Workers’ club as a place of presentation of the Soviet regime: agitation, entertainment, games

Abstract

During the 1920–1930s, Soviet power attached great importance to clubs for workers as institutions for popularizing socio-political ideas of a new way of life and educating a new person. Clubs were supposed to be the venue for specific rituals of the new social order («red weddings», etc.), an intermediary between political slogans and the workers’ world of everyday life. It was through such actions that the authorities sought to root in the public mind the idea of social practices that were markers of the behavior of the new Soviet person. Party leaders in their desire to transform all the social fabric of society in accordance with socialist principles could not rely solely on propaganda activities, ignore the human need for rest and entertainment. They were searching for plastic, streamlined forms of propaganda. It can be stated that in the 1920–1930s cultural workers of Kharkiv workers’ clubs actively used game forms of agitation to incorporate new socio-political ideals into the daily life of society. For this, previously existing games were Sovietized and new ones invented. Designers of the new Soviet culture carefully monitored the content of gaming practices, reacted to their changes. In the mid-1930s, in accordance with the change in the state concept of “culture”, some “Soviet” games that were popular in the first years after the establishment of Soviet power (for example, “political fishing rod”) were marked as “excesses” and removed from arsenal of propagandists. The Soviet government made every effort so that the games were not only and not so much entertainment, but became the means by which social initiatives were refracted into the everyday practices of society, becoming a part of people’s life.