Word: socialistic
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According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed...
...Socialist Realism is the only method of our art," wrote one of the surviving hacks in 1954. "Any other method is a concession to bourgeois ideology. In our country, where socialism has been victorious, where there has arisen a moral and political unity of the people unprecedented in the history of mankind, there is no special basis for different directions in art." Thus the lid clamped down, and it has remained down ever since, condensing the bland, dull, obsequious and piously idealistic nature of official "realism...
Today the most powerful state weapon against the dissident painter who cannot or will not join the Union of Soviet Artists-a closed Socialist Realist shop-is the law on tuneyadstvo (parasitism). An unemployed artist (and all nonunion members are, by definition, unemployed) can be punished with one to two years of prison. Apart from this, the "unofficial" artist must deal with a hundred resistances unknown to his Western counterpart...
...confiscated church lands and abolished religious influence in schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout the Soviet Union, compared with 40,437 before the Revolution...
...Stalin era faded. And still they come: surprising new writers who have shattered the deadening conventions of the past. They have recoiled from the novel, viewing it as prefabricated Stalinist architecture. The genre of choice is the short story or novella. Many writers have managed gradually to escape from Socialist Realism, with its obligatory jargon and hortatory themes, traveling a world away -back to 19th century realism. Even Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the two major Russian writers to produce big novels, did so in the classical manner...