Wolfgang Mende (Dresden, University of Technology)
Music censorship in the era of NEP and cultural revolution: The case of Nikolay Roslavets
The knowledge of Soviet censorship in the fields of the arts has remarkably increased since the 1990s when important archive materials became accessible. The detailed works by Arlen Blyum, Leonid Maximenkov and others focus on literature, with casual views on music. There is still a lack of systematic investigations on Soviet censorship of music.
The aim of my paper is to give a sketch of the structure and character of music censorship in the Soviet Union from about 1923 to 1932. I will examine the institutional organisation of censorship authorities, their staff profile with regard to artistic preferences, the declared function of censorship and its application to practice and the relationship between internal guidelines and public debates. A document I discovered in the archive of Nikolay Roslavets in RGALI provided me with detailed insights into the practice of music censorship. It is a comprehensive account of the composer’s activity as censor in Glavrepertkom since 1924, drafted in February 1930 as an apologia in connection with purge proceedings.
These and other materials show that music censorship from its institutional formation in the early years of NEP until the heyday of the cultural revolution in 1930 was to a considerable extent executed by sympathizers or even activists of progressive art. Vladimir Blyum, leftist theater critic, Meyerhold devotee and leader of the restructured ASM in the final stage of its existence, was the head of the music and theatre section of Glavrepertkom, and as such the direct supervisor of Roslavec. Notwithstanding their progressive orientation in arts, office holders like Blyum or Roslavets pursued their order to exercise political control on all printed material and public performances and to prevent the dissemination of any politically harmful content. In the area of music this concerned, above all, the verbal part of compositions. However, in some cases political censorship was exerted by reason of mere musical style when it was considered to reflect the ideology of class enemies. Maybe surprisingly, this kind of argument was not applied to musical modernism in the examined period, even though the latter was more and more regarded as an import from the decadent Western bourgeoisie (the accusation of formalism was not a criterion of censorship at that time yet). Instead, the mentioned argument was persistently applied to certain kinds of “light” music, for example contemporary Western dance music (“foxtrotchina”) or sentimental urban romances (“tsyganshchina”), even if the models were adapted to ideologically correct Soviet lyrics. Using an analoguos argumentation, Roslavets intended to prohibit the publication of “proletarian” music due to the fact that it was written in a, in his view, inadmissable “semisacral” or “narodniki-like” style. This point of view he advocated in public articles as well as in his activity as censor. Even if his efforts were without success, they provide an explanation why Roslavets became a favoured target of proletarian attacks. He held a position of power from which he wanted to suppress the activities of proletarian musicians. In this respect the common view of Roslavets as a prosecuted advocate of modernism has to be revised, as well as the whole rivalry between ASM and proletarian associations in the 1920s.
