The 1946 resolution of the Central Committee was directed against two literary magazines,
Zvezda and '''', which had published supposedly apolitical, "
bourgeois", individualistic works of the satirist
Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet
Anna Akhmatova. Earlier, some critics and literary historians were denounced for suggesting that Russian classics had been influenced by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Molière,
Lord Byron or
Charles Dickens. Part of Zhdanovism was a campaign against "
cosmopolitanism", which meant that foreign models were not to be unthinkingly emulated, and native Russian accomplishments were emphasized. A further decree on music was issued on 20 February 1948, "On Muradeli's Opera
The Great Friendship" and marked the beginning of the so-called "anti-formalism campaign". (The term "
formalism" referred to art for art's sake which did not serve a larger social purpose.) Nominally aimed at
Vano Muradeli's
opera The Great Friendship, it signaled a sustained campaign of criticism and persecution against many of the
Soviet Union's foremost composers, notably
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Sergei Prokofiev,
Aram Khachaturian and
Dmitri Klebanov for allegedly writing "hermetic" music and misusing dissonance. The decree was followed in April by a special congress of the
Composers' Union, where many of those attacked were forced publicly to repent. The campaign was satirized in the
Anti-Formalist Rayok by Shostakovich. The composers condemned were formally
rehabilitated by a further decree issued on 28 May 1958. In
Wrocław, a congress met in mid-1948. Accompanying Soviet consolidation of power in Eastern Europe, Zhdanov's chosen man
Fadeyev, president of the
Soviet writer's union, made a speech establishing the base for
socialist realism outside of the Soviet Union. This targeted three main groups - Soviet-leaning Western intellectuals that Zhdanov hoped would be brought around to Zhdanovism instead of just preaching peace, sympathetic non-Communist artists and intellectuals in liberal democracies, and artists and intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Soviet-occupied Germany who were to be forced to accept the tenets of Zhdanovism and socialist realism. This led to ripples in the West that led to more sympathies and
pacifism in the West and benefited the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in later East Germany. == See also ==