The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia by Sheila FitzpatrickReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 355-357Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211523 .

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REVIEWS 355

what Kautskii said about the war and I 9I 7 and shown how this clashed with the Bolshevik interpretation, but are not helped to understand why this clash occurred. By taking Kautskii's side, Donald's inference must be that the Bolsheviks betrayed Kautskii; but if they had been shaped by Kautskii's teachings how could it happen? Lacking an answer to this question the book tails off without a conclusion.

The problem is the book focuses entirely on theoretical debate, forgetting the relationship between Marxist theory and practice. Kautskii claimed 'I have never been a practical organizer'; Lenin was obsessed with organization. Starting with a similar theoretical outlook each could reach a different destination. Preaching revolution under legal conditions was quite unlike advocating it under illegal conditions. To analyse situations in abstract, as Kautskii did, was different to implementing policies on the ground. Kautskii came to radical conclusions concerning faraway Russia. He took a much softer approach at home in Germany. It was Luxemburg, another German resident, who first pointed to Kautskii's increasing moderation, much to Lenin's incredulity.

The final element which helps explain the theoretical paradox was the experience after 19I7. In I903 Kautskii had predicted the proletariat would play a significant role in any Russian revolution even if the end result was not socialism. This in turn might spark off a proletarian revolution in Germany which, if victorious, could lead to 'accelerated development' back in Russia. The actual turn of events was not an exact copy of this scenario, but close. A proletarian-dominated revolution in Russia raised the question of socialist revolution in Germany which broke out in I9I8. Upon the latter's success further development in Russia depended. It was in Germany, in the practice of political struggle, that Kautskii proved wanting and the German revolution was defeated.

Only by comparing the theory and practice of both Lenin and Kautskii can the questions effectively posed but not answered by 'Marxism and Revolution' be solved.

Edinburgh DONNY GLUCKSTEIN

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutiona?y Russia. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, I992. XX + 264 pp. Notes. Index. $43.95; $I 5.35-

As her subtitle signals, Sheila Fitzpatrick's new collection of essays analyses the struggle, in the I920s and early I930s, between the political and institu- tional dominance of the Communist Party on the one hand, and the cultural hegemony of the Russian intelligentsia on the other. This was a war, as she illustrates, that ended in Pyrrhic victory for both sides, the intelligentsia losing any semblance of right to self-determination, but gaining symbolic power through its elevation to the most privileged stratum of Soviet society, whilst the Party, conversely, attained authority over the intelligentsia, but was forced to surrender any attempt to make a specifically 'Communist' contribution to

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356 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

culture. Having stated the outlines of this argument in her succinct Introduc- tion, Fitzpatrick then proceeds to a series of chronologically ordered short essays examnining important aspects of cultural-political rhetoric, institutional history and mentality during the I 920s and I 930s.

Fitzpatrick's usual technique is to home in on specific social groups, such as university professors, composers and Stalin's 'new elite' of party cadres, or to provide close readings of key ideological debates in their institutional contexts; in the richest sections of the book both techniques are combined. Particularly striking is the only essay (apart from the Introduction) written specifically for the book, 'The Lady Macbeth Affair', which is a stimulating and witty discus- sion of the brouhaha over the Shostakovich opera. Fitzpatrick's demonstration of the fact that 'militant puritan initiatives did not necessarily come from above; they also came from within the profession and were supported at least tacitly by the musical and concertgoing public' (pp. 2I4-15), is cogent and illuminating. 'The Bolsheviks' Dilemma', an article which attracted consider- able controversy on its first publication in Slavic Review (vol. 47, I988), is a schematic, but interesting, deliberation on the hiatus between 'class war' theory and the realities of early Soviet society, which lacked either a true bourgeoisie or a true proletariat. Rather less convincing are those sections of the book that deal with broad historical themes. Local detail sometimes gets sacrificed to abstraction: 'Stalin and the Making of a New Elite', for example, is a study of the cadres promoted after the Great Purges that, in sticking to numbers and central career facts, gives very little sense of the mentality of such people. Occasionally, too, source material seems spread rather thinly. In 'Becoming Cultured', for example, Fitzpatrick's discussion of Soviet society's growing genteelism during the period of 'Socialist Realism' is largely based on a sampling from I930S periodicals, and her remarks on gender bias in Soviet ideology take no account of the now substantial body of work by Western specialists on Soviet women's history.

The under-annotation of this chapter, originally a Festschrift contribution, and some other pieces makes one wish that Fitzpatrick had revised more substantially when putting the book together. Some strange factual errors have also been allowed to slip through - it is, for example, startling to read that Meierkhol'd 'died in prison or a labour camp a few years' after his arrest (p. 208), or that there were 'numerous instances' when Stalin intervened on behalf of 'prestigious apolitical poets' (p. 245). A specially-written conclusion would have been desirable; as it is, the book tails off with a piece entitled 'Cultural Orthodoxies Under Stalin' that is simply a lame restatement of arguments better articulated elsewhere in the book. The lack of a bibliography in a volume that is clearly intended for student consumption is also regret- table. That said, however, The Cultural Front is a useful introduction both to 1920S and I930S Soviet cultural history, and - though readers are unlikely to be quite as interested as Fitzpatrick herself in the links between these essays and her own intellectual biography, which she explores in some squirm- making paragraphs in the Preface - to the revisionist historiography of the 1970S and I980s. Some elements of revisionism's 'consensus model' of Soviet society are certain to be revised again in their turn during the I99Os. The post-Foucauldian scepticism with regard to the benignity of dominant cultural

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REVIEWS 357 discourses which has now become fashionable amongst nineteenth-century Russian historians will no doubt soon begin to affect the writing of Soviet history. Both this more pessimistic intellectual tradition, and the evidence now emerging from post-Soviet Russia, make it unlikely that future commentators will play down the purges as much as revisionism, partly for polemical reasons, has tended to do. Historians of the future are also certain to develop a more nuanced view of grassroots Soviet history, an area not adequately analysed to date. But Fitzpatrick's determinedly anti-heroic discussion of the Russian intelligentsia's pact with Communism will still retain its importance as a representation of at least part of the truth about life in Russia during the I 920s and I 930s. School of Slavonic and East European Studies CATRIONA KELLY University ofLondon

Klukowski, Zygmunt. Diary from the Years of Occupation 193g-44. Translated from Polish by George Klukowski. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, I993. XX + 37I PP. Index. Photographic Illustrations. Maps. Appendix. No price available.

ZYGMUNT KLUKOWSKI was a doctor, writer, historian and bibliophile. Born in Odessa in I885, he had served as a physician in the Russian Army during World War I and then as a military surgeon in the Polish Army during the Polish-Soviet War of I99I -20. Following the German attack in I939 he was again mobilized, this time to Field Hospital no. 204. Within days, though, the Polish position had become hopeless and he was released by the commanding officer to return to his hospital in Szczebrzeszyn (near Zamosc).

Klukowski's diary follows events in the Zamosc region from the late summer of I939 up to the point almost five years later when the Red Army crossed the River Bug and the Germans were driven out. Day-to-day life - the effects of the curfew, food shortages, deportations of Poles for work in Germany, house searches, arrests, random executions and beatings, retaliatory strikes by the underground, assassination of collaborators and informers - is recounted on the basis of what the author himself witnessed, or what he was told by friends. He describes the steady deterioration of the situation of PolishJews until their final round-up for the extermination camps in I942, the expulsion of Polish villagers from I942 onwards and the steady influx of German colonists (the Zamosc region had been chosen by Himmler as an area of German resettlement) .

The seemingly endless litany in Klukowski's account of arrests, killings, Gestapo executions and deaths in custody, becomes sadly, but perhaps inevitably, almost a matter of routine. Klukowski writes of people being 'numbed' (p. 222) to the sight of everyday killings on the street. The threat of arrest hung over all and brought a tremendous tension into daily life. Many took to the forests to escape arrest, but this was rarely a long-term solution- especially for those with families.

News of the wider events of the war appears in the diary sparingly, since the Germans confiscated radio receivers, news was sparse - and this absence of

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