Bring Ideological Work to the Level of the Party’s Requirements Today.
Report by Comrade A. E. Kochinyan, First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party Central Committee, at a Meeting of the Republic’s Party Aktiv on April 4, 1973.
Original Source: Kommunist, 6 April 1973, pp. 1-3.
… The success of our political and ideological work and the success of the internationalist upbringing of the working people depends on the devotion to principle and consistency of our Communists, whose duty it is to display firmness, to tolerate no concessions and no laxity in questions of ideology and to wage an implacable struggle against all manifestations of nationalism. The trouble is that we still have people who, relying on the successes of our multinational country’s half-century path, underestimate the need to combat nationalistic sentiments.
It should not be forgotten, however, that prejudices of this kind survive even when relations between nations have no objective conditions engendering mutual antagonism. These prejudices and the inflation of national feelings or their distorted manifestation are very tenacious and remain stubbornly rooted in the psychology of politically immature people.
National narrow-mindedness and exclusiveness are expressed when in certain instances the republic press, radio and television programs and books lavish praise on individual figures of the past and the present, regardless of their class affiliation and ideological positions. In such cases, the principle of class allegiance is replaced by the principle of national affiliation.
I would like to discuss briefly the ties between Soviet Armenia and the Armenian colonies abroad.
In developing day-to-day relations with the Armenians abroad, we are guided by the principles of our party’s Leninist foreign policy and the Peace Program worked out by the 24th CPSU Congress. We support those foreign progressive and democratic forces that in the political field stand for peace and democracy and take the position that the Armenians abroad really around Soviet Armenia.
At the same time, it is known that the Armenian colonies abroad are not homogeneous in their social makeup. The reactionary bourgeois -nationalist Dashnak Party is active among them. The Dashnaks have been and remain the hired agents of reactionary forces, in our time of American imperialism. Their anti-Soviet, anticommunist activity is one segment of international anticommunism. It is no accident that the imperialist counterintelligence and propaganda centers provide them not only with financial wherewithal but also with other possibilities to conduct slanderous anti-Soviet propaganda. Like all the black forces of anticommunism, the Dashnak Party in our time has selected the Communist Party’s Leninist nationalities policy for its target. This hostile subversive work was stepped up especially during the days when the glorious 50th anniversary of the USSR was being celebrated.
It is necessary that we intensify the struggle against the penetration of bourgeois, anti-Soviet ideology and expose the Dashnaks’ frenzied, nationalistic anti-Soviet propaganda and activity. This is also necessary in order to help the working masses and democratic forces of the Armenian colonies abroad and give them the proper orientation. …
As is true in all fields of ideological work, in the social sciences too our scientists and the cadres of workers on the ideological front should stand firmly on principled positions of the class, Party evaluation of social phenomena. Success in ideological-political work and the internationalist upbringing of the working people depends largely on this. We cannot allow individual scholars, in elucidating historical problems, to deviate from Leninist Party criteria, to smooth over the sharp edges of the class struggle, to idealize the past and ex post faet0Jehabilitate activities, unacceptable from a class standpoint, of particular political trends or historical figures….
Some individuals in our republic try to deny realistic art and the principles of its Party spirit and class nature. In their opinion, art has nothing in common with true reality, With its phenomena, facts and objects. The problems of content, theme and plot do not exist for them. In Grakanterte, for instance, we read: “There are no minor or major themes. There is the artist, the creator, who, according to his temperament and his understanding of the world, seeks by expressive means to disclose what is inside him, what he has lived through and felt.” Such reasoning is not new; it was taken from the arsenal of the bourgeois theory of art. Or take another example. In a recently published catalogue, the art critic Igityan declares abstractionism to be the highest achievement of human thought in the fine arts and proclaims form in art to be its content. It is not surprising that the art of “the highest achievement of human thought” completely eliminates the hero or, in other words, denies a requirement of our life -the creation through artistic means of the image of Soviet man, the builder of communism.
Our art is class art, art that is guided by the principle of Party spirit, and precisely for this reason it is the freest art, since it serves mankind, which is composed of many millions of working people. The notorious bourgeois “free art,” camouflaged as “non-class,” “non-Party” art, essentially has a declass nature, since it serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie.
Armenia’s artists held a congress recently. It showed that our artists correctly understand their civic duty to the people and to socialist society. Many of them have created works of lasting value, works which, thanks to their high ideological conviction and artistic level, will add to the treasure house of Soviet fine arts.
At the same time, the congress showed that both the leadership of the Artists’ Union and its Party organization have a great deal to do in the Marxist-Leninist upbringing of their creative collective and in strengthening Party guidance of the Union’s activity.
Recently our young people’s poetry has sounded some motifs that cannot be approved by our society. Here too broad civic resonance is sometimes supplanted by the narrow self-expression of the poet’s own person, the philosophical-poetic generalization of the interests of society and the people is supplanted by elements of indifference to politics, and healthy, pure lyricism is supplanted by inexplicable pessimism. …
We direct our criticism at the leadership of the Writers’ Union. The unprincipled and fruitless arguments that frequently arise in the Union impede the resolution of important questions. The Secretariat of the Writers’ Union does not provide sufficient guidance for the work of the literary press.
It was only in conditions of the absence of businesslike leadership, a sense of responsibility and exactingness that it was possible for the magazine Sovetakan grakanutyun [Soviet Literature] to carry certain stories pervaded with ideological concepts that are unacceptable and alien to socialist art.
A few days ago the Bureau of the Party Central Committee, having discussed the mistake made by the editors, applied measures of Party responsibility to those guilty in the case and instructed the leadership and Party organization of the Writers’ Union to establish strict control over the activity of literary press organs and to help the editors correctly and profoundly to reflect the true tendencies in the development of our society and thereby effectively to facilitate the communist upbringing of the working people.
It is the task of the Party organizations, all workers on the ideological front, the press organs and the creative unions to fight implacably for the purity of the Marxist-Leninist theory of art and more consistently and purposefully to carry out the cultivation in our creative intelligentsia of a spirit of understanding of their lofty duty to society.
The cultivation of the social consciousness of Soviet citizens and the molding of the Marxist-Leninist world view cannot be complete without surmounting manifestations of reli? prejudices among certain parts of the people. It should be said forthrightly that some Party committees and organizations are unsatisfactorily fulfilling the resolutions of the CPSU Central Committee and the Armenian Communist Party Central Committee on intensifying atheistic propaganda. …
It is with deep satisfaction that we can say that the overwhelming majority of our young people possess lofty moral and ideological qualities….
However, we cannot shut our eyes to facts of another sort. Among some young people one can observe a scornful and lighthearted attitude toward socially useful labor, manifestations of indifference to politics, individualism, skepticism, and the commission of acts that are alien to our society. Owing to political immaturity, some young men and women unwittingly succumb to bourgeois morals and lose a correct orientation in public and political life.