In the annals of the twentieth-century avant-garde, the decade following upon the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Armistice of 1918 was distinguished by a significant shift in the relation of modernist art to radical politics. Briefly stated, it was a shift that brought about a close but uneasy and ultimately tragic alliance between modernism in the arts and socialism in politics. From this ill-fated alliance, which had far-reaching consequences for both modernist art and the future of socialist cultural policy, neither the avant-garde nor the political Left escaped unscathed. Indeed, the net effect of the principal experiments in the politicization of the avant-garde in the 1920s was to guarantee that for the rest of the twentieth century modernism would remain a special target of totalitarian cultural repression and thus peculiarly dependent for its growth and survival upon the liberties and patronage accorded by bourgeois democracy. Yet for some seven decades now, these stormy and short-lived attempts to bring modernist art into alignment with the imperatives of socialist ideology have constituted something of a model for utopian radicals still dreaming of some ideal convergence of art and politics. Even today, with socialism thoroughly discredited as a political idea and as an economic system, this model—or some fanciful variation on it, anyway—persists as a basis for the academic study of the modern period. It is all a vivid illustration of the way the intellectual life of the academy has become a sort of séance in which the living, while spurning