Archival audio of Vladimir Lenin (in Russian): What is Soviet power? What is the essence of this new power, which people in most countries still will not, or cannot, understand? The nature of this power, which is attracting larger and larger numbers of workers in every country, is the following: in the past the country was, in one way or another, governed by the rich, or by the capitalists, but now, for the first time, the country is being governed by the classes, and moreover, by the masses of those classes, which capitalism formerly oppressed.
Professor Stephen Kotkin: The fall of the czarist regime and Vladimir Lenin's coup d'état in 1917 didn't bring about the revolution in art. What it did bring about was a difficult question for the artists: should they serve the new regime for its revolutionary ends?
I'm Steven Kotkin. I'm a Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Propaganda for Lenin came very easily. Let's remember that World War I was pretty horrible. All of those families who had lost a loved one in the war. People who came home were maimed. Societies were just dumbstruck. And, so, there was a sense that things had to change. Something had to get better.
The promises of the revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union were extraordinary. The slogans from 1917—peace, land, bread, national self-determination—all of these sounded wonderful. Of course, in hindsight, we know that it was a big lie and a failure because you cannot produce peace and social harmony through mass violence, deportations, famine, terror, and everything else.
The essence of totalitarianism is how you act in support of a system that destroys your independent agency. This happened to many artists who were trying to propagandize, to mobilize the masses for the building of a new world.