "uninterrupted, festival"time64 but on the subdivided time of theater,which yields to the manipulations of a director.In ritual drama (medieval mysteries or earlySoviet mass dramas) there is a unity of perform-ance timethe time frame in which the perform-ance is viewed. There are no breaks in perform-ance, no time when the performance is "turnedoff" and the spectator leaves the performativeframe. Depicted time, however, is not unified;sharp, unexplained breaks and shiftsfor ex-ample, from Spartacus's Rome to Robespierre'sParisare the rule. Modern theater works on an-other scheme: performance time is broken,while depicted action is more continuous.Winter Palace, which finally solved the technic-al problems of mass spectacles, was the first inwhich depicted time was unified. With action

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concentrated in a single place and time, the fest-ival was able to establish the palace seizure asthe center of the Revolution. No historical mythis complete without that center, the moment ofabsolute change.

Action on the Red stage was in a monumentalstyle; performers wore no make-up.65 Actingwas done in "collectives": characters weregroups, not individuals like Kerensky, a devicethat demonstrated the collective character of theReds. A few hundred workers come onstagefrom the factories Annenkov built for his city.While about half the group stand forestage andhold statuesque poses, the other half rhythmic-ally strike anvils with their hammers. Morepeople flood onstage and gather round a largered flag. The ever-increasing crowd falls silent,as if straining to hear something. The Interna-tionale becomes faintly audible; then

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cries of ''Lenin, Lenin!" echo from the audienceuntil the word is caught up by the chorus. TheRed stage has been changing throughout thisscene. Beginning as a gray mass, the workersgrow brighter as the searchlights illuminatethem ever more intensely. As the masses, whichhave been pouring onstage chaotically, becomeincreasingly more organized, they gather aroundthe flag and take up the chant. When the Inter-nationale breaks out at full volume to end theepisode, the gray mass has completed its trans-formation into the Red Guard.

Now the Reds can attack the Whites, with theirtroops surging over the connecting arch; thismystery-play device, used in every mass spec-tacle from The Overthrow of the Autocracy on,had its place in Winter Palace. Many troopsfrom the White side go over to the Reds; onlythe Junkers and the Women's Battalion remainto defend the government. Oblivious to the un-rest, Kerensky continues his oration, but hisministers, whose bench has begun to rattle andsway to the rhythm of the Red chants, crash tothe floor at the clap of the first Red volley. Ker-ensky nimbly escapes to a car (American flagwaving) waiting before the stage and drivesaway. His ministers follow in another car.

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Up to this point, the performance could havetaken place on any large stage. Space was con-ventional, its value assigned by the decor. Timewas conventional; the events of a few revolu-tionary months of 1917 were summarized in anhour's dramatic action. But when Kerenskystepped over the proscenium, he stepped intoreal space. For Kerzhentsev, Meyerhold, and thesymbolist generation, theater would attain itsideal when the audience crossed the same line inthe opposite direction. That was the theater asritual. Evreinov, however, pursued the theatric-alization of life, the theater as play; history wasreplayed according to the rules of art. Ironically,Winter Palace, the height of artifice, was themost real of all the mass spectacles. Previousspectacles could have been performed anywhereanytime and have been about anything. By sub-stituting a different set of revolutions The Mys-tery of Liberated Labor could become Toward aWorld Commune; that scenario could be

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replayed at Krasnoe selo. Winter Palace couldonly be about the October Revolution, it couldbe played only on Palace Square, and only onNovember 7. This performance fixed the final,irreducible center of the revolution.

Kerensky and his ministers, having drivenmadly across the square between the two massesof spectators, are admitted to the palace. Mean-while, action continues on the stage, where theRed Guard and White soldiers battle for controlof the city; this segment is performed like a

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wartime battle spectacle. Suddenly, the lights in-side the palace spring on, and in the brightly il-luminated windows silhouettes grapple for con-trol of the palace. A different stage of thestruggle is depicted in each window, and thebattle unfolds as each is illuminated in progres-sion. The Reds gradually take the upper hand inthese duels, and the palace finally falls undertheir control. The Revolution is accomplished.The searchlights of the Aurora, which havebacklit the palace in an aura, switch to a pointabove the palace, where a tremendous red ban-ner is raised, and red lights flash on in the win-dows. The performance ends with a comic scenefrom the revolutionary apochrypha; Kerenskyflees the palace dressed as a woman. A cannonsalute from the Aurora and fireworks end thefestival and herald the dawning of a new age.

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EpilogueTime Moves On

The Bolshevik program was inspired by Marx'sphilosophy, and it was shaped by years of un-derground struggle. Yet neither source truly pre-pared the Bolsheviks for the frustrations of gov-ernance or provided a political lexicon access-ible to the general public. These had to be de-veloped in the revolutionary cauldron, by trialand error. The process of adapting their complexprogram to mass communication compelled re-volutionaries to rethink their movement, to em-phasize aspects that had been secondary beforethe Revolution, and to push others into thebackground.

Mass festivals were one of several venues ofcommunication with the public, one that offereda unique conjunction of elements. They wereperhaps the most public of media, whichbrought representatives of many groups withmany opinions into intimate contact. Politicians,artists, and simple citizens were mixed in asingle great performance, with the needs andparticulars of each group contributing to the fi-nal product. In this sense, festival enthusiastswere correct in believing that festivals weremodels of the greater society surrounding them.

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The mixed sources and tangled communicationsof festivals revealed the uncertainty and intric-acy of revolutionary cultural processes. Thesponsors' ideology was only one factor determ-ining the final outcome. Bolshevik festivalsgrew from a political culture that predated theOctober Revolution. The Romanov dynasty wasrenowned for the majesty of its pageants and therichness of its rites, and the tradition proved ad-aptable to socialist ideology. The politics of cel-ebration fascinated

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leading revolutionaries, who saw several pos-sible uses for festivals. They could be instru-ments of class struggle, but they could also unitethe nation in the joys of socialism. Themillennia-old art of festivity fulfilled bothneeds.

Although the Bolsheviks understood the need tocommunicate with the populationperhaps betterthan any political movement before themtheybetrayed a profound ambivalence about openinga dialogue of equals. The political opposition,which still existed in 1918, brought contentionto that year's festivals; and the artistic avant-garde brought the spirit of mockery. SomeBolsheviks, however, damned the lighter side offestivity, believing that it derided their cherishedprinciples. By 1919 they occupied the upperrungs of festival committees, and they used theirpower to solemnize celebrations. The condem-nation was inspired by more than sobriety.Festivals were a bid for political legitimacy, anattempt to lend the Revolution a sacred aura,and that aim might have been thwarted by dis-sonant voices.

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The sponsors of revolutionary festivals courtedpopular participation, but the invitation was be-lied by efforts to limit mass initiative. At theheart of the uncertainty lay the contradictory no-tion of self-activity (samodeiatel'nost'), accord-ing to which revolution was spawned by popularvolition yet needed the guidance of professionalrevolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were failed bytheir imaginations in their dealings with themasses; they did not account for the variety andunpredictability of reactions. When officialcommentators remarked on popular reactions,they projected their own views onto the people;and when mass participation was integrated intofestival plans, it was usually with the intent ofconstraining it.

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When older revolutionaries discussed the histor-ical role of popular celebrations, they usuallymentioned fâtes of the French Revolution, Hel-lenic tragic festivals, medieval mysteryplaysanything but their own rich native tradi-tion. The neglect was remedied by 1919, whenthe artists invited to direct revolutionary spec-tacleswho were themselves not always so re-volutionarybegan incorporating popular tradi-tions. The innovation proved beneficial. Populartheater provided a variety of forms ideal for pro-paganda and made the message highly access-ible. Clowns proclaimed revolutionary coupletsfrom the circus arena; Petrushka puppetspummeled the heads of reactionaries; wanderingplayers performed skits about the benefits ofBolshevism and the detriments of dysentery.

People's theater was a common phrase duringthe Revolution, but it

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meant many things to many people. It could be avast ritual bringing together classes and nations;a childlike dance of the liberated masses;troupes wandering the countryside performingpropaganda pieces; vast spectacles simulatingrevolutionary action. These concepts merged inthe mass festivals, whereaccording to planner-sthe people would unite to spontaneously createrevolutionary dramas. But practice showed thatthe notions of people's theater contradicted eachother. Popular theater did not always preach themessage of socialism; ritual dramas did notalways re-create the tension of revolt; and tradi-tional spectacles discouraged viewer participa-tion and segregated audience and actors. Produ-cing the desired artistic results and promptingthe desired audience reaction did not seemcompatible.

Professional directors hired for the mass spec-tacles confronted the contradiction between pop-ular initiative and mass organization already fa-miliar to the Bolsheviks. Mass drama was an un-wieldy form that made questions of manage-ment paramount. Masses of bodies had to bemoved up and down sweeping staircases; scoresof searchlights had to be focused on precisespots at precise moments; massive choruses hadto sing to a baffling array of cues. Maintainingorder in the face of thousands of ecstatically im-provising citizens was unthinkable. The direct-ors adopted a stricter dramatic organization thatchanged the social dynamics of mass festivalsbut increased their power to dramatize the Octo-ber Revolution.

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Mass festivals and their centerpiece spectacleshad a tremendous potential to project legitimiz-ing myths. The Bolsheviks restated their revolu-tion as the culmination of a long historical pro-cess rather than as a tenuous partisan uprisingand thus demonstrated their legitimate claim toleadership of the Russian and world proletariats.The political advantages of the myth were ap-parent, yet its genesis could be explained aes-thetically as well as politically. The great spec-tacles of summer and autumn 1920 were moreorganized, more streamlined, more managedthan before; because of their stricter form, thehistorical narratives enacted became more com-pelling. A diffuse, unfocused story becamecentered; history was no longer cyclical, buthierarchical, teleological, closed. The dramamade the October Revolution seem inevitableand the Bolsheviks the legitimate rulers ofRussia.

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Mass drama was an essential feature of SovietRussia's cultural life, yet the conclusion of theCivil War diminished its importance. The Armyhad funded the biggest spectacles of the CivilWar years and

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provided conscripts for their mass scenes; whenit was demobilized, a needed sponsor was lost.Closer inspection suggests, though, that the endof the war should have freed resources, noteliminated them, and that if the government hadwanted to sponsor mass spectacles, it couldhave.

Although the first months of NEP saw calls for acentralized festival administration, such an or-ganization was not in the spirit of the timesnorwithin the country's abilities. The scaling downof the armed forces meant that no single organ-ization had the funds to sponsor or control cel-ebrations nationwide. The party did seek influ-ence in the May Day 1921 celebration in Petro-grad, but this was a local incident that did notrepeat itself. 1 The Moscow festival was organ-ized by the local branch of the political-educa-tion arm of Narkompros, Glavpolitprosvet;2 andwhile the November 1921 anniversary in Mo-scow was created by the All-Russian CentralCommittee for October (Celebrations), thisgrand rubric concealed a group that operatedonly in Moscow and disbanded after November7.3 Most holidays were actually the work of loc-al cadres provided by unions, factory commit-tees, and workers' clubs.

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Civil War festivals often led to clashes betweencentral organizers and artists, which led to a vig-orous artistic variety. During NEP, there wasless need to present a monolithic face and moredesire for popular expression; as the MoscowMay Day Commission said in 1923, ''We rejectthe strict centralization of celebrations that wasonce necessary to demonstrate to the West thestrength and power of the Soviet Republic."4Despite the slackening of discipline and the ab-sence of central leadership, however, NEP fest-ivals were remarkable for their stylistic uniform-ity. Decorations and slogans changed little (theywere often reused); the festival was significantnot for what it said but for the fact that marchersshowed up. A temporary committee would usu-ally plot the holiday schedule: where and whenmarchers should congregate; the marching orderthrough Red Square; a nighttime fireworks dis-play. Street decorations and performanceswould be assigned to smaller groups, such as a

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local workers' club or Proletkult. Floats were thefocus of the parade. Each factory club was as-signed the construction of a float, which com-bined a theme relevant to the factory with thecentral political theme of the day. Some contri-butions were clever: in 1923 Skorokhod, thePetrograd shoe factory, seated effigies of theEntente in a galosh ("to be in a galosh" means tobe in a jam). Still, most often they were of a fewbasic types. Much work was done on a popularlevel, yet it was guided by club cultural instruct-ors; and in large cities instructors were in closecontact with each other.

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Newsreels, which regularly brought images offestivals to the entire country, were anothersource of similarity.

Official indifference did not always discourageartists and directors from hatching grandschemes. Lunacharsky wrote a grandiose scen-ario for the Moscow Comintern conference of1921 that was to be produced by Mardzhanov inRed Squarethe first time that this ideal spacewould have been exploited. Its subject was his-tory from caveman times to the present. Thefirst act portrayed prehistoric life:

Groups of people march in to parade music car-rying props that depict cliffs and rocks. . . . Pre-historic people enter; they light fires, danceabout, and swing their clubs, perform large chor-al corrobore (mass ceremonial dances of theAustralian aborigines); the women dance on thecentral stage (ballet); horsemen gallop betweenthe cliffs, hunting beasts; life seems free and joy-ful; however, distinct groups attack each otherwith a howl and create a wild ruckus. Mean-while, atop the stage a primitive fetish is con-structed: a large boulder, which is gaily decor-ated. Shamans, wailing and producing noise onprimitive instruments, summon the people tobow before it; a human sacrifice is brought. Acannon shot signals the end of the first act. 5

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The next acts featured pharaonic Egypt, feudalEurope, the capitalist West, the triumph of theThird International. In many waysin themassiveness of the production, the clumsy edit-ing, and the confusion of size withgrandeurLunacharsky ignored the lessons of1920. The finale could have come from a Ja-cobin production:

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A group of workers appears with new props andbuilds the city of the future. It is a complex ofwondrous and fantastic buildings shimmeringwith the colors of the rainbow (I would recom-mend using light, inflatable materials) with thenames "Free Labor School," "Temple ofScience," ''Temple of Art," and so forth. Themain task is to create a truly captivating picture,which would be a hint of the "Promised City."Children, women, young men, girls, and eldersappear. The children frolic and play. The youthsmarch in a proud procession, half-bared; theywrestle and run tag races (use Vsevobuch[Universal Military Training Corps] here).Women's games, their procession and choir . . .Everyone gathers round the elders, who bless thefuture generation.

The plan was canceled, perhaps wisely, in theface of economic collapse and starvation.

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There were also less-immediate causes of thedecline of mass spectacles. Grand and often im-practical ventures that had seemed exhilaratingduring the struggle no longer seemed so power-ful. The flush of revolution was not somethingthat could last forever; its bright colors faded. In1918, when David Burliuk hung a futurist paint-ing on Kuznetsky

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Bridge, this act was taken as a bold foray of artinto life; but when NEP rolled around the paint-ing was still on the wall, sun-faded and rain-splotched, invisible to the eyes of pedestrianswho had seen it too many times before. 6

Conventions, like fashions, begin to seem sillywith time, and by late 1920 parodies of massspectacles began to appear, some in good fun,some malicious. The Legend of the Com-munardan easy targetwas mocked by the sameProletkult students who a year before had playedit with all due solemnity. The young peoplewere growing up, acquiring sophistication.7 Amock agitational skit performed in Astrakhan'sLenin Theater on New Year's Day 1921 attackedanother easy target: "An International Proletari-an Political Review, featuring the "Entente Giv-ing Birth" [standard journalese], was shown.Onstage the pregnant Entente, portrayed by anactor [!], went through birth throes, complainingthat it was embarrassing to give birth in publicand uttering unprintable vulgarities."8 The mosttempting target was The Storming of the WinterPalace. In a children's performance VladimirDurov, the famous clown and animal trainer, leda phalanx of rabbits in storming the palace: over

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the captured palace they hoisted the slogan"Rabbits of the world unite!''9 Russia's greatestmaster of parody, though, was Evreinov himself,who did not let the opportunity for a jest passhim by. His World Contest of Wit10 mocked therhythmic military maneuvers of mass spectacles,including his own.11

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Small theaters specializing in small productionsproliferated under NEP, while funding for massspectacles dwindled. Parody, wit, and lightness,which suit the café more than the city square, fitthe mood; and mass drama was not, after all, aprofitable venture. Yet it was not financial con-siderations alone that diminished mass spec-tacles. Funds were still available for decoratingcities, for processions, and for most spectacleswith political utility. Rather the unbrokensolemnity and zeal needed for mass drama weregone. The intensified, often euphoric days of theCivil War had spawned the genre. Symptomaticwould be the remark found in an instructionbook printed for the tenth anniversary celebra-tion in 1927: the best subject for a mass dramawas still the Civil War.12

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Early Bolshevik festivals had combined twoprerevolutionary traditions: grim May Dayworker demonstrations and the magnificentspectacles of the autocracy. During NEP,demonstrations and mass spectacles once againwent their separate ways. The change was inmany ways

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salutory: participants in spectacles were nolonger involuntary conscripts but young and en-thusiastic members of workers' clubs. The greatartists who had directed the spectacles of 1920eventually emigrated or moved on to otherthings. Though NEP spectacles no longer heldthe artistic world's imagination, much more pop-ular participation was possible. What happenedwas not that mass spectacles disappeared butthat they moved from the cultural center to theperiphery.

With their great victory in the war, new tasksstood before the Bolsheviks. The regime ruled asociety that was sometimes hostile to and oftenignorant of its plans; simply legitimizing theseizure of power was not enough. Political edu-cation, which demands a calmer voice and moredetail than festivals, was now imperative; and ifmass spectacles were to continue, new condi-tions had to be acknowledged. During the CivilWar, the central aim of any festival was to enlistpopular support. A binary choice was posed:Red or White, past or future, for or against.More complex messages, though they mighthave been present, were extraneous and werenot always understood. As party propagandistsbecame more aware of the consciousness gapseparating people and party, they looked tomore complex media. 13 Organizers began toview spectacles as the Jacobins had, as a schoolof citizenship.

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The military continued to sponsor and exploitmass dramas as training exercises. In fact, theat-ricalized military maneuvers and militarized the-atrical spectaclesthe line was blurred attimeswere popular during NEP. In May 1925,the Baltic Fleet was handed over to a theater dir-ector for a re-creation of Iudenich's 1919 attackon Petrograd. Writers and commanders collab-orated on the script, which was performed in theLuga district. Spectatorssailors and local peas-antswatched from a hill as the battle unfolded. Itinvolved naval maneuvers and an amphibiouslanding that came right up to the foot of thehill.14 The fashion stretched even further inOrenburg in 1927, when during a war scare theentire city was treated to theatricalized battlesand participated in civil-defense alarms and sim-ulated evacuations.15

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Meyerhold was enthusiastic about ties to themilitary and security organs. He supervised the-atricals for three different GPU (later, KGB)clubs;16 and on Book Day 1925 he produced athematic skit employing "artillery, the Engineer-ing Corps, the Air Force, and the ChemicalWarfare School, which demonstrated a chemicalattack."17 His grandest plan, conceived for the1921 Comintern conference, would have cost afortune in military supplies. The site of the spec-tacle, entitled Struggle and Victory, would havebeen Khodynka Field, and its cast would have

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included 200 cavalrymen, 2,300 infantry cadets,sixteen artillery guns, five aeroplanes mountedwith Zeiss projectors, armored vehicles, andtanks. The show was divided into twelve briefepisodes, showing that Meyerhold had absorbedlessons learned by Evreinov.

In the first five action moments, various nationalgroups of the army of the Revolution conduct aunified attack on the bastions of capitalism, sur-rounding them in a tight circle, blanketing themwith a smoke screen, and exploding tenpoundpowder mines.

The armored transports release tanks into thesmoke of the artificial fire, which cross artificialobstacles and barriers. The smoke screen dis-perses. Capitalist emblems fall from the bastion,and national flags disappear. The tall, flamingcones of flamethrowers rise high above thebastion. . . .

Moment VI. The troops file by the tribune, whereall members of the III International Congress arelocated. . . .

Moment VII. The projectors create a curtain oflight.

Decorated with the emblems of labor, truckstransport Vsevobuch athletes dressed as laborerspast the tribune onto the field, where they formranks in front of the city of the future.

Moment VIII. "The victors do not forget theirweapons." They throw the javelin and the discus.

Moment IX. The hammer and sickle. In timewith an orchestra, the former soldiers performthe movements of blacksmiths and harvesters. 18

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Podvoisky, a commander of the Palace Squareoperation on October 25, 1917, then director ofVsevobuch during the war, was an early enthu-siast of mass festivals, and he helped promotethem through the 1920s. Podvoisky occasionallycollaborated with Meyerhold, though he was notinvolved in Meyerhold productions like Struggleand Victory or even Dithyramb of Electrifica-tion.19 Podvoisky preferred the pseudoHellenicclassicism of the prewar years, and he founded acolony on the Sparrow Hills where childrenwore tunics and frolicked in the lap of nature.Isadora Duncan herself toured the facility, andshe was so enraptured that she called Podvoisky"a man like a god." She observed the children'supbringing in freedom and health, their happi-ness, the great stadium being built on Moscow'soutskirtsand, with some disapproval, a game inwhich the children skipped down the mountainand sang "Death to Speculators."20

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Podvoisky saw a new social role for Vsevobuchwith the introduction of NEP: "In the initialperiod of conflict, Vsevobuch considered itsmain task to be the creation of fighters and war-riors; at the present time its most important taskis to train the bodies and wills of our youth. . . .Physical culture, closeness to nature, and masstheatrical dramas are the

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[major] factors in the creation of a new, collect-ive humanity.'' 21 He reorganized the remnantsof Vsevobuch into a network of sports clubs thatwas the military's main civilian training agency,and gave birth to the popular physical culture(fizkul'tura) movement. During the mid-1920s,fizkul'tura training was often combined with wargamesscenario-based games in which thousandsof participants acted out failed revolutions, cap-italist attacks, and socialist victories. In 1924,the Sparrow Hills, now renamed the Lenin Hills,was the site of a revolutionary war fought by In-dia, Britain, and the "Reds" (led by Trotsky). In1928, the same site hosted an international con-flagration entitled Worldwide October.22 Parti-cipantswho were all volunteerslearned the basicsof drill discipline and more complex maneuvers,like amphibious attacks. The exercises were dis-continued only in 1930, when a game entitledStepan Razin was marred by serious maulings.23

The third-anniversary celebration in Petrogradwas the advent of the most important trend inNEP-period mass spectacles: amateur theaterclubs took over festival performances. Perhapsyoung club members did not have professionalskills, but as players they were far superior tothe soldiers conscripted for Civil Warera spec-tacles. One group, the playwrights' circle of theKarl Marx Club, wrote a script, Along theThorny Path to the Stars, that was performed bythe dramatic circles of central Petrograd. Thefirst scene represented the October Revolution:"Cannon fire is heard, and a woman runs bywith a child. Soldiers dash by, snapping theirrifle chambers shut. Cowardly citizens clusteron the street. A worker with a hammer appearsamong them and speaks of the workers' comingtriumph over the bourgeoisie."24 The secondscene depicted postrevolutionary moments: bur-eaucratic sabotage, the field after a battle, a sub-botnik, the return of soldiers from the war. The

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apotheosis was a tableau vivant in which aworker, soldier, peasant, and sailor held a globealoft. Above them stood a woman personifyingthe world commune.

The most active producer was a network ofclubs run by the Petrograd Politprosvet, or Polit-ical Education administration. Its artistic direct-or was Piotrovsky, who hired his old colleaguesShcheglov and Shimanovsky. Their system, theUnited Artistic Circles, used arts instruction tointegrate members into Soviet society. Thissamodeiatel'nyi theater was not an imitation ofthe professional; it had its own esthetics and itsown expressive system.25 It also had a grand so-cial purpose: it was theater "born of the crowd,"as Greek tragedy had been born of popular reli-gion, and it could by rights speak for the entirepeople.26

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New members joined one of several club circles:theatrical, playwriting, artistic, musical, or polit-ical. Initial instruction took place in the indi-vidual circle; and the efforts of separate circleswere eventually synthesized into the productionof a mass spectacle. Work was timed to the cal-endar of Soviet holidays. To begin, the politicalcirclewhich was explicitly the primary circle inthe clubchose a theme for the holiday: for ex-ample, for Paris Commune Day, the thememight be "From the Paris to the Petrograd Com-mune." The playwrights then wrote a scenariobased on the theme; the theatrical circle put ittogether with the assistance of the musicians andartists. Each member of the club was given aspecific task to be carried out under the supervi-sion of the club director and political circle. 27Each club in the Petrograd network competedfor a central position in the citywide festival.The city had many squares, some on the out-skirts, some in the center; and a club's ability to

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fulfill the tasks set by Politprosvet determinedplacement and time of performance.

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Leftists from the old futurist movement werestill enthusiastic about public celebrations, butthey worked from a different angle. Their goalwas not to unite the nation but to instigate fur-ther social change. In January 1923, in collabor-ation with the national Komsomol, leftists or-ganized a "Komsomol Christmas." When believ-ers exited from their churches for the traditionalcandlelight procession, they were greeted byCommunist youths dressed in pagan costumeswho mocked religious superstition and burnedreligious effigies. Readings from enlightenedscientists replaced the scriptures, agit-versesstood in for the old hymns, and modern medi-cine and technology were forwarded as a substi-tute for backwardness.28 In some cities, clubsperformed a skit written by the leftist poetSergei Tretiakov entitled Neporzach (a Soviet-style abridgment of the Russian for ImmaculateConception), which subjected the virgin birth ofChrist to merciless ridicule.29 The pious were,

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needless to say, offended; Communists wererumored to have been murdered in some provin-cial towns. Lenin himself was discomfited bythe hard line at a time of reconciliation, and thepractice was discontinued.30

The toughest and ultimately most quixotic tasktaken on by the leftists was to revitalize Sovietholidays. Ideas and practices that were novelduring the Civil War had become habitual bythe mid-1920s. The main target was demonstra-tions, which had fallen into an unvarying patternand become empty forms.31 One suggestion wasto dilute the martial spirit with a dose of carnivallaughter: a group of Moscow "Chinamen" car-ried a traditional carnival dragon; a jazz orches-tra marched through

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Red Square. 32 Still, the artists discovered thatthe new Moscow did not allow for carnivals: thecapital was becoming a modern industrial city,and its winding alleys were giving way to grandthoroughfares. Another leftist suggestion wasthat rather than hanging up garlands and redbanners, which would be taken down the nextday and leave the city as dirty and gray as be-fore, artists should devote their holiday work topermanent improvements in the city.33

Most important was the demand that marchersshould once again have a reason, not an obliga-tion, to come to the demonstration. Forced tostand for hours while the parade was organizedand then herded before the tribune to shout their"Hurrah!", workers had become bored and an-noyed. The leftists proposed reorganizing thedemonstration so that it was directed at themarchers, not the spectatorsthat is, the politi-cians on the tribune. Placards said little tomarchers. They were usually either the imagesof leaders or slogans; and the practice of givingeach marcher only one letter of the slogan hadeven evolved. Not only did marchers not knowwhich slogan their letters helped constitute, butwhen they went their separate ways during theday, the slogans collapsed into gibberish. Evenwhen slogans stayed together, they faced for-ward and were unreadable by the marchersthemselves. Artists suggested that banners beheld along the length of the marching column,

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not across, and that columns be marched by oneanother, not by the tribune. Then, instead ofhaving to read the slogans from a newspaperafter the demonstration, marchers could see theplacards themselves. The most radical idea wasto break down the pattern of movement in thesacred center of Soviet Russia, Red Square.Trooping by the leadership could be expected ofslaves, not of workers; why not go through thesquare in a zigzag pattern, which would meanthat no spectator was more important than themarchers and that all marchers could see theircomrades? Although avant-gardists were pro-posing sensible measures for improving holidaydemonstrations, they were also trying to removethe centeredness and hierarchy that had crept in-to festivals in 1920 and that remained forever.

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The avant-garde in 1927 did not meet the activeresistance it had met in 1918, but the result wasthe same. NEP was coming to an end in late1927, and its diffused patterns of culture andpolitics were soon to be subordinated to thepowerful center of the Stalinist state. The center,not the periphery, was the focus of the tenth-an-niversary celebration. The avant-garde was in-vited by the Moscow Soviet to organize the cel-ebration in June; but in July the national govern-ment established a

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Commission of the Central Executive Commit-tee of the USSR for the Organization and Con-duct of the Tenth Anniversary of the OctoberRevolution, the first body in Soviet Russia withauthority to regulate festivities throughout theentire country. Its chairman was Podvoisky. Thecommission issued instructions for the holiday;and preparations were to be supervised by localparty organs and the Worker-Peasant Inspector-ate. 34

Local initiative and popular participation werechoked off; and in fact spectators were kept asfar away from the central celebrations as pos-sible. In Leningrad, the holiday was capped bythe largest spectacle there had ever been. In1920, the Revolution had been the culminationof the show; now, it was the beginning, and thenew industrialization program was the climax.Hundreds of thousands of spectators came, butthe spectacle took place on the Neva Riverbetween the Kirov and Lieutenant Schmidtbridges, which made viewing difficult and massparticipation impossible.35 In Moscow, the cel-ebration was focused on Red Square. Access tothe square was severely restricted, and marcherspassed by the tribune as they always had.Doubtless, the leadership was not sorry. Theholiday came at the moment when the Trotsky-Stalin struggle was reaching a crisis and finalresolution. Trotsky's followers had planned acounterdemonstration for the square. It was to

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be a disappointment. All attention was focusedon Lenin's Mausoleum, the ceremonial center ofthe Soviet Union, atop which stood Stalin andthe party leadership; when the counterdemon-stration began in a corner of the square, it wasdrowned out by the hoopla of the marchers andwent unnoticed. Stalin had secretly invited a re-giment of mounted Georgian Cossacks to theparade; and as the small band of Trotskyistsshouted in the corner, the Cossacks chargedthrough the square with swords bared and sa-luted the tribune. The counterdemonstrationfizzled out.36

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List of AbbreviationsAMI(1971)

Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria (E. Speranskaia,ed.)

AMI(1984)

Agitatsionno-massovoe iskusstvo: Oformlenie prazdnestv (I. M. Bibikovaand N. I. Levchenko, eds.)

DN Delo narodaIK Iskusstvo kommunyIzvPS Izvestiia Petrogradskogo sovetaIzvTsIK Izvestiia Tsentral'nogo ispolnitel'nogo komitetaKG Krasnaia gazetaLGAOR Leningradskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv oktiabr'skoi revoliutsiiNZh Novaia zhizn'P PravdaPl PlamiaPP Petrogradskaia pravdaPSS V. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochineniiRM Rabochii mirSK Severnaia kommunaTK Teatral'nyi kur'erTsGARSFSR

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv RSFSR

TsGALI Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstvaVIMS Vechernie izvestiia Moskovskogo soveta

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VO Vneshkol'noe obrazovanieVT Vestnik teatraZI Zhizn' iskusstvaZPOT Zapiski peredviznogo-obshchedostupnogo teatra

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Notes

Introduction

1. Thorold Dickinson, Soviet Cinema (London:Falcon Press, 1948), pp. 13233.

2. Istoriia sovetskogo teatra (Leningrad: Aca-demia, 1933); Massovye prazdnestva(Leningrad: Academia, 1926). See also E. Ri-umin, Massovye prazdnestva, ed. O. M. Beskin(Moscow: GIZ, 1927); O. Tsekhnovitser,Prazdnestva revoliutsii (Leningrad: Priboi,1931). On the artwork, see A. S. Gushchin,Izoiskusstvo v massovykh prazdnestvakh idemonstratsiiakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennoeizdatel'skoe aktsionernoe ob-vo, 1930), andKhudozhestvennoe oformlenie massovykhprazdnestv v Leningrade, 19181931 (Leningrad:Izogiz, 1932); Massovye prazdnestva v staroi inovoi grafike. Katalog vystavki (Moscow: Izd.gos. muzeia iziashchnykh iskusstv, 1927); A.Kuznetsova, A. S. Magidson, and Iu. P.Shchukin. Oformlenie goroda v dni revoliut-sionnykh prazdnestv (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1932).

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3. See Rosalinde Sartorti, "Stalinism and Carni-val: Organization and Aesthetics of PoliticalHolidays," and Richard Stites, "Stalinism andthe Restructuring of Revolutionary Utopian-ism," in Hans Günther, ed., The Culture of theStalin Period (New York: St. Martin's Press,1990).

4. Most notable were V. P. Tolstoi, "Materialy kistorii agitatsionnogo iskusstva perioda grazh-danskoi voiny," Soobshcheniia Instituta istoriiiskusstv, Akademiia nauk SSSR, no. 3 (1953);Iurii Osnos, "U istokov sovetskogo teatra,"Teatral'nyi al'manakh, no. 2 (1946); P. I.Lebedev, Sovetskoe iskusstvo v period inostran-noi interventsii i grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1949); N. Shchekotov, ''Iskusstvokhudozhestvennogo oformleniia," Tvorchestvo,no. 3 (1938).

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5. D. M. Genkin, Massovye prazdniki (Moscow:Prosveshchenie, 1975), p. 6.

6. V. I. Brudnyi, Obriady vchera i segodnia(Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 16480.

7. E. Speranskaia, ed., Agitatsionno-massovoeiskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1971); I. M. Bibikova and N. I.Levchenko, comps., Agitatsionno-massovoeiskusstvo: Oformlenie prazdnestv (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1984); V. K. Aizenshtadt, Sovetskiisamodeiatel'nyi teatr (Kharkov: KhGIK, 1983);T. M. Goriaeva, "Pervaia godovshchinaoktiabr'skoi revoliutsii: Dokumenty," IstoriiaSSSR, no. 6 (1987); Russkii-sovetskii teatr19171921: Dokumenty i materialy (Leningrad:Iskusstvo, 1968).

8. Valentina Khodasevich, "Gorodteatr, nar-odakter," Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 11(1979), and "Massovye deistva, zrelishcha iprazdniki," Teatr, no. 11 (1967); Nikolai Petrov,50 i 500 (Moscow: VTO, 1960); U istokov (Mo-scow: VTO, 1960); N. G. Vinogradov-Mamont,Krasnoarmeiskoe chudo (Leningrad: Iskusstvo,1972).

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9. For example, V. S. Aksenov, Organizatsiiamassovykh prazdnikov trudiashchikhsia,19181920 (Leningrad: LGIK, 1974); Brudnyi,Obriady vchera i segodnia; A. I. Chechetin,Istoriia massovykh narodnykh prazdnestv ipredstavlenii (Moscow: Gos. inst. kul'tury,1976); Genkin, Massovye prazdniki; P. P. Kam-pars and N. M. Zakovich, Sovetskaia grazh-danskaia obriadnost' (Moscow: Mysl', 1967);Massovye prazdniki i zrelishcha (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1961); A. I. Mazaev, Prazdnik kaksotsial'no-khudozhestvennoe iavlenie (Moscow:Nauka, 1978); V. G. Sinitsyn, ed., Nashiprazdniki (Moscow: Politizdat, 1977); V. Aizen-shtadt, ed., Rezhissura i organizatsiia mas-sovykh zrelishch (Kharkov: KhGIK, 1973); V.A. Rudnev, Sovetskie prazdniki, obriady, ritualy(Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1979).

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10. See, for instance, Joseph Ben-David andTerry Clark, eds., Culture and Its Creators: Es-says in Honor of Edward Shils (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1977); Sean Wi-lentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritualand Politics since the Middle Ages(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1985); David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds.,Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial inTraditional Societies (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987); Roy Strong, Art andPower: Renaissance Festivals 14501650(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Also: M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press,1968); Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); EricHobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The In-vention of Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1982); Barbara Babcock, ed.,The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in

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Art and Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1978).

11. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Re-volution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1988); Maurice Agulhon,Marianne into Battle, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in theFrench Revolution (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984).

12. See Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, RichardStites, eds., Bolshevik Culture (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1985); SheilaFitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia,19281931 (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1978); Günther, The Culture of the StalinPeriod.

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13. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the PropagandaState: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization,19171929 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985); Richard Stites, RevolutionaryDreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Lifein the Russian Revolution (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1989).

14. Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cultin Soviet Russia (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1983).

15. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History asRitual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981); Regine Robin, Le réalisme socialiste:Une esthétique impossible (Paris: Payot, 1986).

16. Frantishek Déak, "Russian Mass Spec-tacles," Drama Review 19, no. 2 (June 1975).

17. Richard Stites, "Adorning the Russian Re-volution: The Primary Symbols of Bolshevism,19171918," Sbornik, no. 10 (1984), and "TheOrigins of Soviet Ritual Style: Symbol andFestival in the Russian Revolution," in ClaesArvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist, eds., Sym-bols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legit-imation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987).

18. Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);Christopher A. P. Binns, "The Changing Face ofPower: Revolution and Accommodation in theDevelopment of Soviet Ceremonial Systems,"Man, no. 4 (1979), no. 1 (1980).

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19. Many sources on the French fêtes wereavailable to Russians, including André Grétry,Memoires ou essais sur la musique (Liège:Vaillant-Carmanne, 1914); P. A. Kropotkin, TheGreat French Revolution, 17891793 (NewYork: G. P. Putnam, 1909); Julien Tiersot, Lesfêtes et les chants de la Revolution française(Paris: Hachette et cie, 1908)in Russian:Prazdnestva i pesni frantsuzskoi revoliutsii,trans. K. Zhikhareva (Petrograd: Izd. Parus,1917).

20. Eugene Zamiatin, We, trans. Gregory Zil-boorg (New York: Dutton, 1952), pp. 13132.

21. Lane, The Rites of Rulers, pp. 23.

Chapter OneThe Precursors

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1. This description has been condensed from theorganizer's account: G. S. Maliuchenko, "Pervyeteatral'nye sezony novoi epokhi," in U istokov,pp. 28587. The quotation is from Maliuchenko.I could not find any such article in the VoronezhTelegraph for that summer.

2. See A. Ia. Alekseev-Iakovlev, Russkie nar-odnye gulianiia, ed. Evg. Kuznetsov(Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1948), p. 144. See pp.100 ff. for descriptions of a number of such pro-ductions; for more shows (without descriptions)see the lists in Istoriia sovetskogo teatra (Lenin-grad: Academia, 1933), p. 153, or Nikolai A.Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia, trans.Edgar Lehrman (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1957), p. 421, note 77.

3. Iu. A. Dmitriev, Russkii tsirk (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1953), p. 194.

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4. Genkin, Massovye prazdniki, p. 33. On thecelebrations of Nicholas II

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and his immediate predecessors, see RichardWortman, "Moscow and Petersburg: TheProblem of the Political Center in TsaristRussia, 18811914," in Wilentz, Rites ofPower.

5. For the program, see N. N. Vinogradov, ed.,Prazdnovanie 300-letiia tsarstvovaniia DomaRomanovykh v kostromskoi gubernii 1920 maia1913 goda (Kostroma: Gub. tipografiia, 1914).

6. M. A. Chekhov, Put' aktera (Leningrad: Aca-demia, 1928), pp. 6469.

7. See V. V. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Istoriiarusskogo teatra (Leningrad: Teakinopechat',1929), vol. 1, 36064. The English reader willfind some descriptions in Robert K. Massie,Peter the Great (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp.14748, 26871, 74043.

8. It is described in Torzhestvuiushchaia Min-erva: Obshchenarodnoe zrelishche, predstavlen-noe bol'shim maskaradom v Moskve 1763 goda(Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii universitet,1763).

9. See Iu. A. Dmitriev, Mikhail Lentovskii (Mo-scow: Iskusstvo, 1978), pp. 19495. A special il-lustrated pamphlet was published also: Vesnakrasna, illustrated by F. O. Shekhtel' (Moscow,1883).

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10. This period is treated in Charles Rougle,"The Intelligentsia Debate in Russia 19171918,"in Nils Ake Nilsson, ed., Art, Society, Revolu-tion: Russia, 19171921 (Stockholm: Almqvist &Wiksell, 1979). Another discussion of the com-mission, and of the All-Arts Union, which willpresently be discussed, can be found in K. D.Muratova, M. Gor'kii v bor'be za razvitie sovet-skoi literatury (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1958), pp.2250. Although her discussion of leftist artistsbetrays a certain bias, the archival materialsused are of value. A more balanced treatmentcan be found in V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestven-naia zhizn' Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu(Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1983), pp.7385.

11. I thank Hubertus Jahn for this information.

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12. For the styles of interrevolutionary demon-strations, see Stites, "The Origins of SovietRitual Style," pp. 2329.

13. LGAOR, f. 2551, op. 1, d. 2246.

14. Noted by V. D[esnitsky], "Eshche nepozdno!" NZh, 21 April 1917, p. 2; Peter A.Garvi, Zapiski Sotsial-Demokrata, 19061921(Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Part-ners, 1982), p. 266.

15. See Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn', pp.11924.

16. See Oleg Nemiro, "Prazdnik svobody, vesnyi tsvetov," Neva, no. 5 (1967), pp. 2057. Moreevidence would be needed before this claimcould be accepted.

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17. Vo imia svobody. Odnodnevnaia gazeta(Petrograd: Soiuz deiatelei iskusstv, 25 May1917). The editor was Sologub.

18. In his Kollektivnaia refleksologiia (Petro-grad: Kolos, 1921), pp. 17679, the eminent psy-chophysiologist Vladimir Bekhterev used thebond campaign as an example of inflamedcrowd psychology.

19. A. Rostislavov, "Revoliutsiia ikhudozhestvennaia zhizn'," Rech', 26 May 1917,p. 3.

20. The attribution of the performance toGaideburov's group belongs to S. S. Mokul'skii,"Programma burzhuaznoi revoliutsii v teatre," inIstoriia

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sovetskogo teatra, p. 50. The description be-low is taken from L___v, ''Teatr i muzyka.Teatr na ulitse," Rech', 30 May 1917, p. 7.

21. See E. M. Bebutova, "Vospominaniia," in Izistorii stroitel'stva sovetskoi kul'tury: Moskva19171918 gg. (Moscow: Mysl', 1964).

22. This People's Art Academy is described in"Khronika," Put' osvobozhdeniia, no. 4 (1917),p. 21.

23. P. V. Kuznetsov, "Iskusstvo v 1917 godu,"in Iz istorii, pp. 31415.

24. Tiersot, Prazdnestva i pesni frantsuzskoi re-voliutsii. The translation project was begun be-fore the October Revolution.

25. A. V. Lunacharskii, "O narodnykhprazdnestvakh," VT, no. 62 (1920), p. 4.

26. Most notably, A. V. Lunacharskii, "Sotsial-izm i iskusstvo," in the anthology Teatr: Knigao novom teatre (St. Petersburg: Shipovnik,1908), and the social-democratic response tothis anthology, Krizis teatra: Sbornik statei(Moscow: Problemy iskusstva, 1908), in partic-ular V. Friche, "Teatr v sovremennom i budush-chem obshchestve."

27. Anatolii Strigalev, "Sviaz' vremen," Dekor-ativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 4 (1978), pp. 12.

28. Quoted from account reprinted in Lapshin,Khudozhestvennaia zhizn', p. 389.

29. M. Kuzmin, "Rampa geroizma," ZI, 20November 1918, p. 2.

30. M. Kuzmin, "Tsirk," ZI, 4 January 1919, pp.12.

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31. The best description is to be found in Iu.Iur'ev, Zapiski (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1963), pp.24969.

32. He had expressed the opinion even beforethe October Revolution: A. V. Lunacharskii,"Kul'tura sotsializma torzhestvuiushchego i sot-sializma boriushchegosia," NZh', 21 June 1917,p. 4. His stand was based more on Hegelianismthan cynicism.

33. Romain Rolland, Le théâtre du peuple(Paris: Suresnes, 1903). First translated in 1910,then 1919: Narodnyi teatr, introduction byViach. Ivanov (Petrograd-Moscow: Izd. TEONKP, 1919).

34. For the policy and practices of Proletkult,see Lynn Mally, Culture of the Future: The Pro-letkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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35. See, for instance, Sheldon Cheney, TheOpen-Air Theater (New York: Mitchell Ken-nerly, 1918), pp. 5 ff.

36. For example, Evg. Bezpiatov, "Teatr podotkrytym nebom," Narodnyi teatr, no. 34(1918), pp. 2527, or B. Nikonov, "Teatr, blizkiik prirode," ZI, 20 May 1919, p. 3.

37. Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre (NewYork: Mitchell Kennerly, 1912).

38. Ibid., p. 15.

39. For mention of MacKaye in the Soviet liter-ature, see besides Kerzhentsev's books (referredto in next note): A. A. Gvozdev, "Massovyeprazdnestva na zapade," in Massovyeprazdnestva, pp. 4850.

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40. "Doklad tov. V. Kerzhentsev," in P.I.Lebedev-Polianskii, ed., Protokoly pervoi vser-ossiiskoi konferentsii proletarskikh kul'turno-prosvetitel'nykh organizatsii,

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1520 sent. 1918 g. (Moscow: Proletarskaiakul'tura, 1918). The protocols of the sessionon theater are translated in William Rosen-berg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: The First Phaseof the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984), pp. 42835.The following two books were published aspractical and theoretical treatises (Kerzhent-sev explicitly separated the two): V.Kerzhentsev, Revoliutsiia i teatr (Moscow:Dennitsa, 1918) (practical program); andTvorcheskii teatr (five editions from 1918 to1923; all further citations are from the edi-tion published in Moscow by Gosizdat in1923). See pp. 2830 for his discussion ofMacKaye and the American festivals.

41. Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr, p. 23.

42. Ibid., p. 37.

43. Ibid., p. 44.

44. The word was used to translate MacKaye'sterm into Russian. See Gvozdev, "Massovyeprazdnestva na zapade," p. 48.

45. A. A. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre (Leningrad:Academia, 1932), vol. 2, p. 43.

46. Russkii-sovetskii teatr 19171921, p. 338.

47. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2, p. 321.

48. "Doklad tov. V. Kerzhentsev," p. 122.

49. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2, pp. 32223.On pp. 32131 of vol. 2 Mgebrov provides thebest description of the declamations, and minewill be based on his account. For a summary ofthe critical reaction, see the section "Studiia Pet-rogradskogo Proletkul'ta" in D. I. Zolotnitskii,Zori teatral'nogo oktiabria (Leningrad:Iskusstvo, 1976).

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50. See Russkii-sovetskii teatr 19171921, p. 347.

51. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2, p. 324. Thissort of staging led to accusations of an antireal-ist bias. Photos of another Proletkult inst-senirovka, Whitman's Europe, are in Plamia, 22September 1918, p. 13.

52. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2, pp. 32829.

53. Ibid., pp. 32930.

54. The influence of Wagner's pamphlets, whichwere reprinted in 1918, is discussed in Lars Kle-berg, "'People's Theater' and the Revolution. Onthe History of a Concept before and after 1917,"in Nilsson, ed., Art, Society, Revolution.

55. Lunacharskii, "Sotsializm i iskusstvo," inTeatr, p. 28.

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56. From Richard Wagner, Prose Works, trans.William Ashton Ellis (London: Kegan Paul,Trench, Trübner and Co., 1895), vol. 1, p. 90. ARussian translation was published in 1918:Iskusstvo i revoliutsiia (Petrograd: LITONarkomprosa, 1918).

57. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 74.

58. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 34.

59. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 5152.

60. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 59.

61. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and theArts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre,trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press,1960), p. 126.

62. Friche, "Teatr v sovremennom i budush-chem obshchestve," in Krizis teatra, p. 185.

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63. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family,Private Property and the State, trans. EleanorBurke Leacock (New York: International Pub-lishers, 1972), p. 237. The emphasis is Engels's.

64. See his articles on proletarian culture in A.A. Bogdanov, Iskusstvo i rabochii klass (Mo-scow: Proletarskaia kul'tura, 1918).

65. A. A. Bogdanov, Red Star: The FirstBolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1984), pp. 7679. This workwas first published in 1908 and was widely readbefore and after the Revolution.

66. Lunacharskii, "Sotsializm i iskusstvo," inTeatr, p. 30. For the development of his ideas onWagner, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, "Wagn-er and Wagnerian Ideas in Russia" in David C.Lange and William Weber, eds., Wagnerism inEuropean Culture and Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 24042.

67. N. K. Krupskaia, "Glavpolitprosvet iiskusstvo," P, 13 February 1921.

68. For a summary of Ivanov's views of theater,see Lars Kleberg, "Vjaceslav Ivanov and theIdea of Theater," in Lars Kleberg and Nils AkeNilsson, eds., Theater and Literature in Russia19001930 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell,1984).

69. A. Skriabin, Pis'ma (Moscow: Muzyka,1965), p. 15.

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70. See Alfred J. Swan, Scriabin (London: JohnLane, 1923), pp. 97111.

71. "Predchuvstviia i predvestiia" (1906), col-lected in Viacheslav Ivanov, Po zvezdam (St.Petersburg: Izd. Ory, 1909), p. 206. See also"Nitsshe i Dionis," in Ivanov, Po zvezdam, p. 8,and "The Essence of Tragedy," translated inLaurence Senelick, ed., Russian Dramatic The-ory from Pushkin to the Symbolists (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 210 ff.

72. "Predchuvstviia i predvestiia," in Ivanov, Pozvezdam, pp. 21213.

73. Viacheslav Ivanov, Borozdy i mezhi (Mo-scow: Musaget, 1916), p. 265.

74. The idea is best expressed in "Kop'e Afeny"(1904), collected in Ivanov, Po zvezdam.

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75. "Dve stixii v simvolizme" (1908), in Ivanov,Po zvezdam, p. 285.

76. "Predchuvstviia i predvestiia," in Ivanov, Pozvezdam, p. 218.

77. This view was forwarded notably by M.Gorky: The Confession, trans. Rose Strunsky(New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1909), chs. 14ff.

78. A. V. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsializm (St.Petersburg: Shipovnik, 190811), vol. 1, p. 16.

79. See the letter from Meyerhold to Briusov inV. E. Meyerhold, Perepiska, 18961939 (Mo-scow: Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 59.

Chapter TwoRevolution and Festivity

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1. U istokov, p. 281. The original grammar hasbeen preserved.

2. The following description is based on ibid.,pp. 27780.

3. "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in theDemocratic Revolution," in V. I. Lenin, Collec-ted Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers,196070), vol. 9, p. 113.

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4. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution,chs. 6 and 7.

5. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane,trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourtand Brace, 1959), particularly ch. 1; Bakhtin,Rabelais and His World.

6. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: TheMyth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R.Trask (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 46; seealso Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, ch. 1.

7. E. Speranskaia, "Materialy k istorii oform-leniia pervykh revoliutsionnykh prazdnestv vSaratove i Nizhnem Novgorode," in AMI(1971), p. 141.

8. The Smolny Institute was Bolshevikheadquarters during the October uprising.

9. "Monuments Not Made by Human Hands," inK. S. Malevich, Essays in Art, 19151933, ed.Troels Andersen (London: Rapp & Whiting,1968), vol. 1, p. 65.

10. See M. L[ev]in, "Miting ob iskusstve," IK, 7November 1918, p. 3.

11. Truman Guy Steffan, ed., Lord Byron's Cain(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), p.189.

12. Valerii Briusov, "Nenuzhnaia pravda," Miriskusstva, no. 4 (1902).

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13. Translated variously as "stylized," "relativ-istic," "conditional," and "conventional," itmeans ''agreed on.'' Conventional will be usedhere, with the reservation that it not have thenegative connotation of "routine." See V. Bri-usov, "Realizm i uslovnost' na stsene," in Teatr,translated as "Realism and Convention on theStage" in Senelick, ed., Russian Dramatic The-ory, pp. 17182.

14. Briusov, "Realism," p. 178.

15. V. E. Meyerhold, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi,besedy (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1968), vol. 1, p. 96.

16. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Dir-ector, trans. George Petrov (Ann Arbor, Mich.:Ardis, 1981), pp. 100101.

17. Meyerhold, Stat'i, vol. 1, p. 237.

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18. On this point, see Lars Kleberg, "People'sTheater and the Revolution: On the History of aConcept before and after 1917," in Nilsson, ed.,Art, Society, Revolution.

19. V. E. Meyerhold, "The Stylized Theatre," inVsevolod Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. EdwardBraun (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969), p. 63.

20. Meyerhold, "The Search for New Forms19021907," in Vsevold Meyerhold on Theatre,p. 56. First published in Teatr.

21. K. R., Tsar' Iudeiskii (St. Petersburg: Tipo-grafiia Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1914).This edition has photographs of the productiondescribed below. The play was translated intomany languages, including English: [GrandDuke] K[onstantin Konstantinovich]R[omanov], The King of the Jews: A SacredDrama, trans. Victor E. Marsden (New York:Funk and Wagnalls, 1914).

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22. In late 1920 Soviet critics were still fulmin-ating against the play: "Opium dlia naroda," VT,no. 70 (1920), pp. 89.

23. Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, p. 13.

24. Victor Marsden, who translated the play intoEnglish, was also the enthusiastic translator ofThe Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,translated from the Russian of Nilus by VictorE. Marsden (London: The Britons, 1923).

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25. Dimitri Tiomkin and Prosper Buranelli,Please Don't Hate Me (Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday, 1959), p. 43. The score is includedin the Russian edition of the play.

26. Most of the above information was takenfrom N. N. Gievskii, "Iz teatral'nykh vospomin-anii," Novyi zhurnal, no. 10 (1945), pp. 28288,291.

27. On Bakhtin and GIII, see Katerina Clark andMichael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1984), 9697.

28. Characteristically, a GIII colleague saw theFeast of Fools as an expression of class struggle.See A. A. Gvozdev, Massovye prazdnestva nazapade (Petergof, 1926), p. 19.

29. A prominent advocate of festivity's revolu-tionary potential was Adrian Piotrovsky, ascholar at GIII and leading director of massspectacles in 191920. See, for instance, his "Kteorii samodeiatel'nogo teatra," in Problemy sot-siologii iskusstva (Leningrad: Academia, 1926).

30. See D. S. Likhachev, A. M. Panchenko, andN. V. Ponyrko, Smekhovoi mir drevnei Rusi(Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), pp. 2535; and Rus-sell Zguta, "Peter I's Drunken Synod of Foolsand Jesters," Jahrbücher für GeschichteOsteuropas 21, no. 1 (1973), pp. 1828.

31. Evg. Vakhtangov, Materialy i stat'i (Mo-scow: VTO, 1959), pp. 1045.

32. V. Smyshliaev, "Opyt instsenirovki stik-hotvoreniia Verkharna 'Vosstaniia,'" Gorn, no.23 (1919), p. 82.

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33. See "The Tragical in Daily Life," in MauriceMaeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, trans.Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903),pp. 1059.

34. This information has been culled from alonger description: V. Piast, Vstrechi (Moscow:Federatsiia, 1929), pp. 16980.

35. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2, p. 202.

36. From Meyerhold's production notes, in Vse-volod Meyerhold on Theatre, p. 143.

37. The history of the problem is discussed byLars Kleberg, "Sootnoshenie stseny i zritel'nogozala. K tipologii russkogo teatra nachala XXveka," ScandoSlavica 20 (1974).

38. Andrei Bely, "Theater and Modern Drama,"in Teatr; translated in Senelick, ed., RussianDramatic Theory, p. 158.

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39. Ibid., p. 159.

40. Aleksandr Blok, "On Drama," in Senelick,ed., Russian Dramatic Theory, p. 110.

41. Balaganchik, in Aleksandr Blok, Sobraniesochinenii (Moscow: Khudozh. literatura, 1963),vol. 4, p. 20.

42. This period is well documented. See V. V.Sipovskii, "Italianskii teatr pri Anne Ioannov-ne," Russkaia starina, no. 5, June 1900, pp.593611; or V. N. Perets, Italianskie komedii i in-termedii, predstavlennye pri dvore imp. AnnyIoannovny v 17331735 gg. (Petrograd: Imp. aka-demiia nauk, 1917).

43. See T. M. Rodina, Aleksandr Blok i russkiiteatr nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1972),p. 133.

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44. In the Foreword to his Lyrical Dramas, oneof which was Balaganchik, in Blok, Sobraniesochinenii, vol. 4, p. 434.

45. On prerevolutionary Russian cabarets, seeHarold B. Segel, Turn-of-the-

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Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin,Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St.Petersburg, Zurich (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1987).

46. For readers of English there is an excellentmonograph on Evreinov: Spencer Golub,Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Trans-formation (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI ResearchPress, 1984).

47. Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov, The Theatrein Life, trans. Alexander I. Nazaroff (New York:Brentano's, 1927), p. 30.

48. Aleksandr Tairov, Proklamatsiia khudozh-nika (Moscow: Shlugleit i Bronshtein, 1917), p.4.

49. See my article on Nietzsche and the Sovietpopular theater, "Nietzsche and the Debate onMass Theater from the Civil War to NEP," inBernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche inRussia, vol. 2 (forthcoming).

50. "K prazdniku revoliutsii," VIMS, 26 Septem-ber 1918, p. 3.

51. V. E. Meyerhold, "Voina i teatr," Birzhevyevedemosti (evening edition), 11 September1914, p. 4.

52. P. S. Kogan, "Teatr tribuna," VT, no. 2(1919), see also P. S. Kogan, V preddveriigriadushchego teatra (Moscow: Pervina, 1921),p. 14.

53. N. N. Evreinov, V shkole ostroumiia [unpub-lished memoirs]. TsGALI, f. 982, op. 1, d. 13,II. 3132.

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54. The script is in Liubov' k trem apel'sinam,no. 67 (1914), pp. 1955.

55. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Misteriia-Buff, geroi-cheskoe i satiricheskoe izobrazhenie nasheiepokhi, 1918 g, in V. V. Maiakovskii, Polnoesobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozh. liter-atura, 195561).

56. V. Katanian, Maiakovskii, literaturnaiakhronika (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1948),pp. 90, 102, places it after February;Mayakovsky dates the idea to early fall: "Iasam," PSS, vol. 1, p. 24. Most of the writing wasdone in 1918: A. Fevral'skii, Pervaia sovetskaiap'esa (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1971), pp. 18ff.

57. N. Punin, "Kak moglo byt' inache?" IK, 12January 1919, p. 1.

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58. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: Live Artfrom 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry N.Abrams, 1979), pp. 910.

59. M. Zagorskii, "Kak reagiruet zritel'," Lef, no.2 (1924), pp. 14151.

60. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A His-tory (Berkeley: University of California Press,1968), p. 107.

61. See John E. Bowlt, "The Union of Youth,"in George Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma, eds., Rus-sian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde,19001930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress, 1976), pp. 17780, and Markov, RussianFuturism, pp. 14247.

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62. On the apocalyptic tendency in prerevolu-tionary culture, see B. G. Rosenthal, "Eschato-logy and the Appeal of the Revolution:Merezhkovsky, Bely, Blok," California SlavicStudies, no. 2 (1980).

63. As shown in Mayakovsky's sketches, in-cluded in the PSS text.

64. S. V. Vladimirov, "Maiakovskii," in Ocherkiistorii russkoi-sovetskoi dramaturgii, 19171934(Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1963), vol. 1, p. 102. Forsome interesting ideas on the influence of thefolk theater on the Russian revolutionary theat-er, see N. S. Zelentsova, Narodnyi revoliutsion-nyi teatr v Rossii epokhi grazhdanskoi voiny irevoliutsii (Moscow, 1971).

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65. See Edward Braun, The Theatre of Meyer-hold. Revolution and the Modern Stage (NewYork: Drama Book Specialists, 1979), p. 150.

66. The recollections of V. N. Soloviev, Mai-akovskomu (Leningrad: Khudozh. literatura,1940), p. 149.

67. The Kozlinsky drawings appeared originallyin Oktiabr' 19171918. Geroi i zhertvy Oktiabria(Petrograd: IZO Narkomprosa, 1918); both thedrawings and the street paintings are in MikhailGerman, ed., Serdtsem slushaia revoliutsiiu.Iskusstvo pervykh let oktiabria (Leningrad: Aur-ora, 1980), plates 148, 9499.

68. See Rudnitsky, Meyerhold the Director, p.256. Contrary to what historians have claimed, apicture of Malevich's work has survived; seeNovyi zritel', 7 November 1927, p. 6.

69. German, ed., Serdtsem, plate 305.

70. According to Fevral'skii, Pervaia sovetskaiap'esa, p. 73.

71. Alekseev-Iakovlev, Russkie narodnyegulianiia, pp. 16263.

72. For the presence of popular theater in thepoem, see B. M. Gasparov and Iu. M. Lotman,"Igrovye motivy v poème Dvenadtsat," Tezisy IVsesoiuznoi konferentsii "Tvorchestvo A. A.Bloka i russkaia kul'tura XX veka" (Tartu,1975), and Iu. M. Lotman, "Blok i narodnaiakul'tura goroda," in Blokovskii sbornik, vol. 4(Tartu: Gos. universitet, 1981).

73. Maiakovskii, Misteriia-Buff, p. 212. Thepassage suffers much in translation.

Chapter ThreeThe Politics of Meaning and Style

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1. "Petrograd 1-e maia," P, 4 May 1918, p. 4.

2. AMI (1971), p. 13.

3. Gushchin, Izo-iskusstvo v massovykhprazdnestvakh, p. 12.

4. Ibid., pp. 1213.

5. Oleg Nemiro, V gorod prishel prazdnik (Len-ingrad: Aurora, 1973), pp. 1516.

6. AMI (1971), p. 138.

7. AMI (1971), pp. 1920, plates 56; AMI (1984),plates 3639; A. Strigalev, "M. V. Dobuzhinskiiv revoliutsionnye gody," Sovetskoemonumental'noe iskusstvo, no. 7577 (1979), pp.24456.

8. N. P[unin], "K itogam oktiabr' skikhtorzhestv," IK, 7 December 1918.

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9. See Iz istorii, pp. 121 ff., for the protocols ofsome of the planning sessions.

10. A. Chiniakov, Brat'ia Vesniny (Moscow:Stroiizdat, 1970), p. 50. See AMI (1971), plates7292.

11. Blokovskii sbornik, vol. 1, p. 332.

12. V. Kerzhentsev, "Peredelyvaite p'esy," VT,no. 36 (1919), pp. 68.

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13. V. Kerzhenstev, "Mozhno li 'iskazhat" p'esypostanovkoi," VT, no. 1 (1919), p. 2.

14. V. Smyshliaev, "Deiatel'nost' teatral'nogo ot-dela Moskovskogo Proletkul'ta," VT, no. 35(1919), p. 5.

15. N. F., "Novye stsenarii dlia opery Glinki,"VT, no. 8990 (1921), pp. 1213.

16. N. Malkov, "Za krasnyi Petrograd," ZI, 5May 1925, p. 10.

17. For a collection of eyewitness reports, seeSpektakl', zvavshii v boi (Kiev: Mistetstvo,1970). For a contemporary view, see L. Nikulin,"Teatr na Ukraine. Pis'mo iz Kieva," VT, no. 33(1919), p. 16.

18. Presumably the opera Fidelio, traditionallyperformed with the "Lenore" overture, whichends in the liberation of political prisoners and afreedom chorus.

19. "Opera S.R.D.," TK, 1214 November 1918,pp. 23; "V teatrakh. Opera S.R.D." IzvTsIK, 9November 1918, p. 5. See also Igor Il'inskii,Sam o sebe (Moscow: VTO, 1961), pp. 8688.

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20. AMI (1971), pp. 99100. A black-and-whitephoto of the curtain can be found in René Fülöp-Miller and Joseph Gregor, The Russian Theatre(New York: Benjamin Blom, 1930), p. 257. A.Raikhenshtein"1 maia i 7 noiabria 1918 g. vMoskve," in AMI (1971)provides sufficientevidence for the planning of such a performancefor November 1918, but it should be noted thatLentulov dated it to 1923 and claimed the dir-ector was Nemirovich-Danchenko: M. Lentu-lova, Khudozhnik Aristarkh Lentulov (Moscow:Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1969), pp. 9596. BolshoiTheater archives date the performance toNovember 1919: Russkii-sovetskii teatr, p. 92.

21. Pavel Markov, "Pervye gody," Teatr, no. 11(1957), p. 67; see also "Teatr v oktiabr'skietorzhestva. Bol'shoi teatr," TK, 1214 November1918, pp. 23.

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22. Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels 16001800(New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 26567.

23. Quoted in Alexander Rabinowitch, TheBolsheviks Come to Power (New York: Norton,1976), p. 277.

24. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 29, p. 331. Toadd another twist to history, the monument ded-icated by Lenin was first proposed by the inter-revolutionary Cossack Committee: "PamiatnikRazinu," DN, 30 April 1918, p. 3.

25. AMI (1971), pp. 8586.

26. AMI (1984), plate 55.

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27. Information on the presentation is sparse. Ibelieve it was a staging of his poem of the samename, published in Moscow in 1918. In 1919 adramatic text based on the poem was published:Vasilii Kamenskii, Sten'ka Razin. Kollektivnoepredstavlenie v 9-i kartinakh (Petrograd, 1919).On November 7, 1918, though, Kamensky didstar in a reading of the poem, in a circus fromatop a horse: "Grandioznoe zrelishche," TK, 29October 1918, p. 2; Iurii Sobolev, "Sten'kaRazin," TK, 1214 November 1918, p. 3.

28. Fragments of the poem were published as"Chugunnoe zhit'e" in the futurist anthologyMoloko kobylits: sbornik. Risunki, stikhi, proza(Moscow: Gileia, 1914).

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29. Vasilii Kamenskii, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy(Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1966), p. 469.

30. See A. I. Klibanov, Narodnaia sotsial'naiautopiia v Rossii: XIX vek (Moscow: Nauka,1978), or Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, pp.1419.

31. Lunacharskii, Religiia i sotsialism.

32. AMI (1971), p. 95; Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin(Leningrad: Aurora, 1980).

33. Proletarskie poety pervykh let sovetskoiepokhi (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1959), p.232; my translation.

34. Pavel Arskii, "Gimn," Pl, 12 May 1918, p. 7.

35. B. Shishlo, "Ulitsa revoliutsii," Dekorat-ivnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 3 (1970), p. 6.

36. Nikolai Petrov, 50 i 500, pp. 1516.

37. Viktor Shklovskii, "Soglashateli," in Khodkonia (Berlin: Helikon, 1923).

38. P. Kozlov, Legenda o kommunare. P'esa-poema v 5 kartinakh (Arkhangelsk: Volna,1923), p. 5. The play actually has only threescenes. Summaries of the text and performancecan be found in Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatre, vol. 2,pp. 480500, and L. Tamashin, Sovetskaia dram-aturgiia v gody grazhdanskoi voiny (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1961), pp. 9094.

39. Kozlov, Legenda, pp. 23.

40. Ibid., p. 16.

41. Mgebrov, Zhizn' v teatr, vol. 2, p. 483.

42. M. Zagorskii, "Legenda o kommunare," VT,no. 56 (1920), p. 9.

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43. Kozlov, Legenda, p. 22.

44. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in theFrench Revolution; Agulhon, Marianne intoBattle. For a study of the use of a similar ap-proach by Russian revolutionary culture, seeVictoria E. Bonnell, "The Representation ofPolitics and the Politics of Representation," Rus-sian Review 47 (1988).

45. This idea was put forward by Maurice Agul-hon, "Politics, Images and Symbols in Post-Re-volutionary France," in Wilentz, Rites of Power,p. 185.

46. IzvTslK, 14 April 1918, p. 3.

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47. "Lenin o monumental'noi propagande," inLiteraturnaia gazeta, no.45 (1933). Reprinted inA. V. Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia i vpecha-tleniia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1968), p.199. Lunacharsky recorded his memoirs in1933, when Lenin's views on art had acquiredmore sanctity than they had in 1918, and I sus-pect that his enthusiasm was magnified in theaccount. For an unexpurgated view of what Len-in thought of the statues (he hated them) and ofart in general, see A. V. Lunacharskii, "Lenin iiskusstvo," Khudozhnik i zritel', no. 23 (1924),pp. 510. Later reprints of this article have beenheavily edited.

48. Sergei Eisenstein used footage of these "ce-remonies" in Ten Days That Shook the World.

49. Iz istorii, pp. 3844.

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50. At the dedication of the monument to Blan-qui, a brochure with the title Blanqui: the FirstCommunist Buried Alive was distributed: "Kotkrytiiu pamiatnika Blanki," ZI, 4 March 1919,p. 3.

51. See IzvTsIK, 2 August 1918. The list givenhere differs somewhat from that in Iz istorii.

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52. For a full schedule of the openings, see "Kprazdnovaniiu godovshchiny oktiabr'skoi revoli-utsii," P, 6 November 1918, p. 4. Some of thespeeches were amplified by a new inventioncommissioned by the Central Organizing Bur-eau: the loudspeaker. See "Liubopytnoe izobret-enie," ZI, 29 October 1918, p. 7.

53. Robespierre's statue was vandalized on itsfirst night outdoors. This desecration should nothave been a surprise: in his opening speech, LevKamenev praised Robespierre for "crushing theFrench counterrevolution with an iron hand andcreating a Red Army." "Iz Moskvy," SK, 5November 1918, p. 3.

54. For photos see Hans-Jürgen Drengenberg,Die sowjetische Politik auf dem Gebiet derbildenden Kunst von 1917 bis 1934 (Wiesbaden:Harrassowitz, 1972); also John E. Bowlt, "Rus-sian Sculpture and Lenin's Plan of MonumentalPropaganda," in Henry A. Millon and LindaNochlin, eds., Art and Architecture in the Ser-vice of Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978),pp. 188191. The Drengenberg book includes acollection of documents relevant to the subject.

55. St. Krivtsov, "Novye pamiatniki," Iskusstvo,no. 6 [10] (1918), pp. 79; Lunacharskii, Vo-spominaniia, pp. 199, 193; Arthur Ransome, SixWeeks in Russia in 1919 (London: G. Allen &Unwin, 1919), p. 10; Lunacharskii, Vospomin-aniia, p. 192.

56. Ol'sen, "Otkliki," Voronezhskii telegraf, 17May 1918, p. 3.

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57. Quoted in Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, p.192.

58. Ibid., p. 198. The source is Tommaso Cam-panella, The City of the Sun, trans. Daniel I.Donno (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1981).

59. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner(London: Penguin, 1965), p. 106. The passagecontinues: "But anyone who deliberately tries toget himself elected to a public office is perman-ently disqualified from holding one."

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60. David and neoclassicism were of course notthe only French influence. P. Zhilin's poster forthe November 7, 1918, festival, Long Live theGreat Anniversary of the Proletarian Revolu-tion. Long Live the Commune, bears a strikingresemblance to Eugène Delacroix's romanticLiberty Leading the People For Zhilin's poster,see Nadezhda Suliaeva, Revoliutsionnyiprazdnichnyi plakat, 19171927 (Leningrad:Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1982).

61. Brudnyi, Obriady vchera i segodnia, p. 61.

62. Lunacharsky suggested dating the new era inRussia from the October Revolution rather thanfrom the birth of Christ in an address to studentsin 1918: TsGA RSFSR, f. 2306, op. 2, d. 224, 1.5.

63. For a discussion of Soviet holidays, seeBinns, "The Changing Face of Power," Man, no.4 (1979), pp. 586 ff.

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64. "Pereimenovanie ulits," SK, 13 November1918, p. 5. For Moscow, see "Prigotovlenie koktiabr'skim prazdnestvam," IzvTsIK, 23 Octo-ber 1918.

65. "K godovshchine revoliutsii. Otdel IZONarkomprosa" VIMS, 20 October 1918.

66. Goriaeva, "Pervaia godovshchina," p. 126.

67. "Aviatsionnaia katastrofa," NZh, 3 May1918, p. 3; "Katastrofa s aeroplanom," DN, 3May 1918, p. 2. (These were both oppositionnewspapers.)

68. "Na otkrytii pamiatnikov," IzvTsIK, 5November 1918, p. 5, and V. Rikhter, "Pervaiagodovshchina," in Vchera i segodnia (Moscow:Khudozh. literatura, 1960), vol. 1, p. 26.

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69. P. D. Mal'kov, Zapiski komendantaMoskovskogo Kremlia (Moscow: Molodaiagvardiia, 1961), pp. 13435.

70. "Chudo na Krasnoi Ploshchadi," IzvPS, 3May 1918, p. 4.

71. See Lane, The Rites of Rulers, or Mazaev,Prazdnik, for the application of the theory to thehistory of Soviet festivals. A vast Soviet literat-ure on the subject sprang up in the 1960s and1970s.

72. A. A. Bogdanov [Malinovskii], Pervoemaia. Mezhdunarodnyi prazdnik truda (Petro-grad: G. V. Belopol'skii, 1917), p. 9.

73. "Pervoe maia 1918 goda," Pl, 12 May 1918;reprinted in Lunacharskii, Vospominaniia, p.212.

74. D. Donskoi, "Khleba i zrelishch. K demon-stratsii 1-go Maia, DN, 26 April 1918, p. 1;"Chrezvychainoe sobranie upolnomochennykhfabrik i zavodov Petrograda," DN, 30 April1918, p. 4; Veniamin Spavskii, "Tserkov' i per-voe maia," IzvPS, 1 May 1918, p. 4; "Anarkhistyo prazdnovanii pervogo maia," IzvPS, 1 May1918, p. 6.

75. "Petrograd," IzvTsIK, 1 May 1918.

76. Mazaev, Prazdnik, p. 248; I. Rostovtseva,"Uchastie khudozhnikov v organizatsii iprovedenii prazdnovaniia 1 maia i 7 noiabria vPetrograde v 1918 g.," in AMI (1971), pp. 1011;Nemiro, V gorod prishel prazdnik, p. 7.

77. AMI (1971), p. 39.

78. "Prigotovleniia k prazdnestvu pervogomaia," DN, 27 April 1918, p. 3.

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79. "Rabochaia zhizn'," DN, 30 April 1918, p. 4,and 1 May 1918, p. 4; "Rabochie i manifestat-siia," NZh, 3 May 1918, p. 3.

80. For the fullest reports, see DN, 3 May 1918;NZh, 3 May 1918.

81. See "Obzor pechati. Posle pervogo maia,"NZh, 4 May 1918, p. 1.

82. Pl, 12 May 1918.

83. "Velikaia godovshchina. Ob"iazatel'nyepostanovleniia tsentral'nogo biuro po organizat-sii prazdnestv godovshchiny oktiabr'skoi revoli-utsii," SK, 1 November 1918, p. 4.

84. A. V. Lunacharskii, "Pervyi pervomaiskiiprazdnik posle pobedy," Krasnaia niva, no. 18(1926).

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85. This battle has been well documented: see,for example, Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij andFuturism, 19171921 (Stockholm: Almqvist andWiksell, 1977), pp. 9598.

86. "K prazdnovaniiu godovshchiny oktiabr'skoirevoliutsii," P, 1 November 1918, p. 3.

87. A. Raikhenshtein, "1 maia i 7 noiabria 1918g. v Moskve," p. 77.

88. From the protocols of a December 10, 1918,TEO meeting. Russkiisovetskii teatr, p. 49.

89. LGAOR, f. 2551, op. 1, dd. 2250 and 2357.

90. Nemiro, V garod prishel prazdnik, p. 7.

91. "Velikaia godovshchina. Ob"iazatel'nyepostanovleniia," p. 4; "Podgotovitel'nye raboty,"SK, 26 October 1918.

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92. "Biusty i portrety vozhdei proletariata," KG,30 October 1918.

93. The title is abbreviated here.

94. P, 2 November 1918.

95. PP, 25 September 1918. Reprinted in MariiaFedorovna Andreeva

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Perepiska, vospominaniia. Stat'i, dokumenty,vospominaniia o M. F. Andreevoi (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1961), p. 258.

96. "Prikaz komiteta po ustroistvu oktiabr'skikhtorzhestv," IzvTsIK, 5 November 1918, p. 4.

97. Rikhter, "Pervaia godovshchina," vol. 1, p.25. I did not believe such munificence possible,but it is confirmed in P, 1 November 1918. Ex-travagance in a time of great deprivation was toremain a feature of Civil War holidays. An extraration had also been distributed for May Day;yet three days later, the daily ration for all cit-izens was cut drastically, to one-eighth of apound: "Moskva bez khleba," PP, 4 May 1918,p. 5.

98. AMI (1971), p. 140.

99. Quoted in Nils Ake Nilsson, "Spring 1918.The Arts and the Commissars," in Nilsson, ed.,Art, Society, Revolution, p. 45.

100. Istoriko-revoliutsionnye pamiatniki SSSR(Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), pp. 56.

101. Iurii Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech(New York: Inter-language Literary Associates,1966), vol. 2, p. 265. The quotation should read,"War is the locomotive of history."

102. AMI (1971) credits the work to Lentulov.S. M. Alianskii, "Vstrechi s Blokom," Novyimir, no. 6 (1967), pp. 18283, credits Annenkov.For a black-and-white photo, see AMI (1984),plate 133.

103. AMI (1984), plates 13940.

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104. Mark Shagal, "Pis'mo iz Vitebska," IK, 22December 1918. Unfortunately, in his enthusi-asm Chagall failed to mention what was painted.In his My Life, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (NewYork: Orion Press, 1960), p. 139, he mentionscows and horses; but I expect it was less thesubject than the manner that raised the fuss.

105. See, for instance, Evg. Kuznetsov, "Komis-sar teatrov," in Andreeva, Perepiska, vospomin-aniia, p. 416.

106. Ia. Tugenkhol'd, Iskusstvo oktiabr'skoiepokhi (Leningrad: Academia, 1930), p. 17.

107. See AMI (1984), plates 2435. Altman's de-scription of his intent is to be found on pp. 6465.

108. Semen Rodov, "Prazdnik Ery," Gorn, no.23 (1919), p. 122. Rodov later gained notorietyas a critic with the "Na Postu" (On Guard)group.

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109. "Ukrashenie Petrograda," ZI, 9 November1918, p. 2. Also "K oktiabr'skim torzhestvam,"ZI, 6 November 1918, p. 3; "Prazdnikoktiabr'skoi revoliutsii,"IzvTsIK, 9 November1918, p. 5; N. Barabanov, "Kartiny oktiabr'skikhprazdnestv," Vestnik zhizni, no. 34 (1919), pp.11620; ''Na Krasnoi Ploshchadi," Vestnik zhizni,no. 34 (1919), p. 118; Leonid Dashkov, ''Naprazdnestve revoliutsii," RM, 24 November1918, pp. 3033. Curiously, futurist work inKazan also drew praise from local critics: "Pro-letarskii prazdnik," Znamia revoliutsii (Kazan),10 November 1918.

110. The negative article most frequently citedis: En. K. [M. F. Andreeva], "Neudachnyi debi-ut," ZI, 6 March 1919. Andreeva was editor ofthis newspaper. The article, somewhat distorted,is attributed to her in Andreeva, Perepiska, vo-spominaniia, pp. 41617. Other negative articlesare: A. Evgen'ev, "Futuris-

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ticheskaia gekuba i proletariat," Vestnik lit-eratury, no. 10 (1919); V. Kriazhin, "Futur-izm i revoliutsiia," Vestnik zhizni, no. 67(1919); Lev Pumpianskii, "Oktiabr'skietorzhestva i khudozhniki Petrograda," Pl, 5January 1919; E. Khersonskaia, ''Iz to-varishcheskikh besed o zhivopisi,'' Gorn, no.23 (1919). However, the Pumpiansky articleexpresses unequivocal praise of the leftistartists. And in the Khersonskaia article nomention is made of the holiday, although thedisapproval of decorated houses might be ahint. But Khersonskaia had written anotherarticle immediately following the celebra-tion that demanded that easel painting be re-placed by the decoration of buildings, whichwas a futurist slogan: E. Khersonskaia, "Onovom tvorchestve. Iz dnevnika liubiteliaiskusstv," Iskusstvo, No. 6 [10] (1918), pp.1213. In addition, the Gorn article was fol-lowed immediately in the same issue by the

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Rodov article quoted previously and by an-other article full of praise: N. Volkov,"Krasnaia Moskva," Gorn, no. 23 (1919), p.123. The unfortunate impression one gets isthat scholars have not bothered to read thearticles they cite.

111. Tamara Karsavina, Theatre Street (NewYork: E. P. Dutton, 1931), p. 327.

112. Andreeva, Perepiska, vospominaniia, p.416. I have seen no other report of anyone re-ceiving such letters, nor have the letters them-selves been seen.

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113. AMI (1984), p. 86. The editors of the col-lection give the document a faulty date, follow-ing I. Matsa, Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let; Ma-terialy i dokumentatsiia (Moscow: Ogiz-Izogiz,1933), p. 37. Matsa changed the date fromFebruary 9 to April 9, I assume to make Fricheseem the aggressor and IZO the victim in thefollowing events.

114. V. Friche, "Literaturnoe odichanie," VIMS,15 February 1919, p. 1.

115. See, for example, "K godovshchineoktiabr'skoi revoliutsii," IzvTsIK, 6 October1918.

116. O. D. Kameneva, "Pis'mo v redaktsiiu,"VIMS, 1 March 1919, p. 3.

117. AMI (1984), p. 86.

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118. "Vladimir Il'ich i ukrashenie krasnoistolitsy," in V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, Vospomin-aniia o Lenine (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), pp.38081. How this statement squares withKrupskaia's recollection that November 7, 1918,was the happiest day of Lenin's life I do notknow.

119. A. Talanov, Bol'shaia sud'ba (Moscow:Politicheskaia literatura, 1967), pp. 14849.

120. En. K., "Neudachnyi debiut." Should thereby any doubt that the campaign was a Moscowimport, see an article with identical complaintsand often identical wording: Mikh. Levidov,"Kto nasledniki?" Ezhenedel'nik pravdy, 2March 1919, pp. 1314.

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121. See M. Dobuzhinskii, "Bomba ilikhlopushka? Beseda dvukh khudozhnikov,"NZh, 4 May 1918, p. 3; "Pervoe maia 1918goda," DN, 3 May 1918, p. 2 (including "Den'futurizma i krasnoarmeistva").

122. Andreeva, Perepiska, vospominaniia, p. 87.

123. AMI (1971), p. 39. The decision to acceptIZO's petition was reported in "V Otdele podelam iskusstva i khudozhestvennoi promysh-lennosti," IK, 6 April 1919, p. 3.

124. Modernists, though, were not bannedeverywhere: they made impor-

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tant contributions in Saratov and other cities,including Odessa, where the poet Max Vo-loshin and the artist Aleksandra Exter helpeddirect the festivities: A. Niurenberg, Vo-spominaniia, vstrechi, mysli ob iskusstve(Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1969), pp.78.

125. "Ukrashenie k pervomu maia," IK, 16March 1919, p. 4, in AMI (1984).

126. "K pervomaiskim torzhestvam," VT, no. 22(1919), pp. 34.

127. V. M. Friche, "Znachenie narodnykhprazdnestv," VIMS, 11 February 1919, p. 1.

128. Alexei Tolstoy, Road to Calvary, trans.Edith Bone (New York: Knopf, 1946), pp.43637.

Chapter FourNew Uses for Popular Culture

1. I. I. Vasil'ev-Viaz'min, Iskusstvo liudnykhploshchadei (Moscow: Znanie, 1977), p. 8.

2. A. V. Lunacharskii, "Budem smeiat'sia," inLunacharskii, Stat'i o teatre i dramaturgii (Mo-scow: Iskusstvo, 1938), pp. 16465.

3. Fine descriptions of Russian carnival culturecan be found in Nekrylova, Russkie narodnyegorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniia i zrelishcha,and AlekseevIakovlev, Russkie narodnyegulianiia. No one should miss the magical de-scription in Alexandre Benois, Memoirs (Lon-don: Chatto & Windus, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 11730.

4. Quoted in Dmitriev, Russkii tsirk, p. 32.

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5. Adolphe L. de Custine, Journey for Our Time(Chicago: H. Regnery, 1951), p. 141. Custinenoted that the equality was due to a mutual andabsolute abasement before the tsar.

6. See Ivan Shcheglov, "Narodnye gulianiia vMoskve," in Shcheglov, V zashchitu narodnogoteatra (St. Petersburg: V. Kirshbaum, 1903).

7. "Khronika," ZI, 29 April 1919, p. 2.

8. Trotsky, incidentally, would eventually con-ceive the same notion: see "Vodka, the Churchand the Cinema" (1923) in Leon Trotsky, Prob-lems of Everyday Life, and Other Writings onCulture & Science (New York: Monad Press,1973).

9. Aleksandr Benois, "Vykhod iskusstva naulitsu," NZh, 4 June 1917, p. 3.

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10. Protocols of the commission can be found inLGAOR, f. 2551, op. 1, dd. 2250, 2357.

11. "K sniatiiu pamiatnika NikolaiuNikolaevichu," ZI, 15 November 1918, p. 4.

12. See V. A. Nevskii, Massovaia politiko-prosvetitel'naia rabota revoliutsionnykh let(Moscow: Gudok, 1925), for a thorough over-view of these methods, including their successesand failures.

13. VT, no. 22 (1919), p. 3, in AMI (1984), p.93.

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14. Mazaev, Prazdnik, p. 292.

15. See V. Golovasevich and V. Lashchilin,Narodnyi teatr na Donu (Rostov: Rostizdat,1947), pp. 2728, 5558.

16. For descriptions, see "Sud nad Vrangelem,"VT, no. 7273 (1920), pp. 1617; "Obzor agitat-sionnogo materiala. Instsenirovka agitat-sionnykh sudov," Vestnik agitatsii i propa-gandy, 25 November 1920, pp. 2527; RenéFülöpMiller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism(New York: Knopf, 1928), pp. 2012 (with inac-curacies); Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr, pp.14748; and Vsevolod Vishnevskii, "20-letie sov-etskoi dramaturgii," Sovetskie dramaturgi osvoem tvorchestve (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967),pp. 14950.

17. Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr, p. 147.

18. Rolland, Le théâtre du peuple, pp. 12124.For the views of Gorky and Lunacharsky, see G.V. Titova, "A. V. Lunacharskii o revoliutsionno-romanticheskom teatre," in Teatr i dramaturgiia(Leningrad, 1967), or V. K. Aizenshtadt,Russkaia sovetskaia istoricheskaia dramaturgiia19171929 (Kharkov: KhGIK, 1969), vol. 1, pp.2728.

19. A. V. Lunacharskii, "Kakaia nam nuzhnamelodrama" (1919), in Lunacharskii, Sobraniesochinenii (Moscow: Khudozh. literatura, 1964),vol. 2, p. 213.

20. Russkii-sovetskii teatr, p. 359.

21. Iu. M. Lotman, "Khudozhestvennaia prirodarusskikh narodnykh kartinok," in Narodnaiagraviura i fol'klor v Rossii XVIIXIX vv. (Mo-scow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976). See alsoZelentsova, Narodnyi revoliutsionnyi teatr, p.31.

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22. "K oktiabr'skim torzhestvam," ZI, 5 Novem-ber 1918, p. 4.

23. LGAOR, f. 2551, op. 1, d. 2246, I. 6.

24. U istokov, pp. 29596.

25. See "M. Gorkii o kinematografe," VT, no. 30(1919), p. 10, for the original idea.

26. Iu. A. Dmitriev, Sovetskii tsirk (Moscow:Iskusstvo, 1963), p. 24.

27. Shklovskii, "Iskusstvo tsirk," in Shklovskii,Khod konia, p. 138.

28. For Lunacharsky's views on the conversionof the circus to the new order, see "Zadachi ob-novlennogo tsirka" (1919) in A. V. Lun-acharskii, O massovykh prazdnestvakh, estrade itsirke (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981).

29. Dmitriev, Sovetskii tsirk, p. 33.

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30. Text translated in Frantishek Déak, "TheAgit-Prop and Circus Plays of VladimirMayakovsky," Drama Review 17, no. 1 (March1973). Something similar had already been doneunder different circumstances in the UnitedStates: see MacKaye, The Civic Theatre, p. 71.

31. For the best descriptions, see Annenkov,Dnevnik moikh vstrech, vol. 2, pp. 44955; Shk-lovskii, "Dopolnennyi Tolstoi," in Shklovskii,Khod konia; and Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral'nogooktiabria, pp. 23439.

32. N. N[osko]v, "Pervyi vinokur," ZI, 24September 1919, p. 1.

33. Shklovskii, "Dopolnennyi Tolstoi," p. 127.

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34. Iu. Annenkov, "Krizis èstrady," ZI, 34 July1920, in Zolotnitskii, Zori teatral'nogo oktiab-ria, p. 236. The influence on Eisenstein and his"montage of attractions" would be apparent in afew years.

35. "Vozrozhdenie tsirka," VT, no. 9 (1919), pp.45.

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36. "Tsirk," VT, no. 39 (1919), p. 13.

37. Dmitriev, Russkii tsirk, p. 194.

38. TsGALI, f. 2087, op. 1, d. 80, 1. 98.

39. E. M. Kuznetsov, Arena i liudi sovetskogotsirka (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1947), p. 32.

40. "Vtoroi gos. tsirk," VT, no. 44 (1919), p. 7.

41. "Konenkov dlia tsirka," VT, no. 44 (1919),pp. 67.

42. The figure had been used effectively inposters of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions: Lap-shin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn', pp. 89, 105.And in 1930 Mayakovsky would write a scen-ario for another circus performance, MoscowAfire, using the same formation.

43. "Pervyi gos. tsirk," VT, no. 42 (1919), p. 10.

44. D. Samarskii, Nastrazhe mirovoi kommuny(Rostov: Gosizdat, 1920), p. 5.

45. A tiny theater whose repertory ran to pre-nineteenth-century farces and commediadell'arte interludes: Cervantes's The RivalLadies, Franz Pocci's Crocodile and Persia,Machiavelli's Mandragola. See "MoskovskiiBalagan," VT, no. 8 (1919), p. 6.

46. "K pervomaiskim torzhestvam," VT, no. 22(1919), pp. 34, in AMI (1984).

47. Vadim Shershenevich, "Tsirk," Zrelishcha,no. 2 (1922), p. 15. See also Boris Erdman, "Ne-povtorimoe vremia," Tsirk i estrada, no. 34(1928), pp. 68, 8, or A. V. Lunacharskii, "Otsirkakh," in Lunacharskii, Star'i, pp. 17072.

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48. Historians have ignored Gaideburov's contri-butions. Unfortunately, the main source for allwork on early Soviet festivals has been Pio-trovsky, scholar at GIII through the 1920s and1930s, director of various theaters, and adminis-trator of the Politprosvet theater network. Pio-trovsky, who was a brilliant and productive crit-ic, carried something of a vendetta againstGaideburov, partly for ideological reasons,partly for personal reasons. On top of his histori-ographical elisions, Piotrovsky never hesitatedto slander Gaideburov directly: see Istoriia sov-etskogo teatra, pp. 15968; A. P[iotrovskii],"Akademicheskii teatr intelligentsii," ZI, 20December 1921, p. 4; "Dovol'no Peredvizh-nogo," ZI, no. 23 (1923). From his administrat-ive position, Piotrovsky twice succeeded in ap-propriating the Mobile-Popular Theater's build-ing, the final time when he handed it over toTRAM (Theater of Worker Youth), of which hewas administrative patron.

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49. This approach was most closely associatedwith Ivan Shcheglovfor example, "O repertuarenarodnogo teatra," in Shcheglov, V zashchitunarodnogo teatra.

50. P. P. Gaideburov, "Novye zadachiteatral'nogo instruktorstva," VO, no. 23 (1919),p. 20.

51. Repertory listings can be found in the appen-dices of an excellent study: Gaideburov, Literat-urnoe nasledie.

52. G. A. Khaichenko, Russkii narodnyi teatrkontsa XIX-nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka,1975), p. 165.

53. P. P. Gaideburov, "Vsenarodnyi teatr," inKonst. Erberg, ed., Iskusstvo i narod (Petrograd:Kolos, 1922).

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54. "Nashim budushchim zriteliam" (1918), inGaideburov, Literaturnoe nasledie, p. 224.

55. P. P. Gaideburov, "Novye metodyteatral'nogo instruktorstva," VO, no. 45 (1919),p. 6.

56. P. P. Gaideburov, "Pis'mo k zriteliu. Bezzaglaviia," ZPOT, no. 17 (1919), p. 6. Note thereliance on Ivanov's terminology.

57. Osip Mandelstam provides an ironic descrip-tion in The Noise of Time, in The Prose of OsipMandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp.9899.

58. The line is originally from Plutarch and wasprobably passed on to the Russians by Nietz-sche. My description is based mostly onGaideburov's account in Literaturnoe nasledie,pp. 23839.

59. Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, p. 166.

60. Gaideburov, "Novye zadachi," pp. 2023.

61. "Poezdka v Vitebsk," ZPOT, no. 20 (1919),p. 9.

62. Gaideburov, "Novye zadachi."

63. P. P. Gaideburov, "Tvorcheskaia igra. Im-provizatsionnyi metod N. F. Skarskoi," VO, no.68 (1919), pp. 3640.

64. A complete course list can be found in "VInstitute vneshkol'nogo obrazovaniia," ZPOT,no. 2425 (1919), p. 18.

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65. Again, if history has been recorded differ-ently, Piotrovsky and his assistant Avlov (aformer lawyer) are at fault. In many publicationsthey propagated the idea that Gaideburov wasresponsible for the kulturträger, or anti-amateur,method of instruction: for example, G. Avlov,Klubnyi samodeiatel'nyi teatr: Evoliutsia meto-dov i form, introduction by A. V. Piotrovskii(Leningrad: Teakinopechat', 1930).

66. A. Mashirov-Samobytnik, "IstoriiaProletkul'ta (19051917)," Voprosy literatury, no.1 (1958), pp. 17276.

67. See S. V. Panina, "Na Peterburgskoiokraine," Novyi zhurnal, no. 4849 (1957).

68. Gaideburov, "Pis'mo k zriteliu," pp. 36.

69. See Vinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoechudo, p. 5.

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70. Ibid., pp. 1314.

71. Gaideburov, "Novye zadachi," pp. 2223.

72. Histories of the group can be found inVinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoe chudo,and in Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, pp. 24450.

73. Fedor Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz mertvogodoma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972), vol. 4, pp. 11819.

74. English readers can find a good descriptionin Elizabeth Warner, The Russian Folk Theatre(The Hague: Mouton, 1977), pp. 12740.

75. See V. Krupianskaia, "Narodnaia drama(genezis i literaturnaia istoriia)," in Slavianskiifol'klor (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).

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76. Original accounts can be found in Istoriiasovetskogo teatra, pp. 24446; Massovyeprazdnestva, pp. 5760; Vinogradov-Mamont,Krasnoarmeiskoe chudo, pp. 2630; "Pervyispektakl' dramaticheskoi masterskoi KrasnoiArmii," IK, 30 March 1919, p. 4; and "Peter-burgskie pis'ma," VT, no. 43 (1919), p. 13.

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77. The French scholar Nina Gourfinkel called ita jeu: see Nina Gourfinkel, Théâtre russe con-temporain (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre,1931), p. 129.

78. Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, p. 246. The readermay feel free to doubt this figure, which is givenby many sources but seems unlikely.

79. Vinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoechudo, p. 22.

80. I have yet to fathom how the seats were ar-ranged. Descriptions suggest that seats facedone of the stages; but that would have forcedspectators to constantly swivel back and forth.

81. Vinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoechudo, p. 68.

82. Massovye prazdnestva, p. 59.

83. Original accounts can be found inVinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoe chudo,pp. 10412; "Tret'ii internatsional," ZI, 9 May1919, p. 2; and B. N[ikono]v, "Pod otkrytym ne-bom," ZI, 14 May 1919, p. 1.

84. The obvious precedent was Ivanov's tragedyPrometheus, written in 1916 but published onlyin 1919. Although The Russian Prometheus(Rossiiskii Prometei) was given widemanuscript circulation, the only text I know of isin TsGALI, f. 2640, op. 1, d. 147. ForVinogradov's vision of "the theater of the fu-ture," as declared to Chaliapin, Iurev, Radlov,Petrov-Vodkin, and Aleksei Remizov, see"Khronika," VT, no. 43 (1919), p. 14. This vis-ion also reflected Ivanov's influence.

85. Vinogradov-Mamont, Rossiiskii Prometei, p.7.

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86. It was scheduled for performance on theNovember 1919 anniversary: "K oktiabr'skimtorzhestvam," VT, no. 36 (1919), p. 13.

87. Aleksei Remizov, "Repertuar. III," ZI, 5February 1920, p. 1; Blokovskii sbornik, vol. 1,p. 336.

88. V. I. Lenin and A. V. Lunacharskii,Perepiska, doklady, dokumenty, literaturnoenasledstvo, no. 80 (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), pp.38385.

89. "Khronika," ZI, 17 August 1920, p. 1.

90. "Sverzhenie samoderzhaviia," Izvestiiaarkhangel'skogo gubernskogo revkoma, 4 May1920, p. 3.

91. A. Panfilov, Teatral'noe iskusstvo Urala19171967 (Sverdlovsk: Sredneural'skoe knizh-noe izd., 1967), pp. 3436.

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92. Istoriia sovetskogo teatra, p. 250.

93. See U istokov, pp. 4146. To my knowledge,this is one of the few examples of direct politicalinterference in Civil War mass spectacles; and itmight have been added to Shcheglov's recollec-tions to meet the political demands of latertimes.

94. Ibid., pp. 4345.

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95. Vinogradov implies that Piotrovsky re-moved him from the post by false denunciation:Vinogradov-Mamont, Krasnoarmeiskoe chudo,pp. 12628. Shcheglov just about confirms it: Uistokov, p. 53. In ZI, no. 199200 (1919), Pio-trovsky wrote a strong article againstVinogradov's production of Overthrow (Istoriiasovetskogo teatra, p. 250). Although these ac-tions would be in line with Piotrovsky's later be-havior, it should be noted that weeks after Vino-gradov had departed newspapers reported thatPiotrovsky was still not part of the studio:"Khronika," ZI, 21 November 1919, p. 2.

96. Accounts in Kerzhentsev, Tvorcheskii teatr,pp. 12425; U istokov, pp.

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6668; "V Proletkul'te," ZI, 28 November1919, p. 1; "Khronika," ZI, 18 December1919, p. 3; "V Peterburgskom Proletkul'te,"VT, no. 56 (1920), p. 15. The final episode,The December Days in Moscow, was alsoperformed separately: "Instsenirovkadekabr'skogo vosstaniia," PP, 18 January1920, p. 3.

97. For his teaching methods, see D. Shcheglov,"Praktika teatral'nogo dela," VO, no. 68 (1919),pp. 4345.

98. The text is in D. Shcheglov, Spektakl' vklube (Leningrad: Nachatki znanii, 1925), pp.81101. The fact that Shcheglov claims author-ship suggests the performance was not as "col-lective" as claimed.

99. Firsthand accounts can be found in Istoriiasovetskogo teatra, pp. 24748; Massovyeprazdnestva, pp. 6061; "Tsirk Chinizelli,"IzvPS,, 24 February 1920, p. 1; "Khronika," ZI,26 February 1920, p. 3; E. Kuznetsov, "Peter-burgskie pis'ma," VT, no. 56 (1920), p. 15.

100. Tamashin, Sovetskaia dramaturgiia, p. 45.

Chapter FiveTransformation by Festival

1. PP, 1 January 1920, pp. 34.

2. Quoted in M. Z[agorskii], "V sporakh osovremennom i griadushchem teatre. Na mitingeiskusstv v tsirke," VT, no. 48 (1920), pp. 910.For a deeper criticism of the deistvo theory, seeAleksandr Tairov, Notes of a Director, trans.William Kuhlke (Coral Gables, Fla.: Universityof Miami Press, 1969), pp. 13242.

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3. A. V. Lunacharskii, "O narodnykhprazdnestvakh," VT, no. 62 (1920), p. 4.

4. A good summary of the congress can befound in Joachim Paech, Das Theater der Russ-ischen Revolution (Kronberg Ts.: Scriptor Ver-lag, 1974), pp. 95 ff.

5. V. B[ebutov], "O neoutopizme," VT, no. 43(1919), p. 7.

6. Viacheslav Ivanov, "Organizatsiiatvorcheskikh sil narodnogo kollektiva v oblastikhudozhestvennogo deistva," VT, no. 44 (1919),p. 3. The resolutions passed by the congressafter his address can be found in TsGA RSFSR,f. 628, op. 1, ed. khr. 4, 1. 112. For the originalspeech, see Viacheslav Ivanov, "K voprosu oborganizatsii tvorcheskikh sil narodnogokollektiva v oblasti khudozhestvennogo de-istva," VT, no. 26 (1919), p. 4.

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