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Introduction During the first quarter of the twentieth century, at the very start of the Soviet experiment in social engineering and cultural revolution, many members of Russia’s historic “avant-garde”—Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Natan Al’tman, David Shterenberg, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vassily Kandinsky—went to work for the Bolsheviks, finding gainful employment as museum directors, art school teachers, and arts administrators. Yet until now, neither the extent of these modernists’ involvement in the nascent Soviet cultural apparatus nor the effect of this involvement on their political and artistic identities has ever been fully analyzed. By describing the symbiotic relationship between modernist artists and the Bolshevik state, this study seeks not only to provide a new perspective on the political and professional careers of some of the most important figures of the Russian avant-garde but also to contribute to a growing literature about European modernists’ engagement with twentieth-century political ideologies like Fascism and Communism.1 Echoing Paul Wood’s critique of much of the extant scholarship about the Russian avant-garde,this book argues that previous attempts to disassociate Russian modernists from the revolutionary aspirations of the Bolsheviks by depicting them as “political virgins,” idealistic innocents, or helpless victims have only hindered historical investigations into the political, and specifically Communist,potential of avant-garde artistic production.2 As we will see,most Russian modernists were not content to play the role of innocent martyrs.Both as artists and as administrators,they actively participated in the Soviet project, directly engaging with Bolshevism to realize their own creative visions of aesthetic and social transformation under the aegis of state patronage. Using their positions within the expanding Soviet arts bureaucracy to build up networks of like-minded colleagues, Russian modernists were able to survive and even thrive during a time of tremendous political upheaval and economic chaos. Along the way, individual members of the Russian avant-garde not only produced some of their most important works of art, but also contributed to the centralization and standardization of the Soviet art world—a “sovietization” of culture that mirrored the processes taking place in the spheres of literature, theater, and intellectual life in general.3 xviii introduction As Soviet functionaries, Russian modernist artists incorporated Bolshevik rhetoric into their creative and administrative work and actively participated in the development of socialist culture. In fact, most Russian visual artists, regardless of their political sympathies, participated in what Stephen Kotkin and other historians of early Soviet Russia have dubbed Bolshevik “self-fashioning.”4 Like other Soviet citizens,individual modernist artists performed a “state-sponsored game of social identities” in which the line between “true believers” and those just playing the game became blurred, and “speaking Bolshevik” became the only and “necessary mode of participation.”5 Russia’s modernists also played a vital role in the nascent Soviet state’s public culture, in which “speaking Bolshevik” was mandatory. Although Russia’s modernists had played a role in public culture before 1917,6 the patronage that they received under the new regime allowed them to move from the margins of the art world to its very center, most visibly, for example, by carrying out commissions to decorate the major cities for early Bolshevik festivals.7 Adopting the language of Bolshevism to describe their own projects, as well as the programs of the institutions with which they were affiliated, thus not only allowed modernist artists to secure financial and ideological support from the Soviet state, but also demonstrated the artists’ continued commitment to active participation in the evolving discourse of Soviet life. In other words, I lay to rest the myth of a one-way imposition of control from above, and discuss the great extent to which there was a dynamic relationship between the power brokers and cultural institutions.8 While we may never know the extent to which individual modernists internalized Bolshevik rhetoric, this book clearly demonstrates the commitment of many leading figures of the Russian avant-garde to the task of creating a socially transformative visual language,appropriate for the new Soviet context. Each one of the following three chapters analyzes a different Soviet art institution, tracing its evolution from the October Revolution (1917) through the period of post–Civil War reconstruction known in Soviet historiography as the “New Economic Policy” or “NEP” (1921–28).9 The latter period has been associated with a liberal cultural policy and corresponding artistic freedom that have traditionally been used to explain—and to justify—the...

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