The
Zhdanov Doctrine (also called
zhdanovism or
zhdanovschina,
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
: доктрина Жданова, ждановизм, ждановщина) was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed by the
Central CommitteeThe Central Committee, abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", was the highest body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Its full name was Центральный комитет Коммунистической партии Советского Союза = ЦК КПСС; Tsentralnyy Komitet Kommunistitcheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza = TsK KPSS, or...
secretary
Andrei ZhdanovAndrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician.-Life:Zhdanov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1915 and rose through the party ranks, becoming the All-Union Communist Party leader in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934...
in 1946. It proposed that the world was divided into two camps: the imperialistic, headed by the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
; and democratic, headed by the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
. The main principle of the Zhdanov doctrine often referred by the phrase "
The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best".
The
Zhdanov Doctrine (also called
zhdanovism or
zhdanovschina,
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
: доктрина Жданова, ждановизм, ждановщина) was a Soviet cultural doctrine developed by the
Central CommitteeThe Central Committee, abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", was the highest body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Its full name was Центральный комитет Коммунистической партии Советского Союза = ЦК КПСС; Tsentralnyy Komitet Kommunistitcheskoy Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza = TsK KPSS, or...
secretary
Andrei ZhdanovAndrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician.-Life:Zhdanov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1915 and rose through the party ranks, becoming the All-Union Communist Party leader in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934...
in 1946. It proposed that the world was divided into two camps: the imperialistic, headed by the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
; and democratic, headed by the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
. The main principle of the Zhdanov doctrine often referred by the phrase "
The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best". Zhdanovism soon became a Soviet cultural policy, meaning that Soviet artists, writers and
intelligentsiaThe intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
in general had to conform to the party line in their creative works. Under this policy, artists who failed to comply with the government's wishes risked persecution. The policy remained in effect until 1952, when it was declared that it had a negative effect on Soviet culture.
The 1946 resolution of the Central Committee was directed against two literary magazines,
Zvezda and
Leningrad, which had published supposedly apolitical, "bourgeois", individualistic works of the satirist
Mikhail ZoshchenkoMikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was a Ukrainian author and the foremost Russian satirist of the Soviet period....
and the poet
Anna AkhmatovaAnna Akhmatova was the pen name of Anna Andreëvna Gorenko , a Russian/Soviet poet credited with a large influence on Russian poetry....
. Earlier some critics and literary historians were denounced for suggesting that Russian classics had been influenced by
Jean-Jacques RousseauJean Jacques Rousseau was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whose political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational thought.His novel, Emile: or, On Education, which he considered his most...
,
MolièreJean-Baptiste Poquelin, mostly known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
, Lord Byron or
Charles DickensCharles John Huffam Dickens FRSA , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature's most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print...
.
A further decree was issued on 10 February 1948. Although formally aimed at
Vano MuradeliVano Muradeli was a Soviet Georgian composer.Born in Gori, Georgia, then part of Imperial Russia, he graduated from Tbilisi State Conservatory in 1931. From 1934 to 1938, he worked at the Moscow Conservatory. From 1942 to 1944, he served as a principal and artistic director of the Central Ensemble...
's
operaOpera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
The Great Friendship, it signalled a sustained campaign of criticism and persecution against many of the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
's foremost composers, notably
Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Russian composer of the Soviet period and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century....
,
Sergei ProkofievSergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and came to be admired as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century.-Biography:...
and
Aram KhachaturianAram Khachaturian was a Soviet-Armenian composer whose works were often influenced by Armenian folk music.-Life:...
. The decree was followed in April by a special congress of the Composers' Union, where many of those attacked were forced publicly to repent. The composers condemned were formally rehabilitated by a further decree issued on 28 May 1958.
Zhdanovism in the People's Republic of ChinaThe People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the most populous in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately one-fifth of the world's population...
During the
Cultural RevolutionThe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a period of widespread social and political upheaval in the People’s Republic of China between 1966 and 1976, resulting in nation-wide chaos and economic disarray.It was launched by Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party of China, on May 16,...
, Zhdanovism was carried to an even further extreme than the one it reached in its Russian archetype. Yang Hansheng, former vice-chairman of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, was denounced for extolling such "bourgeois" writers as
William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, Molière and
Henrik IbsenHenrik Johan Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family...
. Zhou Yang, who translated
Nikolai ChernyshevskyNikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, critic, and socialist...
and
Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist...
into
ChineseChinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, was accused in
Red Flag of the crime of praising the "foreigners" (used in the pejorative sense)
Vissarion BelinskyVissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin , and other critical intellectuals...
, Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov. Zhou "stubbornly announced" that "in aesthetics he was a faithful follower of Chernyshevsky". The accusations were all the more ironic as, in the Soviet Union, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov were considered key radical figures who
paved the way for the 1917 Revolution.