The Bennington evening banner. (Bennington, Vt.) 19??-1961, 1919-10-03
NEW CULTURE is
DREAM OF REDS
Huge Sums are Expended by
BoISheviSts to Promote
Their Propaganda.
See weird EFFECTS IN ART
Democratized Paintings are splashes
of Color That Guido the Work of
acknowledgements and
Books are Scarce.

-"Proletarianizing Russian
culture" Is one of the tasks attended
to by the bolshevik government of Lee
nine and Trotzky. What this process
consists of is told by the Copenhagen
correspondent of the London Morning
Post He says;
IF the bolsheyik system, as seems
likely, disappears altogether from Rus
STA during the present summer, curl
GUS experiment in culture thereby
will be brought to an end. Beyond
doubt nine-tenths of bolshevism is
common murder and plunder-the boil
shevik dictator, Znovilleff, in a speech
of May 10, admitted that 'three-quar-
terS of the 100000 soviet officials care
only for their own pockets but the
other tenth is honest fanaticism with
the customary foundation of decisions.
zone delusion is that there can he a
specific proletarian culture Last
month the Moscow provincial soviet
Tin the intervals of shooting old men
and boys whose kinsmen of service age
refused to fighD set about organizing
blograph and graphophone entertain
ments in the villages, at which, says
the Krasnaya Gazetta, fn addition TO
showing plctorially and screaming
stridently the infamies of our former
foes we are providing real proletarian
education art, science, philosophy, his
tory 1t is culture stamped with the
irresistible 'proletkult' mark. This
'proletkult,' word concocted by
Lunatcharsky, Is the official name Of
state department with headquarters in
Catherine street, Petrograd, and In the
Moscow Morosoff palace. The con-
cocted word goes with Sovnarcom (for
Council of Peoples Commissarles)
Glavsakhar (for chief sugar monop-
oIy), Sovdep, and other barbarous
neoIogisms which, with bolshevlsm.
have enriched the language of Tur-
genieff and Tolstoy.
Millions Expended on Cult.
"The commissarlat Of education,
over which Lunatcharsky presides,
spent in 1913 2.90O,000,000 roubles
(nominally 81, 450,000000), and the es-
Inmates of its expenditure for the first
half of 1919 alone amount to 1867 000,-
GOO .roubles, nominany about 80 per
cent more than the whole annual bud
get before the war. OF the first men
toned sum over 250000.0O0 rouhles.
the Kraynaya Gazetta says. was
ON the encouragement of literature and
the arts, that Is, of the specific artis-
tic and literary forms which are glor-
lously known as 'proetkult.' Thus art
and literature are violently democrat
tized.
During the whole of last winter, in
the Morosoff palace We're held weekly
competitive sOlrees, which NJ Lunatch-
arsky and even our mighty Hitch
q. C., Lenine) did not shrink from at
tending, though the ordeal for Lenine,
who is a cultivated man, must have
been hard. Bolshevik poets read aloud
their verses, and bolshevik painters
showed how hopelessly they had left
post-lmpressionists, cublsts and ex-
pressionists behind. Two of their
paintings shown to me at Stockholm
were mere splashes of color framed in
zigZags of common tar.
The report of the commissarlat of
education for 1918 states that in sew
enteen provinces swayed by the soviets
mt the end of last year there were 81
per cent more elementary schools than
under the autocracy. This largely ac-
counts for the swollen expenditure.
Higher education has been proletar-
ianlzed-on paper-by admitting stu
dents according to their merits.
Many Papers Suspended.
1.-THE plight of proletarian culture
has grown markedly worse during the
last few months, mainly owing to lack
of paper. In Petrograd, instead OF
nine newspapers, there have appeared
since April l only five, The bolshevik
propaganda Is still turning out many
thin political pamphlets, some of which
l have seen; but book publishing has
almost entirely ceased; and the best
known Russian novellsts, Andreyeff,
Kurpin and Merezhk6ysky, are begin
ming the publication of their writings
with BONNER of Stockholm. The in
ability to produce books at home will
certainly continue for years."