Transformations of Internationalism: Decades of National Art and Paradoxes of Soviet Cultural Policy

Abstract

This paper is focused on the Decades of National Art, which were regularly held in  the  USSR from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1950s. The authors examine this phenomenon in  the  context of  the  political and ideological shift that occurred in the second half of the 1930s. The  internationalist (and, to a certain extent, cosmopolitan) perspectives were replaced with isolationist, militant-statist ones. However, since internationalism remained a basic element of  regime legitimation, it was not abandoned but was redirected inward. From then on, its main audience was not the working classes outside the USSR, but the peoples within its borders. As  a  result, “the friendship of peoples” becomes the key concept in the system of the self-understanding and self-presentation of the state, and one of its most important manifestations is  the Decades of National Art. The  authors argue that the Decades phenomenon requires a more fine-tuned research approach than what conventional explanatory models (“modernization,” “postcolonial studies”) can provide. Despite the autocratic nature of the political regime, communication between the authorities in Moscow and the local artistic intelligentsia was not one-way. In the union and autonomous republics, the Decades were perceived as emerging opportunities. It was an opportunity to cultivate your national identity and present this identity to a wide audience. In addition, the primordialist cult of authenticity (“true nationality”), shared by both the principal and the agents, left cultural figures from non-Russian regions room to  maneuver. This contributed to the agency of national republics and unintentionally led to their constitution as autonomous ethnocultural units.