- one must surely accept that the art of the Soviet Union will reflect the nature of basic reality in Russia. Soviet Realism was one of the most reactionary and totalitarian artistic forms to have ever existed, surpassing even (I would say) the grotesque idealisations of offical subjects found in 18th and 19th century European academicism and 'salon' art.
Cut off from its historical base, socialised without a socialist reality, art reverts to its ancient prehistorical function: it assumes magical character. – Herbert Marcuse
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 gave way to a surge of radical enthusiasm: here was a moment in history in which the opportunity to construct a new and better society seemed a reality. In this perceived new order, art became of paramount importance. Freed from alienating and exploitative labour, the artist could at last, he thought, look towards a project of unfettered creation. It was in this atmosphere that the avant-garde flourished as some of the most progressive proponents of the international modernist movement, including Malevich and Lissitzky, experimented with the Futurist and Cubist idioms, reaching its culmination in Constructivism. Yet the fate of art in the Soviet Union would not be liberation; rather it faced suppression and enslavement on an unprecedented scale while many of the most radical artists were to meet death.
Russian art before the 20th Century was permeated with anachronism and constraints. Up to the 1700s it remained exclusively religious and Byzantine in style, despite the fact that the era which created that art from a vital reaction with contemporary society had long since passed. These icons were never considered as works granting aesthetic satisfaction but only as an aid to spiritual contemplation and this vision of art – as something for the depiction of truth for a purpose – seems to have been a part of the Russian perspective throughout its history. When art of a secular nature emerged under Peter the Great, it was under the centralised control of an Academy (inspired by that of Louis XIV who said to his artists: ‘I entrust to you the most precious thing on earth – my fame’). All artists had their form and practice dictated to them before the painting of their particular subject. The Marxist critic John Berger explains this catastrophe, as relevant to Soviet Realism as it was to the former Academicism, in these terms: ‘[They] knew how they were going to paint before they knew what they were going to paint. As a result, their pictures reveal their choice of subject, but never the subjects themselves. A subject is revealed in art only when it has forced the artist to adapt his procedure, to admit in terms of his formal means its special case.’
Yet with the Revolution came a genuine striving for artistic progression. Modernism, with its passionate expectations of a new world order and practically religious article of faith of the might of the machine, gave powerful expression to the optimistic desires of a post-revolutionary society. Perhaps surprising (on initial inspection) was the parallel development of the political-aesthetic relationship between the Italian Futurists and Mussolini’s Fascist movement. While Rodchenko drew up daring designs for leftist magazines and proletarian kiosks, Marinetti was involved in the violent Fascist strike that destroyed the socialist paper Avanti. The constant desire for the new (‘A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel – is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.’), the impetuous longing for negation of all that went before led to the Futurists becoming an ideological motor in what they saw as Mussolini’s brave new world, taking them out of that backwards Italy that was ‘a vast Pompeii, white with sepulchres’. ‘We will glorify war –’ said the First Futurist Manifesto, ‘the world’s only hygiene.’
Back in the USSR, the tension between free artistry and what was an inherently conservative state (ran, peculiarly for a ‘workers’ republic’, by lots of white, middle-class men) began to burst. Lenin – that radical – hated the avant-garde. Leftism for him was ‘an infantile disorder’ and in despair at the publication of Mayakovski’s modernist poem 150, 000, 000 he suggested the minister Lunacharski should be ‘flogged’ for having ever let it go to press. Much more to Lenin’s taste was a regressive naturalism, and he longed for a ‘monumental propaganda’, statues of revolutionaries – from Proudhon to Cezanne – adorning the streets of Moscow and Petrograd. Once again displaying his rather dubious desire for the progressive, one of his major inspirations appears to have been the Renaissance thinker Campanella, who in his City of the Sun, Lenin writes, ‘says that the walls of his fantastic socialist city are covered with frescoes, serving the youth with graphic lessons in natural science and history, arouse civic feeling and, in a word, participate in the business of raising and educating the new generation.’ After having rather astutely noted that frescoes might not be viable in the Russia climate, Lenin was shocked by the contributions of artists for the ‘raising and educating’ of his people. (So, for that matter, were the people: a statue of Bakunin was demolished on sight.) It became clear that the purely aesthetic aims of the artists would not meet the needs of Leninist ruling ideology (let alone the downwards-slope of Stalinism). One must also remember when looking at the striking abstract simplicity of Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) that this was near incomprehensible to both a conservative ruling-class and a backwards peasantry. Here in the 21st century we can immediately appreciate the simple geometric shapes – reduced from the figurative to a mental ideal – and their dynamic motion and conflict. For a Volga-dwelling fishmonger, lacking education, or a reactionary bureaucrat, lacking imagination, such an image simply made no sense.
For these reasons the artistic Left faced suppression. Even if there was steel to build Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) (or, for that matter, even if it was physically possible to construct) with its dialectical spirals of glass and iron, its revolving rooms and slanting legs straddling the river, the Party would not have wanted it, no matter how many Dadaists wrote and constructed eulogies for him. Gradually the modernists were barred from public patronage and replaced by realist painters of, at times, remarkable timidity in the form of the AKhRR, remnants of the Academic style that so restricted the art of the past. In a painter such as Deineka, however, we can observe this fascinating transformation, from modernism to the official state-art that would become so infamous. His famous The Defence of Petrograd (1928) or Textile Workers (1927) are both liminal paintings; there is a still visible modernist formalism, a mechanical abstraction, a reduction of objects into the plane of ideas. Yet the tendency is back towards realism – though not yet the anaemic naturalism so typical of Soviet Realism – and Textile Workers is imbued with blunt symbolism in service of the state. The white colouring, the strength of body and determination of expression in the women all conspire to give an image of worker efficiency and discipline.
The emphasis on the body in the Soviet Union was not new as the 20’s drew to a close, but its conception came to be altered. Marx believed that under socialism, freed from the chains of exploitation, the individual would have the time and ability to pursue particular projects of interest of self-improvement, if so desired. After the Revolution this view became distorted by the contemporary fetish for the machine-world. The improvement of the individual became entirely understood in physical terms and a crude mechanistic understanding of human behaviour proposed to maximise a worker’s efficiency through training the body into automatic responses to stimuli, as was attempted in the ‘psychotechnic’ laboratories that were established, while even actors were trained to recreate ‘spontaneity’ systematically through Meierhold’s ‘biomechanics’ technique. Soviet art promoted this vision of the body, as an infallibly productive machine. Workers were depicted in propaganda as physically strong and healthy, while the capitalist was sickly, excessively rotund and balding. This emphasis of the strength of the body can be seen in Deineka’s work, there bordering on the grotesque.
As total state control was extended over art, and as Stalinist ideology solidified, the body became instead a symbol of will-power. Ironically, the USSR began to adopt ideals that actually mirrored those of the capitalist west, rather than inverting them. Brodsky’s Lenin on the Tribune (1927) is astonishing for its hagiographic individualism: the whole painting’s world is configured around Lenin, the clouds circle his head with halo-like symbolism while the viewer is placed below, looking upwards to the individual’s face, like a preacher. The ‘ideal’ man (if he was unfortunate enough not to have been born as Lenin or Stalin) was the strongest, fastest, most efficient worker, as exemplified by the mythical accomplishments of the miner Stakhanov (who supposedly hewed 102 tons of coal – fourteen times his quota). This became the emphasis of art. Deineka’s work, for one, became more and more idealised, less and less grounded in reality, as all artists were instructed, as were the artists of the old Academy, how to construct their work before they admitted the particular case of their subject. The contradictions between the idealised conception of Soviet life in art and the pains and impoverishment of reality became grosser and more disturbing. (Indeed, art under Stalin came to resemble that of the Third Reich to a sickening extent.) Prohibited from confronting the issues of reality, art really did, as Marcuse states, ‘[revert] to its prehistoric character: it [assumed] magical character.’ For this reason, this realist art forced to reflect an unreal-reality, this contradiction between ruling-class, superstructure-ideology and material, social reality, offers an instantaneous analysis of the grand, historical failure that was Revolutionary Russia.
