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1 Revolutionary Art: the Bolshevik Experience* Several Months After The images reproduced here accord with fair use. Please acknowledge credits. 1 © Susan Buck-Morss, 2006. Revolutionary Art: The Bolshevik Experience* Several months after the October Revolution, Anatolii Lunacharskii, newly appointed as head of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment (NARKOMPROS), reported to a meeting of artists and sculptors: "I have just come from Vladimir Ilich [Lenin]. Once again he has had one of those fortunate and profoundly exciting ideas with which he has so often shocked and delighted us. He intends to decorate Moscow's squares with statues and monuments to revolutionaries and the great fighters for socialism."1 Lenin had told him that this plan for "monumental propaganda" was for long his cherished idea.2 It was to be public art that wrote history onto urban space. The masses would see history as they moved through the city. The revolution entered the phenomenal world of the everyday. "Memorial Obelisk for the Great Socialist Innovative in Lenin's idea was the adaptation of a Thinkers and Revolutionaries," Moscow. Photo from 1920s. The obelisk was first nationalist art form for socialist ends. Whereas in the erectedin 1913 to commemorate the sixt jubilee of the Romanov dynasty. It was nineteenth century, monument-building became an transformed into a Bolshevik monument by engraving on it these names: Marx, obsession of nation-states as a means of celebrating (and Engels, Liebknecht, Lasalle, Bebel, Campanella, Meslier, Winstanley, creating) their own particular pasts, Lenin's monuments Thomas More, Saint-Simon, Vailant, evoked an international heritage. The twenty-one Russians Fourier, Juarès, Proudhon, Bakunin, Chernyshevskii, Lavrov, Mikhailovskii, Plekhanov. on the list of approved "fighters for socialism" included • Based on material from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 1. Cited in Christina Lodder, "Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda," Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992, eds. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 19. 2. Lodder, "Lenin's Plan," Art of the Soviets, p. 20. 2 many assassins or would-be assassins of royalty—not the category usually n. , 1919. ni e memorialized by national regimes. There were ow c L os 19 Europeans, half of them French, among ut bo M a m them a cluster of Revolutionary heroes: l on," fi nt Danton, Marat, and Babeuf; later, Robespierre a nda a g was added. Cultural figures were among the of D ue t a t propa "revolutionaries," including Heinrich Heine S a , " i and Frédéric Chopin. Paul Cézanne's name was a from kol s i seriously considered.3 i ge v, N a 4 e m Material was in short supply. Statues i ndre he were hastily built out of plaster or cement, A T 3. There does not seem to have been any concerted effort to place these figures in a particular sequence, chronological or otherwise; nor were the monuments placed in spatial relation to each other in any particularly meaningful fashion. Rather, these "heroes" were brought into the present as a constellation that suggested a new historical narration, connecting figures of the past across national and occupational, and even political boundaries. The ecumenicalism of the list was striking. Among the Russians were the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom Marx had criticized repeatedly, and (after his death in May 1919) the social revolutionary, Georgii Plekhanov, who in 1903 had accused Lenin of "bonapartism," confusing dictatorship of the proletariat with dictatorship over the proletariat. The Germans included (besides Marx and Engels) the recent Communist martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Also named were the Italian nationalist Garibaldi, the English utopian socialist Robert Owen, the French utopian theorists Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon, and a handful of ancient European fighters against tyranny (Spartacus, Gracchus, Brutus). (Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], pp. 89-90). By August 1918 the list of those considered "worthy of sculptural attention" had been extended to 66 (Lodder, "Lenin's Plan," Art of the Soviets, p. 20). The name of the French painter Paul Cézanne appeared on an early list, but was crossed off by government officials "at the top" (Vasilii Rakitin, "The Artisan and the Prophet: Marginal Notes on Two Artistic Careers," The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 [New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992], p. 31). 4. This lack of material was to be turned into a democratic advantage, as "the public would be allowed to give their judgement on the merit of the work before some were converted into more permanent materials such as bronze, granite or marble" (Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks, vol 1: The Crisis of Renewal, 1917-1924 (London: Pluto Press, 1991), p. 59. Lunacharskii wrote that the monuments should be "modest, and let everything be temporary" (cited in Vladimir Tolstoy et al., eds., Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia, 1918-33 [New York: The Vendome Press, 1990], p. 13). 3 replacing monuments from the Tsarist era that were just as hastily disassembled.5 Time mattered. The meaning of history was being constructed. If the Bolshevik victory in St. Petersburg was to be more than an urban coup, it needed to assume the mantle of sovereign legitimacy presently claimed by the provisional government, established after the February Revolution and abdication of the Tsar. The Russian people had already been proclaimed "free citizens" in the Western, bourgeois-democratic sense; the "new era" had allegedly begun.6 When the Bolsheviks led the crowd that forcefully evicted that government, headed by Kerenskii, from the Tsar's Winter Palace, nothing less than world history was called upon to legitimate the act. The October events were to be understood in a sublime context, not merely as a case of catching up with the West, but of superseding it, advancing the world-revolutionary tradition to its highest culmination. Without this interpretation, the Winter Palace storming was vandalism, and the overthrow of the existing government was treason.7 5. In response to acts of vandalism during the early days of the Revolution, Lunacharskii issued an appeal to "Protect the Property of the People," and appointed artists to a Commission for the Preservation of Monuments that had the power to decide which of the Tsarist monuments were to be saved on account of their artistic value. (See Hubertus Gassner, "The Constructivists: Modernism on the Way to Modernization," Great Utopia, p. 301.) The issue of monumental propaganda took on increased significance in the context of the Civil War, as Trotsky wrote, "particularly in the outlying areas": "We must say...if the bourgeois breaks through the front and comes here, he will sweep away that monument together with the Soviet power and all the achievements we have won" (cited in Taylor, Art and Literature, vol. 1, pp. 56-57). 6. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, p. 37. The Provisional Government adopted as its national anthem the Workers' Marseillaise, "Otrezemsya ot Starovo Mira" ("We Renounce the Old World"). 7. The Provisional Government severely damaged its own legitimacy by resuming the European war, thereby provoking mass street demonstrations in St. Petersburg on July 4, 1917, which turned violent. Lenin agreed to speak to the demonstrators but warned them that it was still too early for armed insurrection. 4 It is “history” that legitimates political revolution.8 . , 1921. t The structuring of history as a ow c ane l os narrative discourse transforms w P ry, M Ne the violent rupture of the present e l l he a T into a continuity of meaning. kov G One has to imagine the ya n Iuon, t i e r nt tenuousness of the situation. a t T e t a ons t With the expected workers' K S revolution in Europe delayed indefinitely, Lenin counted the days for "[W]e people are the children of the sun, proof that the Bolshevik victory could the bright source of life; we are born of the sun and will vanquish the murky fear of outlast the revolutionary Paris Commune death" -- Maxim Gorky, Children of the Sun (1905).9 of 1871. Why, when even fellow- Lenin told the British science fiction writer, Marxists believed a period of bourgeois H.G. Wells, who interviewed him in the Kremlin in 1920, that if life were discovered democracy in Russia was a historical on other planets, revolutionary violence would no longer be necessary: "Human necessity, should the Bolshevik splinter ideas -- he told Wells -- are based on the scale of the planet we live in. They are group gain hegemony, not only of the based on the assumption that the technical potentialities, as they develop, will never political discourse, but of the cultural overstep ‘the earthly limit.’ If we succeed in making contact with the other planets, all discourse as well? Mass support existed our philosophical, social and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these 8. Historical progress along a developmental potentialities will become limitless and will put an end to violence as a necessary trajectory is not the only possible form of means of progress."10 revolutionary time. The French Revolution looked backward to ancient Rome for its historical model; seventeenth-century English rebels appealed to Biblical time. Both required what Benjamin referred to as "a 9. Gorky, cited in Stites, Revolutionary tiger's leap into the past" (Walter Benjamin, Dreams, p. 103. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books, 10. Cited in Stites, Revolutionary Dreams p. 1969], p.
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