Time difference

Author and Presenter Vladimir Tolts

Vladimir Tolts:

To the song question “Where does the homeland begin?” there are many answers - from the falsely pathetic to the cynical - from the anecdote. One of them, contained in the song itself for the Russian president’s favorite spy film, “From the song that our mother sang to us,” is partly correct. In part, because orphans and deaf-mute children who never sang any songs to them have a homeland, and those who don’t remember their mother’s songs either. But everyone has songs, let’s say more broadly - melodies as an essential component in the formation of our ideas about our homeland.

This was always felt and understood by the Soviet government, which throughout its history fought on the “musical front” either with “confusion instead of music,” or with jazz, or with church singing, or with romances. With the melodies of our childhood. With our homeland, that is.

One of the early stages of these non-musical battles on the “musical front” will be discussed today.

Historians have noted more than once that the power that was established in Russia after the heavy bloodshed of the civil war, both by virtue of its genetics and as a result of its goals, had a pronounced militaristic consciousness and worldview. It is no coincidence that 15 years after the civil war, a Komsomol activist would write in the Metrostroy newspaper:

"And how they fought then, in the eighteenth,
Not sparing his young years -
So now we have to fight
For each linear meter."

In accordance with this military perception of everyday life, introduced into the mass consciousness, it - everyday life - was divided by power into “fronts” - “food”, “economic”, then the “industrialization front”, “collectivization front”, “tractor front” appeared... There was an “anti-religious front”, and a “cultural”, and a “literary”, of course, and an “ideological front” that existed until the end of Soviet communism, in the communist trenches of which Not long ago, many of today’s anti-communists, democrats and liberals fought bravely. In 1929, the year of the end of the NEP, on the eve of the total de-peasantization of the country, “the beginning of a comprehensive offensive of socialism along the entire front” was announced.

It was then that the first battle began on one of this host of “fronts” - on the “musical” front. Preparations for it have been going on for a long time.

The story is told by a musicologist from Hamburg, the author of numerous studies on the history of music in Europe, Marina Lobanova.

Marina Lobanova:

One of the warning bells for the upcoming political campaign was sounded in the resolution of the First Conference on musical political and educational work, which took place in 1926. This resolution condemned “gypsyism,” “boulevardism,” and “musical moonshine.” In 1927, Anatoly Lunacharsky defined Western European art in one fell swoop as “a noisy drug of a jazz band nature.”

Vladimir Tolts:

The subtle party connoisseur of beauty, People's Commissar Lunacharsky, especially, according to the recollections of his contemporaries, who valued jewelry expropriated by the authorities, was very irritated by the tango and foxtrots that came into fashion during the NEP period.

“These rhythms are not human, they chop your will into a cutlet. ... Along the foxtrot line, the bourgeoisie is moving towards such confusion, Dadaist ingenuity and ridiculous, unpleasant sounds that all this will undoubtedly lead to the direct opposite of music - inhuman noise, and that’s where it will end. But the music will not end: by this time we will turn the head of the bourgeoisie and begin our creativity.

We have an opportunistic tendency that says that it is in vain to try to eradicate the foxtrot in clubs. We stand for joy, we have reasons to rejoice and dance. We have young forces who have already won gigantic victories and who still have many victories to win. Why don't they dance? But the question is - what should they dance? Why is it absolutely necessary that if you dance, then only do the foxtrot? I don't see any evidence for this and I applaud the attempt to create your own proletarian dance. In foxtrot, the main thing is from mechanization, from dulled eroticism, from the desire to dull the feeling with narcotics. We don’t need this, we don’t need this kind of music.”

Vladimir Tolts:

“We” means, first of all, the new government. A small group of “professional revolutionaries” settled in and around the Kremlin, people without a profession and, as a rule, without regular education, people, many of whom spent many years abroad, where their eclectic and largely conservative-bourgeois tastes were formed.

But the tastes of the new government (or lack thereof) were, I think, a secondary matter in the first battle on the “musical front.” (It is significant that, according to the recollections of the “Kremlin children,” their families kept and listened to gramophone recordings of foxtrots, tangos, and emigrants Chaliapin and Vertinsky for many years.) More important was the Kremlin leaders’ understanding of the “political moment” and the tastes and mood of that broader layer of the new class that had developed around them - the party state nomenklatura with the “proletarian leaven.” The Kremlin “inhabitants” correctly understood that in the perception of the “Civilian fighters” and younger “promoters”, tangos and foxtrots were associated with the NEPmen they hated, and gypsy romances were associated with “White Guardism”. Just like the work of Yesenin, the singer of peasant Rus' prepared for the slaughter, they, following Bukharin, declared “the rotten belch of a tavern intoxication.” After all, it was the “party favorite” Nikolai Ivanovich who made his party “diagnosis” of “Yeseninism” in 1927:

" This is disgusting, powdered and brazenly painted Russian swearing, liberally moistened with drunken tears and even more vile ."

Vladimir Tolts:

In 1929, the turn of the “tavern frenzy” music came. The “Proletarian Press” of those years was full of headlines:

- “The cooperative store is a hotbed of musical hack work,”
- “Down with hack work and the “light genre”,
- “Down with “brick music”,
- "Hack workers don't give up without a fight"
- “The hacks don’t stop,” etc.

The ideological “alienity” and “harmfulness” of the “light genre” was substantiated in the articles of the leaders of “proletarian music”:

" What kind of repertoire is this, what is this so-called “light genre” in general? Its distinctive feature is truly lightness: it does not touch or disturb thought, feeling, will, does not pose any acute, big questions. It subtly and very deftly captures the attention and will of a person, and then usually distracts them in the sensual, erotic direction. The operation occurs subtly and imperceptibly, and different styles of this music are different - depending on their emotional content - take over the human nervous system...

Gypsy is primarily relaxing. Heavy, fat, static harmonies and howls teach the will to be in a weakened state, acting on a person like a hothouse atmosphere. The theme of “gypsy romances” is always the same: on the one hand, the love vicissitudes of the parasitic and therefore animal-sensual classes, on the other hand, in connection with this, complaints about satiety, relaxation, and fatigue.

“Gypsy” has nothing to do with the song of the Gypsy people. Why is it covered up by national, folk origin?

The origin of the name dates back to that terrible time when our bankrupt, squandering landowner, rude and uncultured merchant exploited for his amusement a significant part of the gypsies living in Russia and, first of all, the gypsy woman.

Imitating Europe, our Russian merchant was drawn to the “exotic”, “oriental”... Carrying out all the orders and whims of the “ruling Russians”, on whom the gypsies entirely depended, according to the will of their masters, forced to lavish affection, fun, riot, and if necessary (if the merchant “softened”) - sadness and tears - all this was, as it were, the personification of the power of the Russian state, dependence East from the Russians. Here the tyranny, cruelty, and frenzy that later became so famous developed.

It's no secret - gypsies, and in particular gypsy women, filled taverns and restaurants in droves, and gypsies were often forced to sell themselves, become kept women of hussars, landowners and merchants, to go, as they say, "from hand to hand." A gypsy mistress, a kept gypsy, was considered a woman of the “first class.” The entire demimonde of Moscow cocottes and kept women looked up to the gypsy, especially in her ability to sing and dance. However, the content in the song and dance was the most ordinary - salon, vulgarly vulgar, stupidly prostituted. There was only one “brand” left - a “gypsy” romance and nothing more...

Let us firmly remember: “gypsyism” is humiliating chauvinism, outright propaganda of prostitution; This propaganda is carried out from the stage of our clubs, carried out in subtle, persistent ways, achieving an infinitely greater effect than if it were carried out in ordinary, so to speak, journalistic forms.”

Vladimir Tolts:

About “gypsyism” - this is from Lev Lebedinsky’s article “The Most Important Link in Our Work” (On the so-called “light genre”). But the same author is talking about foxtrot and tango:

" In folk dance, a person flies, rushes, his legs and arms live, he is free and joyful. Foxtrot is something exactly the opposite. Monotonous, dead movements of the legs and swaying are the content of the dance. People move in space only forward and backward; first you crowd your partner, leaning on him, then your partner. Therefore, the task of the foxtrot is to accustom the body, the rhythm of a person, his will, his thought - to mechanics, to something dead, once and for all This is the rhythm, the pulse of capitalist society. What does the foxtrot wean from free movements, from strong emotions, from a dynamic elastic rhythm, from a rhythm in which only the legs and nothing else can participate, but in which the whole body and thought, will, heart participate, becoming accustomed to freedom, attention, developing and enriching.

Another type of so-called syncopated music - tango - is built on erotic teasing, twitching... This is the music of the weak, the music of the impotent."

Vladimir Tolts:

The following year, 1930, Lebedinsky took up the then popular American tap dance.

" ...I had to take part in a concert at the Central House of the Komsomol of Krasnaya Presnya (in Moscow). In the middle of the concert, it was announced that “at the request of the public”... one Komsomol member from the propaganda group of the Central House would dance an “American dance.” Somehow strangely, waddling from side to side and swaying in different directions with his whole body and limbs, he pushed onto the stage (namely, he didn’t go out, didn’t run out, but somehow "stuck out", a young guy stepped forward and began to dance.

He either brought his bent knees and toes together and at the same time spread his heels, or, on the contrary, began to walk with his feet turned out, that is, with his heels together and his toes “looking” in different directions. In this case, the bent knees were also not “brought together”, but on the contrary, they were “spread apart” as widely as possible, just like the toes. After walking this way and that, the guy suddenly began to change movements frequently: first he would bring his knees together, then he would spread them apart.

Every now and then the elbows turn outward at sharp angles, just like the hands, palms and crooked fingers flash. It seemed that the man was in some kind of seizure: convulsions were convulsing his limbs, he had no control over himself. The will, the brain, the nerve centers that control movements left him, and some extraneous force, blind and senseless, took possession of the man, tugged at his limbs and made the most arbitrary, ridiculously unnatural movements with him.

For ten minutes, dangling in front of the guys like a leather bag with waddling trash, the guy tried to emphasize his indifference to the dance. He is no longer the master of his body, he is a slave to some force that does what it wants with him. He is not averse to flaunting this “cheerful” position of his so that they will laugh at him. He himself laughs at this with his slavery, helplessness, transformation into some kind of obedient animal, into some kind of mechanism. In the end, he has nothing against this state: he is quite calm, does not protest, he ate and even drank (he is almost asleep) - let someone, some kind of machine control him, his body, arms, legs, head.

This slavish, weak-willed, submissive, dull state of the human will, the human body is the main content, the main idea of ​​the dance...

Its name tells us a lot about the origin of the dance: “American” dance. It was brought to us from America, a country in which real slavery was and still is extremely widespread, with the inevitably accompanying mental and physical degeneration of man... Slavery in America exists both black and white... A huge mass of unemployed people always live near the gigantic industrial centers of America. A significant part of them are the bankrupt petty bourgeoisie, small traders and artisans, and sometimes even the degenerate and decayed aristocracy and intelligentsia. ...This is a completely declassed, decayed mass, the so-called “lumpen proletariat”. The “lumpen-proletarian” no longer protests against capitalism, against his position, does not fight with anyone, he has come to terms with his semi-bestial conditions of existence, he thinks only about his belly, about somehow eating sausage and beer, and he doesn’t need anything else. For this, he is ready to serve the police, the fascists, beat up demonstrators, stand at the machine instead of the strikers.

He is a slave of capitalism, the capitalist system.

This art, this ideology, these dances are beneficial to capitalism. This art, through the bourgeois part of our artists, through the bourgeois part of our theater, penetrated into the USSR and gained some popularity among us. Why? Because we have not yet completely uprooted the roots of capitalism, because we still have bourgeois artists, bourgeois critics and art theorists."

Vladimir Tolts:

So, the time has come to talk about “artists and art theorists.” The names of the "bourgeois" ones are known. But who were the new ones - theorists and practitioners of “proletarian music”, those who started and carried out the first battle on the “musical front”?

Marina Lobanova:

In the 1920s, in Soviet music, as well as in literature, painting and theater, there were various groups of “proletarian musicians”. The most aggressive are RAPM (Association of Proletarian Musicians) and Prokoll (Production Collective of Students of the Moscow Conservatory). They fought for a monopoly in musical culture. RAPM and Prokoll declared themselves the only true representatives of the proletariat in music, fighters for its ideological purity.

“Proletarian musicians” exercised “Chekist control” in music: in conservatories, publishing houses, and other musical institutions they carried out regular checks of profiles, interrogated the accused, and exposed “class alienation.” All these checks ended in powerful “purges”: competitors were destroyed, and the vacant positions were captured by “proletarian musicians”. Representatives of RAPM and Prokoll denounced in the press “class enemies”, “enemies of the proletariat” and, starting from 1929, “saboteurs in music”: “Trotskyists”, “opportunists”, “Mensheviks”, “formalists”, “bourgeois decadents”, “emigrants”, “White Guards”, “fascists”, “reactionaries”. One of the victims, the wonderful Russian composer Nikolai Roslovets, called these processes “a pandemonium of thugs and an orgy of ignoramuses.”

Vladimir Tolts:

Well, what if, like Galich: “...let’s remember by name everyone who raised their hand...”? Who are they, what kind of people are they? And, by the way, tell your listeners who is this Lev Lebedinsky, whose writings we have already quoted today?

Marina Lobanova:

The most aggressive, most terrible speeches and publications belonged primarily to Lebedinsky, as well as to Daniel Zhitomirsky, Viktor Bely, Nikolai Chemberdzhi, Marianne Koval, as well as Yuri Keldysh. As for Lev Nikolaevich Lebedinsky, he was a remarkable figure in all respects. His career began during the Civil War, when he led mounted reconnaissance. Later Lebedinsky became a security officer. In 1922, he was sent by a factory to the Moscow Conservatory to organize “proletarian control in music.” A laudatory report about this was published in the proletarian press under the title “Composer-Komsomol Member”. Lebedinsky exercised his control in alliance with Leopold Averbakh and Vladimir Kirshon. After the fall of Averbakh and Kirshon, Genrikh Yagoda’s henchmen, Lebidinsky lost much of his power, but did not leave the stage and even gained the trust of Dmitry Shostakovich, whom he had also exposed before. During the years of perestroika, Lebedinsky argued: he, Lev Lebedinsky, was the first victim of Stalinism in music.

Vladimir Tolts:

And how did the party lead them - “the leading and directing detachment of the proletariat”?

Marina Lobanova:

If only there was a party! But not only the party, behind the “proletarian musicians” stood not only the party ideology, all the relevant organizations, but also the punitive authorities. The Association of Proletarian Musicians was one of the branches of the NKVD, this is proven by its charter, published in 1930. It directly says - “lists of members of the Association are submitted annually in duplicate to the NKVD body that registered the Association”; “The composition of the elected Council and all changes occurring in it are reported to the relevant body of the NKVD.”

Vladimir Tolts:

Well, okay... What did the RAPM members themselves write (besides denunciations)? What kind of “music of the masses” could they contrast with popular foxtrots, tangos, and romances?

Marina Lobanova:

“Proletarian musicians” argued that the main thing is the content, the main thing is the verbal text. If it is revolutionary, then in general it automatically guarantees the quality of the music. Therefore, they mainly composed songs and choirs, very primitive things based on revolutionary and, I would say, militaristic texts. For example, the title is typical: “They wanted to beat us, they wanted to beat us...” - this is Alexander Davidenko. Stylistically, if you remember “Heart of a Dog,” these are the chorales that this newly elected house management sang in the Kolobukhov house, when Philip Philipovich exclaimed: “Well, now the Kolobukhov house is gone! We’ll have to leave, but where, one wonders? At the beginning, every evening, singing, then the pipes will freeze, then the boiler will burst, and so on. The lid to Kolobukhov.”

Nikolai Roslavets deciphered this abbreviation RAPM as “Russian Association of Bad Musicians”. And he gave an absolutely damning description of this RAPM production: “The creativity of “proletarian musicians” is reduced to primitives, in the spirit of military marches, once composed by bandmasters of all foot and cavalry regiments on the orders of their superiors. Any old Jaeger march, provided that a text of revolutionary content is pinned on it, can instantly turn from counter-revolutionary to revolutionary, without changing one bit in the formal meaning." Vissarion Shabalin was also inclined towards his opinion; he testified: “Composers Bely and Davidenko (these are “proletarian musicians”), not knowing how to orchestrate their written music, are forced to resort to hired labor, that is, order orchestration at a reasonable price. My students who studied with Schechter (another “proletarian musician”), they bring me, say, 3-4 bars of some clumsy melody, it begins discussion: do these 3-4 bars, clumsy bars, reflect the experiences of the proletariat during the Kronstadt uprising? This is just an idiotic game of phraseology!

And here’s another statement from the head of the Leningrad radio center “Sirius”, as he called the RAPM members in 1931, for which he was also persecuted. He called them “donkeys”, “fools-Komsomol members”, “opportunists”, “illiterate ignoramuses” and “plagiarists” and “self-interested people”...

Vladimir Tolts:

What motivated these lovers of “revolutionary phrases”? Faith in the ideals corresponding to their phraseology?..

Marina Lobanova:

The most important thing in this struggle was the elimination of competitors. In this respect, the RAPM members were very different from the representatives of Proletkult. Proletkults were in many ways primitive, naive poets and writers, but they had some beliefs, had their own ideology, had their own faith, if you like. RAPM were careerists of the purest water, so it was about power, about power in all its manifestations, about places, about money, about prestige.

Vladimir Tolts:

In 1930, “proletarian musicians” with particular passion began to embrace the famous director Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold, declaring him “the defender and propagandist of the foxtrot.”

From the article by Daniel Zhitomirsky “The Meyerhold Theater - “agitprop” of bourgeois music (On the position of Comrade Meyerhold on the musical front)”:

“ Comrade Meyerhold has been playing a significant role on the musical front for several years now. Being a convinced supporter of urbanism in music, he has long and consistently implanted this style in his theater, grouping around himself composers of the so-called “modern movement.” The promotion of the foxtrot from the stage of Meyerhold’s theater has for many years already taken deep roots, which the musical community now has to uproot with great difficulty...

In no Soviet production has the overt propaganda of foxtrot obscenity reached such cynicism as in the review "D.S.E." songs and the like...

All this music is presented with the greatest love and gusto. The results are not long in coming. The viewer is agitated (what the hell is satire, when all this is given so sharply and captivatingly, especially in comparison with excerpts of boring declamation about the defense of the country, the five-year plan and the like) - the sounds of jazz, the cynical dances of tailcoats and bare backs are covered with friendly applause from the audience.

The title of Soviet revolutionary theater is incompatible with the propaganda of music hostile to the working class!"

Vladimir Tolts:

To be fair, it is worth noting that in the 1930s, the “musical proletarians” “fucked” not only Meyerhold. The authors of the “light genre” Yuli Khait, the Pokrassov brothers, and Tsfassman were also denounced. Well, and of course the “bourgeois aesthetes” who have nothing to do with the “light genre” - Nikolai Roslavets, Alexander Mosolov, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninov, Igor Stravinsky (the last three were called nothing less than “fascists”, “White Guards” and “emigrants”). So it was not only the “theatrical revolutionary” Meyerhold who suffered...

Marina Lobanova:

Meyerhold was enemy number one, and after him Shostakovich, because, say, the production of Shostakovich’s first opera “The Nose” was also one of Meyerhold’s projects.

Vladimir Tolts:

But in 1930, responding to a RAPM questionnaire about the “light genre,” Dmitry Shostakovich, who had done a lot of remarkable things in this genre, suggested: “We should contact the authorities that control the publication and performance of musical products, Glavlit and Repertoire Committee, with a demand to issue an appropriate resolution categorically prohibiting the publication and performance of the “light genre.” What’s the matter?

Marina Lobanova:

Shostakovich was afraid, he was absolutely panicky about his fate. And there were reasons for this. In 1928, at the request of the famous conductor Nikolai Malko, he orchestrated the popular song “Tea for Two”. And this arrangement by Shostakovich, which entered the literature under the name “Tahiti Trott,” enjoyed absolutely incredible success both in the Soviet Union and abroad. In 1928, Malko emigrated and took the score with him. “Proletarian musicians” immediately branded “Tahiti Trott” as a vulgar and bourgeois foxtrot. Therefore, when Shostakovich answered this questionnaire about the “light genre” like this, he sought to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of “proletarian musicians.” Later, by the way, he renounced Malko, who allegedly performed a “harmful” foxtrot abroad without his consent.

Vladimir Tolts:

From the article “Musicians and Sabotage,” 1930:

“ The process of the sabotage organization of the Industrial Party stirred up broad layers of the working class, peasantry and Soviet intelligentsia. The musical world also did not remain aloof from the process: numerous resolutions and protests against sabotage were made, demanding the application of the most severe measures to saboteurs and ideologists of intervention.

...The spread of the ideology of the decaying Western bourgeoisie (foxtrot) is one of the forms of moral preparation for intervention. There is a certain ideological contact between the work of the Ramzins, on the one hand, and the clergy and foxtrotists, on the other...

To fight sabotage not only in the economic sphere, but also in the ideological and artistic sphere!”

Vladimir Tolts:

This is how the process of the Industrial Party came back to music. Marina Lobanova tells me:

Marina Lobanova:

“Sabotage” was a very convenient, useful label. It’s just that since the processes, political processes against the “pests” began, this label was immediately adopted and applied to the same competitors. Therefore, if you look at the lists of these pests, a variety of concepts and a variety of names appear there. Well, first of all, as already said, this is a reactionary professorship, this is all serious music that fits the rubric of “church” or “decadent”. As for “light music”, the organization “AMA” (Association of Moscow Authors) came under attack first of all. And among other things, the wonderful jazz orchestra, which was organized in 26 by the king of Soviet jazz Alexander Tsfassman, was dispersed. In 1931 there was a RAPM resolution, where these “proletarian musicians” spoke very laudably of what they had done: they exposed the class nature of the “light genre” as a type of Nepman music, stopped publishing works by Nepman composers, the performance of pornographic, intoxicating music was prohibited, the private pseudo-cooperative shop, the so-called “Association of Moscow Authors”, consisting of of foxtrotists and gypsies, led by the pest Pereselentsev, sentenced by the court to 4 years of strict isolation. Nepman composers were purged from the author's societies, the ideologists of Nepman music were expelled from the pages of the press, a broad movement was raised among the masses and this is the main decisive factor against all types of musical vulgarity, hack work, against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois influences in music.

Vladimir Tolts:

Well, the last question: when, how and why did this first battle on the musical front end?

Marina Lobanova:

I would say that this battle did not end, it was suspended, largely due to the fact that this decree was issued that dissolved all proletarian groups in 1932. That is, in 1931, complete abomination of desolation reigned; all composers wrote about this; those who still risked writing were mostly silent. And in 1932, many breathed a sigh of relief, because RAPM, RAP and the rest ceased to exist. But in return, the Union of Soviet Composers and other creative unions were created, which practically brought the RAPM members to power. In addition, there were other circumstances, people had different tastes, and the authorities, right up to the highest, some people still loved this “light music”, which the “proletarian musicians” called “pornographic” and “obscene”, and so on, and which they sought to completely eradicate. Therefore, these former Nepman composers found high patrons.

Vladimir Tolts:

Who for example?

Marina Lobanova:

They call the military authorities, they call Voroshilov, for example.

Vladimir Tolts:

P.S:

Time changes both people and the attitude of authorities and society towards them. The persecuted Hight wrote the melody “Stalin gave us steel wings and a fiery engine instead of a heart” - which became an anthem and a sign of an entire era, and then a symbol of nostalgia for the new generation, whose fathers failed to “make a fairy tale come true.” The fairy tale remained a fairy tale. And its author, having turned into a singer of the era, after her death again became an object of criticism. Today, yesterday's orthodox communists stigmatize him not only for praising Stalinism, but also for slandering the Soviet Air Force and the physiology of its valiant pilots (they had real golden hands and not an engine, but a real Russian heart).

“The music of the fat people,” jazz, after the death of the “leader of the peoples,” also gradually won its place under the Soviet socialist sun, paying for it by participating in a general choir chanting the values ​​of the new world.

"The enemies retreated to the river,
And you can smoke in peace,
Forget about stupid marches and
Pokrass Polkas.

And tomorrow again to war,
And tomorrow I'll have to fill it up
Cold earth in waves
Hot jazz.

Comrade military man, why this sadness?
Perhaps tomorrow the world will collapse...
Military comrade, play the new blues,
Which the commander wrote for us!"

(Jazz club of the Red Army. - Off-season. "Accident" (c) 1996. )

New commanders, brought up on Soviet patriotic and “author’s songs,” are already ordering these blues from new authors. The soldiers who participated in the early presidential elections in Chechnya, after fulfilling their “civic duty,” danced to jazz tunes...