A recent collection of Soviet song texts differs from its many predecessors in one interesting respect. It contains Pavel German’s “Pesnia o kirpichnom zavode,“ better known as “Kirpichiki,” one of the most popular songs of the late 1920s, and a song that for decades symbolized the survival of petit-bourgeois tastes and poshlosf after the Revolution. This quiet rehabilitation can serve as the occasion to examine an aspect of Soviet cultural history that is rarely discussed outside the USSR, namely, the beginnings of Soviet popular music.

Collectivism was a Utopian dream that flourished in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and later became part of Soviet ideology. Eisenstein's early films, conductorless orchestras, and mass workers' choruses all aimed at inculcating the view that a collective—be it the party, the proletariat, or the masses—was to replace the individual as the determinant of social and political values. The popular "proletarian culture" movement that flourished during the civil war (1918-21) was one form of collectivism, but there were many others. Yet, as a body of ideas, collectivism in Russia preceded the 1917 Revolution by a decade or more and made a crucial contribution to bolshevism. Indeed, in the years after 1905, collectivism had as much a claim to bolshevism as did the party-centered authoritarianism of Lenin.

The statements in the epigraph reflect contrasting attitudes toward the question of the possibility, desirability, and urgency of creating a "proletarian culture" during the years immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power. Even more, they reflect basically opposing priorities concerning the most important and immediate steps to be taken in order to promote the revolutionary transformation of Soviet society as a whole.

During the past decade, the most important large-scale effort to expand the decision-making and control capabilities of the Soviet economic management system has been the scientific-technical program for creating an integrated nationwide management information system. Formally designated as the Obshchegosudarstvennaia sistema sbora i obrabotki informatsii (dannykh) dlia ncheta, planirovaniia i upravleniia narodnym khosiaistvom (All-State System for the Collection and Processing of Information for Reporting, Planning, and Management of the National Economy), the system is more happily described by its acronym OGAS.1 It is an outgrowth of the rapid expansion of the systems approach (particularly its cybernetic expression) to the rationalization of management, and has developed into the technological variant of reform and an evident alternative and successor to the ill-fated economic reforms of 1965. As a system, OGAS has been projected as a solution to many of the fundamental economic, social, and organizational problems resulting from Soviet socioeconomic development.

The slowdown of growth in the Soviet economy has renewed interest in the agricultural productivity of the Soviet Union. The failure of agriculture to grow at the pace of industry has hampered overall expansion, and domestic crop failure has induced grain purchases abroad. The bottlenecks to Soviet agricultural growth and development are diverse. On the one hand, they may be inevitable, for the resource endowment of the Soviet Union, where the range of temperature is great and the level of precipitation is unpredictable, does not favor agriculture. On the other hand, they may be systemic, for Soviet agriculture has been criticized for weak labor incentives, stifling bureaucratic controls, and overly large farms.

Politically, the phrase “Polish October” refers to the installation of a new government in October 1956, along with the hopes this event inspired for a more liberalized regime. In cultural terms, however, the Polish October is analogous to the “Thaw” in the Soviet Union—but much warmer—and it includes a period of about two or three years, roughly from 1955 to 1958, during which intense debate, settling of accounts, and a reevaluation of tradition took place. Socialist Realism was discredited once and for all, and a burst of new publishing occurred. Drawers were emptied of manuscripts by already established writers as well as by those who were making belated debuts, while postwar West European literature appeared in translation. In addition, many forgotten or forbidden works of Polish interwar literature were reissued, and a selective program of publishing emigre works in Poland was initiated.