Abstract
its conflictlessness, referring to the harmonious relationships between worker and means of production, between masses and leader that appear within its images. Without doubt, pictures of social concordance comprise a major thematic impulse in Soviet visual practice. Ironically, despite its seamless harmonies, the official aesthetics of the Soviet Union in its founding decades betray a tremendous sense of conflictedness: one born of the fragile relationship between revolution, history, and technology. Clement Greenberg famously excluded socialist realism from the canon of Western modernism for inhabiting the realm of mass culture or kitsch.1 Yet, in at least one significant way socialist realism approaches Greenberg's modernism: it expresses a profound skepticism about the cultural effects of photomechanical reproduction. This essay explores the extent to which-despite its anachronistic look-socialist realism in the visual arts must be understood as a
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