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Soviet Union [USSR] Painting, Sculpture, and the Graphic Arts
Moscow and Leningrad housed the two most popular art museums in
the Soviet Union, the Tret'iakov Gallery and the Hermitage Museum,
respectively. The Tret'iakov contained medieval and modern Russian
masterpieces; the Hermitage's collection of Impressionist painters
was one of the best in the world.
Until the mid-1980s, avant-garde expression appeared not in
state museums but within the confines of the basement galleries on
Moscow's Gruzinskaia Malaia street. Displays of overtly religious,
surrealist, or semiabstract works began in 1978. The artists who
created such works became an integral part of the cultural life of
Moscow, as their art directly contrasted with socialist realism.
These "survivalists" withstood pressure from the official unions
and prospered through domestic and foreign patronage from
established cultural figures, influential higher officials,
scientists, and diplomats.
Nonconformist artists created attention both at home and abroad
in the late 1980s. Former underground artists, such as Iliia
Kabakov and Vladimir Iankilevskii, were permitted to display their
works in the late 1980s, and they captured viewers' imagination
with harsh criticism of the Soviet system. Paintings by such
artists as Vadim Sacharov and Nikolai Belianiv, linoleum graphic
works by Dshamil Mufid-Zade and Maya Tabaka, wood engravings by
Dmitrii Bisti, and sculpture by Dmitrii Shilinski depicted society
as gray, drab, harsh, and colorless. Their works indicted
industrialization, the
Great Terror (see Glossary), the annexation
of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the polluted environment.
Gorbachev based much of his policies' success on the new
content of artistic expression appearing throughout the Soviet
Union. By opening up cultural life and enabling mass media
representatives and artists to speak more honestly, the leadership
attempted to win the support of the intelligentsia for its
policies. In the late 1980s, the leadership loosened the strictures
of socialist realism to enrich the cultural vitality of society,
although censorship laws still prevented much information from
reaching the public. Although strictures were relaxed, the
principle of party control remained in force.
* * *
Many works offer insights into Soviet mass media and culture.
For a good overview of the mass media and descriptions of the
censorship institutions, the following sources are particularly
helpful: Frederick C. Barghoorn and Thomas F. Remington's
Politics in the USSR; Jane Leftwich Curry and Joan R.
Dassin's Press Control Around the World; Vadim Medish's
The Soviet Union; Lilita Dzirkals, Thane Gustafson, and A.
Ross Johnson's "The Media and Intra-Elite Communication in the
USSR"; and Ellen Mickiewicz's Media and the Russian Public.
More specialized works concentrating on media and culture include
Maurice Friedberg's Russian Culture in the 1980s; Martin
Ebon's The Soviet Propaganda Machine; Ellen Mickiewicz's
"Political Communication and the Soviet Media System," Wilson P.
Dizard and Blake S. Swensrud's Gorbachev's Information
Revolution; Valery S. Golovskoy and John Rimberg's in Behind
the Soviet Screen and S. Frederick Starr's Red and Hot.
(For further information and complete citations,
see Soviet Union USSR -
Bibliography.)
Data as of May 1989
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