The execution of Vsevolod Meyerhold

What was up with that?

Who knows why he was killed. Maybe someone from the secret police or further above just didn't like his work.
As Wiki says:

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Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism. In the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin repressed all avant-garde art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in January 1938; the ailing Constantin Stanislavski, then the director of an opera theatre now known as Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre, invited Meyerhold to lead his company. Stanislavski died in August 1938.

Such was culture in Stalinism, idiocy, the paragraph and the firing squad as the ultimate arbiter in intellectual work and all fields of human activity. Even Hitler's Germany which held "degenerate art" exhibitions often at least let the artists escape to other countries.

Two articles of interest on the subject of art and literature under Stalin:
* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/a ... tml#kadare
* http://ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/ ... INART.html

There is a reason why the Soviet revisionists rehabilitated him.

Ismail wrote:

Two articles of interest on the subject of art and literature under Stalin:
* http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/a ... tml#kadare
* http://ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/ ... INART.html

There is a reason why the Soviet revisionists rehabilitated him.

Well clearly he deserved to die then. Generally I'm pretty pro-Stalin and anti-revisionist but c'mon, not everything his successors did was bad. Keeping political-economy and art & culture seperate somewhat is one of those things. If the proletarian dictatorship is secure enough then there should be no problem with "letting a hundred flowers bloom" as Mao said (and yes China did have problems because of that, but only because it wasn't a secure proletarian dictatorship)

As Hoxha pointed out, Mao's "hundred flowers" campaign was a result of the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, which served as a clarion call for all the revisionist currents in each country. It backfired on the Chinese revisionists, who were forced to rescind the policy. Maoism was originally to the right of Soviet revisionism, stressing that relations between the bourgeoisie and proletariat could be non-antagonistic. Even during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" Mao's essentially rightist line remained, such as his claims about the "two-line struggle" within the party (wherein the existence of a new bourgeoisie must be tolerated), etc.

Stalin seemed to suffer from paranoia and delusions as a result of acquiring power. Meyerhold was a communist and posed no threat to the USSR. What was the point of liquidating anyone with an independent view? Did he not care about the future of the Soviet Union after his death? Stalin is a major part of the reason why communism is a dirty word in the West.

If Meyerhold was a communist, why did the revisionists rehabilitate him?

And Stalin certainly did care about the USSR after his death. That's why he wrote Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., that's why a struggle was waged against the revisionist theses of Voznesensky and Varga (both rehabilitated after 1956), etc.

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If Meyerhold was a communist, why did the revisionists rehabilitate him?

Wow. Even the hard-core foaming-at-the-mouth Stalinists admit that his regime ( and even Stalin personally ) was responsible for the killing of innocent communists.

Besides you're missing the point here. Meyerhold was an artist, not a politician. Of course for you people it's normal to solve ideological and philosophical disputes and issues of human creativity and culture by the means of the paragraph and the firing squad.

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And Stalin certainly did care about the USSR after his death. That's why he wrote Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R., that's why a struggle was waged against the revisionist theses of Voznesensky and Varga (both rehabilitated after 1956), etc.

Pray tell, which of the cliques that started fighting for power after Stalin's death wasn't "revisionist"? Who, among the highest echelons of power in late Stalinism, according to you, was not a revisionist but a true communist ( of your flavor )?

Loz wrote:

Even the hard-core foaming-at-the-mouth Stalinists admit that his regime ( and even Stalin personally ) was responsible for the killing of innocent communists.

Certainly that was the case. Molotov's wife was imprisoned and charged with being a Western agent after WWII, while Kaganovich's brother was executed during the purges, but neither men used that pretext to denounce Stalin's contributions to Marxism-Leninism, his leadership, or his struggle against revisionism. When Kaganovich insisted to Stalin that his brother was innocent of the charge of being a spy, Stalin likewise insisted that the NKVD was certain he was, in fact, a spy. Stalin got his information from the NKVD, just like at one point he told Dimitrov that Elena Stasova and another woman turned out to be "scum," and that they'd need to be arrested as well, even though nothing actually occurred since the case never got far.

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Besides you're missing the point here. Meyerhold was an artist, not a politician. Of course for you people it's normal to solve ideological and philosophical disputes and issues of human creativity and culture by the means of the paragraph and the firing squad.

It makes little sense to treat both as mutually exclusive categories. Solzhenitsyn was a notorious reactionary, anti-semite and full-fledged defender of American imperialism in Vietnam. Havel went from being a writer to being a bourgeois politician. And it is obvious that Soviet writers and artists were overwhelmingly engaged in forthrightly political works.

Not to mention that he wasn't executed on the charge of his cultural output being "bad" or "incorrect."

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Pray tell, which of the cliques that started fighting for power after Stalin's death wasn't "revisionist"? Who, among the highest echelons of power in late Stalinism, according to you, was not a revisionist but a true communist ( of your flavor )?

I already noted Molotov and Kaganovich, the latter of whom lamented decades later that it is because they were unorganized, that they didn't behave as a clique, that they could never overcome Khrushchev and Co. Malenkov had his clique, Beria had his clique, and Khrushchev likewise had his own clique as well. Molotov and Kaganovich didn't.

But of course Hoxha noted more precisely that it was because Molotov and the like were bound by "bureaucratic legality," they did not understand that what was taking place was a struggle to restore capitalism, they just thought that if they sternly criticized Khrushchev and convinced the bureaucratized party apparatus to set him and his associates "right" then everything would go just swell. What was necessary, in his words, was revolutionary legality, which neither were in a position to use.