The Russian Devolution : After the Fall, How Will Artists Fare in the Soviet Union?

They tumbled through the televised air in slow motion, huge blocks of Stygian granite shaped like men. They shattered gracefully against the pavement, hands bouncing one way, grim-visaged heads pirouetting in another. For a rare moment they seemed almost poignant.

It’s gone on for months. As the Soviet Union disunited, freedom-intoxicated crowds celebrated by trashing sculpted icons of mute power set in implacable stone by those who would remind them that, here, raw power rules.

Last February in Albania, a mob clawed down a statue of Enver Hoxha with their bare hands, then ceremonially urinated upon it. In Romania, the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 set the citizens to liquidating a 30-foot bronze behemoth sculpture of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The statue proved as resistant to change as the regime. It took wrecking balls, blow torches and industrial cranes three days to bring the thing down.

In the Polish town of Nowa Huta, delirious protesters attacked a Lenin monument with everything from hacksaws to dynamite. In Vilnius, after the failed coup against Gorbachev, the Lithuanian government trumpeted independence by cracking Lenin’s stone effigy off at the legs and swinging him across the square on a steel cable--hauled off like a bad vaudeville comedian in mid-monologue.

These images came to symbolize the disintegration of the Soviet Union for an astounded world. We stared at them on the evening news and reviewed them embalmed in color, front and center, in the morning paper. Look at that kid putting a rope around the neck of the great Bolshevik villain, Yakov Sverdlov. Ten-thousand people mass outside Lubyanka prison to watch the toppling of Evgeny Vuchetich’s statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the KGB. If that doesn’t tell the story of the fall of Big Brother, I don’t know what.

Life and art imitate one another constantly. That’s interesting--but not news. On rare occasions, life and art actually overlap and blend. Such interpenetration is the occasion of high drama. Real events unfold with the magic of great theater.

That blending elevated the story of crumbling communism to the status of epic opera. Significantly, its symbolic central images were themselves artworks. Those brutalist colossi were works in the official state-sanctioned styles that dominated communist countries since the 1930s, Socialist Realism.

While we all saw a phenomenon that had all the lineaments of a political revolution, we were simultaneously witnessing an artistic devolution in the making--the demise of an immensely influential way of seeing that once held sway over half the world.

After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the communists for a time flirted with the artists of the Russian avant-garde whose names came to be so well known in the West--Malevich, Rodchenko, Kandinsky, Chagall.

In the communist mind there was always something politically incorrect about avant-garde abstraction and its links to decadent capitalism. From the beginning Lenin betrayed a weakness for what he called “Monumental Propaganda.” Now they are talking about removing Lenin’s embalmed body from its Moscow tomb. Maybe that’s too bad. Some Western wags saw it as quite radical--either the first work of body art or the first hyper-realist sculpture.

Stalin and his artistic Rasputin, the novelist Maxim Gorky, invented Socialist Realism--less a style than a method for turning art into a political tool. Much of the varied art that came out of Socialist Realism was so fatuously heavy-handed one would like to dismiss it as a bad joke with its posters of heaving Stakhanovite supermen hefting I-beams to fulfill the five-year plan, strapping blondes in babushkas scything grain for the motherland while Bunyan-big Uncle Joe oversees the whole with avuncular puffs on his pipe.

Totalitarian art, objectively viewed, is always an exercise in unconscious self-mockery--probably because dictators think they can get away with anything. Stalin certainly never expected to be called to task because the smoke from his pipe was a screen for millions of lost lives in collectivization and the Gulag.

But what goes around still comes around. By the mid-’50s Nikita Khrushchev’s Stalinist purge came to constitute the first chapter in the demise of Socialist Realism. Stalin had built many a pompous monument to himself. Khrushchev simply caused them to vanish. Never an artistic high-brow, he nonetheless fomented an artistic thaw. When offended by a semi-abstract sculpture by Ernst Neizvestny, he berated the artist but did not kill him. In the end, Neizvestny was asked to design Khrushchev’s tomb. Nice Russian irony, that.

After Khrushchev, the political temperature in the Soviet Union frosted over again. Leonid Lamm is an emigre artist now living in New York. He thinks that he, his writer friend Igor Gelback were the first to use official communist art against itself as a weapon of protest.

Gelback now lives in Melbourne, Australia. By chance he was visiting Lamm and his wife Immesa when reached by phone.

According to Gelback’s account, their protest “performance” took place in the summer of 1967. They selected a statue of the great Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, which stands on a square named for him in central Moscow. Mayakovsky had collaborated with the communists. He eventually committed suicide, as did Gorky.

The square, one of the three largest in the city, was flood-lit at night and watched over by a ceremonial guard. The artists, armed with bottles of red paint, waited hours for their chance. In the pre-dawn dimness the floodlights extinguished and the artists attacked.

“We managed to hit the statue right in the heart so the paint seemed to flow from it like blood from a wound.” Gelback said. “Mayakovsky was a great poet in spite of everything. We wanted to say symbolically that it was really the regime that killed him.”

In rather surprising contrast to the iconoclastic crowds in the Soviet Union, all three of the emigres said they hoped the monuments of Socialist Realism would be preserved.

Immesa Lamm is a critic and curator noted for urging--when it was still dangerous to do so--that art of every stamp be freely shown in the Soviet Union.

“It should be preserved. It is the landmark of an epoch. I am trying to organize a Socialist Realism show here in New York. Visiting Moscow recently, I bought a version of the Dzerzhinsky sculpture in a department store. They had never sold a single one and everyone looked at me like I was crazy or stupid. But this work was by very famous official artists and ordered by the state. It is very high-quality work and deserves to be preserved and studied.”

One wonders what will become of these ranking official artists--once so handsomely supported--as the bureaucracy unravels.

Gelback observed that Russians are resourceful. He thinks the artists may have to move out of the top level of activity but may find the market opening wider than was permitted under government control.

“There are a lot of cemeteries and workers resorts that require sculpture. Many of these artists are still rich and powerful. Despite changes, much of the conservative structure is still in place.”

Alexander Melamid agreed, or almost. He is half of the widely noted emigre artist team of Komar and Melamid. Reached in his New Jersey studio, he said, with a shrug in his voice, “Those artists will now have lives as difficult as those of any American artist.”

Of the iconoclastic frenzy he said: “People are trying to kill the regime by killing the image. It is a kind of revolution by magic.

“It is a tragedy for the 20th Century. We are seeing the crash of a great culture. Good or bad, it was grandiose and powerful. People feel the loss of that power. It is a good revolution but, like the French Revolution, all revolutions are tragic because they destroy whole cultures.”

Somehow our media image had not quite included the Russian intelligentsia’s sense of nostalgia and loss of a certain center. But imagine how we might feel if, in the grip of some political frenzy, Americans pulled down the Lincoln Memorial or vandalized Mt. Rushmore.

We might regret it. We might do what the Russians did with the broken pieces of their colossal wrecks. Remember that photo of the dishonored sculpture standing in a copse near Gorky Park? They looked suddenly benign and harmless, once-ferocious strongmen attending a retirement picnic.