Smashing the Mould The Art of Russia


Smashing the Mould

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Inside lot 36 of an industrial estate on the outskirts of Moscow

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lie the fragments of one of the most spectacular pieces of 20th-century Russian art.

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It once stood astride the entrance to the Russian Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair...

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Crafted by the same engineers who built Soviet warplanes...

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20 metres high, a worker and a woman,

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holding aloft the hammer and sickle.

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A Soviet shout of defiance,

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aimed at the capitalist West.

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Communism is healthy. Communism works.

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Throughout the 20th century, Russia's leaders used art like this to spread their political message.

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They were acutely conscious of the power of images.

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But during the years of Soviet rule it was also extremely dangerous

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to be an artist - you could be punished, even eliminated, for making the wrong kind of work.

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Works of art weren't judged merely as things of beauty.

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They were far more important than that.

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They were the building blocks of an entirely new kind of society.

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1917. Lenin and the Bolsheviks

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seize power, as revolution erupts in Russia.

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It shook the world and spawned a thousand fictions.

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Sergei Eisenstein restaged the uprising in his epic film October.

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This was art spreading the word of a new, radical creed - Communism.

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With St Petersburg tainted by its imperial past,

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a new capital was chosen for the Revolutionary State - Moscow.

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With all of Russia drunk on change, it must really have seemed that anything were possible.

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And Russia's artists, so often at the margins of society, now found themselves projected

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to its very centre as the Bolsheviks sought out an art

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that would be radical and forward thinking as their politics.

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Lenin even included artists on his list of the heroes of the Revolution.

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That was a rallying cry and Russians painters, sculptors

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and architects responded with a great outpouring of creative energy.

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It was driven by a group of artists who called themselves the Constructivists.

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The voice of the movement

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was the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

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But its dominant figure was his best friend,

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the artist Alexander Rodchenko.

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His early paintings still pulse with the energies of an extraordinary time.

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In a sense, Constructivism was built on a whole series of No-s.

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No to beauty, no to artistic mystery no to the idea of creativity, even.

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Definitely no to the idea of art you can buy and sell.

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And he created this very simple language of form -

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it almost reminds me of the diagram a convict might put on his wall

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to count off the days to his release, except here,

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Rodchenko is counting the days until the Revolution would truly come to pass, and alter the world forever.

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He pushes art also away from the language of representation,

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towards the language of mathematics.

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This picture could almost be a Venn diagram... or of electrical engineering.

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It looks like it could be a diagram of some electrical circuitry.

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He said, "We want to be constructors, engineers, not creators."

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It's anti-mystical, anti-mystery, so even when he draws a cross,

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you know very well that Rodchenko is not alluding to Christianity - he abhorred religion.

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He said, "What could be more stupid than a church."

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And over here, perhaps the oddest, this almost nothing of a pictorial experiment.

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This very, very strange... little dot painting.

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Damien Hirst eat your heart out. But what is he trying to tell us here?

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I think, again, he is conceiving the canvas rather as if it were a society that could be remodelled

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and that perhaps these represent conglomerations of individuals

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that can be altered and moulded.

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And to me, again, it's as if he's pushing the language of painting

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towards the language of social engineering.

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Which, of course, is what Communism would become.

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And the Constructivists would soon leave the art gallery behind.

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Just four years after the Revolution, Rodchenko

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took his most radical step.

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He announced the death of painting itself.

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The future lay in posters, pamphlets, propaganda.

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Agit-prop spread across Russia on special agit-trains.

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You can still sense their idealism,

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in this beautiful poster designed to encourage workers to read.

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Mayakovsky did the words, Rodchenko the images.

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And the girl was Mayakovsky's lover, Lilya Brik.

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This vibrant new graphic language

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turned the city into a carnival of colourful, sharp-edged forms.

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Today, just a few examples survive like this for the state shop, Mossel'prom.

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But I'd been told there was a place where you could still experience this lost world.

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A great archive, rarely visited, in the back office

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of Moscow's Mayakovsky Museum.

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Somehow, it didn't seem like the kind of place you'd want to keep

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a collection worth millions.

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My guide was a rather inscrutable lady called Eugenie.

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So is this where you keep your priceless Rodchenko?

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-Oh, Wow.

-Yes, of course.

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It took Eugenie about five seconds to puncture my scepticism.

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So what have we got? Oh, wow.

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Rodchenko's Constructivist suit.

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Rodchenko montage...

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This exquisite paper cut-out. That is beautiful.

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Photomontage.

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Financial inspector.

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The earliest experiments in photomontage.

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Is it OK if I put this up here with the others?

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Of course.

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-Making my own little museum here. Montage.

-Oh, wow. That's fantastic.

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For Mayakovsky poetry.

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And that was just for starters.

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They worked together on some state advertising, like posters?

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Like poster, of course. You can see.

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Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked

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in advertisement. And you can see.

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I just can't believe you have this stuff in drawers here.

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Such interesting things.

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That's a priceless object so be careful.

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-That's one of the famous posters for bread.

-Yes.

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That's tremendous.

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What else have you got here?

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If you want I can show.

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-Could you have a look?

-Two minutes.

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Two minutes. Yes.

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Yeah, absolutely, I've got all the time in the world that's very kind.

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-Wait here.

-I will wait.

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No, no, no.

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You're back. Wow.

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With an armful, a cornucopia!

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Oh, how fantastic.

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I much prefer seeing this kind of work in the chaos

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of an archive because its not all been sanitised by an exhibition.

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Oh, isn't that fantastic?!

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This is a very famous one very beautiful.

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Now what's this is beautiful.

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Advertisement of cigarettes.

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I love this just... DANG!

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Exclamation mark. Smoke cigarettes!

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If you look here there is a really nice little symbol of the closeness

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of their partnership - they put, not a signature - very important,

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it's an industrial stamp.

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Mayakovsky/Rodchenko. Isn't that great?

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Is this watches?

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-Yes, yes.

-It's like opening... literally we are opening the Pandora's box of your archive.

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But you can feel they were opening the Pandora's box of this new world

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of cultural possibilities, where suddenly to design

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a humble watch advertisement, that was far more worthwhile

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than what Cezanne had been doing when he painted the Mont Sainte Victoire 20 years earlier.

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This was real art, because it was art for everybody.

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Of course.

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Look at that, look at this frowny face and the smiley face - Communist biscuits.

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I love this graphic language - this...

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Neville Brody obviously took all this for The Face - still kind of familiar to us now,

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but then that was from nowhere, this was just totally new to use words like this.

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And that's one of the paradoxes that Rodchenko and Mayakovsky

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give to the West - the visual language of capitalism!

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Because they're inventing advertising - this becomes...

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the origins of the McDonald's logo among other things lies there.

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We keep going round in these revolutionary circles. Oh, wow!

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Such simplicity of design.

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-One rouble.

-I want that made into a T-shirt - what do you think?

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One rouble, not going to get you far in modern Russia.

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SHE LAUGHS

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Listen, it's been fantastic - thank you so much. You've completely...

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My brain is pullulating with revolutionary ideas.

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Let's take to the streets and forge a new world.

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Come with me, Eugenie. ..We're going, we're going to leave you.

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A new society also needed a radical new architecture.

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And the Constructivists competed with each other to invent it.

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The most daring of these experiments

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was Vladimir Tatlin's monument to the 3rd International.

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A giant revolving tower housing offices for the party.

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Lenin didn't like it, so it never made it past the model stage.

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But some great structures did.

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This is a radio tower.

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For me, it's the forgotten masterpiece of the Constructivist era.

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It was designed by an engineer called Vladimir Shukhov in 1922.

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Hardly anyone comes here any more.

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But I had to make the pilgrimage, even though I do hate heights.

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Hand-cranked technology. I think the guy is winching us up manually.

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This is one of the great monuments of the Constructivist post-Revolutionary period.

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Shukhov is a really interesting character.

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He was somebody from a much earlier generation.

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Russian revolutionaries cottoned on to him - got him to build things.

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Lenin got him to build this tower to broadcast the propaganda of the Soviet state.

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But he himself was a political conservative who saw in the Revolution primarily

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an opportunity to build some of these designs that had been seething around in his head.

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He's the first industrial designer to apply the principles of non-Euclidean geometry

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to tensile steel structures and he designed

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these extraordinary hyperboloid, as they are known, structures.

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This amazing shape. Its kind of the direct ancestor of a building like the Gherkin in London.

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It's a long way up.

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What I love about this is precisely the fact it hasn't been "heritaged".

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Look, it's still rusty - this is probably the original cabin

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in which Lenin came up to inspect his great new radio tower!

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It's raw around the edges and its still a working tower today.

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I just think it's...

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Ah, vertigo...!

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It is absolutely fantastic.

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This is far more exciting, far more the real spirit of that early Soviet moment

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than Tatlin's never-constructed tower.

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This is the real Tatlin tower, and it's by Shukhov, and it works. It's still broadcasting today.

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And so the word according to Lenin was transmitted via the radio waves,

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reaching across the vast Russian hinterland.

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And that was just the beginning.

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What if their message could be broadcast by moving pictures?

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For Lenin, cinema was the revolutionary art-form.

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And so a home-grown film industry was born.

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Welcome to the movie-set version of old Moscow - a backlot

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of Communism's very first film studio - Mosfilm.

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Hollywood, but with a Soviet twist.

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In the fantasy world of the film set you could create a perfectly edited version of the birth

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of the Communist state, an origin myth in which there is no such thing

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as a good aristocrat or a kind Cossack and every member of the working class

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is an heroic proletarian engaged in a struggle for freedom.

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This was really a Communist version of the Bible's book of Genesis,

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a story in which, again and again,

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the forces of proletarian good triumph over Tsarist darkness.

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Now Karl Marx had famously said that religion was the opium of the people

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but what was this, if not another form of religion?

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They might've got rid of the Church, but they'd replaced it with something equally beguiling - the cinema.

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This is the Soviet Gospel, through the lens of Sergei Eisenstein.

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His film October gave Russians the authorised version of their Revolution.

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Eisenstein was a great manipulator,

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who used deeply emotive jump-cut editing to fire his message home.

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Image follows image, like icon painting,

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but at 24 frames per second.

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But by the time October was finished, in 1927,

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the Communist experiment itself was beginning to lose its lustre.

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When Lenin died, the country was in economic and social meltdown.

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Into the chaos stepped Josef Stalin.

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Stalin wanted to fast-forward Russia into modernity.

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Despite the Revolution it remained an almost feudal society,

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with a huge peasant population.

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Stalin's solution was a series of brutal Five-Year Plans.

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Millions were press-ganged into his new factories.

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And forced to live like termites in vast communal blocks.

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Those who stayed on the land were uprooted

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to industrial-scale collective farms.

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If they refused to leave their homes,

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they were machine-gunned or starved to death.

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At least five million people died.

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Artists too were being forced to conform,

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their revolutionary energy snuffed out.

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'And Rodchenko's great friend and collaborator Mayakovsky was one of the first victims.'

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This barely furnished room

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is the place where Mayakovsky chose to end his life.

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He shot himself,

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shot himself dead sitting at this chair.

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His last years had been deeply troubled - he'd written

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highly critical satires of Soviet bureaucracy.

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He'd been denounced by the Russian Proletarian Writers' Association.

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Everyone had abandoned him - even his long-time lover Lilya Brik,

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who'd long ago modelled for that girl advertising books, for that beautiful Rodchenko poster.

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The story is even she was denouncing him to Stalin's secret police.

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Mayakovsky, like all of the early great revolutionaries, was a fantastic eccentric.

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In those early days, everyone had their own idea of the Revolution.

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But that precisely was what was going to be outlawed from now on.

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That individual voice had to be suppressed in the expression of collectively enforced optimism.

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Everyone from now on had to be super-positive about everything in the new Soviet regime.

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The death of Mayakovsky was a real watershed in the history of the Russian avant-garde.

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Stalin wanted art that depicted Russia as a fertile,

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pastoral idyll where healthy, happy peasants tilled the land.

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The name given to this state-approved style was Socialist Realism.

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And the most powerful examples are to be found deep beneath the streets of Moscow...

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..where a series of extraordinary time capsules take you right through the Stalin years.

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My whirlwind tour of the metro system has to begin here

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at Revolution Square - it's one of the earliest stations, and it's one of the most spectacular,

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because here we've got the language of Renaissance Italian tomb art,

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think Michelangelo's Medici chapels,

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applied to a Moscow Communist situation.

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And what we've got essentially is a kind of Communist typology -

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these are the sorts of people that Stalin and the party want in their society.

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It's a kind of roll-call of desirables - the intrepid young sailor,

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the determined young airwoman,

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a lot of military types.

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Here's a very important figure, the Stakhanovite miner.

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Stakhanov was this heroic worker who hewed vast amounts of coal

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on one particular night, and the feat became legendary.

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They wanted legions of these Stakhanovs to turn Russia into an industrial powerhouse

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and to fuel revolution, to push society on to a higher lever.

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On this side, we've got, as it were, his intellectual counterpart -

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the engineer, the designer, the thinker - probably inspired by Rodin's The Thinker.

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There are a lot of these references to classical academic art

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in this phase of Socialist Realism.

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And over here, we've got - very important - we've got agriculture.

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The contented peasant, and here's metaphorically or actually his wife.

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These are the people you are supposed to be. These are the shoes you've got to fill

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if you want to be part of Stalin's Russia.

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Eventually the idea, I think, is that all of these figures will be running off the trains

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and going up the stairs, but you have to think about what's missing from this pantheon of people,

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and its of course, it's the creative melancholic,

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the dissident, the poet, that great Russian figure

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who has driven so much of Russian culture over the centuries.

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That figure is absent because of course he doesn't fit the pattern, he doesn't fit the mould.

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And people were disappearing for real.

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No-one was above suspicion, not even loyal members of the party.

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Stalin's police arrested and killed some 700,000 "undesirables"

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in two years of terror.

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Many more disappeared in the night.

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Altogether, 30 million would be sent to a network of prison camps

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known simply as the gulag.

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But a threat from outside would briefly unite this troubled nation.

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In 1939, the Second World War broke out.

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Two years later, Hitler began his great assault on Russia

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and as bombs dropped on Moscow, it could have been the end for Stalin.

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But it turned out to be his finest hour.

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I'd like you to try and imagine it's the 7th of November 1941.

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It's the height of the siege of Moscow - Hitler's army is encamped

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outside the city, and instead of commuters getting off these trains,

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you've got a very different scene.

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Stalin is holding a rally - it's to celebrate the 24th anniversary of the October Revolution

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and in the centre of this hall they erect a great statue of Lenin on a podium

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and at the end of the meal, Stalin addresses all his generals,

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and he says, "We, the Soviets, we must stand strong against the Nazis - we will triumph."

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Now, what's remarkable about the decorations in Mayakovsky station

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is that they were created three years before, in 1938,

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before the war even broke out, and yet you sense that Deyneka, the artist responsible,

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felt very strongly that war was in the air, because he chose as his subject the Soviet skies.

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But these are skies through which planes are flying in formation

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releasing parachutists - there's very much a sense of Russia gearing up for war.

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They're very, very beautiful, full of a kind of energy

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and sense of threat and I wonder if it isn't a case of adversity

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even under such terrible a tyrant as Stalin, sparking a considerable artist

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into a truly great piece of work.

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They famously called the underground system here in Moscow the "people's palaces"

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but I can't help thinking of them more like the "people's churches".

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And here - what this makes me think of very much are the mosaics

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in the dome of a cathedral, except of course, here we are worshipping

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at the altar of Soviet military might.

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But there is also something sort of semi-religious about the iconography

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because what are these planes and parachutists but Soviet angels, doing battle

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to save the Communist state?

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I particularly love this image of the heroic parachutist

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coming down towards us as if through a hole in the ceiling.

0:28:030:28:07

And his been depicted at the very moment when he pulls his rip-cord

0:28:070:28:12

and it's actually fantastically skilfully done, this foreshortening,

0:28:120:28:16

and if you look at the face

0:28:160:28:19

of the parachutist, it's got this wonderful fresh-faced expression.

0:28:190:28:24

These really are, I think, probably among the very few genuine masterpieces of art

0:28:260:28:32

produced under the tyranny of Stalin.

0:28:320:28:35

Russia would suffer crippling losses in World War Two.

0:28:550:29:00

But by its end, with Hitler defeated, Stalin was once more a hero to his long-suffering people.

0:29:000:29:06

For a moment, it seemed as if the Russian avant-garde might flourish once more.

0:29:100:29:15

During the conflict, Stalin had allowed even dissident artists to rouse the nation with their work.

0:29:170:29:23

Anna Akhmatova's poems in the newspapers,

0:29:230:29:27

Shostakovich's symphonies on the radio.

0:29:270:29:30

But as soon as the war was over, the clampdown resumed,

0:29:340:29:39

under Stalin's cultural apparatchik Zhdanov.

0:29:390:29:42

Now, I've travelled one stop.

0:29:470:29:51

But I've moved through a kind of chasm in time,

0:29:510:29:54

because now we're in 1952.

0:29:540:30:00

And this is the era when the dead hand of Stalinism reasserted itself.

0:30:000:30:06

And what it's produced is a dead art.

0:30:060:30:10

Compared to those beautiful mosaics of Deyneka,

0:30:110:30:15

look at these ossified images set in tile.

0:30:150:30:19

And what we've got here are images of a kind of fantasy Russia

0:30:190:30:24

where peasants are forever happy and smiling.

0:30:240:30:28

They've got these smiles painted onto their face as they reap the tall corn and prepare

0:30:280:30:34

to kill the fatted calf.

0:30:340:30:36

These are images that are being fed to a starving people.

0:30:360:30:41

Images of an imaginary happy land for people who are actually living

0:30:410:30:45

lives of extreme misery and hardship.

0:30:450:30:49

Zhdanov even said that art must be optimistic, and you can feel that sense of enforced optimism here.

0:30:490:30:56

There's a kind of heaviness about it, too. This barrel vault, it's like a Roman imperial vault,

0:30:560:31:02

emblazoned with, again, images of things that the people didn't actually have.

0:31:020:31:05

Corn, plenty, abundance.

0:31:050:31:07

Of course, Stalin himself knew that this wonderfully happy Soviet state

0:31:080:31:13

could only ever exist in the images of a fantasy art.

0:31:130:31:18

So, boy, did he commission a lot of it.

0:31:180:31:21

You won't find much of the art commissioned under Stalin

0:31:340:31:38

on the walls of the New Tretyakov.

0:31:380:31:41

But it's still there.

0:31:410:31:43

You just have to look in the right place.

0:31:430:31:45

Certainly hidden away, the socialist room.

0:31:450:31:49

This is seriously idealised.

0:32:020:32:05

Is this Deyneka too?

0:32:090:32:11

They've got a whole Stalin section.

0:32:130:32:16

I'm trying to see if I can find someone who isn't smiling in this picture.

0:32:210:32:26

Extraordinary.

0:32:260:32:28

And in this labyrinth, I was looking for one painting in particular.

0:32:300:32:35

-Oh, we're here?

-This side.

0:32:350:32:38

This side?

0:32:380:32:40

Oh, fantastic.

0:32:400:32:42

Here he is.

0:32:450:32:48

Wow.

0:32:480:32:50

Uncle Joe.

0:32:550:32:56

So, yeah.

0:32:590:33:00

I bet he never imagined he'd be in the cupboard

0:33:030:33:06

one day along with all the other unwanted lumber of history.

0:33:060:33:11

One of the things you immediately notice about the picture

0:33:150:33:18

is how reactionary its style is.

0:33:180:33:20

I mean this painting... Take the figure of Stalin out,

0:33:200:33:22

this could be basically a 19th-century landscape painting.

0:33:220:33:26

I think that's part of the message of the picture.

0:33:260:33:29

What it's saying is, it's saying to everybody, yes, there's been this huge upheaval.

0:33:290:33:32

Yes, there's been revolution.

0:33:320:33:34

Yes, it might seem as though society's turned on its head, but actually, don't worry.

0:33:340:33:39

Everything's OK. Everything is as it has always been except better.

0:33:390:33:44

Now we've got factories belching out smoke.

0:33:440:33:47

We've got these huge collective farms being ploughed by these new combine harvesters.

0:33:470:33:52

We've got pylons taking electricity and power to every corner of Russia.

0:33:520:33:57

You've got to remember, these pictures were not painted for the intellectuals.

0:33:570:34:00

These pictures were painted for the people.

0:34:000:34:03

Every good Communist family was supposed to have a painting of Stalin on the wall of their house.

0:34:030:34:09

And, again, to me, this is very much taking the language

0:34:090:34:12

of old religious art and bringing it,

0:34:120:34:15

using it for the Communist cause because Uncle Joe, standing there very much like a saint.

0:34:150:34:23

There's a sense of votive stasis about this image of him.

0:34:230:34:28

And he stands with the sunlight catching his face just as the sun

0:34:280:34:31

catches the face of a Caravaggio saint.

0:34:310:34:34

But, just one little detail,

0:34:350:34:38

that even in paradise, you're being watched. Because...

0:34:380:34:43

look at that car, that little tell-tale black car.

0:34:430:34:47

That's the signature vehicle of the secret police.

0:34:470:34:52

So, yes, everything's fine in this new Russia but just remember,

0:34:520:34:57

you're being watched.

0:34:570:34:59

All forms of dissidence were ruthlessly suppressed.

0:35:090:35:13

It was actually illegal to say anything negative about

0:35:130:35:17

the perpetually positive art of the Stalinist era.

0:35:170:35:21

But one critic called Alexander Kamensky found a way.

0:35:230:35:27

He wrote an essay that was simply a list of titles.

0:35:270:35:32

And it went like this -

0:35:320:35:35

'Congratulations to the Heroine', 'The Cotton Growers' Award Ceremony',

0:35:350:35:39

'A Toast to the Hero of Socialist Labour',

0:35:390:35:42

'The Glorious Days of the Shipbuilders', 'Industrial Successes',

0:35:420:35:46

'Abundance of the Collective Farm'.

0:35:460:35:49

The list went on and at the end the critic added just one ironic word of his own.

0:35:490:35:55

"Etc".

0:35:550:35:57

The art of the Stalinist past still looms like a threat

0:36:040:36:09

over the Moscow cityscape today.

0:36:090:36:11

You'd be forgiven for thinking those who created it were cynically going through the motions.

0:36:170:36:22

But not all of them were.

0:36:250:36:27

The sculptor who carved these heroic-looking figures is still alive today.

0:36:310:36:36

90-year-old Nikolas Nikogosyan's studio is full of models for unbuilt monuments.

0:36:460:36:53

I wondered whether he'd ever had any qualms about working for the regime.

0:36:530:36:57

Nikogosyan's the living embodiment of the betrayed Communist dream.

0:37:500:37:54

You can imagine his sculptures scowling in lofty disapproval

0:37:570:38:00

of the new capitalist Russia.

0:38:000:38:03

And asking themselves the unanswerable question -

0:38:030:38:07

"Where did it all go wrong?"

0:38:070:38:09

Stalin died in 1953 and his successor, Nikita Krushchev,

0:38:170:38:22

quickly signalled a change of direction.

0:38:220:38:26

While the West entered the swinging '60s, Soviet Russia experienced a more limited thaw.

0:38:260:38:33

The Space Programme opened fresh horizons.

0:38:410:38:45

And out of this new optimism emerged Socialist Realism's spectacular last gasp.

0:38:450:38:53

The most dynamic and extraordinary monument of Communist propaganda

0:39:150:39:19

of the whole 1960s is, I think they call it, the Space Obelisk.

0:39:190:39:26

What we've got is this great image of a rocket thrust

0:39:260:39:30

phallically into the sky on its own plume of energy,

0:39:300:39:34

rendered in the form of this beautiful curve of aluminium-clad metal.

0:39:340:39:39

You've got a tremendous sense of abstract energy and of aspiration.

0:39:390:39:44

It's as if just for a brief moment they've somehow managed to recover the energy and idealism of the very,

0:39:440:39:52

very earliest Revolutionary Communist art, the spirit of Constructivism, all over again.

0:39:520:39:59

Now, here at ground level,

0:40:060:40:09

you've got this wonderful collective frieze, this kind of Parthenon

0:40:090:40:13

frieze of Soviet space exploration.

0:40:130:40:15

Everybody's been included.

0:40:150:40:17

There's the wireless girl.

0:40:170:40:19

Here you've got the heroic engineers pulling levers, pushing buttons.

0:40:190:40:25

There's ground control talking to Major Yuri and it's all taking place

0:40:250:40:33

under the tutelage of this Soviet deity.

0:40:330:40:37

This ancient Slavic mythological figure of Mother Russia.

0:40:370:40:41

Now, here at the end you've got the suited figure of Gagarin himself,

0:40:410:40:45

the very first cosmonaut,

0:40:450:40:48

ascending the ladder metaphorically into space.

0:40:480:40:53

I can't help wondering why it was that space exploration should have tapped into the Soviet psyche

0:40:530:40:59

in this way, should have produced this last great exhalation of Communist propaganda art.

0:40:590:41:04

And I wonder if it wasn't because,

0:41:040:41:07

really, they weren't just dreaming of exploring the great blue yonder.

0:41:070:41:13

They were dreaming of escaping the Communist collectivist present.

0:41:130:41:18

Despite its name, what Socialist Realism never showed

0:41:410:41:45

was social reality -

0:41:450:41:47

how people actually lived.

0:41:470:41:50

For decades, millions of Russians

0:41:540:41:57

had co-existed in cramped communal flats.

0:41:570:42:02

State propaganda insisted that this was happy collectivism.

0:42:020:42:06

But it wasn't.

0:42:060:42:09

And there was one artist,

0:42:200:42:22

a dissenter, who was prepared to expose the rot.

0:42:220:42:27

From the 1970s, Ilya Kabakov

0:42:290:42:32

created haunting installations inspired by the communal flats.

0:42:320:42:38

He prepared them in secret.

0:42:380:42:40

He even made this one look like an archive so if the KGB came calling,

0:42:400:42:46

they wouldn't know that it was art.

0:42:460:42:49

Every object stands for a different person or event

0:42:490:42:54

in the overpopulated tenement.

0:42:540:42:57

This is the slipper of the old man who paced about at night.

0:42:570:43:01

These are the pots and pans we argue over.

0:43:010:43:05

Whose turn is it to boil the cabbage?

0:43:050:43:08

This is a lapel badge.

0:43:100:43:13

It was worn by the man who reported our friends to the secret police.

0:43:130:43:17

It's a bleak inventory of unhappiness.

0:43:200:43:23

But it was also a blueprint for radical change.

0:43:230:43:27

Kabakov was part of a generation of underground artists who exhibited

0:43:320:43:37

covertly in their homes.

0:43:370:43:39

I've come to see painter Tatiana Levitskaia,

0:43:420:43:45

a veteran from those years, who still lives in Moscow.

0:43:450:43:49

She remembers the era of secret exhibitions and whispered dissent.

0:43:490:43:54

-Hello.

-Tatiana!

0:43:580:44:00

Hello.

0:44:000:44:02

Hello. Very nice to see you.

0:44:020:44:06

Was it difficult, the life of an artist?

0:44:060:44:08

Yes, I can say it's difficult because you always see at the window, grey people.

0:44:080:44:14

You call them grey people?

0:44:140:44:17

-Yes.

-Was that the KGB?

0:44:170:44:19

-Yes.

-Really?

-Yeah.

0:44:190:44:20

So, you're looking out of the window to see if the KGB...

0:44:200:44:23

Because they all the same.

0:44:230:44:25

From the first glance, you can see that it's is KGB.

0:44:250:44:29

Some time they want to make us to be afraid.

0:44:290:44:33

Oh, I see. So, they stand

0:44:330:44:35

-outside the flat?

-They say, "We see.

0:44:350:44:37

"We go there and...". We are not usual...

0:44:370:44:40

-They think your art is irregular?

-Yes, very irregular.

0:44:400:44:44

In 1974, Tatiana was part

0:44:460:44:48

of a clandestine exhibition staged in a forest.

0:44:480:44:52

It was bulldozed by the police and the art destroyed.

0:44:520:44:57

But public response was so strong that the state censors backed down

0:44:570:45:02

for fear of provoking open rebellion.

0:45:020:45:05

Two weeks later, the same artists were allowed to show their work openly.

0:45:050:45:10

So much people come to this place.

0:45:100:45:14

They were really happy and they cried, they cried.

0:45:140:45:19

They said, "How wonderful you are!"

0:45:210:45:25

because they didn't know that artists like us exist.

0:45:250:45:32

So for me,

0:45:340:45:36

it was the happiest moment of my life.

0:45:360:45:41

Do you think that you were actually part of some kind revolution at that time?

0:45:480:45:54

We understood that time was changed,

0:45:540:45:57

because everybody started to think maybe I don't go there,

0:45:570:46:03

maybe I don't make it,

0:46:030:46:06

maybe I don't say so,

0:46:060:46:09

and nothing will happen.

0:46:090:46:12

Freedom is coming and grass is growing,

0:46:120:46:17

growing very quickly.

0:46:170:46:19

The time when Gorbachev came,

0:46:190:46:23

the grass was very old, very tall.

0:46:230:46:30

For years, the two countries have been glowering at each other threatening nuclear destruction.

0:46:300:46:36

Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms signalled the beginning of the end.

0:46:360:46:40

In 1991, the seemingly impossible happened.

0:46:420:46:47

To universal astonishment, the Soviet Union simply dissolved.

0:46:470:46:52

Exhilarated by the freedom they'd fought so hard for, Russia's artists unleashed a tsunami of work.

0:46:540:47:01

They put two fingers up to the old world order.

0:47:040:47:07

Igor Markin is Russia's answer to Charles Saatchi.

0:47:140:47:19

In the past 15 years, he's snapped up pretty much every piece of post-perestroika art

0:47:190:47:25

worth owning, and then some.

0:47:250:47:28

And he's crammed it all into his very own museum.

0:47:360:47:40

Like Lenin meets Giacometti.

0:47:420:47:44

-Good space, this.

-This is my favourite room, the best room in the museum.

0:47:440:47:49

-LOW CHIME

-That's good.

0:47:510:47:53

-Who made this piece?

-I forget!

0:47:530:47:58

But you like it.

0:47:590:48:01

It feels to me like a museum about Russia.

0:48:010:48:05

In the sense that this generation of artists you are collecting,

0:48:050:48:09

that's actually the question they are asking themselves.

0:48:090:48:11

What happens next?

0:48:110:48:13

What are we going to do?

0:48:130:48:15

-What's in here?

-This is the toilet.

0:48:150:48:18

This is the toilet?

0:48:180:48:20

Wow. I think that's fantastic.

0:48:200:48:22

In the old Soviet times every office, every institution,

0:48:260:48:29

had an official book where you could make comments and complaints.

0:48:290:48:34

And he decided to make instead of that book,

0:48:340:48:38

the lavatory of his museum would be the space of complaint

0:48:380:48:41

and free self-expression. I think it's a great idea.

0:48:410:48:43

-Write something.

-I'll try and write something.

0:48:450:48:48

I'm just looking for a little bit of clear space.

0:48:480:48:53

That's my small contribution.

0:49:020:49:04

There's a lot of mockery and free expression here, but also uncertainty.

0:49:100:49:15

Art struggling to find an identity.

0:49:180:49:22

Russian artists today do face a difficult choice.

0:49:220:49:27

Communism may have gone, but it seems the old structures are still in place.

0:49:310:49:37

And if an artist really wants to be part of the system,

0:49:390:49:43

he's got to toe the party line.

0:49:430:49:45

This is the work of Russia's most successful modern artist, Zurab Tsereteli.

0:49:480:49:54

It's a 200-foot-high statue of Peter the Great.

0:49:540:49:59

In one sense, it says Communism is over.

0:50:000:50:04

Russia acknowledges its Tsarist past.

0:50:040:50:08

But it hasn't exactly turned away from autocracy.

0:50:080:50:11

There's just one man at the helm, one all-powerful leader.

0:50:110:50:16

We arranged to meet Tsereteli

0:50:170:50:19

at the Russian Academy of Arts, where he's president.

0:50:190:50:23

He's a man much in favour with Russia's leadership.

0:50:230:50:26

An entire wing of the State Academy is filled with his own work.

0:50:260:50:29

Do you know when he's going to get here? We've been waiting for two hours.

0:50:290:50:33

This is his family crest.

0:50:330:50:36

This is his self-portrait.

0:50:360:50:40

And here at last is the man himself.

0:50:400:50:44

Andrei is good.

0:50:550:50:57

In Georgian it would sound like "Andrik".

0:51:010:51:04

OK. Andrik.

0:51:040:51:06

May we look round the work?

0:51:060:51:10

I'm fascinated by this apple.

0:51:160:51:19

Can we go inside the apple?

0:51:190:51:22

Wow...

0:51:310:51:33

This is extraordinary...

0:51:330:51:36

There is certainly quite a lot of sex going on in here.

0:51:360:51:39

You can see in the centre, avant-garde moments up here...

0:51:390:51:43

It wasn't the first thing that struck my attention, the avant-garde aspects.

0:51:430:51:48

TRANSLATOR: For me, the main thing is art for art's sake...

0:51:520:51:58

'I was genuinely struck dumb by the Kama Sutra sex apple.

0:51:580:52:03

'So I asked him if he could show me some portraits...'

0:52:030:52:07

There's more... It goes on through here, too.

0:52:120:52:15

Who's this figure?

0:52:150:52:17

This is our mayor, Mr Luzhkov.

0:52:190:52:21

He's the mayor of Moscow?

0:52:210:52:23

Mayor of Moscow...

0:52:230:52:25

The broom symbolises how he is sweeping bad things out of Moscow.

0:52:250:52:32

How he's making life in the city better.

0:52:320:52:35

Is Mr Tsereteli a friend of the mayor?

0:52:350:52:38

Of course. So...

0:52:430:52:45

Do I recognise this man?

0:52:460:52:48

What's the title, then?

0:52:520:52:56

Healthy spirit, healthy body.

0:52:560:52:58

So it's not called Portrait of Putin?

0:52:580:53:01

TRANSLATOR: I've tried to look at people from an artistic viewpoint...

0:53:080:53:12

those whom I love, those whom I cherish,

0:53:120:53:15

I try to create the images...

0:53:150:53:18

I haven't stopped yet... If I liked you...

0:53:200:53:22

maybe I would make a sculpture of you.

0:53:240:53:27

'Tsereteli's world is certainly unique.

0:53:270:53:31

'I also find it hard to fathom.

0:53:310:53:34

'It's an odd mix of the old and the new,

0:53:340:53:37

'a strangely hollowed-out version of the old Soviet Socialist Realism.

0:53:370:53:41

'Communist art with the ideology removed.

0:53:430:53:47

'It's as if the only thing this art believes in is power itself.'

0:53:470:53:53

But there is another way.

0:54:090:54:11

This strange apparatus

0:54:150:54:18

is the work of Andrei Molodkin.

0:54:180:54:21

His heroes are the Constructivists.

0:54:230:54:26

You can sense that in the grid-like forms, in his love of engineering and machines...

0:54:260:54:32

He's filling these structures of the past with new life...

0:54:340:54:37

and new substance...

0:54:370:54:39

So is that the smell of Russian oil?

0:54:460:54:47

Yes, I think it smells of Russian oil and smell of Russia.

0:54:470:54:52

When you smell deeply you can feel the Russia I think,

0:54:520:54:55

better than you can see the souls of Russia.

0:54:550:54:58

For me it's very important that people can come and can really touch this oil,

0:54:580:55:04

they can really smell it and understand that oil is organic

0:55:040:55:08

material and it's part of Russian identification.

0:55:080:55:11

In a sense, I suppose literally, this is the stuff of Russian history, isn't it?

0:55:110:55:18

This is Russia's pre-history.

0:55:180:55:21

Yeah, of course, because as everyone knows that oil comes from organic material and we can imagine that

0:55:210:55:26

all life, which kind of stains the territory of Russia, this is it here.

0:55:260:55:31

That's why, when we burn in car the oil, we burn our history, we burn our past.

0:55:310:55:37

I think it's very important ideas to think about.

0:55:370:55:40

Andrei Molodkin's work is dark and disillusioned, but there's hope there, too.

0:55:440:55:49

He's fascinated by the structures and ideas that once seemed

0:55:500:55:55

to promise a Communist utopia,

0:55:550:55:57

but he takes a carnival-esque pleasure in disrupting them.

0:55:570:56:02

So I feel like we are getting down

0:56:050:56:10

into the basement of your thought.

0:56:100:56:14

-Yeah.

-This is like a mock-altar, everything's turned upside down.

0:56:140:56:19

Yeah, that's why it looks like life to oil...and oil to life.

0:56:190:56:23

It's funny, I almost want to take one and turn it upside down...

0:56:230:56:27

Because when you see it...

0:56:270:56:29

It's really, ideally, like this works in this kind of way...

0:56:320:56:37

it's much more formal, starts to be.

0:56:400:56:42

Yeah I quite like it that way round... If we make a revolution... shall I help you?

0:56:420:56:46

Yeah, because before, I was thinking, "Oh, it's a little bit too direct."

0:56:460:56:50

I even can't sleep about it.

0:56:500:56:52

That's great. So we're actually changing the work...

0:56:520:56:54

Poor old Karl Marx.

0:56:560:56:58

If you could change the world...

0:57:010:57:03

-How?

-Yeah, like we do now.

-Turn everything upside-down?

0:57:030:57:07

Yeah, of course. It's great things.

0:57:070:57:10

It was

0:57:100:57:12

one work... now it's starting to be other work...

0:57:120:57:15

-I really love it.

-You love it?

0:57:150:57:17

So we've done some good work today!

0:57:170:57:19

I like Molodkin's vision of history.

0:57:290:57:31

For him it's a story of revolution, and circulation.

0:57:310:57:36

It's as if, after all the failed experiments, he's drilling down

0:57:400:57:44

to the essence of Russian reality - oil,

0:57:440:57:48

the substance of pre-history, and the fuel of its economic future.

0:57:480:57:53

But when I think back through a thousand years of Russian history,

0:58:060:58:09

there's surely another cycle at work here.

0:58:090:58:12

A seemingly eternal alternation

0:58:160:58:19

between conformity and rebellion.

0:58:190:58:23

For centuries, one set of tyrants after another has tried to contain

0:58:230:58:28

the population, to fuse the many, into one, using art as a tool.

0:58:280:58:35

But I wonder if Russia's people have finally had enough

0:58:400:58:43

of being controlled and disciplined.

0:58:430:58:45

I can't say what lies ahead for Russia or for Russia's artists,

0:58:480:58:52

but I know one thing for sure. As the old Russian proverb says,

0:58:520:58:56

"Life will never be just a walk through an open field".

0:58:560:59:00

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0:59:110:59:14

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0:59:140:59:17

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