By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 August 2023

Andrey Zhdanov was one of the key figures in the Soviet Great Terror (Yezhovshchina) and, indeed, during Stalin’s reign more generally until his death in 1948. Zhdanov is perhaps best remembered for the strictures he imposed on Soviet cultural life in 1946, known as Zhdanovism (or Zhdanovshchina).

The imposition of Zhdanovism was, in effect, the institutionalisation of the outlook of the pre-1917 Russian intelligentsia and the terrorist-revolutionaries it gave birth to, including the Bolsheviks, which saw cultural produce—literature, painting, sculpture, music, theatre, film—as having no intrinsic value; such things were merely useful for political warfare.

Zhdanovism involved an escalation in censorship—and self-censorship—within the Soviet Union to eliminate anything writers, artists, and so on produced that was not geared towards promoting Communist ideology, and especially to suppress anything that resembled or drew inspiration from the “bourgeois” and “imperialist” West.

Or, to put it another way, the Zhdanovist vision of art as divided between “socialist realism” and “bourgeois decadence”, where only the former counted as having any merit, involved not only exclusion of officially disapproved material—a normal enough practice in a despotism—but the forced inclusion of approved material: only if cultural products contained a sufficient quantity of approved values, messages, and themes did they reach the “standard” necessary to pass the censor.

Since cultural-artistic outputs were no longer measured by standards of truth and beauty, but by how well they promoted the official ideology, all art became propaganda—and this was applied retrospectively. Living writers like Alexander Fadeyev and Galina Nikolaeva were made to publicly repent for the “errors” in their novels and to rewrite them, so as to remove such “errors” and to include the new orthodoxy. Books by authors who were deceased (or purged or exiled) were rewritten by the State to make them conform with official doctrine.

(The “Cultural Revolution” in Red China would take this further by withdrawing “incorrect” books from circulation and having the authors burn existing copies after “struggle sessions” where they confessed their mistakes. People were also made to publicly apologise for and burn books they simply owned that contained “Old Think”, with a particular focus on Western classics.)

The result was an even more stultifying uniformity and draconian simplification of cultural life in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nobody would produce a book or film about the human condition with all its complexities and contradictions: playing by aesthetic standards that had been judged treasonous was extremely dangerous. The incentive was to produce works that didactically reinforced moral lessons from official theology.

The echoes of this at the present time are obvious, but Western Zhdanovism has been around at least since Edward Sa’id’s attempt to redefine “Orientalism” in the 1970s. Instead of a branch of scholarship, Sa’id recast the Orientalists as handmaidens of “imperialism”, whose output, therefore, past and present, was to be discounted—except for those parts that accorded with his own political ideology. The Sa’idian worldview, where scholarship on Middle Eastern history and society is judged “good” or “bad” depending on whether it supports a current ideological-political program, rather than by the methods and evidence used to compile it, has dominated many university departments for decades.