Political Purges and Academic Paradigms: Moscow Musicology in the 1920s

In September 1928, musicologist Georgii Konius gave a talk at the Music Department of the Academy of Artistic Sciences, entitled ‘Principles of disassembling skeletons of musical bodies’.
Overflowing with natural-scientific rhetoric, the talk elicited a lively discussion of its biologically inspired terminology indicating that it was accepted as legitimate academic research. Contrary to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s notion that the Cultural Revolution fostered proliferation of eccentric theories that pointedly broke with the past, I consider such scientistic approaches to the study of music part and parcel of the pre-revolutionary positivist tradition of applying natural scientific methods to the study of society and art.
However, archives of the early Soviet humanistic research institutes show that in the late 1920s the definition of ‘scientific’ in relation of humanistic scholarship changed considerably. Although affinity between some positivist and Marxist precepts allowed for intellectual continuity before and after 1917, the Cultural Revolution brought about condemnation of ‘purely-scientific’ approaches as ‘divorced from life’, as well as contempt for non-Marxist scholars as ‘dilettantes’. Tellingly, Konius was relieved from his full-time position in February 1930. Comparing rhetoric in musicological writing before and after Academy’s forcible reorganization in 1930 and tracing the changing definitions of ‘scientific knowledge’ across the 1920s, I argue that both the overhaul of personnel (prompted by state policies that fostered upward mobility among workers and peasants) and scholars’ attempts to keep their institutional positions by adapting to the ideological climate change, were responsible for dismantling the humanistic research paradigm of the 1920s.