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speech to the Writers Congress, quoted in Scott, The Soviet Writers Congress, 1934, p.21). Yet
it is a perplexing fact that truthful depiction is not the same as what Zis calls precision in
external description. That is to say, Socialist Realism is actively distinguished from Naturalism.
It seems obvious to any outside observer that AKhRR s rehabilitation and transformation
of the Wanderers tradition in the early twenties sets the tone for Socialist Realism. The rhetoric
is more or less the same, and the pictures look very similar. And yet in one of those bizarre
reversals that characterize the whole question, Socialist Realism condemns the AKhRR tradition
for its naturalism. What Socialist Realism purports to be true to, that is to say, is not external
appearances but the inner essence. Furthermore, naturalism is interpreted as not an inferior
variety of realism, but merely the reverse side of formalism (Zis, Foundations of Marxist
Aesthetics, p.245). Socialist Realism thus presents itself as the synthesis, the overcoming and
transcendence of two equally discredited opposites that cancel each other out the avant-garde
on the one hand and naturalism on the other. Zis makes a distinction between the mechanical
repetition of reality and its creative reproduction (p.39). In other words, what is to constitute
an adequate Socialist Realism, on this model, is no simple matter, and consists more in the
application of Marxist philosophy than in any direct match to observable features of the world as
it is. Since definitive knowledge of Marxism is assumed to rest with the leadership of the
Communist Party, the question of what is good and bad in art is quite legitimately within the
terms of the theory to be decided by the politicians. This sounds hideous to Western ears, or
indeed to anyone outside the orbit of the Stalinized Communist parties; but within them, all was
seen to proceed from the people transmitted via their historic representative, the party.
In practice this often led to a hagiographic depiction of leaders, and rampant idealizations of
working people, as in Gerasimov s many portraits or Mukhina s monumental The Worker and
the Collective Farm Woman [at the 1937 World s Fair]. Yet Socialist Realism in the hands of an
artist such as [Alexander] Deineka could produce telling images of ordinary people, or of the
struggle against Fascism, that were simply not within the purview of the Western avant-garde.
[...] Be that as it may, it is important for us to understand that Socialist Realism was not always a
caricature. And to treat it as if it was is significantly to underestimate its power. It is perhaps also
to underestimate the claims on art of those whose lives are marked less by a preoccupation with
art than with the making and living of life itself. [...]
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