[2] The primary official objective of socialist realism was "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" although no formal guidelines concerning style or subject matter were provided.

Under Lenin's rule and the New Economic Policy, there was a certain amount of private commercial enterprise, allowing both the futurists and the traditionalists to produce their art for individuals with capital.

[13] According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, the term was first used in press by chairman of the organizing committee of the Union of Soviet Writers, Ivan Gronsky in Literaturnaya Gazeta on May 23, 1932.

[16] The work must be: The purpose of socialist realism was to limit popular culture to a specific, highly regulated faction of emotional expression that promoted Soviet ideals.

At this point the group had begun participating in state promoted mass forms of art like murals, jointly-made paintings, advertisement production and textile design.

Some films depicted the part of peoples of the Soviet Union against foreign invaders: Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein, Minin and Pozharsky by Pudovkin, and Bogdan Khmelnitsky by Savchenko.

[47] Born in Latvia, which formed part of the Russian Empire at the time, Znamierowski was of Polish descent and Lithuanian citizenship, a country where he lived for most of his life and died.

His creative method featured a combination of publicistic passion, a critical view of capitalist society, and a steadfast striving to bring reality into accord with socialist ideals.

Bruno Apitz's novel Nackt unter Wölfen, a story that culminates in the vivid description of the self-liberation of the detainees,[50] was deliberately chosen to take place on the same day as the formal opening of the Buchenwald Monument in September 1958.

Other important works of literature include Fyodor Gladkov's Cement (1925), Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1936) and Aleksey Tolstoy's epic trilogy The Road to Calvary (1922–1941).

Sculptor Fritz Cremer created a series of monuments commemorating the victims of the Nazi regime in the former concentration camps Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Ravensbrück.

Thus communists were portrayed as the driving force behind self-liberation, symbolized by a figure in the foreground sacrificing himself for his sufferers, followed by the central group of determined comrades through whose courage and fearlessness is encouraged.

Early after the 1917 revolution, a movement arose to attempt to redefine what theater was, with theorist Platon Kerzhentsev wanting to break down the barriers between actors and the public, creating unity between the two.

Beliefs that were more heavily promoted included those seen to be educational (with the idea of “teaching through entertaining” springing up), those upholding the values of nature and the countryside, and those that generally had a positive quality, especially when looking at children’s theater.

[66] Though socialist realism was created by and is thought to mainly apply to countries within the Soviet Bloc, China in the late 18th century can be seen to be influenced by similar ideas, often taking direct inspiration from them.

He pushed for theatrical reform in a socialist manner, primarily focused on transferring ownership from private troupes to state ones, but additionally on the subject matter of the plays themselves.

Bai Wei, inspired by Tian Han, developed a style of theater in the 1920s that focused specifically on women within a patriarchal society, and the struggle to break free of it.

Strong female characters were, however, idealized and put forward in Chinese socialist realism, with these women often shown making some sort of sacrifice or grand action in service of a greater cause.

[81] Their time and contemporaries, with all its images, ideas, and dispositions found it full expression in portraits by Vladimir Gorb, Boris Korneev, Engels Kozlov, Felix Lembersky, Oleg Lomakin, Samuil Nevelshtein, Victor Oreshnikov, Semion Rotnitsky, Lev Russov, and Leonid Steele; in landscapes by Nikolai Galakhov, Vasily Golubev, Dmitry Maevsky, Sergei Osipov, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Alexander Semionov, Arseny Semionov, and Nikolai Timkov; and in genre paintings by Andrey Milnikov, Yevsey Moiseenko, Mikhail Natarevich, Yuri Neprintsev, Nikolai Pozdneev, Mikhail Trufanov, Yuri Tulin, Nina Veselova, and others.

[87] Other academics, including Cai Xiang, Rebecca E. Karl, and Xueping Zhong, place greater weight on the influence of Mao Zedong's 1942 lectures, "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Art and Literature.

As the head of the SMAD's cultural division, Aleksandr Dymshits asserted that the "negation of reality" and "unbridled fantasy" was a "bourgeois and decadent attitude of the mind" that rejects "the truth of life.

[105] The exhibition for East German art presented itself as "the good founded by socialist realism to better embody a possible alternative to the crisis of values experienced by the West.

Leader of the SMAD's propaganda wing, Sergei Tiulpanov, asserted that the primary goal of DEFA was "the struggle to re-educate the German people–especially the young–to a true understanding of genuine democracy and humanism.

Paul Verhoeven's The Cold Heart (German: Das kalte Herz) was one of such films, which was based on the story written by Wilhelm Hauff of the same title.

[116] The producers gave the actor portraying Müntzer lines that embrace Marxist thought, to clearly communicate ideals of socialism and the roles of the working class to viewers.

[126] In the poster propaganda produced during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) men were overrepresented as workers, peasants, and combat heroes, and when women were shown, it was often either to symbolize an abstract concept (e.g., Mother Russia, "freedom") or as nurses and victims.

[127] Women artists were significantly represented in the revolutionary avant garde movement, which began before 1917[130] and some of the most famous were Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Olga Rozanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

[133][clarification needed] The style of socialist realism began to dominate the Soviet artistic community starting when Stalin rose to power in 1930, and the government took a more active role in regulating art creation.

[135] The AKhRR became more hierarchical and the association privileged realist style oil paintings, a field dominated by men, over posters and other mediums in which women had primarily worked.

[136] The government encouraged women to have children by creating portraits of the "housewife-activist" – wives and mothers who supported their husbands and the socialist state by taking on unpaid housework and childcare.