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335 Ab Imperio, 2/2010 гендерной истории советского пе- риода. Она великолепно написана и апеллирует к различным чита- тельским аудиториям. Сделанные ею выводы пусть во многом и дискуссионны, однако хорошо аргументированы и открывают широкое поле для дальнейшего обсуждения. Krista SIGLER Г. А. Янковская. Искусство, деньги и политика: Художник в годы позднего сталинизма. Пермь: Пермский государствен- ный университет, 2007. 312 c. ISBN: 5-7944-0855-3. 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 336 Рецензии/Reviews tion 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 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 work1 ), 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 realism2 ). 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 institutionaliza1 Toby Clark. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture. New York, 1997. 2 See his seminal work: Boris Grois. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond...

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