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Soviet Culture
The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the country's 69-year existence. It was contributed to by people of various nationalities from every one of fifteen union republics, although the majority of the influence was made by the Russians. The Soviet state supported cultural institutions, but also carried out strict censorship. History Lenin era The main feature of communist attitudes towards the arts and artists in the years 1918–1929 was relative freedom, with significant experimentation in several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. In many respects, the NEP period was a time of relative freedom and experimentation for the social and cultural life of the Soviet Union. The government tolerated a variety of trends in these fields, provided they were not overtly hostile towards the establishment. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist wr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet Union, it dissolved in 1991. During its existence, it was the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country by area, extending across Time in Russia, eleven time zones and sharing Geography of the Soviet Union#Borders and neighbors, borders with twelve countries, and the List of countries and dependencies by population, third-most populous country. An overall successor to the Russian Empire, it was nominally organized as a federal union of Republics of the Soviet Union, national republics, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian SFSR. In practice, Government of the Soviet Union, its government and Economy of the Soviet Union, economy were Soviet-type economic planning, highly centralized. As a one-party state go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Pilnyak
Boris Andreyevich Pilnyak (''né'' Vogau ; – April 21, 1938) was a Russian and Soviet writer who was executed by the Soviet Union on false claims of plotting to kill Joseph Stalin and Nikolay Yezhov. Biography He was born Boris Andreyevich Vogau () in Mozhaysk. His father was a doctor, descended from German farmers who settled on the banks of the Volga during the reign of Catherine the Great. His mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov. Boris first became interested in writing at the age of nine. Among his early influences were Andrei Bely, Aleksey Remizov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Pilnyak achieved fame very quickly at the age of 25 through his novel '' The Naked Year'' (Голый год, 1922; translated into English 1928), one of the first fictional accounts of the Russian civil war. He was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society, views which brought him into disfavor with Communist critics. The poet Demyan Bedny denounced him in '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Influence Of The Western Culture In The Soviet Union
Western culture influenced Soviet life and culture in many ways. From the 1950s until the 1980s this influence was manifested in a widespread fascination with Western manufactured goods, films, music, fashion and ideas. This fascination was condemned by the Soviet authorities and was described as "idol worshiping the West" (идолопоклонство перед Западом / idolopoklonstvo pered Zapadom) and similar phrases. The informal word ''zagranitsa'' ( rus, заграница, p=zəɡrɐˈnʲit͡sə, "the abroad") refers to the real or imagined world beyond domestic borders of the Soviet Union and, during the late Soviet period, to an idealized, imaginary West that lay beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Alexei Yurchak, in his 2006 book ''Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation'', describes the perception of ''zagranitsa'' by the Soviet people as an "imaginary elsewhere" that was "simultaneously knowable and unattainable, tang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ( – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer and conductor with French citizenship (from 1934) and American citizenship (from 1945). He is widely considered one of the most important and influential 20th-century classical music, composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernism (music), modernist music. Born to a musical family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Stravinsky grew up taking piano and music theory lessons. While studying law at the Saint Petersburg State University, University of Saint Petersburg, he met Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and studied music under him until the latter's death in 1908. Stravinsky met the impresario Sergei Diaghilev soon after, who commissioned the composer to write three ballets for the Ballets Russes's Paris seasons: ''The Firebird'' (1910), ''Petrushka (ballet), Petrushka'' (1911), and ''The Rite of Spring'' (1913), the last of which caused a List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience respons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aram Khachaturian
Aram Ilyich Khachaturian (; 1 May 1978) was a Soviet Armenians, Armenian composer and conductor. He is considered one of the leading Music of the Soviet Union#Classical music of the Soviet Union, Soviet composers. Khachaturian was born and raised in Tbilisi (now the capital of Georgia (country), Georgia). He moved to Moscow in 1921 following the Sovietization of the Caucasus. Without prior music training, he enrolled in the Gnessin State Musical College, Gnessin Musical Institute, and subsequently studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Nikolai Myaskovsky, among others. His first major work, the Piano Concerto (Khachaturian), Piano Concerto (1936), popularized his name within and outside the Soviet Union. It was followed by the Violin Concerto (Khachaturian), Violin Concerto (1940) and the Cello Concerto (Khachaturian), Cello Concerto (1946). His other significant compositions include the ''Masquerade (Khachaturian), Masquerade Suite'' (1941), the Anthem of the Armeni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev; alternative transliterations of his name include ''Sergey'' or ''Serge'', and ''Prokofief'', ''Prokofieff'', or ''Prokofyev''. , group=n ( – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who later worked in the Soviet Union. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from ''The Love for Three Oranges,'' the suite Lieutenant Kijé (Prokofiev), ''Lieutenant Kijé'', the ballet Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev), ''Romeo and Juliet''—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and ''Peter and the Wolf.'' Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created—excluding juvenilia—seven completed operas, seven Symphony, symphonies, eight Ballet (music), ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a Cello Concerto (Prokofiev), cello concerto, a Symphony-Concerto ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhdanov Doctrine
The Zhdanov Doctrine (also called Zhdanovism or Zhdanovshchina; ) was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed by Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov in 1946. The main principle of the Zhdanov Doctrine was often summarized by the phrase "The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best". Zhdanovism soon became a Soviet cultural policy, meaning that Soviet artists, writers and intelligentsia in general had to conform to the party line in their creative works. Under this policy, artists who failed to comply with the government's wishes risked persecution. The policy remained in effect until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. History The 1946 resolution of the Central Committee was directed against two literary magazines, '' Zvezda'' and ', which had published supposedly apolitical, "bourgeois", individualistic works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Earlier, some critics and literary historians were denoun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer. Shostakovich achieved early fame in the Soviet Union, but had a complex relationship with its government. His 1934 opera '' Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk'' was initially a success but later condemned by the Soviet government, putting his career at risk. In 1948, his work was denounced under the Zhdanov Doctrine, with professional consequences lasting several years. Even after his censure was rescinded in 1956, performances of his music were occasionally subject to state interventions, as with his Thirteenth Symphony (1962). Nevertheless, Shostakovich was a member of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947) and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from 1962 until his death), as well as chairman of the RSFSR Union of Composers (1960–1968). Over ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946. First established in 1917 as the NKVD of the Russian SFSR, the ministry was tasked with regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, and its functions dispersed among other agencies before being reinstated as a commissariat of the Soviet Union ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Executed Renaissance
The Executed Renaissance (), or Red Renaissance (), was a generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s who lived in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and wеre killed by the Soviet regime. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Lenin's national policy, Lenin's nationality policies of ''Korenizatsiya'' ( "Indigenization") favored the language revival, revival of minority language, minority and heritage languages, encouraging them to be taught in the schools and published and providing them with material support and visibility. The poets and writers of the Ukrainianization generation were often residents of the Slovo Building in Kharkiv, which was then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. With the 1929's Great Break (USSR), Great Turn, or Great Break, newly appointed Soviet Premier and CPSU Secretary General Joseph Stalin reversed those policies in favor of state centralisation, socialist realism, and Ru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valerian Pidmohylny
Valerian Petrovych Pidmohylny ( Ukrainian: Валер'ян Петрович Підмогильний; 2 February 1901 - 3 November 1937) was a Ukrainian modernist, most famous for his novel '' The City'' (). Like a number of Ukrainian writers, he flourished in the 1920s Ukraine, but in the 1930s, he was constrained and eventually arrested by the NKVD on fabricated charges of terrorism. He was executed in Sandarmokh in 1937, during the Great Purge. He is one of the leading figures of the Executed Renaissance. Biography Pidmohylny was born in Ekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine). His father was a manager for a large landowner. He learned French as a child and continued his efforts, eventually becoming a major translator of French literature into Ukrainian, in particular the works of Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant. His early adult life is sketchy, but there is a slight indication that he was a supporter of Symon Petliura, the military co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Purge
The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovshchina ( , ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. After the Assassination of Sergei Kirov, assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev in 1934, Joseph Stalin launched a series of show trials known as the Moscow trials to remove suspected party dissenters from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, especially those aligned with the Bolsheviks, Bolshevik party. The term "great purge" was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book ''The Great Terror (book), The Great Terror'', whose title was an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which functioned as the Ministry of home affairs, interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Starting in 1936, the NKVD under chief Genrikh Yagoda began the removal of the central pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
