In her book Iskusstvo, den’gi i politika, Galina Aleksandrovna Iankovskaia offers a monograph response to the 1980s/1990s wave of Western reinterpretations of socialist realism. Iankovskaia, an assistant professor at Perm State University, shows how artists under Stalinism experienced initial freedom but gradually became absorbed by the Soviet state structure; a surge of hope for postwar freedom, she argues, was crushed by the reality of the postwar Soviet state.
Iankovskaia’s monograph is a work of social and cultural history, tracing the years from the 1920s through the 1950s across Russia. In agreement with many historians, Iankovskaia considers these years essential for the creation of Soviet society. For her particular focus, on the arts world, she explains that these years offered especial opportunities for mass engagement. The Stalinist context of these socialist realist artists is essential for Iankovskaia’s vision: She argues persuasively that Stalinist culture was an economic as well as a social construction, and for this reason, scholars should engage the professional backdrop of the socialist realist artists. She develops this thesis through four chapters, addressing four distinct questions: how Soviet artwork was institutionalized; how artists, rather than signing up merrily for the Soviet ideal of equality, still struggled with problems of identity and status; how Soviet art was situated in the framework of the Soviet economy; and how postwar art was placed in the provinces of the Soviet empire.
Throughout these chapters, Iankovskaia stresses the need for dialogue between Western and Russian historians. Indeed, the first chapter after her introduction is an extensive and highly useful historiographic discussion of the differences between the Western and Russian schools of thought, with criticisms of both. Although she herself is influenced extensively by the visual turn of the later century (she mentions Toby Clark’s Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century as a seminal work^[1]), she challenges Western historians to look beyond Soviet culture at its hour of death, as she puts it (P. 26). In turn, she presses Russian writers to build on post-perestroika works on the development of socialist realism. (For example, she points repeatedly to articles in the journals Iskusstvo and Dekorativnoe iskusstvo in the mid-1990s, and cites Boris Grois as a leading voice on socialist realism^[2]). Now is precisely the time to reinvestigate socialist realism, she argues, with the building wave of Stalinist studies in the Russian academy; she points to writers like E. B. Borozheikina and B. M. Klychnikov as representative of this new wave.
Responding then to visual, economic, and social schools of thought, Iankovskaia develops a book that successfully captures her belief that culture, in her words, is a buffer zone, where the realities of theory and hypothesis meet (P. 26). In her first chapter, on the institutionalization of Soviet art, she shows how throughout the 1920s and up to the 1930s, artists were relatively free, like court jesters, to profane the national ideology. The construction of artists’ corporations (the Society of Soviet Artists, the Artistic Fund, and Vsekokhudozhnik, the Russian Union of Cooperative Associations of Fine Art Workers) was initially able to preserve this “safe zone” for artists to exert their free will.^[3]
In the 1930s, however, this safe zone was gradually absorbed by the government. The government utilized awards and censorship alike to slowly mold the art world in its image. In her second chapter, Iankovskaia shows how the government began to involve itself in the Soviet art world, creating new orders and hierarchy. This new Soviet arrangement of art led to an identity crisis, she points out, as none knew precisely what the “Soviet” artist was to be. As a result, in their quest for identity, the Soviet artists increasingly began to stay closer and closer to the party line, including its definition of socialist reality. For artists at the periphery, such as Yankovskaia’s particular focus on Perm, this meant a struggle not just to toe the party line, but to mimic the work and imagery of the central body of artists.
By 1940, Iankovskaia argues, the Soviet art world had been assimilated by the forces of the Soviet economy. In her third chapter, she builds on the concept of generational struggle mentioned in the second; without incentive to change, the art world and its elite stagnated. Attached to the national bureaucracy, the arts hierarchy had become its own bureaucracy. Just as the government struggled with cronyism, so too did the arts world; the subordination of art to the needs of propaganda stifled the dynamism of early Soviet artwork.
World War II and its legacy, the subject of Iankovskaia’s fourth chapter, created both an opportunity and a tragedy for Soviet artists. The impact was felt throughout the Soviet empire’s artistic world. A strength of Iankovskaia’s work is how she shows the Soviet art world across the empire, not just in the expected sites of Moscow and Leningrad; she balanced her archival research at RGALI and GARF at the national level, and GAPO, GASO, and TsDNISO at the provincial level. Using that material, she discusses extensively the way in which art functioned in the city of Molotov (now Perm), and argues that a “reluctant dialogue” took place. Thanks to forced migrations during and after World War II, the artistic forces of the center were forced to interact with the periphery and vice versa. She adds as well that World War II brought a new layer of influence to the art world; returning soldiers brought back with them their perceptions of West and East European art (P. 231).
Soviet artists therefore had an opportunity for renewed dynamism. Unfortunately, Iankovskaia argues, the legacy of Stalinism continued after the war, even after the era of de-Stalinization, thanks to the continuation of artistic dogma and the social-economic principles framing Soviet art. Artists became divided between those who feared addressing politics at all, and those who plunged into state-endorsed politics as a way to achieve social success (P. 232). As a result, rather than emerging from World War II with a new creativity and passion for their work, the empire’s artists remained bridled by national propaganda and its interests. Dogmatism, Iankovskaia argues, had become the norm, and would remain so; Soviet art would be “deformed,” in her wording, by the biases of national ideological campaigns against cosmopolitanism and formalism (P. 233).
Iankovskaia’s Iskusstvo, den’gi i politika is a solid work that seeks to unite two layers of discussion: between Western and Russian scholars, and between works on center and periphery. With her insistence on comparisons to Perm/Molotov, Iankosvkaia joins Western writers like Stephen Kotkin in trying to see Stalinism from an area beyond Moscow and Leningrad.^[4] With her focus on Soviet culture, Iankovskaia’s work intersects with that of Richard Stites, Katerina Clark, and Sheila Fitzpatrick alike.^[5] Thoroughly researched and thoughtfully written, Iankovskaia’s work accomplishes the author’s objective of embedding a discussion of Soviet art in a discussion of the Soviet social structure.