The USSR, 1918–45

Abstract

An aesthetic reaction against the carnage of World War I was a common phenomenon in much of postwar Europe. In Russia it was not so much the war itself that came to capture the imagination of postwar artists, but the revolutionary toppling of the autocratic government in February 1917 and, most significantly, the unexpected seizure of power, in October that year, by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party in the name of the working class.1 Beyond the broad notion that ‘art belongs to the people’2 and the conviction that artistic culture could and should play an important role in the building of the first socialist state, the revolutionaries had no firm understanding of what that might entail. That ‘Soviet’ art would somehow be as new and unprecedented as the socialist workers’ paradise was a matter of faith. Whether the workers should be creators of the new art or its consumers, whether art should build on the traditions of the bourgeois past or jettison them to begin from scratch, and what forms that art should take, were questions that animated debate for a long time. In many respects, the first twenty years or so of the revolution can be seen as a period of restless struggle to find answers, to define art anew. The resolution to the search would eventually come in the form of a mandate from above.