Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-1955 at the Tate Modern
RED
STAR OVER RUSSIA: A REVOLUTION IN VISUAL CULTURE 1905-1955 at the TATE MODERN
The Tate Modern is
examining the influence of the Russian revolution which occurred 100 years
ago. The exhibition grew out of the
collection of Russian art, films, posters, memorabilia in the possession of
David King (1943-2016) who acquired the vast material presented here over 50
years. His book Red Star Over Russia published in 2009 is the basis for this
exhibition.
Russia had been ruled by
the Romanov dynasty for over 400 years but Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918) led
Russia into the First World War which turned out to be disastrous. Russia was insufficiently economically or
politically advanced to fight a war on such a scale. There had been earlier discontent such as the
1905 revolution which had been a consequence of Tsarist incompetence, the
defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war.
Various radical groups such as the Social Democrats and Social
Revolutionaries (SDs and SRs) proliferated since any attempt at democratic
protest resulted in authoritarian oppression and state violence. Revolutionary parties were forced to adopt
clandestine and ultimately illegal strategies to progress their political
agenda. Eventually two principle
candidates for power emerged when the Social Democrats split into Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks (meaning majority and minority).
The differences between the two groups might be summarised by the
perception of Menshevik Julius Martov that Russia was not ready for a
Proletarian revolution. Therefore,
revolutionaries must ally themselves with liberal, bourgeois forces who also
wished for an end to despotism and strengthening of the Duma (Parliament).
Bolsheviks, however, believed that Russia was an exception and that a
revolutionary party would have to bypass a bourgeois revolution and ally itself
with the peasant class.
In October 1917 Lenin’s
Bolshevik party seized power from Alexander Kerensky’s Mensheviks who had
deposed the Tsar and seized power in a revolution in February of the same
year. Lenin (1870-1924) was the first
General Secretary of the Communist Party and his importance as an icon is
underlined in this exhibition which deals with the power of the image and the
redaction and manipulation of images in the interest of power. Lenin sought to consolidate the Bolshevik’s
grip on power by sending agitprop (from agitation propaganda) trains, trams and
even steam boats across the length and breadth of Russia. Bolshevik power had been established in the great
cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg but these cities were in European
Russia. What was to be done with the
vast regions of central and eastern Russia?
Agitprop trains contained cinemas, exhibition carriages, mobile
theatres, classrooms, even printing presses, they were intended to convey the
Bolshevik message of peace, bread and land to the masses in territories that
were far from Moscow. The first room of the exhibition evokes the
work of agitation propaganda in the initial phase of the Revolution and ensuing
Civil War that killed as many people as the First World War had and fought between
the Soviets and the Red Army on one side, and the more diverse White forces on
the other.
The revolution energised
artists and intellectuals to utilise materials and create forms that were
unlike those used by artists of the past.
Thus, forms and materials such as film, posters, photographs, photomontage
attained pre-eminence over artforms such as genre painting or sculpture as
media through which the revolution and its principles might be promulgated. Lenin himself told Anatoly Lunacharsky
(1875-1933), first Soviet Commissar of Education, that the cinema was the most
important of all the arts. However, the
exhibition, somewhat surprisingly, does not provide examples of the work of
Eisenstein, Pudovkin or Dziga Vertov apart from some stills from Eisenstein’s
films Battleship Potemkin and October.
These emphasize how Eisenstein invented episodes such as the Odessa
steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin
that never actually happened. It focuses
instead on photo stills, paintings and photomontage (collages of photographs)
although there are some short films focussing on the manipulation of Trotsky’s
image before and after the Revolution when he was leader of the Red Army. He subsequently left Russia and went into
exile in Mexico before being assassinated by an agent of Stalin.
Three artist couples are
focussed on to emphasize the collectivist impulse of the avant-garde in the
immediate aftermath of October 1917: El Lissitzky (1890-1941) and Sophie
Lissitzky-Kuppers (1891-1978), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) and Varvara
Stepanova (1894-1958), and Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938) and Valentina Kulagina
(1902-1987). Their work evolved out of
the experimental art of the pre-war period and radical movements like
Constructivism, Russian Futurism and, later, by the work of Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935)
and the Suprematist movement. These
movements and individuals were engaged in experimental, abstract art rather
than realist art which they identified with bourgeois cultural and art
movements. They believed that their
subject was the city and its industry rather than the stereotypical portraits,
landscapes and still life genres of traditional or bourgeois art. In literature craft was valued above
inspiration, regarded as a meaningless bourgeois category implying a monopoly
of talent that kept instruction of craft to its own members. They were politically committed and saw that
the artist’s relationship to society had to be reconfigured in the light of the
new economic conditions brought about by the October revolution. Only later, when Stalinism became the doctrine
of post-revolutionary Russia, did Social Realism become the dominant aesthetic
of the USSR.
Lenin realised that the
economic policies of War Communism in the late teens and early 1920s had
resulted in shortages and economic disaster and he was forced to re-introduce
elements of Capitalism in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The exhibition describes the twists and
turns, backtracking, sidestepping, revisions of Soviet ideology in terms of the
manipulation of images. There is also
time for the victims, a collection of police mugshots, for instance, of the
many anonymous victims of the Great Terror of the 1930s designed to consolidate
Stalinism. These images convey their own
individual tragedies, mainly non-party members abducted and shot without trial,
judge or jury. The only identifiable
mugshot is that of Karl Radek (1885-1939), an expert on Germany and China, a
party member eliminated by Stalin at the end of the period of the purges. The exhibition focuses on three high profile
victims: military leader Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893-1937) executed during the
purge of 1937, at the very height of the Great Terror, (a year in which 1.6
million people were arrested, 700,000 sentenced to death and others sent to the
Gulag labour camps); the suicide of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930);
and the suicide of Stalin’s young wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1901-1932).
Individual
self-censorship was encouraged, there are examples of former generals or
Politburo members cut out of photographs, their portraits blocked out with an X
or surrounded by explanatory text regarding their exile, imprisonment or
execution in photographs owned by workers or peasants. Even to possess an image of Lev Trotsky or
Lev Kamanev, Stalin’s rivals and opponents, might mean persecution since it
only required one other person to denounce a so-called traitor in the Stalin
era. Individual self-censorship was
therefore encouraged but self-censorship was also practised by artists such as
Vasilli Svarog (1883-1946) and his work Joseph
Stalin with Members of the Politburo among Children in the Gorky Central Park
of Culture and Rest 1939. Two versions
of the painting illustrate how redaction and omission of the commander of the
Soviet navy Petr Smirnov (1897-1939) were suddenly required since Smirnov was
suddenly denounced and executed.
Red
Star Over Russia comes to obvious conclusions about the Russian
revolution, conclusions that are clichés about revolutions and the people that
make them. There are also original perceptions
about the nature of power and the connection between this and the images that
summarise and consolidate both tyranny and democracy. Anyone who is interested in the tragedies and
triumphs of the 20th century must see this exhibition, a vital starting
point for further investigations.
Paul Murphy
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