Yevgeny Yevtushenko - Literature as Propaganda

Yevtushenko writes about Stalin’s control over the arts in 1930s Russia, lamenting that socialist realism destroyed creativity.

· Stalin’s control of the arts meant that all artists were encouraged (but really coerced) into creating idealistic images of communism as their only work – “the apotheosis of this trend was a movie which in its grand finale showed thousands of collective farmers having a gargantuan feast against the background of a new power station.”

· Stalin was able to convince even wise and intelligent people to surrender their creativity to fantastic communist propaganda, through his charm and his connection with the revered Lenin

· The focus in the arts on communism and industry dehumanized art, as the classic artistic themes we think of – love, nature, life – were nonexistent or at least inaccessible to the general public

· Interest in the arts died among the general population

“Communism was to serve man, whereas under Stalin it appeared that man served communism”