Enemies of the People - The Destruction of Soviet Film, Theater and Literary Arts in the 1930s (Hardcover)

During the Stalin era, waves of terror scattered and destroyed millions of people in the Soviet Union. Among the victims were artists. By the beginning of the 1930s, the censorship machinery had become fixed in its bureaucratic forms and methods and the crackdown on artists entered an intense and savage phase. Enemies of the People offers a reflective overview of the status of the arts and a broad portrait of cultural policies during this period. Eaton's introduction points out the underlying relationships among the essays, touches on the history of censorship in Russia, and discusses the flowering of arts in the late Russian empire. While the introduction provides an excellent historical context for students and nonspecialists, the volume as a whole describes what was lost, speculates about what might have been lost, and discusses how and why some artists or their work survived.