Central Committee, Resolution on the Policy of the Party in the Field of Literature. July 1, 1925

While Communists followed Marx in the belief that all aspects of life are affected by class struggle, party leaders of the 1920s did not imagine that they could make commanding decisions in the artistic realm. They dealt severely with overtly anti-Communist political opinions, but otherwise were content to encourage "proletarian" cultural contributions, and, as the 1925 party statement on literature illustrates, allow a variety of aesthetic currents to exist.

As the class war in general has not ended, neither has it ended on the literary front. In a class society there is not, nor can there be a neutral art, the class nature of art generally and of literature in particular is expressed in forms which are infinitely more various than, for instance, in politics....

It must be remembered, however, that this problem is infinitely more complicated than other problems being solved by the proletariat. Even in the limitations of a capitalist society the working class could prepare itself for a victorious revolution, build cadres of fighters and leaders produce a magnificent ideological weapon for the political struggle. But it could work out neither the problems of natural science nor the tasks of technical development; and by the same token the proletariat, the class which was culturally deprived, was unable to develop its own literature, its own characteristic artistic forms, its own style. Although the proletariat has ready infallible criteria regarding the sociopolitical content of any literary work, it does not have such definite answers to all questions of artistic form....

With relation to the "fellow-travelers" we must bear in mind: (1) their differentiation, (2) the importance of many of them as qualified specialists of literary technique; and (3) the presence of vacillation in this group of writers. The general directive should be for tactful and careful relations with them, and for such an approach as will guarantee all the conditions for their earliest possible movement in the direction of Communist ideology. While discouraging antiproletarian and antirevolutionary elements (now quite insignificant), and while fighting to expose the ideology of the new bourgeoisie which is taking form among a part of the fellow-travelers-those of the "change-of-landmarks" stripe-the Party should have a patient attitude toward intermediate ideological formations, patiently aiding those inevitably numerous formations to develop in the process of ever closer comradely cooperation with the cultural forces of communism....

Communist criticism should fight mercilessly against counterrevolutionary phenomena in literature; and yet at the same time show the greatest tact, attention and patience toward all those groups which can and will join the proletariat. Communist criticism must drive out the tone of literary command. Such criticism can have deep educational significance only when it relies on its own ideological superiority. Marxist criticism should once and for all drive out of its midst all pretentious, half-literate, and self-satisfied Communist conceit. Marxist criticism should have as its slogan to learn," and should resist every appearance of cheap judgment and ignorant arrogance in its own milieu.

While it has infallible criteria of judgment regarding the class content of literary tendencies, the Party as a whole must not bind itself to any one tendency in the field of literary form. Giving general leadership to literature, the Party cannot support any one faction in literature (classifying these factions according to their different views on form and style), just as it cannot by resolutions settle questions of the form of the family, though in general it does and should lead in the development of new ways of life. Everything indicates that a style proper to the epoch will be created, but it will be created by different methods, and the solution of this problem has not yet been begun. In the present phase of cultural development any attempt to bind the Party in this direction must be repulsed.

Therefore the Party should declare itself in favor of the free competition of various groups and tendencies in this province. Any other solution of the problem would be an official, bureaucratic pseudo-solution. In the same way it is inadmissible to legalize by a decree the monopoly of the literary printing business by any one group or literary organization. While morally and materially supporting proletarian and proletarian-peasant literature, and aiding the fellow-travelers, the Party cannot offer a monopoly to any of these groups, even the one most proletarian in its ideology. For this would be to destroy proletarian literature itself

Source: Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 235-40.