The First Writers' Congress of Donald Trump
Art in the service of politics
Let’s get one thing clear from the start: Trump isn’t Stalin and Stalin wasn’t Trump. Stalin was a reader and had a substantial library and Trump is an enthusiastic golfer. Stalin had pictures of Lenin in his office; Trump has pictures of Trump. Also Stalin was more popular with the voters (they all said so). There are other differences.
The First Soviet Writer’s Congress
With that let me waft you back to August 1934 and the Hall of Columns in Moscow, once the ballroom of the Club of the Nobility, but now the House of Unions. It is the opening of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, the organisation which has by decree replaced all other writers’ associations and the hall is festooned with enormous portraits of great writers of the past: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Cervantes and Shakespeare among them, posthumously conscripted in the service of Soviet culture.
Magnificently moustached, the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky tells the 600 delegates that there is a new type of man now in the young Soviet Union, who though he knows conditions are hard, is animated by optimism not pessimism. And wants his art to reflect that optimism. You can get a grainy flavour of him here:
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/writers-congress/writers-congress-video/gorky-speaks-at-the-congress-1934/
In the hall listening to him are major authors such as Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel and top party members like Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. But the purpose of the Congress has already been outlined to them all by the 38-year-old Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, ideology secretary to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).
Zhdanov had begun by excoriating the state of literature in the West. There, he said…
Everything now is growing stunted - themes, talents, authors, heroes. Characteristic of the decadence and decay of bourgeois culture are the orgies of mysticism and superstition, the passion for pornography. The “illustrious persons” of bourgeois literature… are now thieves, police sleuths, prostitutes, hooligans.
Good Soviet literature has no time for such perversions. The kind of writer Zhdanov (and, by implication, any right-minded person) wants to read:
…derives the material for his works of art, his subject-matter, images, artistic language and speech, from the life and experience of the men and women of Dnieprostroy, of Magnitostroy.., from the creative action that is seething in all corners of our country.
In summary, literature like art should be (a) “realist” rather than abstract or complex and (b) socialist. This was not an entirely new message for the comrade writers. Just after the Revolution (less than 17 years earlier) the head of People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky had argued for art to be sunny and forward-looking. "The sight of a healthy body, intelligent face or friendly smile was essentially life-enhancing”, he told the artists of Russia.
However this was essentially advice. Zhdanov was not advising, he was telling. “Comrade Stalin”, he warned them, “has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What duties does the title confer upon you?”And the Congress, fully grasping his meaning set out four guidelines for good writers to follow. The work (as summarised by the art historian Cathy Locke) must be:
1. Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.
2. Typical: scenes of everyday life of the people.
3. Realistic: in the representational sense.
4. Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State
That’s the kind of art we want, the kind we will pay for in this new world of ours, guided by the light of our beloved Stalin.
“We took over the Kennedy Center. We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. I’m going to be chairman of it, and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be ‘woke.’ Donald Trump, February 2025
If you were to bundle up the Royal Festival Hall, the Albert Hall, the National Theatre and the Barbican Centre into one gigantic arts complex, you might come up with something half the size of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. The product of nearly forty years of debate and deliberation, the Center opened in 1971 to a Leonard Bernstein premiere.
Since then it has done high-brow and middle-brow, popular and ground-breaking, from the plays of August Wilson and Tennessee Williams to the musicals of Sondheim and Rodgers and Hart. It has hosted the National Symphony Orchestra performing classical and avant-garde music. It’s been going for 43 years and put on 300 entirely new plays in that time. And, as in this country, its board of trustees has been made up of appointees approved by politicians but essentially consisting of the famous, the knowledgeable and the wealthy. Until last week it was chaired by one of the most celebrated philanthropists in America, David Rubinstein (it is always sensible for an arts foundation to be chaired by a generous billionaire, or at least by someone who knows how to touch the extremely wealthy for a wing-naming donation).
But a few days ago all the board members who had not just been directly appointed by the Trump administration received an email from a chap called Sergio Gor who runs Trump’s personnel office, titled “An Update from the White House” which read:
On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position on the Board of The Kennedy Center is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.
New to the board were J.D..Vance’s wife Usha, the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and her mother (I’m not joking), Mr Gor himself, Emily May Fanjul (wife of Trump donor and sugar magnate Pepe Fanjul), Allison Lutnick (wife of Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary nominee Hoard Lutnick) and the wives of the CEO of New England Patriots American Football Club Robert Kraft and of the President of the New York Yankees baseball team Randy Levine.