Joseph Stalin was no great lover of the arts, unlike other Communist leaders, but he recognised their power to stir his people’s souls in the pursuit of his political goals.
Stalin and the writer Maxim Gorky are both credited with defining, in 1934, the new style that would encourage this. Socialist Realism: art socialist in content and realist in style.
One of the burdens this new style had to bear in the capitalist West in later years was that it was labelled as formulaic, static and unemotional. Ironically, its purpose was the opposite: expression “saturated with ideas and feelings,” as writer Anatoly Lunacharsky put it.
