Common Assumptions about Evolution of Soviet Cultural Policy Fundamentally Misleading, Incomplete and Wrong, Mitrokhin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 4 – Neither of the two most widespread views about the relationship between culture and the state during Soviet times is correct, Nikolay Mitrokhin says, as can be seen if you consider what actually happened during the 74 years of the USSR regarding cultural affairs.

            The first holds that there was a more or less constant conflict between international an dcultural modernization and conservative and repression modernization, the Russian scholar at Bremen University says, while the second holds that the Soviet state was first tolerant of culture, then established monolithic control, and then suffered the decay of that control (t.me/NMitrokhinPublicTalk/5228  reposted at  echofm.online/opinions/teoriya-sovetskoj-kultury).

            Each captures something of what was taking place, the scholar says; but both distort the historical record and should be recognized as incomplete and false. For example, “under Stalin, there was jazz while under the liberal Khrushchev it was repressed” and then under Brezhnev it spread everywhere but the authorities generally ignored it.

            What was true of jazz was also true of other aspects of culture and its relationship with the state; and that must be factored in to give a full picture of this complicated and hardly unilinear and monolithic arrangement, Mitrokhon suggests.