Soviet culture: the nature and contradictions

The growing research interest in Soviet culture both in domestic science and abroad is due to the need to understand the role of this phenomenon in the cultural life of Soviet society in the context of the development of Russian and European cultures, global changes in the paradigms of cultural development under the impact of the social and historical upheavals of the 20th century. In the categories of Soviet-era cultural policy, the concepts of Soviet culture, the culture of Soviet society, the culture of the Soviet people, and a number of related derivatives were determined by the ideological content of the construct of advanced Soviet culture, opposed to the concepts of culture in pre-revolutionary Russia, the "decaying West, historical epochs, etc. Soviet culture was conceived as a result of the creativity and creative labor of the Soviet people with the role of the unique personality zhnika which had to be an example embodiment of the image Soviet person positioned as a moral ideal people. However, this idealized construct had real content that did not boil down to ideological or propaganda work. When it comes to the special identity of the Soviet man (homo sovieticus), most researchers agree that there existed and functioned some cultural and historical phenomenon, an integral part and result of which was the specific value organization of a person's personal culture. The image of the Soviet man occupies a central place in the artistic culture of the USSR. But not only artistic culture formed it. Therefore, it is essential to distinguish the concepts of culture of Soviet society, which has, first of all, socio-historical connotations, and Soviet culture, based on symbolic and stylistic categories. The concept of culture of Soviet society has a complex architectonics. The culture of Soviet society consisted of a leading cultural paradigm (Soviet culture) and individual subcultural formations of value and stylistic heterogeneity. At the same time, Soviet culture thus existed simultaneously as an ideology of the cultural policy of the USSR and a sociocultural organism whose life predetermined the paradigm for the development of the culture of Soviet society. Socialist realism as a style and aesthetic conception of Soviet culture from the very beginning and throughout the era of its primacy in the aesthetic standards of the official art of the USSR is formed from artistic material of various styles without aesthetic principles of selection at the base, inheriting ideological criteria for assessing plots, characters, actions, compositions, etc. In connection with this, in the modern humanitarian knowledge there is an active discussion on the development of criteria for assessing the content of this phenomenon. Discovered ontogenetic contradictions of Soviet culture lead to the conclusion that reducing this phenomenon to a totalitarian type of culture does not allow us to theoretically disclose its entire complex nature. On the whole, these contradictions should be studied in more detail, since they reveal the inner dialectic of the development of Soviet culture and allow one to trace its genesis in the historical interval between 1920-1980.

Keywords

Authors

References