Modern art styles appeared to refuse to draw upon this heritage, thus clashing with the long realist tradition in Russia and rendering the art scene complex.Oleg Sopontsinsky, Art in the Soviet Union: Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, p. 21 Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1978 Even in Lenin's time, a cultural bureaucracy began to restrain art to fit propaganda purposes.Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p. 283, Leon Trotsky's arguments that a "proletarian literature" was un-Marxist because the proletariat would lose its class characteristics in the transition to a classless society, however, did not prevail.R. H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism p. 191 thumb|left|A mosaic of Lenin inside the Moscow Metro Socialist realism became state policy in 1934 when the First Congress of Soviet Writers met and Stalin's representative Andrei Zhdanov gave a speech strongly endorsing it as "the official style of Soviet culture". It was enforced ruthlessly in all spheres of artistic endeavour. Form and content were often limited, with erotic, religious, abstract, surrealist, and expressionist art being forbidden. Formal experiments, including internal dialogue, stream of consciousness, nonsense, free-form association, and cut-up were also disallowed. This was either because they were "decadent", unintelligible to the proletariat, or counter-revolutionary.
Modern art styles appeared to refuse to draw upon this heritage, thus clashing with the long realist tradition in Russia and rendering the art scene complex.Oleg Sopontsinsky, Art in the Soviet Union: Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, p. 21 Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad, 1978 Even in Lenin's time, a cultural bureaucracy began to restrain art to fit propaganda purposes.Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p. 283, Leon Trotsky's arguments that a "proletarian literature" was un-Marxist because the proletariat would lose its class characteristics in the transition to a classless society, however, did not prevail.R H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism p. 191 thumb|left|A mosaic of Lenin inside the Moscow Metro Socialist realism became state policy in 1934 when the First Congress of Soviet Writers met and Stalin's representative Andrei Zhdanov gave a speech strongly endorsing it as "the official style of Soviet culture". It was enforced ruthlessly in all spheres of artistic endeavour. Form and content were often limited, with erotic, religious, abstract, surrealist and expressionist art being forbidden. Formal experiments including internal dialogue, stream of consciousness, nonsense, free-form association, and cut-up were also disallowed. This was either because they were "decadent", unintelligible to the proletariat, or counter-revolutionary.