The official, mandated style for all art and literature in the Soviet Union from 1934 until its collapse in 1991. In Stalin’s time, there was a high degree of scrutiny of all artworks, and artists could be imprisoned or exiled to Siberia for deviating from the prescribed style. The level of scrutiny diminished dramatically after his death, but it was not until the advent of glasnost that artists could begin to operate without being concerned about the opinion of the state. Socialist realism was born of the idea that the creation of the Soviet Union as not only a new state, but a new kind of state, required art that would advance its glocalization cause and contribute to its human re-engineering programme (what the Chinese would later call the ‘Cultural Revolution’). Art should, in other words, help to define and create the so-called ‘New Soviet Man’. To this end, then, it must describe and celebrate the people’s historical struggle to create socialism. Moreover, its subject matter and manner of construction must be both relevant and comprehensible to the proletariat; it should focus on aspects of daily life familiar to the proletariat; it should be realistic in a representational sense; and, most importantly, it should support the aims of the state. In 1948, this doctrine was laid out explicitly by Andrei Zhdanov, a senior bureaucrat in the Soviet government, and as a consequence socialist realism is sometimes referred to as Zhdanovism. Pre-revolutionary art was regarded with suspicion since it was produced under a bourgeois regime, whose values were at odds with those fostered by the Soviet Union. Therefore artistic styles that emerged before the 1917 revolutions were discouraged, particularly non-representational forms (such as abstract art), which were thought too difficult for the proletariat to comprehend. Socialist realism is derided in the west for being programmatic---artistic inspiration, it is usually said by western critics, cannot be willed on command or made to work to rule---and while that is true to some extent, it nonetheless gave rise to some magnificent artworks celebrating the everyday life of the working people. Socialist realism was the official art of the Soviet Union, but it was not confined to the Soviet Union or its satellites---authors all over the world (e.g. Louis Aragon, Johannes Becher, Jaroslav Hasek, and Pablo Neruda) contributed to its development. The principal exponent of socialist realism in critical theory is the Marxist literary scholar Lukács, György.