ABSTRACT
‘Proletarian humanism’ became a key concept in the official Soviet discourse of the 1930s and retained its ideological impact into the 1980s. This chapter shows how the concept goes back mainly to Maxim Gorky in his role as spokesman for Stalinist culture and propaganda. I will trace the evolution of Gorky’s prerevolutionary understanding of man and ‘man-collectivist’ to his emphasis on the ‘new man’, whose realization was effected by means of reeducation (perekovka) in corrective labor camps and educational communes in the 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, I will analyze his conceptualization of ‘proletarian humanism’. He helped propagate this concept through numerous articles that were published with Stalin’s approval in mass journals such as Pravda and Izvestiya, and in 1935 the concept was also internationally referred to by the Parisian Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture as the prerogative of the Soviet state.
