Working (for) the State: Vladimir Tatlin's Career in Early Soviet Russia and the Origins of The Monument to the Third International

During the first decade of Soviet power, Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), the Russian avant-garde artist best known for his Monument to the Third International (fig. 1), was an active member of the cultural apparatus of the Bolshevik "dictatorship of the proletariat"—the newest and sole patron for the arts in post-Revolutionary Russia.¹ Between 1918 and 1925, the seven year period in which Tatlin conceived and built at least three models of his Monument, the modernist artist was employed by no less than four different Soviet art institutions: the Department of Fine Arts (Otdel Izobrazitel'nikh Iskusstv, or IZO) of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment (Narodnyi Kommissariat Prosveshcheniia, or Narkompros) in Moscow; the Petrograd Free Art Studios (SVOMAS)/ Petrograd Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios; as well as the Petrograd Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei khudozhestvennoi kul'tury, MKK) and its successor, the State Institute of Artistic Culture (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kul'tury, or GINKhUK). At each one of these organizations, Tatlin found himself within a network of like-minded co-workers: modernist artists who helped each other find a job, supported each other's projects, and protected each other from governmental persecution. Thanks to such networks,² as well his official positions in the administrative hierarchy, Tatlin was able to receive a regular salary (an unheard-of luxury in a time of shortages, economic chaos and high inflation caused by three years of civil war)³, and to secure the resources (studio space, materials, and assistants) necessary to pursue his own ambitious artistic agenda. In a very concrete way, Tatlin made Bolshevism work for him.⁴

Fig. 1.

Tatlin, Vladimir (1895-1956) Model of the Monument to the Third International. 1920. PA76. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image

© Copyright. ©The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

The fact that Tatlin successfully operated within the Soviet system is in no way meant to besmirch the artist's moral character or to denigrate his prodigious creative output as pure expediency. On the contrary, as I hope to demonstrate, Tatlin's aesthetic and conceptual decisions which have been discussed at length by numerous scholars can be fruitfully analyzed through the lens of early Soviet social history.⁵ Furthermore, it builds upon extant scholarship that seeks to revise the dearly held vision of a Russian avant garde as "political virgins," disengaged from the realities of Bolshevik ideology.⁶

This article seeks to inform, rather than supplant, previous art historical studies, most of which do not take into account either the social reality of the early Soviet bureaucracy in which Tatlin was enmeshed, or the cliques and patronage networks of which he was a member. It does so by providing a cogent narrative of the first part of Tatlin's career, one that sheds as much light on his political acumen as his artistic versatility. In particular, the article revisits the chronology that has shaped the standard narrative about the origin of Tatlin's Monument to the Third International in order to demonstrate the spuriousness of the claim made by the artist about the early, enthusiastic endorsement that this project had supposedly received from the highest levels of Soviet authority, a notion that conforms to the still widely-held, but increasingly discredited argument that a flourishing of the avant-garde took place under the protective wing of the utopian, revolutionary early Soviet state. As I will argue, such a narrative obscures the artist's own agency and political agenda in the genesis and realization of his grandiose project. For when we examine the chronology and the sequence of events, it becomes clear that Tatlin repeatedly used his personal connections and his position within the state art apparatus to seize upon every opportunity to get funding and state support for a project that would have been unthinkable before the Revolution and remained controversial after it. More broadly, this examination of Tatlin's self fashioning as...