Culture and communism
At the same time, it seems to us, KVN managed—in its own way—to solve the problem of the positive modern hero. Look, here he is, the young Soviet person of our times. He's a little wily, a little snide, a little vain, quick with decisions, cheerful and clever—a young, handsome, modern individual (Aksel'rod 1974, 3).
In its conduct and content, KVN reinforced qualities expected of the New Soviet Man, building up their spiritual-qua-intellectual worth. Molding this New Soviet Man, Homo sovieticus was, in fact, an explicit goal of the 1961 22nd Party Congress. Its proceedings stated, "During the transition to communism there will be more opportunities for cultivating the new man, one who harmoniously combines spiritual wealth, moral purity, and physical perfection" (Program of the 22nd Party Congress 1961). The same congress also described the model communist citizen in a twelve-item list, the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism. The code's tenets included: "love of the motherland; conscientious labor for the good of society; a high sense of public duty; collectivism and comradely mutual assistance; moral purity, modesty, and unpretentiousness in social and private life..." (McNally 1971, 47). Soviet children studied this code in all major educational institutions. It formed the bulk of the items in the official "Rules for Students," the "Pioneer Laws," and the "Komsomol Laws" (Dobrenko 2005, 240). This set of rules became presupposed behavioral norms partly because they were drilled into students. The 22nd Party Congress planned to build communism within twenty years, and influencing youth formed a key part of their strategy (Tsipursky 2016). Leaders urged Komsomol organizations to "use all forms of propaganda, campaigning and cultural-educational work—lectures, political circles (kruzhki), seminars, discussions, theoretical conferences, question and answer evenings, oral journals, meetings with delegates, Party and other leaders" (cited in Uhl 2011, 224). KVN rarely featured ideological content on the level of lectures or political circles, but it operated under the Komsomol umbrella that promoted the Moral Code, and intellectual activities like lectures and political circles, as normative.
The overall value placed on intellectual activity, among everyone, not just the elite, impressed many foreign observers. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote, "Even in their spare time, after work and after class, Soviet citizens were busy improving their minds. Every visitor to the Soviet Union in the 1930s commented on the passionate love of reading and zest for learning of the Soviet population" (1999, 87-88). This reputed voraciousness sprang, in part, from an intense state campaign to eradicate illiteracy from 1923-1927 (Clark 2000, 18). The success of the state's literacy efforts, in fact, help demonstrate why KVN, a game of wits, became so popular, and so prestigious, in the Soviet Union, for two reasons. First, it illustrates how much money and manpower the Soviet state spent to make intellectual activity, of some kind, accessible to all. Second, ordinary citizens were, later, actually expected to participate in intellectual activity (that is, to read, from discussion circles, and otherwise develop their "spiritual wealth").
In 1897, 39% of Muscovites could read. In 1920, this number rose to 72%. While many of these gains resulted from tsarist educational reform, the Soviet state invested significantly more resources into teaching the population to read—both urban and rural—and saw corresponding surges in literacy rates (Clark 2000, 17). Between 1920 and 1928, over eight million people enrolled in literacy schools (Kenez 1985, 157). In 1926, the literacy rate in rural areas was 51%. By 1939 that number jumped to 85% (Fitzpatrick 1994, 225-226).
The increase in rural literacy is significant because it makes plain just how much investment, in terms of both money and manpower, the Soviets made to create a fully literate country. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, large urban areas with pre-existing schools, universities, and libraries, it is all but expected that literacy rates would rise. But the state had to build such educational infrastructure nearly from scratch in villages. They sent teachers, literacy trainers, and books to towns and villages spanning over six million square miles—and that only counts the RSFSR, not Central Asia. For reference, that area is 40% larger than the continental United States.
The Soviets mobilized a largely volunteer force from 1923-1927 for the likbez campaign (abbreviation for "likvidatsiya bezgramotnosti," or "liquidation of illiteracy") (Clark 2000, 26). In the first year and a half, likbez had taught five million Russian adults to read (Clark 2000, 26). Stellar organizing was the key to the movement's success. Networks of cells in a variety of overlapping organizations, the largest of which was the Down with Illiteracy Society, enrolled adults and youth alike in literacy schools, signed up dues-paying members, gave presentations about the importance of literacy, and enlisted volunteers to teach. An elaborate bureaucratic infrastructure supported these efforts. At the top was the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), which helped coordinate the efforts of the Emergency Commission for the Eradication of Illiteracy (Gramcheka), trade unions, and community "reading rooms," libraries with books, magazines, and agricultural how-to manuals (Clark 2000, 117). Each room had its own director, an izbach, available to answer questions. These directors completed at least some training, some completing three-day intensives, others undergoing 108 hours of instruction. According to Clark, training sessions covered,
...the tasks of the party in the countryside, the work of the red corner soviet in coordination with activists, the village soviet, and the liktpunkt [literacy school]. Reference, art, drama, and the organization of "judicious" relaxation were discussed on day three. Days four and five were filled with instruction on work with newspapers, wall newspapers, books, mobile libraries, and various circles: agriculture, home economics, and the co-op circles (2000, 122).
In essence, the likbez campaign trained thousands of literacy directors to create intellectual community, either by guiding locals through the resources of the reading rooms, organizing "circles" (kruzhki) for study and discussion, or by directing those that could not read to the newly-established literacy schools. In 1927, there was one reading room (izba chital'naia) for every fourteen square miles of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), for roughly two to five rooms per rural district (volost'). Reading rooms in larger villages fed "red corners" in communities further from the center. Red corners were places in schools or even private homes where people could find books and agricultural pamphlets. By 1927 there were between ten and twenty red corners per rural district.
As a representative example, the reading room in Il'insk, on the remote Sakhalin island, had around 1,000 books; the red corners in surrounding villages shelved around fifty books. While not all, or perhaps even most, villages had the funding to follow the guidelines outlined by pedagogues, they nonetheless maintained that reading rooms should include sections for agricultural propaganda, aid to villages, newspapers, cooperative societies, political education, agricultural circles, revolutionary holidays, sanitation campaigns, anti-alcohol campaigns, and the "struggle for the new way of life," as well as dedicated areas for literacy instruction and individual study Clark 2000, 119-127).
The elaborate literacy and learning infrastructure Narkompros built made adult learning normative, even in non-urban areas of the USSR. Individuals who could not read faced censure from their peers (Kenez 1985, 151). One responsibility of the literacy director in rural areas was to post a public list of all illiterate people between the ages of eleven and thirty-five. Individuals might be called in before a panel of their peers, as well, to account for their actions. As Clark imagined some of these conversations, "Did Petr Ivanich want to learn to read? Why not? Did Liudmila Vasilevna have a legitimate excuse for not attending night courses?" (Clark 2000, 133). It is hard to imagine literacy workers in, say, rural Arkansas, shaming local adults in this way. But American town councils also do not have the right to summon people to tribunals for not attending night classes. The Communist Party did. Their legal and administrative reach allowed them to compel adult as well as juvenile education.
Simple literacy, though, was not enough. The Soviets created a culture in which constant learning and improvement was expected not only of scholars and lawyers, but of the working and agricultural classes. Lenin said, "The illiterate person stands outside of politics. First it is necessary to teach him the alphabet. Without it there are only rumors, fairytales, and prejudices, but not politics." The drive to educate rural and working class individuals was an intentional, political act, and it worked. From the standpoint of moral socialization processes, however, what is significant is not that Soviet citizens learned to read. More striking is the fact that they did read. In 1936, ten thousand people in the steel-producing city of Magnitogorsk, population 200,000, held library cards. Citizens also bought 40,000 books that year (Kotkin 1995, 190-191).
People read because in this new system, one of not-really-voluntary reading circles, after-work committee meetings, and choir clubs, intellectual activity earned people cultural capital. Cultural capital is a set of competencies that buy prestige in given social groups (Bourdieu 1984, 65). The Soviets built a social system in which there was a payoff for engaging in intellectual activity—or interpersonal reprobation if one did not.
The literacy campaign was part of a larger effort to mold the population into a modern, efficient workforce. Fitzpatrick identifies four main facets of the Soviet civilizing mission: basic hygiene, literacy, "behavior in public places," and petty-bourgeois culture, which included, "...good manners, correct speech, neat and appropriate dress, and some appreciation of the high culture of literature, music, and ballet" (1999, 80). It is this final aspect, of instilling "culturedness," or kulturnost', in the population, that is most relevant to the study of KVN. Becoming cultured meant actively learning, developing the mind, and re-fashioning the self into a politically aware, bureaucratically capable Soviet political subject. Kulturnost began as a Stalinist emphasis on manners (Dunham 1990, Fitzpatrick 1999). For the working classes in the 1930s, reports Fitzpatrick, "major markers of culture were sleeping on sheets, wearing underwear, eating with a knife and fork, washing hands before meals, reading the newspaper, not beating your wife and children, and not getting so drunk you missed work" (1999, 81).
Kulturnost, though, eventually came to denote the educated individual, not just the "civilized" one. Vadim Volkov describes the expanded concept of normative kulturnost as one of continual intellectual development:
To become a cultured person one must read classical literature, contemporary Soviet fiction, poetry, newspapers, works by Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, as well as attend the cinema and exhibitions with the purpose of self-education. A cultured person must have a broad cultural horizon (broad within the frame set up at a given historical moment) and a cultured inner world (Volkov 2000, 225).
Fitzpatrick, speaking of the social pressure to become cultured, maintained, "A worker who mastered War and Peace as well as the Short Course [on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] was a high achiever, deserving praise; the wife of a manager who was ignorant of Pushkin and had never seen Swan Lake was an embarrassment" (Fitzpatrick 1999, 82). The Soviets worked to instill kulturnost using advertising campaigns, reading groups, and even "Are You a Cultured Person?" quizzes in periodicals (Volkov 2000, 224). If questions on a quiz stumped a reader, the magazine Ogonek offered this guidance: "Remember, if you are not able to answer any one of the ten suggested questions, you, apparently, know very little about a whole sphere of science or arts. Let this compel you to WORK ON YOURSELF (porabotat' nad soboi)" (caps in original; cited in Volkov 2000, 224). The quiz from the first week in 1936 is far from easy:
1 Recite by heart at least one poem by Pushkin.
2 Name and characterise five plays by Shakespeare.
3 Name at least four rivers in Africa.
4 Name your favourite composer and his three major works.
5 Name five Soviet automobiles.
6 Convert 3/8 into a decimal.
7 Name the three most significant sport tournaments of the last year and their results.
8 Describe the three paintings which you liked most at last year's exhibitions.
9 Have you read Red and Black by Stendahl and Fathers and Sons by Turgenev?
10 Explain why the Stakhanovite movement became possible in our country (cited in Volkov 2000, 224).
This overall ethic of learning, improving, and working on the self created an incentive for individuals to present themselves in certain ways. Alexei Yurchak observes that Soviet citizens often maintained a cognitive split, voicing official rhetoric while not necessarily believing it (Yurchak 2006, 50). For instance, the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization, tasked university students in Leningrad with holding "political education" lectures. No one wanted to organize, listen to, or give these lectures. So the group existed only on paper. One student submitted fictional reports about the contents of each lecture to the regional Komsomol committee and no one was the wiser (Yurchak 2006, 180). But the work of doing bureaucracy, of doing-being-ordinary in a Soviet context, redefined the ways people approached everyday life. Being ordinary, performing a normative social role, takes work (Sacks 1984). And in accomplishing the work of being ordinary, even if no one was truly interested in Pushkin or rivers in Africa or political education lectures, citizens molded their selves—Soviet selves, homo sovieticus. The repetitive daily effort of enacting socialism created habits, and habitus; those relevant here are the skills sets for planning events and running organizations. People also learned to value education; to make use of it, personally and professionally; and to seek intellectual entertainment. Reading Turgenev was encouraged; reading Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn was forbidden. But people consumed classic and bootleg (samizdat) literature out of the same impulse, the same hunger for information, the same drive towards intellectual community.
The Komsomol leaders' fictional lecture series were socialist in form, insubordinate in content. KVN, as it rode waves of repression and reprieve, followed a similar path. The game thrived in the USSR because, by the 1960s, the population had adopted the socialist ideal of kulturnost as their own. Soviet educational theorist A. Arnol'dov argued that, "The guiding principle of socialist culture is the development of the individual as an intelligent personality with a creative mind" (Arnol'dov 1974, 11). KVNshiki were sharp, well-versed in literature, kept up with current events, were excellent students, and could often sing and dance, too. And they made people laugh to boot.
Framing her fondness of KVN in terms of hunger, a teacher in Moscow wrote to KVN's editors in the 1960s with a request for more broadcasts: "Save our souls, give us this show which has infused joy into our lives for so long. We hunger to see the cheerful, talented, witty" (Gal'perina 1967a, 5). A game that involved word play, riddles, and spoofs on literary themes became a riotously good time in communities all over the Soviet Union, including Central Asia, once people gained the shared educational background to play. Before someone can enjoy chess, after all, they have to learn the rules. Competitors themselves worked hard at KVN because it was fun, to be sure, and because it earned them the admiration of people like the Moscow teacher. But KVN's links to kulturnost also rendered it prestigious. As an activity, KVN promoted what the 22nd Party Congress called "spiritual wealth": sincerity (iskrennost'), soul (dusha), truth (istina), and, of course, kulturnost'. KVNshiki gained cultural capital by participating in the game, within the bounds of a governmental system of praise that consistently highlighted both intellectual achievement and creative work. Despite socialist realist dreariness, creativity had its own conceptual category, its own ideological purpose, and its own set of associated policies and bureaucratic apparatuses. Arnol'dov wrote, "In the Marxist definition of creative activity, a differentiation is usually made between spiritual culture as the sum total of intellectual values—ideas, artistic images, ethics, etc.—and material culture as an aggregate of material values, i.e., objects which embody new ideas and concepts in material form" (Arnol'dov 1974, 9). The Soviets linked intellectual development to social change. To the chagrin of censors, KVNshiki often saw KVN as a platform for change, as well, rendering in Aesopian language the social critiques they could not voice openly.