Research for this article was generously funded by The Leverhulme Trust. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. In the summer of 1932, the Russian artist Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii returned from Leningrad to his Siberian hometown, Tomsk, to find the countryside gripped by a social crisis.1 The recent campaign of collectivisation had been devastating. Rozhdestvenskii witnessed the fallout first-hand when he visited state farms on assignments for the Soviet press.2 ‘Millions were dying’, he later recalled.3 Rozhdestvenskii documented the endemic violence unfolding around him through his art: in Poveshennyi (The Hanged Man) (Fig. 1), a contorted, discoloured corpse hangs from gallows; in Pogorel’tsy, kollektivatsiia (Fire-victims, collectivisation) (Fig. 2), a mother clings to a baby in blood-red swaddling, her skull-like face frozen against a landscape melting away into Munchian horror. ... ... These are not the sorts of images we expect from an artist working under Stalin. The collectivised countryside, when refracted through the lens of Socialist Realism, usually reappears in holiday-brochure bright aesthetics: smiling peasants till rich soils; happy, healthy families collaborate on the kolkhoz. Rozhdestvenskii’s aesthetic, by contrast, can only be described as apocalyptic. The artist consistently painted the catastrophes of collectivisation in a key of abject horror: corpses hang from gallows, starving mothers scream, dark voids eclipse faces, and portraits are erased into ghostly apertures (Figs 1–10). Nor did Rozhdestvenskii endeavour to disguise his images as allegory; titling his work ‘Collectivisation’ seems brazenly reckless in the political climate of the time. How, then, did he get away with it? Perhaps even more surprising than the paintings themselves is the fact that Rozhdestvenskii faced no repercussions for creating them. Indeed, he not only survived but thrived under Stalin; his long, highly decorated career saw him twice selected to present Soviet art to a global audience (at the Paris World Fair in 1937 and New York in 1939), to be celebrated as a ‘People’s Artist of the Russian Republic’ and awarded the state’s highest cultural accolade, the ‘Order of the Red Banner’.4 This success is partly explained by Rozhdestvenskii’s transition away from painting in the late 1930s to focus on exhibition design, a field of primarily nationalistic propaganda wherein he achieved ‘recognition and fame’.5 Nonetheless, for any artistic professional working under Stalin to retain a back catalogue so replete with images of death and destruction under his regime is virtually unheard of. What made Rozhdestvenskii an exception to this rule?