A century after the Russian revolution, a showcase of its art

By J.W.S.W.

ALTHOUGH it marks the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the true inspiration for the Royal Academy’s new exhibition is 1932. In that year, a vast retrospective entitled “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” took place in the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. Curated by Nikolai Punin, an avant-garde luminary, it was meant to be the zenith of the radical artistic current that had been growing in Russia for decades. Instead, it was a swansong. Within years, many of the thousands of paintings featured would disappear into hidden store cupboards, trampled beneath the inescapable march of state-backed socialist realism. Punin himself, accused of “anti-Soviet activity”, was to die, starving, in a desolate gulag north of the Arctic Circle.

“Revolution: 1917-1932” covers the same 15 years as Punin’s show. The period has suffered some neglect. The myth goes that in the years after the Bolshevik revolution, bland socialist realism stomped on the avant-garde. In fact, after the revolution but before Stalinism tightened its grip on culture, there was a frenzied gasp of creative brilliance. Artistic, technological and political innovations clashed and co-existed. Kazimir Malevich turned the geometry of suprematism to figurative portraits of peasant farmers. Pavel Filonov would use the kaleidoscope fragments of his “formula” paintings to depict tractor factories. Buildings designed by El Lissitzky riffed on the crooked perspectives of photo-montage, and on the uncompromising functionality of industrial machinery.

“Revolution” attempts to encapsulate this intellectual ferment. Paintings, architectural models, posters and film screens share the hectic galleries (some rooms are bisected by large panels, doubling the hanging space). Uniting the works is their function as propaganda, a pragmatic means to a dogmatic end. In 1917, when a few hundred thousand Bolsheviks found themselves leading a country of 185m people, they picked up the tools of mass marketing to build control. The euphoric revolutionary scenes on display are a sea of logos, slogans and images of Lenin’s face. Even tea-towels were emblazoned with the benevolent faces of Marx and Engels (one has a hole where Trotsky’s image has been hastily cut out). Floral textile patterns imported from France were thrown out in favour of harsh, jagged designs featuring mechanical nuts and lightning bolts. The aesthetic effect remains instantly recognisable and, still, highly marketable: the Cyrillic slogans, stars and block colours reappear today on the catwalks of Gosha Rubchinskiy as “Soviet chic”.

Not all of the propagandising is so cynical. In Aleksandr Deineka’s off-kilter paintings, lesser-known gems amongst the Malevich and Kandinsky headliners, there is an authentically wide-eyed wonder at the brave new Soviet world. His paintings are peopled by waif-like barefoot seamstresses and peasant-woman workers; out of the windows of his immaculate workshops, brightly-coloured cows benevolently wander by. There is a vertiginous sense that reality itself, not just politics, is contested, up for grabs, and to be formed anew.

The dizzying idealism reaches its height in one of the exhibition’s most striking rooms where, bird-like, a wood and canvas flying machine is suspended from a vaulting rotunda ceiling. It’s a recreation of a glider, built according to a design by Soviet architect Vladimir Tatlin, who became consumed by the notion that the Soviet worker should enjoy the right to fly to the factory. As real-life aeroplanes grew bigger and more advanced, Tatlin remained hung up on his flying “worker’s bicycle”. Its dogged pseudo-science is that of a political ideology obsessed by schematic theorising, one that refuses to adapt itself to the reality that grows around it—even at the cost of millions of lives.

That cost makes the most sunnily optimistic images the most chilling. Their horror lies not in what they depict, but what, with hindsight, we know they ignore. The Eisenstein film showing peasants ecstatically taking delivery of a new centrifugal cream separator is darkened by the knowledge that the collectivisation of agriculture killed millions through famine. The synthesis of man and machine in Filonov’s tractor factory painting looks superhuman, with steely-faced workers blending into a jagged mass of metal. In reality, the factory labourers were not superhumans but slaves, imprisoned or shot if they erred or slowed. Malevich best evokes this unsettling double register. Alongside his famous black square and suprematist abstractions hangs a 1930 painting of two silhouette figures, their heads replaced by hollow shadows. Entitled “Peasants” (pictured, above), it was supposedly Malevich’s half-hearted attempt at the wholesome subject matter mandated by Soviet dogma. The uncanny blank faces silently tell another story: a violent annihilation of individual identity.

As the regime became more repressive, its art became more rigidly homogenous. The final room of this exhibition, on the cusp of Stalin’s cultural crackdown in 1932, is filled with images of identical, muscular Soviet athletes. A black box, the “Room of Memory”, displays a slideshow of mugshots of the victims of Stalin’s purges—avant-garde artists, writers, intellectuals. Thus was the great gasp of creativity choked, its possibilities shrunken, its fruits locked up in forgotten warehouses.

When “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” was transferred to Moscow in 1933, the abstract and constructivist works were quietly dropped. As the Royal Academy’s curators point out in their notes, Punin nervously brushed over the changes, saying that “we are building a new life, a new artistic culture and therefore prefer to look ahead, rather than to pedantically count every step of our historical past.” By illuminating those artistic steps that Punin dared not count, this exhibition reveals a sinister history. In the images of radiant peasants and ecstatic revolutionaries, it is always lurking just out of shot.

“Revolution: Russian art 1917—1932” is showing at the Royal Academy of Arts until April 17th