Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat

How to Celebrate the Tenth

1927

D37

Sergei Tret’iakov 

What should the 10th Anniversary of October be like? 

An unprecedented stirring of emotion, to the greatest extent possible, of all the 

strata of the population.

A socially deployed large scale charging of the millions of builders of socialism, 

with knowledge, confidence and fervor . . .

In order to diff erentiate it from our usual holidays, in which the evening before 

there is a commemoration with a concert that functions as a peculiar all-night 

vigil and a demonstration from the regions to the central square and back, analo-

gous to a religious procession, the days of the 10th Anniversary need to be built 

on the foundations of productivism and utility. 

Productivism has two sides. On the one side, it is the use of highly industrial, cen-

tralized forms of influence. The newspaper, cinema and radio are the three basic 

modes for communication in a centralized manner with millions of people—they 

should be the basic pivots upon which the now already secondary, local and ac-

companying happenings will be elaborated by such supporting modes of influ-

ence as theater, concerts, orchestras, speeches and so forth. 

On this day the newspaper is also a guide to the past ten years, a report sheet, a 

holiday placard, a prediction sheet, notes held in the hands of a singing and de-

claiming crowd, and a demonstration of exemplary Soviet layout. 

In every corner of the country, radio should carry the words of the participants of 

the October battles and of the foremen of the post-October construction. Radio 

should also inform the marching columns and the sick in hospital beds. Through 

radio-acoustic channels, any citizen of the Soviet Union isolated in a room could 

be included for the duration of the holiday on a minute-by-minute basis, sur-

rounded by the best that we have in the realm of word and sound. 

Film, projected on the walls of buildings, will substitute the diff icult (and poorly 

accepted in our daily life) street dramatizations of events with the display of either 

some genuine facts, realized in a film chronicle, or moments of the revolution, 

dramatized with entire precision and eff icacy. 

Much more substantial is the other meaning of productivism.

On these days every person going out into the streets or in places of communal 

celebration should feel himself to be a master of Soviet construction, a master 

who looks over what he has done, filled with construction ardor and certain in 

his views. 

The thriving competition of the production collectives, beginning with individual 

enterprises and finishing with entire branches of our industry and government, 

should be placed at the foundation of the holiday.

A contest in the form of production, in the volume of manufacture and its speed, 

should be carried out before the holiday, so that during the holiday itself a com-

petition of the best, whether they be athletes or typesetters, metal workers or 

machinists or food industry workers, can take place . . . 

Through the evaluation of special juries, entire industries may be declared heroes 

of construction; disputes at enterprises with statements for and against may be 

organized.

On the facades of factories and trusts, people’s commissariats and administra-

tions, rows of red fabric instead of bunting could create columns for statistical 

diagrams on the street, which demonstrate the stages of growth in fundamental 

areas or issues over the last ten years. 

In shop and cooperative windows, in place of AKhRR paintings, visual announce-

ments could appear—with whom we trade, how we trade, how much we trade—

arranged from the objects which fill the window . . . 

Plastered walls, ventilated rooms, conflicts reconciled for the holiday, these are 

more valuable than the most splendid words, written on the facade of a building. 

The industrial reconstruction of the window is one example of the utilitarian orga-

nization of windows for the day of festivities. Instead of rough and ready slapped 

together chorus rehearsals, it would not be a bad idea to already set in motion the 

development of a choral movement in order to create choral groups that will not 

become extinct after the holiday. 

Introducing a moment of labor competition, the demonstration of “the best” 

would be desirable for this form, to transform [such competitions] into one of 

the standard methods of struggle against hackwork, haphazardness and truancy.

Installing loudspeakers in cities—to count on them for long service to the popu-

lace. 

Entrusting cinema with a major role during the days of the October festivities, in 

order to stimulate the production of traveling films and put into distribution films 

not only for the festive days. 

This does not mean that we exclude from the holiday purely aesthetic means of 

emotional influence—fireworks, illumination, music, spectacles. We only say that 

there where one can utilize an aesthetic moment, it should be utilized. 

On the contrary, speaking about means of aesthetic influence, we consider it 

quite necessary to widen their use so that even in the most socially backward 

strata of the population the holiday will cut into the memory of the population 

with a strong emotional mark.

We consider it correct to deploy widely the principles of people’s outdoor festi-

vals during the October holidays . . . 

Originally published in Russian as Sergei Tret’iakov, “Kak desiatiletit’,” 

Novyi lef 3 (1927): 35–37. For a German trans-

lation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten 

in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 458–60. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Notebook. Assessment of the Artistic 

Design of the 10th Anniversary of 

October

1927

Sergei Tret’iakov 

* We leftists said: “let’s produce improvement.” Our opponents said: “let’s produce 

decoration.” A specimen of this struggle can be found at the corner of Tverskaia 

Street and Strastnoi Boulevard. The corner of the KUTV [Communist University of 

the Toilers of the East] is splashed with “realist” posters—punched out figures in 

the “pathetic style.” On the other corner is the store of the State Publishing House, 

which organized a new way of arranging books in the window. The system of 

movable vitrine shelves designed by the constructors E. Semenova and L. Lavin-

skii is new, cozy, neat and as a result decorative.

* Two principles fought one another—utilitarian and aesthetic. The utilitarians 

wanted to raise the mood through the demonstration of achievements, the aes-

thetes by means of so-called artistic techniques. The extreme manifestation of 

the first—the renunciation of red bunting in the name of a repaired streetlight, 

a cleaned up courtyard and a refurbished communal nursery. The extreme 

manifestation of the second—the “heroic” painterly poster hanging like a cur-

tain across the clock of the Central Telegraph off ice, which makes it impos-

sible to check the time; or pin wheels in dried crusts: in the window of a con-

fectioner’s shop they pinned together dried crusts into the jubilee emblem . . .

1.  The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (1921–38) was established to provide both theoretical and 

practical training for party activists from the Eastern areas of the former Russian empire and the broader colonial 

world [Trans.].

Originally published in Russian as “Zapisnaia knizhka. Otsenka khudozhestvennogo oformleniia desiatioktiabriia,” 

Novyi lef 10 (1927): 7. For a German translation see Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Doku-

mente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt 

Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 458–60. 

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Fundación Juan March

372

The Psychology of the Person 

of the Future 

1928

D38

Aaron Zal’kind 

. . . This, in general, is the situation of mature communism. What will be its psyche? 

What will the person of this epoch experience?

A feeling of everyday stability, of biological well-being, of confidence. Fears relat-

ed to elementary biological needs will have disappeared. Nutritional conditions, 

the sanitary environment adjusted to perfection, and biological preoccupation 

will move away further into the shadows. 

No feverishness in mental processes, because their main cause—economic crises 

and unpredictability—will have disappeared. 

A feeling of freedom, of naturalness. No sensation of restraint either internally 

or in the environment. The lengthy inherited inner collective organization that 

gave ancestors (of the first centuries of communism) so much happiness and 

health will turn into an unconditioned reflex, into a newly inborn instinct, which 

will exist side by side with the instinct of self-preservation. The personal instinct of 

self-preservation will be transformed into the collective-personal instinct of socio-

ego-preservation, in the presence of which one is drawn to protect the collective 

as irresistibly as to protect oneself: protection of the hands (“I”) is inseparable 

from protection of the entire body (“the collective”). Inseparability of the feeling 

“I” from the feeling of “collective.” Organic co-existence. 

Perfect rationalization of behavior, of all physiological functions, of all psychologi-

cal processes. Planning of actions, of creative work, carried to the highest levels. 

Industrial everyday life universality. Amicable mutual sharing and mutual assis-

tance in all areas of industrial and everyday life activity. A feeling of universality 

from the first months and years of life. Children are not the children of families, 

but the children of all of humankind. 

Rapidity of decisions, rapidity of actions. 

Work according to one’s taste and talents. Deep satisfaction derived by all from 

their industrial and social functions. 

Deepening, unceasing blossoming of mass mental capabilities. General ratio-

nalization of production and everyday life leads to perfect order in mental pro-

cesses . . . 

Pointless conflicts in mental processes, conditioned by past technical and physi-

ological disorganization of brain activity, will be brought to a minimum. Maximal 

flexibility will be achieved in the cohesion of the most diff erent areas of the cen-

tral nervous system. 

The possibilities of switching energy from one area to another will become im-

mensely rich: the organism will display great sensitivity to new environmental 

influences, since the brakes of that part of the old experience will become useless 

and be quickly destroyed, so that the body will become warmly open to all those 

organized by the universal commune of creative influences . . .

Bygone greed, the sharpness of the hunger instinct, and the instinct of animal 

self-preservation will switch over to other presently more important functions due 

to the liquidation of the elementary struggle for survival. The hunger energy will 

be poured into a sharp hunger for research, into the passionate thirst for knowl-

edge. In its sharpness and insatiability, this impulse will from the first months and 

years of life more than replace the past “belly” hunger, extinct from the bio-psy-

chological custom of the universal commune . . . 

Mysticism will also disappear, like the tail of the pre-human ancestor, the monkey. 

All senses will be intensified, finely diff erentiated, organized by the richest, deep-

est connections, and will provide the exhaustive, full-blooded contact of a person 

with reality. 

Completely “deprived” from god and belief in an afterlife, the person will feel sat-

urated with such joy of life as was never experienced in the mystical pre-historical 

period of their existence. The universe will open before the person previously un-

known areas, providing unexplored sensations, opening a source of completely 

new experiences and aspirations. If life is finite, it is so joyful, so saturated, that 

one needs to learn all of it faster, to enter it with all of one’s substance, to inculcate 

all of it into oneself, to leave in it one’s deep distant footprint, to impress oneself 

in today’s, tomorrow’s, the faraway life of humanity and the entire universe. “An 

aggressive researching impulse.” An impulse to social immortality. As we can see, 

all this is far from the angry fears of Dostoevsky, from his atheist “naked person on 

the naked earth,” melancholic, frightened and monstrously immoral . . . 

Sexual Life. Sexual Love

. . . In a mature communist regime . . . all of the circumstances that once diligently 

occupied humankind with sexual disorganization will disappear. Suff iciently seri-

ous reasons for the perverted “disproportionate” allocation and switching of hu-

man energy will not be found, so the sexual nature of a person will also be rebuilt, 

will also be “re-planned,” as the entire person will be reforged in all areas of his 

bio-psychological existence. 

Marriage as an economic union will disappear—and along with it the nagging 

sexual cohesion of spouses. The raising of children will be completely social, and 

the family as the center of education will also be liquidated. Matrimony will be 

liberated, and sexual life will be free from the artificial conditions of its develop-

ment. The demand and supply of prostitution will disappear, as will parasitic idle-

ness and unhealthy overexcitement, a source of early and excessive swelling of 

the sexual drive. Sexual life will succeed in being brought to those norms which 

are dictated by the interests of humankind, of the communal collective and of a 

given individual . . . 

A communist person will mould a huge new joyful foundation, much more power-

ful than the one even the most rich and bright sexuality gives to our contempo-

rary person. He will have many times more eff icient and fruitful stimuli for creativ-

ity than those produced nowadays by even the best sexuality. 

The process of the growing creative development of a person of the commune, in 

the course of decades and centuries, will be fed to a great extent by the reverse 

switching to creativity and the qualitative rebirth of those energetic resources 

that under the conditions of pre-socialistic chaos were once wrongfully abducted 

by sexuality . . . 

Woman

The “humanized woman” will play a decisive role in the communist health im-

provement of sexuality. By that time the physiological nature of woman basically 

will have lost the ancient burden which she dragged upon herself to the detri-

ment of her creative universal human qualities. 

Firstly, a woman will give birth more rarely,

1

 because abundant childbearing—this 

“defensive birthing reflex”—will disappear in the era of the commune. Secondly, 

pregnancy will become immeasurably easier; it will be accompanied by far fewer 

psycho-physiological complications than it is now, in an era of the ugliest socio-

biological chaos. 

These deep reforms in the area of “woman’s obligation” will appear as a source 

of the richest mental blossoming of woman: the enormous part of her energy 

resources, once spent almost continuously throughout her life on the preliminary, 

present, and subsequent troubles bound up with childbearing, will finally be re-

leased for its creative utilization . . . 

Death

How will the person of the commune die? 

The communist person will be long-lived. Decreased fatigability, morbidity due to 

infectious and other diseases (conditioned in our present life by socio-hygienic 

imperfections) will be minimized to the utmost degree—all this will unfold an era 

of unprecedented longevity . . .

Dying will consist in that an organism will gradually, as a whole, deplete all its 

resources, will limit its abilities and will gradually fall asleep, part by part. Death 

will come in the course of years, decades; it will come without pain, without suf-

fering, without inner bodily imbalances. It will grow as a deepening overall rest, as 

a harmonious fading away, as a widening and increasingly deep sleep.

Of course, humankind will never love death and will always feel spite towards it, 

and with each century, growing repugnance (not fear!). First and foremost, it will 

throw all its creative resources at the problem of the maximal prolongation of life. 

Here is where collectivism of research creativity has the prospect of an absolutely 

unique future. However, humankind obviously will not succeed in obtaining im-

mortality, and for us it is important to state that for a person of the future death 

will not seem like that monstrous torment that it appears to all of us. 

This is how the person of the era of mature communism will live and die . . . 

Fundación Juan March

The biographical information on Aaron Borisovich Zal’kind (1889?–1936) is inconsistent. 

He supposedly came from a bourgeois Jewish family in Saint Petersburg and studied at the 

Institute for Psycho-Neurology under its founder and head, Vladimir Bekhterev (though ac-

cording to other accounts he was born in Kharkov in 1888 and graduated from the medical 

faculty at Moscow University in 1911). Around 1910—as he himself reported—he became 

familiar with psychoanalysis, which he attempted to combine with Pavlov’s theory of the 

reflexes. He was especially interested in the dynamic relationship between the individual’s 

internal impulses and their capacity for consciously shaping the external environment. 

Zal’kind became a Freudian and a Marxist. He greeted the revolution with enthusiasm.

In the 1920s Zal’kind taught at the communist Sverdlov University in Moscow, where 

he was the recognized authority on the education of neglected children and on sex ed-

ucation. In the anthology 

Revoliutsiia i molodezh [Revolution and Youth, 1925] he heav-

ily condemned the results of the “sexual revolution” and the concept of free love. Under 

capitalism, he argued, a hypertrophied sexuality had replaced religion as the opium of 

the people and was sapping the strength of the proletariat like a parasite. In place of “pan-

sexualism” Zal’kind posited the demand for “revolutionary sublimation,” i.e. the channeling 

of libidinal energies into the class struggle and the construction of communism. In 

Polovoi 

vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti [The Sexual Question under the Condi-

tions of Soviet Society, 1926] he formulated twelve “commandments for the sexual life of 

the revolutionary proletariat” in which he called for premarital abstention, class-conscious 

partner choice, monogamy and moderate, controlled sexual intercourse for the purpose of 

procreation. Sexuality, according to Zal’kind, had to be subordinate to class interests. The 

Party was therefore entitled to get involved in the sexual lives of its members. One of his 

statements became quite famous: sexual attraction to a class enemy was supposedly just 

as perverse as sexual attraction to a crocodile or an orangutan.

In the second half of the 1920s Zal’kind distanced himself from the Freudianism of his 

past and became one of the leading representatives of Soviet paedology, editing the jour-

nal 

Padiologiia from 1928 to 1932. Paedology was understood as a “synthetic” science com-

bining children, medicine, psychology and pedagogy. It was based on a “monistic view of 

the child as a psycho-physical entity” and saw its task in investigating the biological and 

psychological “laws of development” in childhood and adolescence. Zal’kind represented 

the “socio-genetic” tendency, whose proponents, in contrast to the “biological material-

ists,” emphasized the exceptional significance of societal factors for the virtually unlimited 

physical and psychical “plasticity” of mankind. This was the source of their “revolution-

ary paedological optimism”; the belief that the new socialist environment would produce 

the new man. In a decree of July 4, 1936 paedology was condemned as an “anti-Marxist 

pseudo-science” and forbidden by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. When 

Zal’kind received this news he suff ered a heart attack and died as a result.

— MH

1.  I do not dare to fantasize of the time when “extra-uterine conception” will appear. Let this be done by my oppo-

nents, who have persuasive data for this. 

Originally published in Russian as Aaron Zal’kind, “Psikhologiia cheloveka budushchego,” in 

Zhizn’ i tekhnika budush-

chego (sotsial’nye i nauchno-tekhnicheskie utopii) [Life and Technology of the Future (Social and Scientific-Technical 

Utopias)], ed. Ark. A-n and E. Kol’man (Moscow, Leningrad: Moskovskii rabochii, 1928), 432–503. For a German transla-

tion see 

Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and 

Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 606–89.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf. Fragments selected by Michael Hage-

meister.

The biographical note has been translated by Jonathan Blower from 

Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in 

Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

2005), 606–7.

A Caution!

1928

D39

Aleksandr Rodchenko

By regarding “what” is photographed rather than “how” it is photographed as 

the most important aspect of photography, certain comrades in LEF are issuing a 

caution against turning photography into an easel art, against experimentation, 

and against formalism. In so doing, they themselves succumb to the aesthetics 

of asceticism and philistinism. It should be pointed out to our comrades that the 

fetishism of fact

1

 is not only not needed, it is also pernicious for photography. 

We are fighting against easel painting not because it is aesthetic, but because it 

is out of step with modern times, weak in its reproductive technique, unwieldy, 

introverted, and cannot serve the masses. Strictly speaking we are fighting not 

against painting (it is dying anyway) but against photography “à la painting,” “in-

spired by painting,” “à la etching,” “à la engraving,” “à la drawing,” “à la sepia”, “à 

la watercolor.”

There is absolutely no point in fighting over “what” to depict; one only need indi-

cate it. Which is what everyone is doing. A fact badly or simply recorded is not a 

cultural event or a thing of value in painting. There is no revolution if, instead of 

making a general’s portrait, photographers have started to photograph proletar-

ian leaders—but are still using the same photographic approach that was em-

ployed under the old regime or under the influence of Western art.

A revolution in photography takes place when a factual photograph acts so 

strongly and so unexpectedly with its photographic elements (because of its 

quality, because of “how” it was taken) that it not only can compete with paint-

ing, but can make clear to any viewer that this is a new and complete means of 

revealing the world of science, technology, and the everyday life of modern man. 

As the avant-garde of communist culture, LEF is obliged to show what must be 

photographed, and how. Any photo-circle knows what to take, but very few know 

how. When a worker is photographed looking like Christ or a lord, when a woman 

worker is photographed posing as a Madonna, these images indicate what is val-

ued, what is regarded as important. Stated simply, we must find—we are seeking 

and we will find—a new (do not be afraid) aesthetic, a new impulse, and a pathos 

for expressing our new socialist facts through photography.

A photograph of a newly built factory is, for us, not simply the snapshot of a build-

ing. The new factory in the photograph is not simply a fact, it is the embodiment 

of the pride and joy felt in the industrialization of the country by the Soviets. And 

we have to find “how to take it.”

We are obliged to experiment. Photographing mere facts, like just describing 

them, is not a very novel aff air. But the trouble is that painting can obscure a fact 

that has merely been photographed, a novel can obscure a fact that is merely 

described. You who love actuality—you do not find it so easy to write down the 

facts either.

If you do not look out, comrades, you will soon lose your sense of right and left.

Not the LEF member who photographs facts, but the one who can fight against 

“à la art” with high-quality examples of photography, this is the person who needs 

to experiment, even to the point of turning the craft of photography into an easel 

art.

What is easel photography? Actually, there is no such term, but we might under-

stand it to mean experimental photography. Do not teach only theoretically, with-

out consulting those who have practical experience; and do not be friends who 

are worse than enemies. Abstract theories dictating to those who practice their 

profession, theories invented for the sake of an aesthetics of asceticism—they 

constitute a very great danger.

(In publishing Rodchenko’s remarks, the editors [of Novyi lef] maintain their dis-

agreement with the author’s basic idea: to substitute a campaign for a “new aes-

thetics” in place of those utilitarian and productional functions of modern pho-

tography that interest LEF above all. The editors provide a detailed response to “A 

Caution” in the twelfth number of 

Novyi lef).

Fundación Juan March