ABSTRACT

Lenin recognized the fact that the artist claimed creative liberty, but he declared that the regime, not the artist, should and would determine the outcome in the arts. During the Civil War Lenin stepped up the seizure of church properties, which netted the regime over 7 billion rubles, and dissolved the monasteries, at the same time exposing a variety of "relic frauds" in which purportedly miraculously preserved saints' corpses were revealed to be wax images and the like. Lenin's policy toward the Orthodox Church at first was as cautious as his earlier pronouncements on religion. Lenin was far from being a cultural revolutionary in the sense of wishing to break all the artistic images of the tsarist period and build de novo. Proletkult was composed of theoreticians rather than artists and did not include the extreme radical wing of the writers, who talked of uprooting all the culture of the past.