Lenin's Cultural Policy and the Persecution of the Arts Essay

Lenin's Cultural Policy and the Persecution of the Arts - Essay Example However, things were not the same as shown to the world. The growing experimentation in the arts and cultural aspects of Russia forced Lenin to embrace more conservative and traditional ways and it was because of this reason that since his early days, Lenin started to control cultural institutions of the country. This control of culture in the country further worsened as the Lenin’s Communist party started to target those musicians and artisans who were relatively against the Communist thought. Lunacharsky- Lenin’s main person behind controlling the Cultural Revolution in the country put forward his own aesthetic theories which largely redefined the socialist art, however; this was often criticized by the later scholars for the reasons of curtailing the artistic creativity. â€Å"In the late 1920s, the term was taken up and transformed by young communist cultural militants who sought the party leaders' approval for an assault on "bourgeois hegemony" in culture; that is, on the cultural establishment, including Anatoly Lunacharsky and other leaders of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the values of the old Russian intelligentsia. For the militants, the essence of Cultural Revolution was "class war" - an assault against the "bourgeois" intelligentsia in the name of the proletariat - and they meant the "revolution" part of the term literally. In the years 1928 through 1931, the militants succeeded in gaining the party leaders' support, but lost it again in 1932 when the Central Committee dissolved the main militant organization, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), and promoted reconciliation with the intelligentsia.† (Encylopedia).