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

374

In “A Caution” Rodchenko responds to those in the 

Novyi lef group who proclaimed the 

documentary “fixing of facts” to be the sole basis of the contemporary literary and visual 

arts. Rodchenko advances his own argument that in a post-revolutionary society, new so-

cial “facts” can only be portrayed by means of equally new aesthetic forms. Hence, he 

concludes, “we are obliged to experiment.”

— CP

In actual fact, this once again tackles the core question of the discrepancy between ex-

periment (estranged camera perspective) and the reproduction of “facts,” which, from the 

point of view of Rodchenko’s angry troop of enemies, was nothing but formalistic experi-

mentation or deformation of an objective reality or its authentic ideological interpretation.

Rodchenko summarized the core theses of the “belly-button perspective” and its alien-

ation in an article titled “The Paths of Modern Photography” (

Novyi lef 9 [1928], English 

translation by John Bowlt in 

Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and 

Critical Writings, ed. C. Phillips, 256–63): “Photography—the new, rapid, concrete reflector 

of the world—should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to 

develop people’s capacity to see from all sides. It has the capacity to do this. But it’s at this 

juncture that the psychology of the ‘pictorial belly button,’ with its authority of the ages, 

comes down on the modern photographer . . . providing him with such models as oil paint-

ings of madonnas and countesses” (ibid., 257–58).

— AH-L

1.  The “fetishism of fact” alludes to the demand of some 

Novyi lef members for an entirely fact-based art and litera-

ture, or “factography.”

2.   By 1928 around three thousand amateur photography organizations or “photo- circles” organized in schools, 

factories and army units had sprung up in the USSR, with a total membership of nearly fifty thousand. In the 

late 1920s these groups were encouraged by the Soviet government to provide reportage photographs to the 

growing illustrated press, and to concentrate on themes that glorified the achievements of the first Five Year Plan. 

Rodchenko led one Moscow photo-circle and took part in its exhibitions. 

 

Fulfilling a Request

1928

Boris Kushner

My comrades in 

Novyi lef have asked me to respond to A. Rodchenko’s “A Cau-

tion,” published in the eleventh issue.

Comrade Rodchenko’s mistakes are very elementary and quite obvious. Their ap-

pearance here can only be explained by their having been written under the influ-

ence of his stupefying theory about fighting against the aesthetics of painting 

with the methods of easel photography.

I can’t understand a thing in Rodchenko’s complicated aesthetic philosophy, and 

I must thus restrain myself from passing judgment on it. I have never had the op-

portunity to see easel photography, and I am inclined to think that it does not exist 

anywhere in the whole wide world. However, maybe I am mistaken as a result of 

my extreme ignorance. Still, I feel that Rodchenko is obviously in error when he 

asserts that “There is no revolution if, instead of making a general’s portrait, pho-

tographers have started to photograph proletarian leaders.” But this is what the 

revolution is all about. A. Rodchenko thinks that it is only “how” our leaders are 

photographed that is revolutionary. He quite forgets that for him to formulate the 

question like that, a revolution first had to take place. Before the revolution, pro-

letarian leaders were impossible. There were only supposed to be generals. After 

the revolution the generals are impossible, but the leaders are needed, and they 

exist. How can anyone assert that there is no revolution in this change? Therein 

lies the essence of the revolution that, from the standpoint of any revolutionary 

proletarian photographer, has taken place.

This is what determines the subsequent development of the photographic art 

or technique (I am not sure how Rodchenko prefers to describe his profession).

The author of “A Caution” repeats exactly the same mistake in his arguments about 

photographing a new factory. Here too he imagines that the crux of the matter is 

“how” to take the factory. Once again, he overlooks the revolution in the very fact 

that the factory was built, that its construction was possible and necessary, and 

that it was constructed within the system of a socialist planned economy. Therein 

lies its revolutionary quality and the remarkable feature that distinguishes it from 

aIl other factories being built beyond the frontiers of our country.

The questions of “how to build” and “how to photograph” are secondary.

In this respect we have not yet managed to produce anything that has not already 

been seen and talked about in the bourgeois, capitalist countries. We have simply 

set ourselves the aim of catching up with the technology of the capitalist coun-

tries and of overtaking it, but we still have a long way to go in this. In the matter of 

“how” we are still very much behind Western Europe and America. On this basis 

would Rodchenko assert that we did not make a revolution?

In accordance with the meaning and character of our epoch, the revolution is 

precisely a revolution of facts—not of how we perceive them, or how we depict, 

transmit, render or pinpoint them. In such a simple aff air as a revolution, facts play 

not only a persistent role, but also a decisive one.

Rodchenko’s statement that “we must find—we are seeking and we wiIl find—a 

new aesthetic, a new impulse and pathos for expressing our new socialist facts 

through photography” is all very fine and merits praise.

StiIl, why aIl this pathos about facts if they themselves are devoid of meaning?

An obvious “misunderstanding.”

One must certainly agree with Rodchenko: abstract theories constitute a very 

great danger.

A clear example is Rodchenko’s theory of facts which leads him to a quite undia-

lectical statement: the revolution is to be found not in the fact that the proletariat 

seized power, but in what occurred after this.

A second example is the theory about fighting the aesthetics of painting with the 

medium of easel photography.

As this reply by Boris Kushner to the previous selection demonstrates, Rodchenko’s de-

scription of experimental photography as “easel photography” only provided fresh ammu-

nition to critics who saw him as obsessively concerned with formal issues.

— CP

It is not so much the arguments in Kushner’s polemics that are shocking, but more the 

threatening tone which searches out the opposition within their own ranks and downright 

inquisitorially unearths their “errors.” Rodchenko’s main criticism is decking out current 

figures and scenes with atavistic costumes (“A worker . . . photographed looking like Christ 

or a lord”), as was almost all too often the case in those years at that time of state realism. 

Exactly this criticism of the hollow emotionalism of current monumentalism and Neoclassi-

cism pervades Malevich’s polemic argument with the dominant “feeding through realism” 

(from as early as the 1920s) (see A. Hansen-Löve, “Die Kunst ist nicht gestürzt” [Art Has Not 

Fallen], 420ff .; also 222ff .).

Kushner reduces Rodchenko’s extreme perspective to a simple trick which cannot be 

entitled to clarify a “circumstance” more than the standard “belly-button perspective.” 

However, with this, the relevance of the estranged perspective for the aesthetic poetic of a 

revolutionary world view lapses at an all-important point. Kushner’s “Otkrytoe pis’mo” was 

published in 

Novyi lef 8 in 1928. An English translation by John Bowlt is available in Photog-

raphy in the Modern Era, ed. C. Phillips, 249–51. 

Kushner twists this criticism, not only of Rodchenko’s old wine in new bottles in a com-

pletely manipulative way to the contrary, when he acts as though the socialist or revolu-

tionary “content” was becoming completely unimportant due to a mere “how” in the pre-

sentation. For in this way it was possible to prove that Rodchenko—as all other “formalists” 

—violates, or in any case misjudges the revolution and communism as “content.”

The explanation published in the same edition of 

Novyi lef with the title “From the 

editor” by Sergei Tret’iakov documents, in a shocking manner, the crumbling solidarity 

within the left avant-gardes or LEF constructivists. His proposal of resolving the dilemma 

of “what” and “how” or “content” and “form” is by introducing the question of “why,” i.e. 

of function. This apparently conciliatory third method was not really able to convince, but 

instead exposes—now already towards the end of the real development opportunities of 

the left avant-garde in the Soviet Union—their end dilemma. An English translation by John 

Bowlt is available in 

Photography in the Modern Era, ed. C. Phillips, 270–72.

The polemics were started by a rather spiteful accusation of plagiarism addressed to 

Rodchenko in the form of an anonymous reader’s letter sent to the 

Sovetskoe foto maga-

zine, 4/25 (1928). An English translation by John Bowlt is available in 

Photography in the 

Modern Era, ed. C. Phillips, 243–44. The letter is supposed to document the accusation, in-

cluding photos, that the typical Rodchenko trick—a photo taken from a viewpoint far below 

or above—had in reality already been published in Western photo publications. The read-

er’s letter thereby implicitly suggests that Rodchenko’s own trademark was nothing more 

than a copy of a procedure that is standard in capitalist countries of all places. At the same 

time, however, this combines with the accusation that Rodchenko proved to actually be a 

(capitalist?) formalist since his photography focused on the “how” and not on the “what.” 

Rodchenko had been attacked for his supposed “formalism” since 1926 (J. E. Bowlt, 

“Das fotografische Werk” [Photographic Work], pp. 15ff .); criticism increased in the late 

1920s not only—as in this concrete case—by the 

Sovetskoe foto magazine and the Associa-

tion of Proletarian Photojournalists, but also from his editorial colleagues in the LEF group. 

The attacks by the group October, with whom Rodchenko and other constructivists initially 

cooperated completely, were particularly irreconcilable (see the declaration by the Octo-

ber group in 1928 on p. 374). In around 1930, the October group’s anti-formalism campaign 

increased and Rodchenko was finally excluded in 1931.

Everything therefore revolves around the navel of the photographic world, more spe-

cifically, around Rodchenko’s famed fight against the “belly-button perspective”—an ex-

pression which on the one hand metonymically describes the conventional camera posi-

tion, from which the perspective is for “normal” photos, but on the other hand also meta-

Fundación Juan March

phorically targets the term “navel-gazing,” which can mean nothing other than solitude, 

isolation and ignorance (see A. Rodchenko, “Krupnaia bezgramotnost’ ili melkaia gadost’?” 

[Downright Ignorance or a Mean Trick?] 

Novyi lef 6 (1928). English translation by John Bowlt 

in 

Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 245–48. 

This contrasts with Rodchenko’s extreme estranged perspectives, often composed di-

agonally into the picture, from which, completely in keeping with the formalistic aesthetics 

of estrangement, the usual seems unusual and the familiar unfamiliar. However, it was ex-

actly this estrangement principle on which advocates of the norm(ality) and a generally hu-

man and broadly socialist realism pounced (see J. E. Bowlt, “Das fotografische Werk,” p. 20).

The formalism accusation applied only insofar as that the Russian formalists’ theory 

of estrangement exactly matched Rodchenko’s perspectival eccentricity and extremity. 

However, this was not what was meant; instead it was always about the general accusation 

of being more concerned with the “how” than the “what.” Of course, a view like this implied 

a clear separation between “form” and “content,” “composition” and “message” or “ideol-

ogy” as was expatiated again and again in prevalent art teaching. It was, however, exactly 

this that was to be overcome in the overall aesthetic project of modernity, particularly in the 

avant-garde (and its theory in formalism). It is in any case to be assumed that Rodchenko 

was familiar with the basic ideas of formalism. The closeness of Rodchenko’s ideas to those 

of Viktor Shklovskii or Osip Brik was by all means guaranteed as part of the LEF movement. 

How diff icult their positions were as part of 

Novyi lef and in the context of a sharpened 

theory of 

Literatura fakta or factual art can be seen by Tret’iakov’s rather ambivalent and not 

very helpful reaction to the polemics between Rodchenko and his rather lacking in solidar-

ity colleague Boris Kushner.

The eternal problem of an authentic “reproduction” of reality (in art), which had 

weighed on Russian art and literature like a millstone since the realism of the nineteenth 

century—especially since the great critic Belinskii—was lifted in the period of social realism 

and the establishment of a state art ideology to become a brutal weapon against all formal-

ists. The discussions of “the literature of fact” which filled the pages of 

Novyi lef in 1927 and 

1928 were still on a high level in comparison.

— AH-L

Originally published in Russian as Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Predosterezhenie,” 

Novyi lef 11 (1928): 36–37, and in re-

sponse, Boris Kushner, “Ispolnenie prosby” 

Novyi lef 12 (1928): 40–41. For a German translation see Am Nullpunkt. 

Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 

373–80; the complete texts of the Rodchenko/Kushner exchange in German also appear in 

Sowetische Fotografie 

1928–1932, ed. Rosalind Sartori and Henning Rogge (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1975). 

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from Aleksandr Rodchenko, “A Caution,” in 

Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, ed. Christopher Phillips, trans. John Bowlt 

(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Aperture, 1989), 264–66. 

The notes by Groys and Hansen-Löve have been translated by Andrew Davison from 

Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der 

russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 375, 378–80.

Declaration of the Association of 

Artists of the Revolution

1928

D40

AKhR

The Great October Revolution, having emancipated the forces of the worker and 

peasant masses, has summoned artists to participate in the class struggle and 

socialist construction in the ranks of the proletariat and toiling peasantry.

“Art belongs to the people. With its deepest roots it should penetrate into the very 

thick of the toiling masses. It should be understood by these masses and loved 

by them” (Lenin).

As artists of the proletarian revolution, we have the duty of transforming the 

authentic revolutionary reality into realistic forms comprehensible to the broad 

masses of the workers and of participating actively in socialist construction by 

our socioartistic work.

The tasks of artistically designing everyday life (architecture, clubs, leisure, mass 

celebrations) and also of artistically finishing articles of mass consumption (dupli-

cating designs, textiles, ceramics, the processing of wood, metal, etc.) confront 

the artists of the proletarian revolution as urgent, present-day tasks.

The heroic class struggle, the great workdays of construction, should be the 

mainsprings of the content of our art. The subjects of our immediate work are 

not only the past and present of the struggle, but also the prospects created 

by the proletarian revolution. We consider this profound content—invested in an 

artistically perfect, realistic form organically engendered by it—a sign of truth in a 

contemporary work of visual art.

In actively realizing the slogans of the cultural revolution on the visual-arts front, 

in organizing the feelings, thoughts and will of the toiling masses by our artistic 

and social work, we set as our primary objective: to assist the proletariat in the 

realization of its class objectives.

In national cultures, October is creating a diverse but united current of revolution-

ary, realistic art of all republics and autonomous provinces of the USSR. This is 

also true of the art of revolutionary artists of other countries;

1

 and in setting as our 

task the development of keen artistic interaction between peoples liberated and 

those being liberated, we aspire to unite the revolutionary artists of all countries 

in a single organization—INTERNAKhR.

“Proletarian culture is not something that has come out of the blue; it is not the in-

vention of people who call themselves specialists in proletarian culture . . . Prole-

tarian culture should be the legitimate development of the reserves of knowledge 

that mankind produced under the yoke of capitalist society, landowner society 

and bureaucratic society.”

With these words of V. I. Lenin in mind, and on the basis of continuity and critical as-

similation of world artistic culture, we will come to the creation of a proletarian art.

Advancing along this path, perfecting the forms of our language with persistent 

work and labor, we will come, by means of a new content, to the creation of a 

monumental style—the expression of our epoch, the style of heroic realism.

Art—to the masses.

For details on AKhR, see p. 339.

The text of this piece, “Deklaratsiia Assotsiatsii khudozhnikov revoliutsii (AKhR),” was published 

in the 

Bulletin of the AKhR Information Off ice dedicated to the First All-Union Convention of 

AKhR. This convention was held just after the tenth exhibition of AKhRR/AKhR in Moscow, in 

February 1928, which was devoted to ten years of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. 

— JB

1.  In 1928 a German aff iliation was established in Berlin.

Originally published in Russian as “Deklaratsiia Assotsiatsii khudozhnikov revolyutsii (AKhR)” in the 

Bulletin of the AKhR 

Information Off ice dedicated to the First All-Union Convention of AKhR (1928). It is reprinted in 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo 

za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 356, from which this translation is made, and in Assotsiatsiia Khu-

dozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii, ed. I. Gronskii and V. Perel’man (Moscow, 1973), 320–21. For a German translation 

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), pp. 305, 306.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Declaration of the Association of 

Artists of the Revolution,” in 

Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. 

Bowlt, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 271–72. 

Fundación Juan March

376

A New Association of 

Artistic Labor in Moscow 

1928

D41

Boris Arvatov 

In Moscow a new artistic association has been established under the name “Oc-

tober.” The new association diff ers from previously existing societies on quite a 

number of points. The platform of the association “October” has a rigorously prin-

cipled character. The first point of its charter reads as follows:

“The artistic association ‘October’ sets for itself the goal to assist in the further de-

velopment in the USSR and the world over of truly revolutionary, that is proletar-

ian, currents in the area of the spatial arts. In the fields of architecture, industrial 

arts, cinematography, photography, painting, graphics and sculpture, it unites 

leading artist-productivists, who are ready to subordinate their creative activity 

to the concrete demands of the proletariat in the area of ideological propaganda, 

production and the design of collective everyday life with the aim of raising the 

cultural-ideological level of the working masses to the level of an avant-garde of 

the conscious industrial proletariat.”

The following artist-productionists, art historians and critics have joined as found-

ing members: 

A. Alekseev, A. A. Vesnin, V. A. Vesnin, E. G. Veis, Aleksei Gan, M. Ia. Ginzburg, A. I. 

Gutnov, A. I. Damskii, A. Deineka, Dobrokovskii, V. Elkin, P. Ia. Irbit, Klutsis, Kreichik, 

A. I. Kurella, Lapin, I. I. Matsa, A. I. Mikhailov, D. Moor, P. I. Novitskii, A. Ia. Ostretsov, 

D. D. Rivera, N. Sedel’nikov, Sen’kin, Spirov, N. G. Talaktsev, S. B. Telingater, V. Toot, 

V. Uits, Freiberg, E. Shub, N. S. Shneider, Eisenstein. 

Originally published in Russian as “Novoe ob”edinenie khudozhestvennogo truda v Moskve,” 

Sovremennaia arkhitek-

tura 3 (1928): 73. For a German translation 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), 179–80.

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

October — Association of New Forms 

of Artistic Labor Declaration

1928

D42

October

An Introduction

Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen

The Oktiabr’ (October) group of artists, joined under the programmatic name “Asso-

ciation of New Forms of Artistic Labor,” was founded in the first half of 1928.

In spite of the proliferation of diff erent schools of painting at that time, constructivism 

had, to some extent, solidified its role and produced advances in various production areas 

such as typography, poster and exhibition design, photography and architecture, as well as 

in the VKhUTEIN projects for traff ic and interior design, everyday items and textiles, which 

enjoyed considerable public acclaim.

Hence, the time seemed ripe for consolidating all these forces which were active in 

the new types of art—new compared to the traditional genres of painting, graphics and 

sculpture. The political and social climate, which had experienced a significant shift to 

the left after the termination of the New Economic Policies and the start of the so-called 

reconstruction period during the First Five-Year Plan, also helped the off ensive of left-wing 

artists through their consolidation.

On September 30, 1927, Alfred Kurella, who was the head of the Glaviskusstvo (The 

Chief Administration of Aff airs of Artistic Literature and the Arts within Narkompros) in 

VKhUTEIN, gave a speech in front of students where he strongly criticized the AKhR paint-

ings and called on the artistic youth to form a new assembly: “The time has come for pro-

letarian artists, sculptors and graphic artists who concern themselves with applied 

arts, with theoretical, practical and programmatic questions, and most of all with 

paintbrushes, chisels and pencils, to come together and create the basis for pro-

letarian fine arts.” At this point in time, the painting faculty was undergoing a process of 

restructuring and reorientation, in which easel painting was supposed to play only a minor 

role; instead, the focus was on training educators, monument artists, decorators, club in-

structors and restorers. In VKhUTEIN, a reorientation of the artists’ role had commenced 

which Kurella perceived as necessary also for artistic organizations outside of the uni-

versity. Kurella, the son of a German doctor’s family and a painter and graphic artist trained 

at the Munich College of Applied Arts, joined forces with A. I. Gutnov, who had completed 

the same training in Berlin after the war, to unite those active in the various artistic areas 

and like-minded people. First they contacted Pavel Novitskii, who had been the director of 

VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN since 1926 and had harshly criticized AKhR in numerous articles 

and speeches, calling for a new type of artistic production practice. Novitskii became one 

of the chief theorists of the association. However, other important theorists of the 

new Marxist aesthetics were also recruited to the cause: Ivan Matsa, A. Mikhailov, Alek-

sei Fedorov-Davydov, with the eff ect that almost all belonged to the communist academy 

of the October association. They were joined by important representatives of functionalist 

architecture: M. Ginzburg and the Vesnin brothers as well as the film-makers S. Eisenstein 

and E. Shub, graphic designers A. Gan, El Lissitzky, V. Elkin, S. Telingater, N. Sedel’nikov and 

Tagirov, photographers and photomontage artists G. Klucis, V. Kulagina, N. Pinus, A. Rod-

chenko, B. Ignatovich, E. Langman and S. Sen’kin, as well as painters and graphic artists A. 

Deineka, M. Dobrokovskii, A. Samokhvalov, Diego Rivera, Bela Uitz and the exponent of the 

political and satirical poster, D. Moor. These artists already working in practice were joined 

by a group of students from VKhUTEIN who called themselves Molodoi Oktiabr’ (Young Oc-

tober). They also incorporated the worker illustrators of the Komsomol’skaia Pravda as well 

as the Leningrad Art of the Working Youth (IZORAM). In 1930, October had 246 members, 

but their numbers increased significantly (approx. 500), especially since branches were 

founded in Leningrad and Ukraine.

The speakers at the conference “Art in the USSR and the Role of Artists,” which was held 

at the Communist Academy in March 1928 and at which the most important working per-

spectives for artistic work over the coming years were determined, consisted exclusively 

of members of the October group. Hence the conference was essentially a manifesto of 

the ideas of this association. These ideas were set forth in the first declaration of October, 

which was developed collectively but formulated mainly by Kurella, Matsa and Mikhailov.

The concept of the program was unique for its time: it was not at all limited to traditional 

forms of art but included all the creative ideas of “mass art” (from graphic design and pho-

tography to everyday objects, interior furnishing and architectural designs, city decoration 

and parade design). It was aimed at art produced by the masses, which was supposed to 

replace art produced for the masses. Approaches for this existed in the worker illustrator-

correspondent movements for the daily press, of which V. I. Kostin as an October member 

looked after 15,000, as well as in the art groups of the working youth (IZORAM) and 

the Agitprop theater movements of the working youth (TRAM). They were all supposed to 

collaborate with professional artists as equals rather than in a student-teacher relationship. 

The professional artists also introduced art groups in the workers’ clubs. The photogra-

phers did the same within their medium and the graphic artists tried to establish an on-

going collaborative relationship with the print shop workers. The goal was to achieve a 

synthesis of art not only between the individual genres of art but also between the diff erent 

groupings of art practitioners (professionals and lay people).

Fundación Juan March

The practical results of their work were presented in several smaller traveling exhibi-

tions in factories and workers’ clubs; these always related to the area of activity that was 

closest to the target audience (textile, typography, photography, etc.). The first large ac-

countability exhibition opened after a considerable delay in the Moscow Park of Culture 

and Recreation on May 27, 1930, having been postponed twice, once in December 1929 

and then in February 1930. Such delays also occurred in the publication of a collection of 

works with declarations by October and papers on textile work, photomontage, photogra-

phy, ceramics and packaging and advertising. It was supposed to come out at the time of 

the exhibition but could only be published in September 1931, more than one year later. In 

the preface, the editors felt compelled to criticize their own positions represented in the 

brochure because the “situation at the front of spatial arts had changed,” that is, October’s 

scope of action was already significantly limited due to pressure from RAPKh. The at-

tacks from AKhr and RAPKh on the constructivists had already started when the exhibition 

was first discussed, even though they also contained real points of criticism, as shown by 

a comparison with the review of the same exhibition by a member of the German Bauhaus; 

they ended with the coerced self-critiques and denunciations of the second half of 1931.

The exhibition list provides an idea of the variety of the “new forms of artistic labor” 

that were united in this association. October and its youth organization were not the 

only ones who participated in the “demonstration exhibition” in the Park of Culture 

and Recreation. They were joined by the Leningrad branch, the Association of Con-

temporary Architects (OSA), the Leningrad and Moscow TRAM Theater, the Meyerhold 

Theater, workers’ photo groups and employees of the papers 

Komomolskaia Pravda 

and 

Rabochii i iskusstvo [Workers and Art].

In September 1930, a large scale October exhibition organized by A. Gutnov, who had 

contact with Berlin due to his apprenticeship and his collaboration with Heartfield for the 

presidential elections of the German Reich, opened in Berlin. After substantial public in-

terest in and attendance of the exhibition, it was also shown in Krefeld, Düsseldorf and 

Cologne. The increasingly harsh polemics and open reprisals from RAPKh ultimately forced 

the members of October to abandon their positions. At first, a group of seven poster artists 

sought to be accepted into RAPKh (Deineka, Klucis, Freiberg, Sen’kin, Pinus, Kulagina and 

Elkin), since they would have been labeled bourgeois left sectarians and robbed of further 

opportunities to work in the poster publishing house (IZOGIZ) had they not done so. De-

spite the ritualistic self-criticism, they held on to their basic positions, which distinguished 

them from AKhIL and RAPKh, just like the entire Molodoi Oktiabr’, who were compelled 

to collectively join RAPKh together with other members of the association. Novitskii and 

Kostin were forced to repent publicly; the latter was dictated the formulations of his self-

denunciation by RAPKh chief Tsirel’son. Hence October disintegrated in the second half 

of 1931 due to political pressure. The chance to establish an operational constructivism 

that included all forms of spatial arts in its concept of the synthesis of art and life had been 

in vain.