"Nostalgias, utopias and quagmires" Anna Łazar

In Ukraine, the attitude towards the heritage of the USSR is very complicated. On the one hand, the war with Russia favours its identification with the Soviet Union and the need to reject the communist heritage, while on the other hand, it is impossible to erase nearly seventy years of history.

One morning, on Ploshchad Iskusstv (Arts Square) in St. Petersburg, I got entwined in the nineteenth-century root of socialist realism - a style that I had associated primarily with the official violence imposed on Soviet art. Close to Engineer’s Street I saw a huge banner announcing an exhibition in the Russian Museum. It depicted a soldier all in bronze, as can be seen both in Matejko’s paintings and during wars. At first I thought that it was another picture of the heroic “Pobeda”, Soviet victory, but no. It was about World War I, and the banner advertised the exhibition of Ilya Repin. Repin died in 1930, and it was two years later that socialist realism was introduced as the official style of the Soviet Union. In France, even after Stalin’s death, Louis Aragon tried to impose it on Pablo Picasso, so that he could be proclaimed a truly communist painter.

Let’s stay a while longer on St. Petersburg’s Engineer’s Street, not only because of St Michael’s Castle, where a certain Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent some time in cadet’s boots, but also because of Isaac Brodsky’s apartment/laboratory located by the said Arts Square from the side of this street. He was Lenin’s favourite portraitist, and thus a leading socialist realist. In his two-storey apartment, today transformed into a museum full of paintings and elegant furniture, I realised that the October Revolution had spared some places and lifestyles. It is quite an unusual feeling when you manage to change your perspective, jump a dozen or so decades back and hear in your mind the angry incantations of the ”Catechism of a Revolutionary” Sergey Nechayev from 1869 in the painter’s apartment, luxurious even by today’s standards.

“11. When a comrade falls into poverty, in answer to the question: save him or not, the revolutionary should appeal not to any personal feelings, but only to the benefits for the revolutionary cause. Therefore he should, on the one hand, consider the benefits brought to the cause by the comrade and, on the other hand, the depletion of the revolutionary forces needed to save him, and judge accordingly.

22. Comrades have no other purpose but the full liberation and happiness of the nation, the working people. But, convinced that this liberation and this happiness can only be achieved through a crushing people’s revolution, comrades, with all their strength and means, will contribute to the development and exposure of these misfortunes and the miseries that should finally ignite the fuse of the people’s patience and drive them towards a universal uprising. ”

Brutal. Discernible in the practices of comrades making decisions about the lives of workers and peasants. Different than socialist realism, which illustrates the future reality, improved and optimistic, so accessible and examining the subject of work, class struggle and the tradition of the workers’ movement. And silent about violence, unless it is violence directed against greater evil, violence necessary for the victory of the revolution or waged on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. Socialist realist images actually mean conjuring reality that is yet to happen. The relationship between socialist realism - or, more broadly, the idea that determines the character of the Soviet Union - and the ideas of the Russian Cosmists, who believed that the dead should be resurrected, the whole world and the closest environment of the individual should be transformed, is a subject for a separate study, now undertaken by Boris Groys. A lot has been said and written about the iconographic patterns in which Lenin or Stalin officiated among children like Jesus.

The roots of socialist realism as a style of image-making go back to the movement of the Peredvizhniks. They were expelled from the Tsarist Academy of Art because a few years after the abolition of serfdom in the Russian empire, they had asked for permission to freely choose the subject of their thesis rather than write about the “Feast of Odin in Walhalla”. They were wrong in assuming that they would, just like peasants, gain some freedom. Their demand was considered an unacceptable manifestation of cheek. They were sent off without references, which shut the door to an official career for them, so in the 1870s they founded the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions, Peredvizhniks for short, which was something like a cooperative of artists. Its members rejected academism and painted genre scenes from the life of the people - freshly liberated, but living in conditions that left much to be desired. In describing their work, the term “critical realism” was used, which remained in the orbit of the Narodniks’ views and Leo Tolstoy’s writings. The Society survived until 1922, when it was transformed into the Association of the Artists of Revolutionary Russia, already playing the party tune. Initially, it functioned in parallel with the avant-gardists, who were more and more marginalised, and then put to prison and killed. The avant-gardists wanted a new language for the new era, but it was the heirs of the Peredvizhniks who were comprehensible to the public and eventually they were considered by Lunacharski and Lenin to be more useful to illustrate the actions of the workers’ and peasants’ party.

The story of the interest in the heritage of the USSR

The general perception of Soviet art was for a long time limited to avant-garde movements, linked to the international artistic currents of the early 20th century such as the Bauhaus. The common theme was the belief in the possibility of transforming humans through artistic activity. Today, this aim is no longer considered totally innocent, because such a “transformed” person was not the self-possessed agent of this process, but had to give in to it without question in the name of a vision of a better future outlined by someone else. Socialist realism also had such a goal, except that it used artistic patterns developed in Tsarist Russia, while the avant-gardists wanted a completely new world. For a good few years now, the view of art from the communist era has become more reflective and goes beyond the sentimental, somewhat debilitating exchange of socialist-realist paintings abandoned by institutions. These works no longer have an ideological edge - they have become out-of-context souvenirs from Atlantis, testifying to an original sense of humour of the buyer - and have been consistently popular both at flea markets and in specialised galleries. It also goes beyond the paeans in honour of the avant-gardists, who wanted to transform the masses while ignoring their opinions, but ultimately experienced repressions.

The reception of socialist realism in Ukraine, or how art broadens the spectrum of attitudes

In Ukraine, the attitude towards the heritage of the USSR is very complicated. On the one hand, the war with Russia favours its identification with the Soviet Union and the need to reject the communist heritage, while on the other hand, it is impossible to erase nearly seventy years of history. The country has many problems, and yet unlike other post-Soviet states, it enjoys freedom of expression, a high degree of internal conflict notwithstanding. We also know this from the Polish backyard.

Nevertheless, the artists turn to their cultural legacy, trying to momentarily suspend their judgment and objectify the experience of Soviet culture. It is worth mentioning here the pioneering activities of the R.E.P. group (Revolutsijnyj Experymentalnyj Prostir, Revolutionary Experimental Space), established in 2004. Among its many undertakings, it has looked at the rituals (replacing the critical process and substantive discussion) accompanying the defence of diploma theses at the National Academy of Art of Ukraine in Kiev, transplanted intact from the period when the artists were trained to mimetism, flights of emotion and obeying ideological commandments. It was artists of this generation who began to wonder about the impact of the unreflective artistic education on them. We should note here the cycle of pictures by Lesia Khomenko where she engages in dialogue with social realism, discussing contemporary problems related to the labour market and replacing heroines and heroes with bodies of elderly people destroyed by work. Also fascinating are the oneiric projects by Grupa Predmetiv (Group of Objects) focused on modernist architecture and the grassroots social practices that grew around it.

The most recent and fascinating phenomenon is the work of a collective of activists - Evhenia Molyar, Leonid Trotsenko and Mykyta Kadan from the group DE NE DE (Here and There) at the Josip Buchanchuk Art Museum in Kmytiv, a village by the Kiev-Zhytomyr route. At first glance, the Kmytiv museum is an ideal embodiment of the Soviet utopia of friendship between soldiers, artists and peasants. It was created from the collection donated to the school in 1974 by Josip Buchanchuk, a retired military man, who after demobilisation was sent to teach civil defence at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Art Institute. There he became enthralled by art and began to collect paintings. The collection also included donations from artists dreaming of reaching out to rural audiences and various institutions, starting with the USSR Academy of Arts, the USSR Ministry of Culture, analogous institutions on the level of the republics, as well as associations of artists from Ukraine, Moscow and St. Petersburg. A decade after the first exhibition - organised in the corridor of a school in Buchanchuk’s home village - a museum was built in nearby Kmytiv, with the support of the Ukraine Kolkhoz and deliberately placed by the thoroughfare. The students from the Repin Institute prepared the original project especially for the needs of the small village. The building has beautiful, spacious and bright exhibition rooms. It is perceived as harmonious and ergonomic. But the roof leaks. Three decades later the story is no longer so perfect and people write about the ensuing conflicts and tensions. Was it really so easy to build a museum at the twilight of the USSR, using only enthusiasm? Who would know that today...

Until the break-up of the USSR the institution was called the People’s Soviet Art Museum in Kmytiv, and then the Josip Dmytrovich Buchanchuk Art Museum in Kmytiv. The mainstream media became interested in this place when the DE NE DE group found its way there. Its members established contacts with external institutions, secured funds for the conservation of over a dozen paintings, helped to create a space for children, promote the museum and, most interestingly, implement the curatorial project by Mykita Kadan “Dzhesty Stavlennya” (Gestures of Reference). Works of contemporary artists were fitted into the museum’s collections in thematic cycles devoted to general education, modernisation of society, war, national liberation movements, human body, privacy, and the figure of the artist and art, thus creating the blueprints for a new permanent exhibition.

Everything must be negotiated between artists, museum staff, local and central authorities, but thanks to this lively process history is discussed at the local level rather than uncritically absorbed from textbooks, from central institutions or, worse still, from parliamentary laws. Thus, there is a civic empowerment to reflect on it, although this process can by no means be called easy. The biggest storm was caused by the museum’s Facebook fanpage, were the term “Soviet” returned. It was not an official change, but this small gesture was enough. The people badly bruised by the current armed conflict and the trauma of the totalitarian USSR, which has not been worked out, react sensitively to actions seen as an attempt to reactivate the ideological apparatus of the past system. Interventions, denunciations, accusations, and debates followed. Chaotic, rapidly evolving reality, the changes and threats resulting from oligarchisation, globalisation and the actions of an aggressive neighbour probably make people want to have clear, simple measures of the past. But the past is as complicated as the present and attempts to simplify it most often reflect the need for empowerment, which cannot be fulfilled in today’s world. However, we should ask ourselves whether putting the communist legacy under quarantine could simplify anything. The uproar associated with the Museum in Kmytiv shows the impressive activity of citizens who engage in practical work for the decentralisation of cultural capital and mobilisation of provincial communities in a state weakened by war and corruption, and diversify the story of the past, not agreeing to an unequivocal labelling of the Soviet legacy as foreign, oppressive, and null and void, while on the other hand, they provoke polemical voices and bring out other people willing to co-decide on cultural institutions.

I was similarly impressed by the performance of “The Red Wedding” directed by Viktoria Myroniuk, shown as part of the 12th Theatre Meetings Bliscy nieznajomi/Close Strangers: Ukraine, organized by Teatr Polski in Poznań. This play, like Mykyta Kadan’s cycle of exhibitions, humanises the past, bringing additional threads to a narrative that increasingly claims exclusivity and treats violence as the only form of relations in the USSR. Myroniuk does not use the language of self-victimization, allowing the viewer to confront the untapped area of history and memory on his or her own. The creators of “The Red Wedding” show the communist rituals created in the 1920s - substitutes of religious rituals in public life. They use the methods of the Siniaja Bluza workers’ theatre (Blue Blouse - from the costumes of actors and actresses referring to work clothes: blue unzipped sweatshirt and black trousers or skirt), tasked with informing the masses about the international situation, the latest reports, literature and political decisions through songs, choral declamations, sports and gymnastics scenes and dances. At its best, in 1928, seven thousand theatres operated according to this method, also known as the “living newspaper”.

In 1933 they were banned. Of course, Boris Juzhanin, the creator of the Blue Blouse, was sent to a gulag in the northern Urals, and Varlam Shalamov recalls meeting him at there. “The Red Wedding” was created at the alternative Kharkiv-based Publicist Theatre, still based on the tradition of agitprop theatre. The strength of this performance lies in reminding us of the moral postulates from the beginning of the October Revolution, which, despite their historical form, have not lost their relevance to this day - including feminism, equal rights for same-sex unions, emancipation. It does not idealise or infantilise things, it is ludic, and at the same time it opens up a space for critical thinking. Isn’t it a paradox that today’s state ceremonies, for example the beginning of the school year, are conducted according to the scenario from the times of the USSR, but the flag of the USSR has been replaced by the national flag, a party representative by a clergyman, and a member of the Komsomol by a local MP? The author of the play believes that the Ukrainian society needs a new performativity. I think that the Polish society needs it too.

The leading theme

Finally, I return to the leading theme proposed by the editorial staff of “Herito”: magical socialist realism. I find that this term a little startling. It sounds partly like a joke, and partly like a hypothesis. What does the label “magical” mean when put next to the words “socialist realism"? Well, it softens it and imposes a veil of nostalgia on past, unrealised visions of the future, a veil blurring the unpleasantly sharp outlines. Magical realism, the term often used to the point of domestication, does not attract so much attention, although it too contains contradictions, creating a wobbly common platform for realities, experiences, the mind and fantasy. Oh, it was wonderful to read the books of Gabriel Marquez, Jeanette Winterson, Michel Tournier, Isabel Allende, Janet Frame and the sophisticated Italian Calvino in the dreary circumstances of the 1990s. I had the impression that I was in a circle of the initiated. When I was reading books from Eastern Europe, I hardly experienced the communal feeling of entering into a charming uniqueness, because gulag literature cannot be classified in this way. Before the wave of translations of contemporary Ukrainian authors of the younger and middle generations writing after the break-up of the USSR, there had been signals that the need for magic was there, but it was rather averse to socialist realism. I was seduced by two novels - the first one was “Christ landed in Grodno” by Uladzimir Karatkevych (1972, Polish edition 2012 - the translator Małgorzata Buchalik wanted the title to be “Christ came to Grodno”, which in fact better reflects both the original and the content). It shows Jesus, who, in addition to performing well-known and classic miracles, is also an advocate of social change and a revolutionary. The second novel, Valeriy Shevchuk’s “House on the Hill” (1983, Polish edition 1989, translation by Jerzy Litwiniuk), is a beautiful lyrical story about a women’s house to which two types of men come: some know how to turn into birds, and the girl they seduce leaves her house and gives birth to a son, while others ask for water from the well, then stay and the girls are born at home.

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

Anna Łazar – has worked as deputy director and acting director at the Polish Institutes in Kyiv (2008–2014) and Saint Petersburg (2015–2018). She is the author of text on Polish and east European literature and contemporary art, a translator, and co-editor of “Sekcja”, a periodical on contemporary art. While at university she worked with Polish NGOs working on eastern issues. She studied for her PhD at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.