RPC / Reviews & Articles / Imagery in the Service of a Utopian Dream

REVOLUTIONS, AT LEAST SINCE
the French set the paradigm, have depended heavily on images–symbols, pageants, paintings – to promote the cause of radical change. The Soviet Union after 1917 outdid all previous attempts to draft the visual arts into service. The arts themselves were in revolution – said the painter Kasimir Malevich.“ May the overthrow of the old world of art be penciled on your palms” –and vanguard artists eagerly sought to communicate the benefits of Bolshevism to the illiterate masses.
The new languages of art promised a new society, a new way of looking at it, a new human potential. Artists decorated streets, buildings, buses, trolleys and the trains and boats that traveled through the countryside spreading the message of revolution. In 1920, Malevich and his supporters painted the streets and walls of Vitebsk white, then added colorful circles and squares – an entire town re-envisioned.
From the beginning, photography had a privileged place in the Soviet program, but aside from Alexander Rodchenko, certifiably an avant-garde artist in several media, few

Photography held a privileged place in the early Soviet Union. But like all propaganda, it tended to manipulate.

photographers of the period are well known in the West. “The Utopian Dream: Photography in Soviet Russian 1918-1939” at the Laurence Miller Gallery (through Feb. 15) begins to fill the gap.
Many of the 45 images are unfamiliar and some a bit beat up – surviving the Communist regime was never easy. They constitute a tiny fraction of the thousands tracked down in the Soviet Union by the Los Angeles collectors Howard Schickler and David Lafaille in the last couple of years.
After the Revolution, photography, the newest way of seeing, seemed a fitting means of communication for a brave new world. Lenin spoke of its immense value; the Commissar for Education promised every citizen training in camera technique. Rodchenko said, “The camera lens is the eye of civilized man in a Socialist society.” By 1928 that society was severely criticizing Rodchenko for excessive formalism, conservative

Vicki Goldberg is author of “The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives.”

“ By the Entrance to the Hermitage,” 1930, by Boris Ignatovich

forces moved toward Socialist Realism, a traditional, simple and essentially propagandistic art accessible to the masses. In 1934, the state made it official: civilized men from then on were to be instructed by decree in what and how to see.
Long before the Soviet Union joined the machine era, even before the Revolution, Russian art had allied itself with Modernism, and photography soon followed. In the 20’s, Rodchenko intended to shake up habits of vision by viewing from odd angles: above, below or on the diagonal.
Some of his pictures in this show, such as his bold, clean, half-abstract views gazing down on the patterns made by tiny figures in the street, or looking up in dizzying perspective on the silhouette of a man climbing a ladder, may have struck conservative forces

as overly preoccupied with form, but his style continued to influence the photography of the 30’s.
Boris Ignatovich’s 1930 image of Leningrad pushes the view smack up against the massive, heavily veined foot of a statue, in the city that opens up beyond, strollers are reduced to blank cutouts less grand than one marble toe. Other photographers blended experimental Modernism with the picturesque by stylishly tilting their pictures of laboring men or peasants scattering seed.
To an extent, the shift in the late 20’s from a machine esthetic of geometric designs in Socialist Realism ran parallel to developments in the West, where the Depression persuaded artists and photographers that workers rather than sleek machines

should be their central focus. The Soviet Union differed from the West, as the critic Max Kozloff sug- gests in the exhibition catalogue, in that workers were regarded less as individuals whose humanity gripped the imagination than as objects in an inventory of the state and its achievements. The proletarian census included laborers who benefited from Government planning, heroic workmen who gave their all for national goals, and peasant types whose common labor was transformed into emblems of loyalty and joy in the reinvented motherland.
The photographs make clear how disparate the Soviet peoples were in race and customs. One means of unification was through up-to-date communications systems; several

images trace their progress. (Mass propaganda is itself a relatively up-to-date mode of communication.) A picture by Georgi Zelma shows a group of peasants in Uzbekistan listening to one man read the newspaper; another depicts two peasants entranced by sounds from Moscow over their earphones; Dimitri Debabov’s photograph of students recording folklore is actually an image of peasant excitement about a rather primitive recording machine. The advent of modern technology was energetically celebrated. The first Five-Year Plan began in 1928; the Soviets managed to compress the Industrial Revolution into the space of a few years. In a 1931 photograph by Arkady Shishkin, men guiding horse-drawn

Continued on Page 35

Continued from Page 33

plows trudge across the land; in the 1935 “Now We Can Live,” a tractor and threshing machine bring promise of an end to the devastating famines of the 30’s. (In some cases, Stalin engineered those famines to break the will of rebellious peasants; unofficial figures suggest that between five million and eight million people died.)
The most stunning image of construction in the show depicts a marvel of labor rather than technology: In Max Alpert’s 1935 “Construction of the Fergana Grand Canal,” workers in quilted coats and boots, called by Six-foot-long trumpets that pierced the sky, emerge from sheets of mist to cross a featureless landscape. The photograph amounts to an epic poem on manual labor, and so did the canal, an enormous undertaking accomplished with pick and shovel over 15 years.
An epic ends triumphantly, though tragedies are woven into its fabric. These photographs are full of proud and happy workers, happy athletes, happy sailors, happy peasants, invigorated by the unprecedented opportunity to create an ideal state. That is how the Soviet Union must have looked -“I have been over into the future,” the editor Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1931, “and it works.” Presumably, the photographers saw it that way too, and in some respects the vision was true.

•

The Government insisted that the camera create a myth, one of the most compelling of the century; only the costs remained invisible. If the photographers saw terrors, they apparently did not record them. (What is omitted from the photographic report is often as vital as what is includeed.) The purges, the gulags, the arrested children of political offenders became common knowledge, yet the photographs (and other media) offered vigorous evidence that the great dream was becoming a reality. When Socialist Realism was mandated, imagery effectively became the property of the state and far-reaching experiments had to be abandoned in favor of a bureaucratized concept of heroism. Perhaps documenting a wish with a camera should be numbered among the country’s heroic achievements. Soviet photography purported to encode the life of the time but in fact, at least by the late 20’s, attempted to manipulate it. Like all propaganda that can be decoded, these photos exist on several

“ Detail from "Construction of the Fergana Grand Canal, "1939, by Max Alpert - an epic on manual labor

The photographs

have suddenly

and painfully

acquired an aura

of failure.

layers of significance: the ostensible report, possibly truthful as far as it goes; the pressure to slant it (whether imposed by the Government or by the photograph’s own bias), and the facts that belie it.
Today, when both the dream these pictures embodied and the nightmare they concealed have unexpectedly evaporated in the light of a new and uncertain day, the images have suddenly and painfully acquired an aura of failure. For some, the god failed long ago, but the system blew up only yesterday, turning these photographs into detailed accounts, however skewed, of an extinct volcano. Thus does current history constantly reinterpret the

documents of the past. Throughout its 74 years, the Soviet State maintained a firm grip on public imagery; the blush of propaganda tints everything that was released. Stalin oversaw every movie that was made; Sergei Eisensteins’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” was banned until five years after Stalin’s death. Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky,” about the medieval Russian hero who beat back invaders from the West, was withdrawn from circulation so precipitously when Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pack that some theaters went dark in the middle of the film. A few days after the Nazi invasion of Russia, “Nevsky”returned to the screen.

•

Television changed the character of imagery in the Soviet Union, just as it did in the West. A recent article about Soviet television in The New York Review of Books reported that when Leonid Brezhnev was seen repeatedly losing his place in speeches

on television during the 70’s, many people began to question the leadership for the first time, and when the party Congress was televised in 1988, citizens were suddenly and bewilderingly confronted with the fact that their country was run by unexceptional men who could not even agree among themselves.
The old images and symbols still count. According to Mr. Schickler, Sovietskoye Photo, a magazine founded in the 20’s, is not only still published today but includes among its illustrations historical material like that in this show. Photography keeps the past ever present.
When the Soviet state crumbled, the public took out its anger on the most obvious images of a dead authority: its monuments. The statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret Police, was removed from the square in front of K.G.B. headquarters; statues of Stalin’s henchmen were toppled; even Lenin was forced to lie ignominiously on the ground in pieces. These men had seen the future, and when it did not work, their images were forced to pay a price.