Soloist

Londoners, stalkers and anyone else with nothing better to do on a Friday evening should note that, rather terrifyingly, I am sole speaker (following the mighty, if Cherry Coke-splattered Comrade Seymour last week) at the Institute of Historical Research, as part of the the Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture series. I'll be on Friday the 12th December, 5.30, and here. It goes on for about two hours, about half of which will be spent listening to me talking and showing slides. The subject matter is 'Aesthetics of the Offensive: The 'Third Period' and Comintern Modernism, 1928-32'. 

(Attempts to remember what he was talking about when suggesting that title) In short, I'll be tackling an awkward question for Trotskyist or (in my case) Trotskyish aesthetic historians - that the consolidation of Stalinist power and the defeat of the Left Opposition in 1927 did not, as the usual history has it, lead instantly to the abandonment of Modernist film, design and architecture. In fact, this was the period of - to name just a few artefacts - the workers' clubs of Melnikov, the 'social condensers' of the OSA in architecture; in film, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, FEKS' New Babylon; in design, El Lissitzky's PRESSA exhibition or the posters of Gustav Klutsis. The argument is that in many respects, early Stalinism brought about not just a continuation, but an intensification of aesthetic radicalism, aligning itself with the developmentalism of the Five Year Plans. This continued in the international wing of the movement, in the form of the glossy USSR In Construction propaganda sheet, designed by Lissitzky, Rodchenko and others. In fact, the 'radicalism' of early Stalinism, when added to the suicidal tactics of the 'Third Period' of the Communist International ('after Hitler, us', the refusal to work with the SPD against the Nazis, and so forth) led to an aesthetic aggression and particularly, an aggressive youthfulness, that is under-investigated by leftists and easily exploited by the opponents of modernism or indeed of socialism. Without wanting to defend the often appalling politics they represented, the paper will try to argue that this aesthetic radicalism threatened to spill over into something that threatened Stalinism altogether, which perhaps is what ultimately led to its suppression from 1932-4. Now I have to write the bloody thing...