censorship i || censorship in the soviet bloc

Censorship in the Soviet BlocAuthor(s): Amei WallachSource: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3, Censorship I (Autumn, 1991), pp. 75-83Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777221 .

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Censorship in the Soviet Bloc

AMEI WALLACH

n the Soviet Union in the fall of 1987 and in East

Germany in November 1990, I experienced two of those moments when, as in a journey, the way things were in

the place from which you have come is still far more real than the hardly imaginable place ahead. In the United States in 1987, the newspapers were still saying that an accurate translation of glasnost was "propaganda." And your average Soviet on the street would have agreed-from the women who

queued in November rain for wormy apples, to the wife who threw her husband anxious warning looks when he began to talk loudly about government policy in a restaurant, to the mother who said, "Russians are afraid of Russians."

But the artists-the painters, sculptors, novelists, po- ets, actors, film directors-knew, as certainly as the artists of East Germany knew after November 1990, that the rules had changed. They did not know how; they did not know what the new freedoms would mean, and this uncertainty filled them with all-too-familiar fears: fear that the new freedoms would end as quickly they had begun, fear of overstepping the new unwritten limits, and, that most artistic of anxieties, fear of failure.

There were certainties under the old ways, and the most reliable was self-censorship. If you wanted to reap the glittering prizes the government meted out, you were adept at

reading shifting signals, fitting in with slippery new ways. If

you were willing to forgo official approval and take a certain risk, you could win a reputation for integrity simply by telling the tiny bit of truth that was possible between the lines.

To be a relevant artist in the Soviet bloc may have been

fraught with danger, but it was not so very difficult. Now, in the winter of 1991, thirteen of the fourteen top-grossing films in Hungary are American, writers in Poland cannot get their books published because no one will buy them, German museum directors and the artist George Baselitz are declaring that there are no artists in what was once East Germany, only artistic bureaucrats. "It turns out," the Polish playwright Janusz Glowacki told me recently, "that art was an anti-Communist activity."

The uses of art became utterly distorted under the Soviet system. Censorship was the tool and cause. It was both like and unlike the early warning signs of censorship here. The primary difference was that it was all-pervasive. Censor-

ship in the Soviet Union succeeded absolutely when government support of the arts became the only form of support available. As long as there remained relatively independent schools and associations and the tattered remains of a collect-

ing class, during the 1920s, the more conservative elements in the government and the arts were only sporadically suc- cessful in quenching the dangerous enthusiasms of the dis-

parate, often warring factions of the Russian avant-garde, who had championed the Revolution.

But on April 23, 1932, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party issued a Decree on the Recon- struction of Literary and Artistic Organizations. The decree dissolved all former organizations in literature and the other arts on the grounds that "these organizations might change from being an instrument for the maximum mobilization of Soviet writers and artists for the task of Soviet construction to

being an instrument for cultivating elitist withdrawal and loss of contact with the political tasks of contemporaneity. .. ."'

Instead, the government organized all artists into central artists' unions, which became the sole source of commis- sions, sales, and exhibitions-and also of housing, studio

space, paint, canvas, printing presses, foundries. Shortly thereafter, the Academy of Arts, which had been dead for a few heady decades, was revived as the only route toward a career in the art profession. And Isaak Brodsky, who hated all advanced art, starting with Post-Impressionism, became its director. The Academy's definition of true art was Socialist Realism. At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in

August 1934, Socialist Realism became the single accept- able style for all the arts throughout the USSR.

Maxim Gorky, who presided over the congress and lent it congruity, since his plays could be interpreted as forerun- ners of the official aesthetic, dismissed the great artistic experiments of 1907-17 as "the most disgraceful and shame-

ART JOURNAL

75



ful decade in the history of the Russian intelligentsia."2 Andrei Zhdanov, then secretary of the Communist Party, invoked Stalin by declaring:

Comrade Stalin has called our writers "engineers of human souls." What does this mean? What obligations does this title impose on us?

First of all, it means that we must know life so as to depict it

truthfully in our works of art-and not to depict it scholastically, lifelessly, or merely as "objective reality"; we must depict reality in its

revolutionary development.... Soviet literature must be able to show our heroes, must be able to catch a glimpse of tomorrow.3

In other words, art was to depict the heroes and the dreams of communism with optimism, conviction, and easily recogniz- able verisimilitude.

However, what was most pernicious and most brilliant about the definition of Socialist Realism as officially adopted, was that not only were the two concepts of reality and revolutionary zeal contradictory, but the language of the edict was so vague and misleading that it made the promise of "exceptional prospects for manifesting creative initiative, of a

76 choice of diverse forms, styles, and genres."4 Basically, that threw it back into the laps of the artists, whose job it was to

second-guess, tussle with their consciences, anticipate who would object to what and what they ought to do about it. They were to become their own secret police.

James Billington has pointed out that Socialist Real- ism "was, in fact, a formula for keeping writers [artists] in a state of continuing uncertainty as to what was required of them: an invaluable device for humiliating the intellectuals

by encouraging the debilitating phenomena of anticipatory self-censorship."5

Both Socialist Realism and the self-censorship it pro- moted became the pattern for the arts of the Soviet bloc after World War II. Obviously, there were notable differences

between the way the doctrine manifested itself in Poland,

Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. The experience of those nations before communism had been quite opposite to that of

Russia, where there was basically no educated public, no

alternative to the official Academy, once it was established by Peter the Great, until the appearance of educated collectors at the end of the nineteenth century. The cosmopolitanism of

Europe, so often disdained in Russia, made it far more

difficult for conformity to seed itself quite so virulently in most of the nations of Eastern Europe. Also, the Soviet bloc had to endure only a few years under Stalin; the terror was

relatively short-lived; it didn't blot out close to two genera- tions' worth of role models and information, and the freeze was closer to the surface. So it is impossible to make blanket

statements that accurately describe censorship in Eastern

Europe as well as the Soviet Union, except to say that they share in common the definition of Socialist Realism, the centralization of supplies and support, and the compulsions toward self-censorship.

The culture of the Eastern bloc had to resemble that of the Soviet Union by conforming to Stalin's dictum, "national-

ist in form, socialist in content." Meaning, so far as possible, national differences must be erased, since by definition in nations subjugated by force, nationalism was anti-Soviet. Nationalist tendencies had to be subordinated to the demands of Socialist Realism, and further cowed with a healthy dose of

genuflection toward the Supreme Soviet. Not only did the Eastern artist get to " 'inoculate' others with the 'basic princi- ples of enthusiasm,'" as Czeslaw Milosz put it,6 they got to

paint hymns of praise to Russian soldiers, Russian apparat- chik, Russian victories.

The process Milosz described in the Eastern satellites in the early 1950s was a secondhand reflection of what was

occurring in the Soviet Union at the time:

The philosophy of History emanating from Moscow is not just an ab- stracted theory, it is a materialforce that uses guns, tanks, planes and all the machines of war and oppression. All the crushing might of an armed state is hurled against any man who refuses to accept the New Faith. At the same time, Stalinism attacks himfrom within, saying his opposition is caused by his "class consciousness," just as psychoanalysts accuse their foes of wanting to preserve their complexes.

Long after Stalin, Soviet artists such as Ivan Chuikov com-

plained that it was possible to dare more in Eastern countries than in the Soviet Union, "Because there Big Brother is

watching. In the Soviet Union, there is no Big Brother, so we can't go so far."7 However, when Big Brother did clamp down on Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in

1981, censorship suddenly once more became much more

repressive than in the Soviet Union. Thus, the history of

censorship in the Soviet Union may be examined independently, drawing, on the experiences of Eastern European writers and artists that seem relevant as a way of understand-

ing the phenomenon. Although the occasion of the present examination is in

response to disturbing events in the United States, the insti- tutionalization of censorship as it manifested itself in the Soviet Union before 1985 is bizarrely beyond our comprehen- sion. It succeeded only so long as it had the full force of a totalitarian government behind it; so long as artists had no

options. As soon as the slightest alternatives presented them-

selves, in the mid-1950s, the absolute control of censorship began to crumble. The process of its disintegration was long,

bewildering, and dangerous. Censorship, even in crippled form, effectively destroyed the natural development of Soviet culture. What was permitted one year was forbidden the next, and vice versa; what was tolerated in literature was con- demned in painting; what one artist might be permitted would bring dire consequences to another; what one bureau- crat endorsed, another might veto-then meting out punish- ment to the artist who had been foolhardy enough to believe in such good fortune. The loosening process, in fits and starts,

FI G. 1 llya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1981-86, mixed media, 145V2 x 96 x 110 inches. From Ten Characters, an installation at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1988. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

FALL 1991



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with two steps forward and four steps back, began with the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953.

"In the Stalin time, we could see only death. Only death. Not literature, not art," the painter Eric Bulatov said in 1987.8 Bulatov was born in 1931, just as Stalin was

reinventing Soviet culture, and just as the purges began (fig. 1). Peasants protesting collectivization perished as "class enemies," or were starved to death. Then, as James Billing- ton describes it, "The 'leftist activists' who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed. ... Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions."9

The new society could not tolerate Jews, intellectuals, or artists perniciously adept at objectivity and acts of imag- ination. A few survived and continued as before, but they kept to themselves. Kazimir Malevich died naturally in 1934 after returning to representation-whether by conviction or coercion is a mystery it will take a great deal of dogged

78 scholarship to decipher. Pavel Filonov starved to death in 1941 in Leningrad, because he was no longer given either food stamps or food.10 Boris Pasternak continued, and

survived-though he was constantly harassed and de- nounced in Pravda-so long as he did not infect anyone with his writing by making it public.

Both images and words-and particularly images and words deifying Lenin and Stalin-were weapons in an alto-

gether sophisticated campaign to adorn atrocities with uplift- ing sentiments. Either the artist aided in this subversion of

signs, or else the artist was an enemy of the state and had to be annihilated. Art had one function: to encourage blind

Stalin-worship with hero-of-the-people altarpieces that would inspire the acts of devotion and carnage that history demanded if humankind was to be remade in a new, Commu- nist image.

An April 1950 article in Pergale, the organ of the Soviet Writers of Lithuanian USSR, describes how the process was

supposed to work:

I approached Stalin's portrait, took it off the wall, placed it on the table, and, resting my head on my hands, I gazed and meditated. What should I do? The Leader'sface, as always so serene, his eyes so clear-sighted, they penetrate into the distance. ... with my every fibre, every nerve, every drop of blood Ifeel that, at this moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and belovedface. What should I do?

The Soviet government handles the enemies of the people with a firm hand. ....

These are thy words, comrade Stalin, I believe them sacredly. Now I know how to act.1'

The stench of blood made independent action impossible, and independent thought unthinkable, just as it was meant to do. It made silence or a double life the only choices. For the very ambitious, there was the alternative of complete capitulation. If you wanted to be a painter, you painted Lenin

and Stalin, and, when you weren't mouthing platitudes and

being decorated for them, you shut up. But the ubiquitous statues of Lenin and Stalin, the three-story banners, the

paintings everywhere had the opposite effect on the minds of a very few of the young growing up in their midst. Joseph Brodsky assigns his first moment of truth to being fed up with all those images of Lenin, "whom, I suppose, I began to

despise even when I was in the first grade-not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which at the age of seven I knew very little, but because of his

omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not. ... I think that coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson in switching off, my first attempt at estrangement."'2

If pictures were what interested you, however, as they did Bulatov, there was very little other than Lenin, Stalin, and heroes of the Revolution to look at. Certainly no Malevich or Chagall. But no Matisse, either, no Monet, Renoir, or Cezanne. Van Gogh and Gauguin, when you heard about

them, were called degenerates and charlatans, if not mad. 13

After Stalin died, the restive factions and interest

groups within the monolith revealed themselves, however, and a few things became possible, particularly if you were

adept at playing the one against the other:

If one had brains, one would certainly try to outsmart the system by devising all kinds of detours, arranging shady deals with one's superiors, piling up lies and pulling the strings of one's semi-nepotic connections. This would become afull-timejob. Yet one was constantly aware that the web one had woven was a web of lies, and in spite of the degree of success or your sense of humor, youd despise yourself. That is the ultimate

triumph of the system; whether you beat it or join it, you despise yourself.14

Psychologically, not all that much had changed-you could feel either guilt or fear; but at least there was a trickle of information. Three young artist friends, Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov (fig. 2), and Oleg Vassilyev (fig. 3), ignoring their art teachers at the Academy, whom they perceived as those who had survived by (tacitly) killing, sought out whomever

they could find with something to impart, from the generation that had preceded them.

Vladimir Andreevich Favorsky had managed to sur-

vive by making realistic woodblock illustrations; Robert

Rafailovich Falk, by teaching little children art. Every day, Falk had been in terror of the KGB, but Bulatov believes that

he was the only first-generation Soviet artist who continued to

evolve naturally, until his death in 1958. In the early 1950s, Bulatov and Vassilyev became his students.

About this time, too, Soviet museums, without any announced change in policy, began showing the Impression- ist and Post-Impressionist paintings in their collections,

beginning with an exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in

1953. And one of the professors at the Academy invited the

young artists to his house and silently, in great fear, laid a

forbidden book about Matisse on the bed and invited them to

ask about it.

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The process that came to be known as "the Thaw," after

Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 novel of that title, accelerated after the twentieth Party Congress in 1956, during which Khrushchev made his first public criticism of Stalin. For the first time in Soviet history, the premier freed political prisoners. Among them was Eva Rosengoltch, who had studied with Falk when she was a girl, but who, because she was Jewish and because her brother had opposed the regime, had spent decades in Siberia. On her return to Moscow she began making ink and

pastel works on paper of the sky or of crowds, which Bulatov admires immensely and for which he calls her "the best Soviet artist at the end of the 1950s,"15 though she never dared show them to anyone but him and his friends.

The young artists had begun by searching for a way to

separate themselves from the morass of lies, to assert: "I'm not like that, I'm not a murderer. I'm not a liar or a savage. I'm an honest artist!" And they discovered that the inescapable next step was to define for themselves just what honest artist, not to mention real art, meant if you were an artist living in

80 the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In 1957 a World Youth Festival included an interna-

tional exhibition of work by young artists, and for the first time gave the Soviets an inkling of what had been going on abroad for the past quarter-century. That was when Bulatov,

Kabakov, and some of their friends began working secretly on their own art at home, taking Falk and Rosengoltch as their role models. Uncertainty was still the governing princi- ple. "Nobody knew exactly if it was dangerous. Some people were afraid, some not," says Bulatov. He and his friends earned their living as illustrators, making it unnecessary to

accept either the carrot or the stick that comprised the

painting section of the Artists Union. Other young painters and sculptors found other methods for outsmarting the system. They made muddy abstractions, heroic-Surrealist

sculptures, studies in neoconstructivism. When the tiny foreign community-mostly consular

officials-began to show an interest in the work of these

independent artists, there was both more danger and a kind of

protection-not to mention a source of income. Starting in the 1950s the Grosvenor Gallery in London began showing the work of such artists as Oskar Rabin and the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who quickly came to be known as "dissident."

By 1962 the situation had changed sufficiently that two

things could happen: paintings by such American artists as

Jackson Pollock went on view at a United States chemical exhibition in Moscow; and some of the young, outsider

artists-among them Neizvestny-were permitted to exhibit in public for the first time, in an exhibition arranged under the auspices of the Moscow City Council. Just why or how it

happened is open to conjecture. John Berger's hypothesis is that this was one of those instances when warring interests at

pains to outsmart each other allowed the unexpected to slip through the fissures they created. In this case the trouble-

maker was probably the Artists Union, which wanted to show up the more prestigious Academy as narrow and backward. 16 In any case, when Khrushchev appeared at the exhibition-

probably primed by both or either of the sides-he erupted in

rage and engaged in a shouting match with Neizvestny. When

security men seized the sculptor, he responded, as Berger reports it: "You are talking to a man who is perfectly capable of killing himself at any moment. Your threats mean nothing to me."17 When he was accused of being a homosexual, he won the premier over man to man: "In such matters, Nikita

Sergeyevich, it is awkward to bear testimony on one's own behalf. But if you could find a girl here and now-I think I should be able to show you." And he was able to make the

point that, if one was a sculptor not working within the Union, the only way to get metal and other materials was to steal them: "The material I use is scrap. But, in order to go on

working at all, I have to come by it illegally." Apparently, Khrushchev approved of the exchange,

and although he had Neizvestny investigated afterward, and

subjected him to an examination to determine whether he was insane, he initiated other conversations with the artist. In one of these, according to Berger, Khrushchev asked how the artist was able to withstand so much official pressure. "There are certain bacteria-very small, soft ones-which can live in a super-saline solution that could dissolve the hoof of a rhinoceros," said Neizvestny. 18

Officially, nothing had changed. The artists who were honored and rewarded under Stalin continued to capture the

glittering prizes. There were generational changes in style, which Jamey Gambrell has discussed,'9 but attitudes remained fixed. Khrushchev's encounter with Neizvestny actu-

ally made it more difficult for other artists who were quietly going about dissolving the hoof of the rhinoceros, not by acts of public defiance, but by working outside the system at home. For six months after the encounter, for example, Bulatov couldn't get any assignments as an illustrator. Pravda went on the attack; a campaign began against "for- malism" in the arts. Once again it became difficult to find works by Malevich and Chagall.20 So interest and information from foreigners, and clandestine sales, became all the more

important, particularly for artists like Bulatov and Kabakov, and the partners Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who were making art about the discrepancy between official

propaganda and daily experience. It was funny, much of this art. Humor, which had gone underground during the purges, resurfaced in the early 1960s.

By the mid-sixties, after the fall of Khrushchev, and after Joseph Brodsky's trial on the charge of parasitism, the thaw was over. If you did not belong to a union and abide by the rules, you were not a useful, working member of society: you were a parasite. That is, you were a criminal and could be sent to jail. Official policy once again became more repressive. However, there were still cracks of dissent within the system and support from outside it.

FALL 1991



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On September 15, 1974, an event occurred that pub- licized and institutionalized the outsider movement in the visual arts. By now detente had made world opinion a factor in Soviet internal policy, and some of the artists had exhib- ited their work abroad. Rabin organized an outdoor exhibition in Moscow for unofficial artists, and applied for the

necessary permissions. But in the world of tangled respon- sibilities, where one office could countermand the permissions of another, where one official group often had reason to embarrass another, the artists, who thought they were exhib-

iting legally in a vacant lot, suddenly found themselves confronted with plainclothes police and bulldozers. Some dozen paintings were destroyed and dumped in a dump truck. Unfortunately for them, official toughs in disguise also beat up some visiting foreigners, including Christopher Wren of the New York Times, whose tooth they had the misjudgment to break.

There was an immediate international outcry, and permission was given for another outdoor exhibit, near Izmailovo

82 Park, on September 29. It was a fine Sunday afternoon and ten thousand visitors came. A French diplomat called the occasion "a Russian Woodstock." The KGB snapped pictures, like FBI agents at a mafia funeral.21 After this, a place was made within a branch of the union for the unofficial artists, and it became possible, quietly, to show here and there.

The Leningrad artist Yuri Dyshlenko asserts that cen-

sorship didn't even become an issue until 1974, because "there was no freedom until that time."22 He means that in

1974, for the first time, he and other outsider artists in

Leningrad were given permission to exhibit, at Leningrad's Hall of Culture. Three conditions were laid down, all of them, of course, open to interpretation: the work must not contain

anything that could be interpreted as anti-Soviet, as religious propaganda, or as pornography. (In 1984 the painter Vyacheslav Sysovey actually was imprisoned for two years for

pornography, because of his cartoons that depicted official

corruption and official greed with scenes such as a naked

couple voraciously devouring sausages.) As repression deepened in the 1970s, artists in all

fields fled or were forced into exile. "Yoghurt at least is a

living culture," they would say. Those who remained became more adept at playing the system. Or else they gave in to it. The Taganka Theater in Moscow, emblem of experimentation in the 1960s, had lost its director, Yuri Lyubimov, to emigra- tion. "By that time," Alla Demidova recalls,

peoples lives had become so stratified that individuals themselves, without noticing it, starting to become stratified, to become used to masks: At work a person was one thing, withfriends another, with thefamily circles a third, on public transportation a fourth, etc. And in the various situations these masks existed independently, without interfering with one another. Peoples inner lives grew increasingly distantfrom their outward public lives. A person would think one thing but sometimes say out loud

something that was diametrically opposite. The theater tried to help out, to make the splintered personality whole again .. 23

By the late 1970s foreign interest had become as much a liability to an artist as a shield.

The writer Victor Yereofeiev misjudged the situation in 1979 when he and some colleagues tried to publish Metropole in the Soviet Union. The collection of advanced Soviet nonfic- tion had already been published by W. W. Norton in New York. Nevertheless, Yereofeiev was ostracized and expelled from the Writers Union and his father was recalled as ambas- sador to Austria. "To live through regression is awful. What you could do this year you cannot do the next," Yereofeiev said.24

What could be published or filmed was subject to

scrutiny so vigilant it bordered on opera buffa. The censors in the unions, in the ministries, in the layered departments of checks and balances and bureaucracies, sharpened their scissors. Second-guessing was the order of the day. In Poland, the playwright Janusz Glowacki asked why a scene in the film The Cruise, for which he had written the scenario, had been cut. The scene took place on a steamer plying the Vistula River. "During dinner," the author recounts, "a piece of kielbasa disappears from the plate of one of the pas- sengers-it got caught on the hook of a fishing rod carried by a sailor who just happened to be passing by. 'What sort of a scoundrel and thief has stolen my sausage!' shouts the

passenger. When Glowacki asked just what could be offensive

about this scene, "The censor told me not to play the fool. We know perfectly well [he said] who the thief and scoundrel is- it is a direct allusion to and an attack on the government for the meat shortages in all the stores. Moreover, the sailor was

wearing a shirt of Russian cut and had the slant eyes of an Uzbek."25

By 1982 the graphics branch of the Leningrad Artists Union, which had shielded artists like Dyshlenko, was dis- banded. Dyshlenko avoided the charge of parasitism by cadging jobs from Aurora Publishing and showing his old union card to interrogators, who fortunately never checked further.

In 1984, in Paris, the magazine A-ya began publishing the work of the Soviet outsider artists, using photographs smuggled out of the USSR. There were immediate repercus- sions: artists were subjected to knocks on the door, question- ing; some were forced to sign documents incriminating themselves. They were told to forbid A-ya to publish their work.

Officially they caved in, but many published anyway. A-ya ceased publication in 1987.

Mikhail Gorbachev's announcement of the policy of perestroika at the twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party in 1985 did not change matters immediately. When

Phyllis Kind and a contingent of other art dealers visited Moscow in 1986 to choose artists to represent the Soviet Union at the Chicago Art Fair, their departure was delayed by Soviet customs officials, and a few weeks later an article appeared in Sovetskaya Kul'tura attacking them. Slides and

FALL 1991



photographs had been found in their luggage, it said, "blas-

phemously insulting to Soviet people," as well as directions

in English on how to visit Kabakov and Bulatov, and articles

fromA-Ya. Kul'tura was particularly violent toward the magazine, calling it:

the anti-Soviet journal . . . which breathes with genuine, unquenchable hatredfor our country ... But the main thing is, do you think that you carriers of the spirit are valued as artists? They spat upon you artists. You behave before the foreign speculators as a full-grown puppy does

before a guest. You jump on his lap, squeal with delight, and then lie on

your back [saying] "scratch my belly for my full enjoyment." But they have only one need of you: to use you as counterweights on the scales of bourgeois propaganda. In reality, this is just one more act of psycho- logical warfare against the Soviet government, the Soviet people, and the Soviet way of life. .. 26

The artists waited for reprisals. However, this time none

came. As the market with the West opened, the alternatives

grew, although the union remains the official source of work,

housing, and supplies. In the past three years, some of those who benefited

from the system have made public confessions and reassess- ments. The cinematographer Yevgeny Gabrilovich, writing in

Moscow News, October 11, 1987, reassessed a career offi-

cially honored for The Dream in the 1930s, Two Soldiers in the

1940s, and The Communist, and collaborations on such

Lenin propaganda warhorses as Lenin in Poland, Lenin in

Paris, and Stories about Lenin, directed by Sergei Yutkevich:

They published my works, made my pictures, and gave me all sorts of rewards, but I cannot say I have done and said everything I could and

ought to have said and done. ... I think the restrictions do their greatest harm not so much where particular works of art are concerned. Restric- tions kill the artist's inspiration, they nip the breadth and depth of his

conception in the bud. What does art begin with? A concept, a dream to create this or that work, to show this or that problem. If you have the

barrier of "You can't do this," "this wont do" in front of you, your concept shrinks unintentionally and vanishes altogether.

The irony is that not all the artists would agree. Even among those who actually did their own work, without reward and

despite the worst fears the state could instill in them, opinion was divided.

In 1987, at the dawn of perestroika, the Georgian

painter Alexander Bandzeladze voiced a nostalgia for the bad

old days, although he had painted his abstractions in secret

for twenty-two years. He told a story:

Once there was a king who made a law that anyone who wrote a poem would have his head cut off. People asked the king, "What reason do you have for such a stupid law? You love poetry." "Exactly," said the king. 'Anyone who must write will still write poetry; it will only deter the others." "Iff were king, " Bandzeladze said, "I would make such a law."27

It is important to remember that censorship was the rule, not the exception, in Russia long before it became the Soviet Union. Such restrictions have come to seem seductive to

some, as artists in the West might restrict colors, materials, or content in order to challenge themselves.

The restrictions themselves became a reason and a

subject for art. Kabakov made them his subject matter, and

he fears now for the young artists who can travel to exhibitions

around the world, imbibing international art currents: "Good

Russian art only grew in a specific situation, between Scylla and Charybdis-between the Scylla of total repression and

danger and the Charybdis of a crack of freedom under

Khrushchev; in the little hole permitted between official art

and private life. That was enough for a little bloom of art. And

today we have lost our enemy. We can do anything. But

what?"28 "But what?" is the Western question. Sometimes it,

too, requires second guessing and self-censorship. ^

Notes 1. Decree on the Reconstruction and Artistic Organizations, reproduced in John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory aud Criticism (New York: Thames and Hudson), 289. 2. In Bowlt, Russian Art, 293. 3. Ibid., 293-94. 4. "From the First Section of the Charter of the Union of Soviet Writers of the

U.S.S.R.," edict reproduced in ibid., 296-97. 5. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe (New York: Vintage, 1970), 535. 6. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage, 1981), 52. 7. Conversation with Amei Wallach, Moscow, September 1987. 8. Conversation with Amei Wallach, Moscow, September 1987. 9. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 541. 10. Stated by Ilya Kabakov in an interview, with Eric Bulatov, conducted by Claudia

Jolles, Moscow, 1987. Reproduced in a catalogue for a traveling exhibition, Erik

Bulatov, 1989, 40. 11. In Pergale. no. 4. (April 1950): 52. Quoted in Milosz, Captive Mind, 231. 12. Joseph Brodsky, "Less than One," in Less than One: Selected Essays (New York:

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), 5-6. 13. Eric Bulatov, conversation with Amei Wallach, New York, October 1990. 14. Brodsky, "Less than One," 9. 15. Conversation with Amei Wallach, New York, October 1990. 16. John Berger, Art in Revolution: Ernest Neizvestney and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 81. 17. Ibid., 83-85. 18. Ibid., 86. 19. Jamey Gambrell, "Report from Moscow," Art in America (November 1985): 31-37, 39-41. 20. Bulatov to Amei Wallach, conversation in New York, October 1990. 21. This account of the bulldozer incident, it's aftermath, and the follow-up exhibition near Izmailovo Park is taken from Hedrick Smith's The Russians (New York: Ballan- tine, 1976), 514-15. 22. Conversation with Amei Wallach, New York, November 1990. 23. Alla Demidova "The Taganka Theater: Losses and Hopes," Izvestia, April 15, 1987, 3. 24. Conversation with Amei Wallach, Moscow, October 1987. 25. Janusz Glowacki, "Censorship," in Modern Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1987), 57. 26. "Little Fish in a Muddy Pond," in Sovestskaya Kul'tura, July 5,1986. Translation

supplied by Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York. 27. Conversation with Amei Wallach, Tblisi, October 1987. 28. Conversation with Amei Wallach, New York, January 1990.

AMEI WALLACH is chief art critic for New York Newsday,

essayistfor "The MacNeillLehrer Newshour," and a contributor to Art in America, Vanity Fair, and Buckminster Fuller's Tetrascroll.

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