WHAT IS “SOCIALIST REALISM” AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
WHAT IS SOCIALIST REALISM?
Either capitalism needs to be destroyed or our species will be destroyed. I am a supporter of communism as one of the strategies to dismantle capitalism. However, there are aspects of historical communism that I believe are worth studying and questioning. Repression of the arts is not an essential element of communism. Before the doctrine of "Socialist Realism" was imposed, Russia had a proud history of not only using the arts as a form of social critique, but also of producing many of the most renowned avant-garde artists in the world. After the 1917 revolution, the early days of Bolshevik Russia witnessed something of a wave of artistic freedom. Many new movements of avant-garde art emerged during this period, such as Rayonism, Russian Futurism, and Constructivism.
This began to change in 1925 when Stalin took control of the party. From 1929 to 1932, the idea of Socialist Realism emerged. The term is attributed to Stalin himself. Describing artists as “engineers of the human mind,” Stalin forced all Soviet arts to serve the state. All cultural production was now required to be affirmative and patriotic. No dissent or moral ambiguity was tolerated.
The writer and Marxist thinker Maxim Gorky, a favorite of Stalin, published an article on the subject in 1933, laying out the four guidelines for Socialist Realism at the 1934 Communist Party Congress: Art should be relevant and understandable to the workers, it should present scenes of everyday life, its representations should be realistic, and it should be partisan and supportive of the aims of the State. Art that failed to meet these guidelines was now illegal. Stalin and Gorky had effectively mobilized Soviet art as a form of state propaganda.
In the case of music, it now had to be simple, accessible, and "hummable". The major enemy of Socialist Realism was declared to be “formalism”. Authorities used vague and shifting accusations of Western-style "formalism" to crush creative freedom, leading to blacklists, arrests, and executions. Certain musical concepts, either correctly or incorrectly identified as Western, were soon officially banned. One of these concepts was atonality, the perceived absence of a tonal center in musical compositions.
When Stalin’s violent purges of the Soviet Union began in 1934, the avalanche of Socialist Realism buried a once-rich Russian culture under the ideologically uniform culture of the Communist Party. This new culture was literally molded around the personality of Joseph Stalin. “Formalism” soon came to mean anything that Stalin and his top officials did not happen to like or understand. Composers were not merely expected to conform to socialist ideology—as were all Soviet artists of the period—but were also subject to the unpredictable dictates of subjective taste on the part of Communist Party leaders.
Stalin favored traditional, melodious classical and romantic Western European and Russian composers rather than modern or avant-garde artists. For example, because Stalin happened to like the music of Beethoven, Beethoven was declared to be in retroactive conformity to Socialist Realism. Unlike with the visual arts, where one can more clearly identify whether a piece is realistic or abstract, music is inherently abstract, and so musical “realism” or “abstraction” become vague concepts that in practice compelled composers to produce their work according to the fickle, conservative tastes of professional politicians who knew little or nothing about music.
One of the most eloquent voices to describe their firsthand experience of composing under Stalin is the renowned Hungarian avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, perhaps best known for his inclusion (not always with his consent) in the soundtracks of such Kubrick movies as 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. As a Hungarian working during and after WW2, he had an unusual perspective of being able to compare Hitler’s repression of the arts to Stalin’s, since Hungary was under the Third Reich’s control during the war, and under Stalin’s control afterwards. The musical phenomena that were criminalized under Hitler were virtually the same as those criminalized under Stalin: excessive dissonance, excessive chromaticism, atonality, foreign influence, dissent, dark themes, and excessive musical complexity or abstraction that politicians found difficult to understand. Here are Ligeti’s exact words:
“I did not choose the tumults of my life. Rather, they were imposed on me by two murderous dictatorships: first by Hitler and the Nazis, and then by Stalin and the Soviet system. People living in the West cannot begin to imagine what it was like in the Soviet empire, where art and culture were strictly regulated as a matter of course — they had to conform to abstract concepts that were almost identical to the regulations of the National Socialists. Art had to be ‘healthy’ and ‘edifying’. It had to reflect Party directives.
My reaction to this political pressure was to write music that was radically dissonant and chromatic. I was in Stalinist, terroristic Hungary where this kind of music was not allowed. And I just wrote it for myself. When I composed [Musica Ricercata] in the year 1950, it was desperate. It was a knife in Stalin’s heart.
Although it was illegal, Vera, my wife, managed to obtain some banned books. Otherwise, any exchange of information was forbidden, and only a few privileged persons were issued with passports. Radio broadcasts from the West were systematically jammed. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, even folk music was allowed only in a ‘politically correct’ form, in other words, if forced into the straitjacket of the norms of Socialist Realism. The peculiar way in which village bands harmonized their music, often full of dissonances and ‘against the grain,’ was regarded as incorrect.”
At the height of Stalin’s “Terror”, in 1936-38, when more than 1.5 million people were arrested and 700,000 killed, musicians were among those persecuted, shipped off to labour camps, or executed. Their compositions and recordings were destroyed or banned and their performances cancelled. The most famous Russian musicians during this period, composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and conductor Sviatoslav Richter, all had infamous run-ins with Stalin and his party leaders. Because of the international popularity of these musicians, these controversies are well-documented.
Offended by the modernist dissonance and overt sexuality of Shostakovich’s 1936 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Stalin famously stormed out and pushed for the publication of a scathing review in Pravda. The work was quickly banned. From that moment on, Shostakovich lived in terror of the secret police knocking at his door. He was faced with the struggle of maintaining his artistic integrity while avoiding imprisonment, torture, or death. But these arbitrary threats were applied to all Soviet musicians. Some successfully toed the ideological line, following the whims of the powerful and diluting their work in the process. Others ended up facing the Gulag or death.
Another example is Vladimir Kozin, the famous Russian tenor and court singer under Joseph Stalin. After Stalin criminalized homosexuality in 1934, Kozin was arrested at the height of his popularity for his homosexuality and sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labor camp. Another chilling story was of the blacklisted and now forgotten composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky. During a sleepless night in the headquarters of the secret police, where Zaderatsky and his fellow prisoners were due to be shot in the morning, Zaderatsky sat down at a piano and played what amounted to a finale for himself. The head of the death squad, who heard him playing, set him free the next day. The other condemned men were killed.
The terror of the purges had a savage, sadistic twist when it was applied to cultural leaders. Writers and musicians were often forced to be the instruments in declaring their own condemnations. A pathetic scene was created in 1946 when Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Khachaturian were forced to repent publicly for some of their earlier works that did not uphold the tenets of Socialist Realism. Soviet citizens were accustomed to seeing their political leaders publicly confess to imaginary crimes, but seeing their composers and other cultural leaders grovel at the feet of Stalin was a shock.
As the realities of socialist rule became increasingly apparent, these restrictions stifled creativity and pushed artists to produce unimaginative and simple works. Artists in all media from painting to literature to theater to music were encouraged to depict positive, propagandist images of Soviet leaders. Stalin’s obsessiveness and ruthlessness even extended to photography. He instituted a gigantic apparatus devoted to falsification of photographs. Authentic photos from the time of the revolution and of the Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin had liquidated were extremely difficult to find after Stalin’s terror began. It was not enough that Stalin’s victims were physically wiped off the face of the earth. It was also necessary to obliterate them from history and memory altogether. The threat of reprisal meant that many collectors and artists exercised a form of self-censorship. In the 1930s those found in possession of a picture or reproduction of Trotsky could anticipate immediate arrest, imprisonment and probable execution.
One by one, Soviet composers and other cultural greats either capitulated to the dictates of Socialist Realism or disappeared into the oblivion shared by many others who were a perceived threat to Stalin’s tyranny. Although Stalin retained a great popularity among Russians both in his day and afterwards, his death in March 1953 brought sighs of relief in many areas of Soviet life. One of these areas was culture. After Stalin, the Socialist Realism decree began to be relaxed somewhat. For example, in the latter decades of the USSR, composer Sofia Gubaidulina was able to write extremely dissonant and personal music, one piece of which can be found on Deerhoof’s free album Love-Lore.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
What is the relevance of this history? As socialism is gaining ground among Americans, and as socialism can take many forms, there has been a noticeable and powerful resurgence of enthusiasm for Stalin-style communism within left discourse. In some cases the voices that are gaining popularity right now are both glamorizing Stalin and taking pains to aggressively silence any voices that might differ on a point of strategy or that might wish to point out aspects of Stalin’s policies that might not be relevant or helpful in 2026.
There have also been increasing calls, often from a Marxist perspective, for today’s musicians to abandon both the “ugliness” of modernism and the “meaninglessness” of post-modernism in favor of more “beautiful” music that is “easier to understand.” Musicians, particularly of the avant garde variety, are well used to such calls when they come from capitalists, record label execs, concert promoters, tastemaking journalists, managers, streaming platforms, and industry know-it-alls. This call coming from the American political left is in my experience a new phenomenon. What would American music sound like if it were even more conservative than it is already? AI music is fast supplying our ears with an answer, and it’s not pretty. That’s why I chose to write about this now.
Within our movement, we are grappling with questions about what form of communism or socialism might be most effective. I’m adding my piece to that conversation by suggesting that while Stalin achieved many tremendous positive things for hundreds of millions of Russians, and that this fact has been maliciously denied by decades of anti-communist propaganda in the most authoritarian country in the world, the United States, that doesn’t erase those aspects of Stalin’s rule that are not relevant or helpful in 2026, and that I think we should consider not imitating.
One of those aspects is the violent repression of the arts by systematically criminalizing the avant garde and the narrowing the purpose of all artistic work down to state propaganda that politicians like and understand. Another is Stalin's criminalization of homosexuality, with the standard punishment being five years of imprisonment and forced labor. Another is his absolute hostility towards both social democracy and anarchism. For us to stage a revolution against the most powerful, most funded, most lethal, most propagandized empire the world has ever known may require an open-mindedness and creativity that did not characterize Stalin’s or even Lenin’s strategy in early 20th century Russia.
If we are hoping that real debates about the merits of Stalinism will become more and more common, these questions are going to come up. It’s not in our movement’s best interest to remain willfully unprepared or in denial. I assume that people who, like me, are on the internet frequently speaking up about the merits of communism, are doing so in order to grow the movement. Uncritically glamorizing Joseph Stalin, while trendy right now, is a flawed strategy, unless one wishes to alienate the LGBT community, the artistic community, the social democrats gaining ground in the U.S., and the anarchist or horizontal movements seeing success right now in places like Serbia.
Almost every artist I know right now is in some kind of crisis of purpose. Global polycatastrophe has us deeply questioning the value of our work. Capitalism wants us to believe that what we do is nothing but trivial entertainment while the world burns. Actually I think radical creativity is exactly what the world needs right now. Artists know what it means to go out on a limb and propose new ideas that others might not yet understand.
Calls, especially ones being made by those who do not have an artistic practice of their own, for the arts to reduce their purpose down to state propaganda are deeply misunderstanding what art is for our species. To take music as an example, no culture can boil down its purpose to one simple statement. It’s not that idealizing the worker is necessarily a bad purpose for music. It's that decreeing that this is the only purpose of music erases the infinity of other purposes music can serve. Music is for dancing, for entertainment, for thinking, for memorization, for sex, for group solidarity, for group differentiation, for dissent, for mental and physical exercise, for self-expression, for battle, for research, for play, for prayer, and for any number of other perfectly valid things.
Many of us, like me, look hopefully to anticapitalist movements to support. It isn't always easy to find ones that welcome what we have to offer. Even movements on the left sometimes fall into the trap of getting touchy when you start talking about strategy or creativity instead of toeing the party line. Like liberals who pounce if you ever dare utter a criticism of Obama, left movements can sometimes fetishize its past heroes, and suggest that if you question any of their actions, you must be "splitting the left." But how can these past heroes have a fully laid out plan for global conditions they couldn't foresee? Their ideas may yet need some creative tweaking.
One movement we've been happy to see growing within the discourse of the left is the communist movement. But speaking as part of an international community of musicians, and avant garde musicians particularly, I felt moved to say that not every famous communist trending right now was a friend to radical thought within the arts.
That doesn't mean their accomplishments are worthless. The most significant of Stalin's were that he led the USSR to victory over Hitler, to preventing capitalist takeover, and to bringing hundreds of millions of Russians out of poverty. Less known is that the USSR was at the forefront of electronic musical equipment, such as microphones and pre-amps. Many of the items created at the time for use in government broadcasts are highly sought after today. We know this firsthand because we just recorded our most recent album Divine Schism at Russian Recording in Bloomington. Studio owner and producer Mike Bridavsky has been building his collection of rare Soviet equipment for many years and some of what he owns and uses every day has not been topped by anything created anywhere since.
Of course many of the works created during the era of Socialist Realism have a certain bizarre charm to us today, including to me. But that’s not the same as saying that any musician I know would feel their artistic life improved if they were forced to write only patriotic music from now on, with all dissent, dissonance, complexity, irony, or emotional ambiguity removed on pain of arrest or physical attack. Just think of all your favorite music that would simple be deleted under such a scheme. Almost all of African American music history and innovation would be instantly down the tubes. Any political system that tends to repress or minimize cultural creativity for not being patriotic enough, easy to understand enough, conservative enough, or popular enough, is not one a lot of us are going to be much more excited to sign up for than the capitalist repression and minimization we're already used to.
The worst authoritarian state on the planet is the USA. It has two parties, both dictated remorselessly by oligarchs. The freedom to choose between buying Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and Beyonce is not a real choice. It doesn’t mean you have any political or economic control over your life. You obey the laws that billionaires want you to obey, period. There is no democracy here.
Capitalists run this country in an authoritarian manner and they always have. The founding fathers were ultra-rich English men who wanted to form an oligarchy and increase their tremendous wealth on the backs of the enslaved. They did not believe in democracy. "No Kings" is a joke. It is run by zionists, has no demands, isn't trying to impeach, and is really only trying to channel a genuine mass groundswell of revolutionary energy into simply voting for more oligarchs.
You're told you're a capitalist and you believe it. But you have no capital. No means of production, no workers, no control of resources, no large of sums of money to invest. Neither do I. I’ve lived under the poverty line most of my adult life, including now. You aren't a capitalist. You are a tool of capitalists.
Capitalism is greed and violence turned into a value system. The only value system. That's all it is. It's stupid and its economists and politicians and CEOs are stupid. Humans have other values besides greed and violence. Society should really be set up to discourage greed and violence, and many sustainable ones have been, till they were invaded by well armed capitalists. Under capitalism even the good guys commit genocide every day and it's your civic duty to help them do it. Hooray capitalism.
Ever since the European colonial period began 500 years ago, it's been a free for all of white people outlawing anything they couldn't understand, whether it was a language, a religion, a style of dress, a cuisine, or a musical genre. Either that or stealing it and pretended it was theirs to profit from. Life doesn't always have to be about making yourself palatable or accessible to the person with the gun. It makes sense to be opaque and incomprehensible to power sometimes. Sometimes the underground has to speak in code.
People are going to call you crazy sometimes for being yourself or saying what you believe. Any marginalized group knows this. Artists know this. We know that creating new things that some people won’t understand is part of the job, no matter what the gatekeepers say. No matter what the style police say. No matter what the analytics say. No matter what the authoritarians say.
What gets called "common sense" or "human nature" in this god forsaken capitalist paradise of ours is usually nothing of the kind. It's usually capitalist propaganda about how you or I might have humane values but Joe Blow down the street is straight out of Adam Smith, so don't bother trying to work together to create a world your children might be able to survive.
The industry of hopelessness runs our country. It says sure you and I might not like ICE or genocide but you have to do what everyone else wants and everyone else wants those brown people dead or in concentration camps. So get in line. Meanwhile almost no one actually wants that, except the deranged psychopaths who run our country and profiteer off of human misery that they create on purpose. This country is not a democracy under either party and never was.
Using the past as a guide can be instructive. History books are literally my favorite. But the world has never before been where it is in 2026. The past doesn't have all the answers. Stalin or Mao or Ho Chi Minh or Che or FDR don't necessarily have all the answers. We're allowed to create things too. We're allowed to envision things. We don't need Barack Obama or American Idol or Spotify to tell us what is or isn't beautiful or realistic. Not in a world being run into the ground by genocidal capitalists with nuclear weapons and AI. Our crisis is in many ways unprecedented.
It’s all too easy to blame modernism, the avant garde, anarchism, communism, or any other constantly attacked radical movement for failing to bring about a perfect society. For being too hard to understand. For going too far. For getting coopted by corporations or academia or the bourgeoisie or the far right. But are we sure it failed? History still isn’t finished yet. We don’t how it might have been different had its art done less to signal the revolutionary spirit in the air.
Artists, stand up for yourselves. There's an essential place for your creativity and your dissent in any movement hoping to succeed in replacing the capitalist system that is now destroying the world. And like Caribbean anti-colonial philosopher Edouard Glissant spoke of the "right to opacity," remember that your art does not lose value just because it is hard to understand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stalin’s restrictions on Soviet composers is a well-known, undisputed historical fact. The voluminous scholarship on the subject spans decades, languages, countries, and the political spectrum. I invite interested readers to pursue finding information about this history from whatever sources they trust. Here are the sources I used.
One well-written, in-depth resource is The Sound of Utopia, by Dutch writer Michel Krielaars, which Pushkin Press released just this year. The author spent years researching primary sources and conducting interviews in Russian with family members of the actual Soviet composers and performers who lived through the Stalin years, to create cradle-to-grave portraits of their navigation of state censorship, terror, and ideological demands.
Another amazing book is Alex Ross’s comprehensive history of 20th century classical music, The Rest Is Noise, with its emphasis on the struggles of composers within the hierarchical, paranoid, and cynical political contexts of fascism, communism, and U.S. capitalism with its Red Scare tactics and CIA machinations.
Some online articles I also used for my summary are:
• EBSCO
• Discussion in the Meeting with the Creative Intellectuals, 1946