Social and Political Conditions for Intellectual’s Literary-Art Activities in 1920s

Abstract

This paper analyses the most important processes of Ukrainian culture development in early totalitarian period of 1920s. The fundamental approach for assessing this period was the fact that the formation of the totalitarian regime had the primary influence on the cultural in general and literary-art activities in particular and was transforming it in the way the regime saw the “cultural revolution”. The 1920s were marked as the period of the soviet policy against intellectuals. Same concerns the policy of “ukrainisation”, despite it caused the acceleration of the Ukrainian culture development, in its essence has not created a freedom of development and was a controlled by bolsheviks’ party process of the regime adaptation to the reality of national republics. Thus the analysis of a change in approaches to intellectuals and their role in society, which was living through the heavy transformations of forced character, is important aspect of totalitarian USRR regime development. The subject matter of this paper is the analysis of social and political conditions for the literary and artistic intellectuals in 1920s in motion and analysis of the connections with the political processes in USSR. Mass social oppression and social engineering are the aspects specific for the soviet regime. The issue of literary-art activities are analysed in three aspects: intellectuals in soviet ideology; state politics innovations against literary and artistic intellectuals in 1920s; general soviet approaches to conquering and controlling the Ukrainian literature and art representatives in the USSR. We have identified that social and political conditions had significant differences with the Russia and USSR in general. This was due to the fact that the national character of intellectuals was creating a tension between the center and republics. We explored the fact that the soviet policy against literary and artistic intellectuals had a non-linear character and had the peculiarities different to the general political processes.

Keywords

• literary and artistic intellectuals
• totalitarian regime
• mykola khvyliovyi