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

The Great Terror

As for so many Soviet citizens, Deineka’s period of 

“joyousness” came to an abrupt end in 1936, with the 

advent of the period of denunciations and purges 

known as the Ezhovshchina or Great Terror, which 

lasted from 1936 to 1938. The 1934 Party Congress 

that had been called the Congress of Victors would 

come to be known as the Congress of the Con-

demned, because well over half of the party mem-

bers present would be arrested during the Great Ter-

ror, and about two thirds of those executed. The first 

of the famous show trials was conducted in August 

1936, resulting in the conviction and execution of for-

mer party leaders Grigorii Zinov’ev and Lev Kamenev. 

The art world was set on edge already in early 1936 

by the campaign against formalism, initiated by a se-

ries of editorial attacks on artists in a variety of me-

dia (music, ballet and architecture as well as paint-

ing) published in the newspaper 

Pravda

. Just a few 

months after the success of Deineka’s solo exhibi-

tion, the article “Against Formalism in Art” in the June 

1936 issue of the journal 

Pod znamenem marksizma

 

singled him out as an artist influenced by formalism, 

criticizing in particular his 

Defense of Petrograd

—

until then considered one of the undisputed master 

works of Soviet art. At a meeting at the Tretyakov 

Gallery in October, Deineka spoke out against this 

unpredictable, witch hunt atmosphere, stating that 

in other countries “once paintings are hung in a mu-

seum, it is not with the concern that eventually they 

will be removed because an artist may be a genius to-

day but a nobody tomorrow.”

18

 Rendered vulnerable 

by these public attacks, Deineka would have been 

particularly anxious as the atmosphere in MOSSKh 

became really contentious in 1937, with accusations 

of being Trotskyites and Bukharinites slung back and 

forth between former members of the AKhRR and 

October groups, and with increasing numbers of ar-

rests of artists, especially the administrators of the 

various art organizations.

19

 Touching him personally, 

his colleague and sometime friend Gustavs Klucis, 

with whom he had worked closely in the poster sec-

tion of MOSSKh, was arrested in early 1938 (it would 

later emerge that he was killed soon after his arrest), 

and Deineka’s first spouse, the artist Pavla Freiburg, 

was also arrested that year and would die during her 

imprisonment a few months later.

20

Deineka would not, in fact, be purged or arrested 

during the Great Terror, and in the capricious atmo-

sphere, in spite of the attacks against him, he was 

off ered the high-profile commission of painting a 

giant mural for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Inter-

national Exhibition, scheduled to open in May 1937. 

The mural itself is now lost, but an oil sketch, 

Stakh-

anovites 

[fig. 7], shows rows of handsome figures 

dressed mostly in white, striding toward the viewer—

yet another celebration, this one destined for foreign

FIG. 7. Aleksandr Deineka

Stakhanovites, 1937

Oil on canvas, 126 x 200 cm

Perm State Art Gallery

Fundación Juan March

FIG. 8. Aleksandr Deineka

Defense of Sevastopol, 1942

Oil on canvas, 148 x 164 cm

State Russian Museum

Saint Petersburg

are sitting on a step at a measurable distance from 

the concrete breakwater barrier that curves around 

in front of them, the foreground space is carefully 

set up on a diagonal, and the sea is studded with 

frothing waves. As a whole the painting is still vintage 

Deineka, however, with its wide almost monochrome 

expanses and, most significantly, the tender bodies 

of the naked and partially naked boys, slim and 

suntanned, his Soviet people of the future. Idyllic as 

the picture appears to be, it also captures the anxiety 

in the country as it prepared for the coming war: the 

scene is the Crimea, the southern border from which 

an attack by sea would come, and the older boy on 

the right seems to be instructing the younger boys 

about the hydroplanes taking off  and landing, which 

may represent coast guard planes, patrolling the 

border.

21

 Deineka was also commissioned to produce 

thirty-five mosaic panels on the theme of 

Days and 

Nights in the Land of the Soviets 

for the vaults and 

platform of the Maiakovskaia Metro station, which 

was inaugurated in September 1938. The commis-

sion was a significant honor, and also represented 

Deineka’s first foray into mosaics—a medium of the 

monumental-decorative art that would increasingly 

occupy his career, and which allowed him to escape 

from the constant indictment of his painting for for-

malism. As yet another example of this, three of his 

paintings were included in the massive 

Industry of 

Socialism

 exhibition that opened in 1939, but they 

were ominously passed over in complete silence 

in the critical reception, and were not included as 

viewers, of the rewards of socialist labor. The work 

could easily be described as formalist, holding 

true to Deineka’s usual practice in the lack of fussy 

narrative or painterly detail, intense color contrasts 

of red and dark brown against the shimmering 

white, and the overall blankness of the space and 

the figures. Although his production of a work at this 

time that could easily be accused of formalism might 

strike us as surprising, flatness and decorativeness 

were to a certain extent acceptable, even desirable, 

in the context of monumental wall paintings. Further, 

Deineka had proven himself popular with Western 

audiences, and therefore was an expedient choice for 

the commission. He was promised a 

komandirovka

 to 

the Paris Exhibition to install his mural, and a visa was 

even in preparation for him, but at the last minute it 

was voided and his trip was canceled. Other artists 

interpreted this as a sign of his vulnerability, as the 

artist Valentina Kulagina, wife of Klucis, reported in 

her diary.

Continuing the up and down cycle, shortly after 

the cancellation of his Paris trip, in July 1937, he was 

commissioned to produce two works for the major 

exhibition 

20 Years of the Workers and Peasants 

Red Army (RKKA) and the Navy

, slated for 1938. One 

of them was his popular canvas 

Future Pilots

 [cat. 

233], and in this work we can see, for one of the first 

times, Deineka bowing to the anti-formalist pressure 

by setting his figures firmly into a readable and de-

tailed three-dimensional space—or as close to such a 

space as Deineka was capable of rendering. The boys 

66

stops in the off icial tours of the exhibition. In the 

unseemly manner of Soviet exhibitions at that time, 

even the introductory essay to the catalogue—which 

illustrated Deineka’s pictures—accused Deineka 

once again of “schematism.”

22

Second World War

The war between the Soviet Union and Nazi Ger-

many, initiated by the German invasion on June 22, 

1941, was called the Great Patriotic War. The eff ects 

on the Soviet Union were devastating, with a stag-

gering total of over twenty million military and ci-

vilian deaths. Few families were untouched by the 

violence; the German army captured Kursk, where 

Deineka’s mother and sister lived, and his mother 

died during the long occupation, in October 1942. 

Yet the advent of the war would also prove perverse-

ly advantageous for Deineka: he was able to move 

out from under the cloud of accusations and snubs 

against him and work his way back into the fold of 

favored artists through the patriotism demanded by 

war. He stayed in Moscow for most of the war, rather 

than evacuating to a safer location, and traveled to 

the front lines to sketch the troops defending the 

city. In 1941–42 he participated, as he had during the 

Civil War, in producing military propaganda posters 

for the Okna TASS, leading a brigade of poster art-

ists, and he painted a series of stark cityscapes and 

landscapes chronicling the war. Following the defeat 

of his beloved Crimean city of Sevastopol in the sum-

mer of 1942, he was commissioned by the Council 

of People’s Commissars to complete the enormous 

canvas 

Defense of Sevastopol 

[fig. 8], which was 

exhibited in Moscow in early 1943 and immediately 

became an icon of Soviet patriotism. By the summer 

of 1943 his strong position in the Soviet art world 

had clearly been cemented again, when thirty-two 

of his recent works were included in an exhibition at 

the Tretyakov Gallery featuring six major Soviet art-

ists. In 1945 he was sent to accompany Soviet troops 

into Berlin to document the fallen city, and that same 

year he was appointed director of the new Moscow 

Institute for Applied and Decorative Arts (Moskovskii 

institut prikhladnogo i dekorativnogo iskusstvo, MI-

PIDI). His rehabilitation was seemingly complete. 

High Stalinism

The final years of Stalin’s rule, from the end of the 

Second World War to his death in 1953, are referred 

to as High Stalinism—a period marked by extreme 

conformity and conservatism in culture, and by the 

strong anti-westernism that defined the initial years 

of the Cold War. Cultural policies shifted radically, 

and Deineka again found himself under attack. He 

had been named director of MIPIDI, for example, 

during the brief period of 1945–46 that is known as 

the mini-thaw, when wartime contact with the West 

opened up discussion about the Soviet system, in-

cluding the arts. Already in the fall of 1946, however, 

the Party issued three hard-line decrees defending 

an anti-modernist, anti-Western, and explicitly aca-

demic position in the arts, and Deineka and other 

“liberal” artists began to be criticized in the art press 

once again for schematism and formalism. 

His 1947 painting 

Donbass 

[cat. 243], supposedly 

based on sketches he made that year on a 

koman-

dirovka 

to the region, can be read as a concerted 

attempt to counter his critics by making the kind of 

academic and traditionally realistic 

kartina,

 or large 

scale picture, that was then most valued by the art es-

tablishment. Compared to his rendering of essential-

ly the exact same subject of two women workers in 

his much earlier 

Building New Factories

, this painting 

is far more orderly in its depiction of the spatial coor-

dinates of the factory setting and far more realistic, 

even prosaic, in its rendering of details of the young 

women’s costumes and poses. Deineka has tamed 

the charged fervor conveyed by his earlier terse, 

graphic style to get down to the workaday task of a 

more finished realism. And the workaday was pre-

cisely the subject matter: this is a picture not of the 

ecstatic fantasy of industrialization of the 1920s, but 

of a by-now long industrialized country exhausted 

from war, steadily going about the business of living 

up to its new status as a superpower. While Deineka 

had depicted women workers in his major canvases 

before, here the significance is pointed: the young 

women are working because a whole generation of 

young men was lost in the war. Glimpses of Deineka’s 

former style erupt from this more conventionally-

structured picture, such as the flattened silhouettes 

of the workers up above on the bridge, the bright acid 

hues of the pink scarf and yellow dress, that triangu-

lar yellow breast knowingly fitted perfectly into the 

bridge. In fact the entire composition can’t help but 

form a tightly-ordered surface pattern of verticals, 

diagonals and the slicing horizontal of the bridge, 

giving it what we might call a proto-pop sensibility. 

The harsh constraints of the socialist realism of High 

Stalinism have made him dilute his former style, but 

an unexpectedly compelling form of modern realism 

takes its place.

We might recognize something modern and ef-

fective about this admittedly less than successful 

attempt at academic realism, but contemporary 

critics did not; this kind of picture did not head off  

the attacks on Deineka’s formalism. A February 1948 

resolution taken by the Central Committee of the 

Communist Party itself against the formalism of an 

opera by Vano Muradeli initiated a renewed cam-

paign against formalism in all the arts. The campaign 

reached MIPIDI, and by October 1948 Deineka was 

essentially forced into stepping down from his posi-

tion as director (he would continue in his position as 

chair of the department of decorative sculpture). His 

ouster from the center of Soviet art was quite com-

plete: over the next nine years, until 1957, Deineka 

would be given very few off icial commissions, he 

would be rarely exhibited, and he would receive little 

attention in the press. He had to take on additional 

teaching jobs, including one at the Moscow textile 

institute. In the absence of the off icial commissions 

for publicly-oriented works that had structured his 

artistic production throughout his career, his picto-

rial output would be increasingly dominated by land-

scapes, still lifes, portraits and domestic scenes—the 

traditional genres of the artist working for the mar-

ket, but in this case there was none. His extraordinary 

Self-Portrait

 of 1948 [cat. 1] can be read as a defiant 

pictorial attempt to disavow the inadequacy he felt 

as a result of this cruel marginalization. Deineka had 

never been tall (he was about 1.70 meters), and at 

the age of forty-nine, as photographs attest, he in no 

way resembled the long, lean, muscular and movie-

star handsome man depicted here, with his robe 

suggestively slipping off  one massive shoulder.

In one of the rare commissions that he received 

during this period, for a painting on the theme of 

The 

Opening of the Kolkhoz Electric Station

 [cat. 244] for 

the 

All-Union Agricultural Exhibition

 in Moscow in 

1952, we can observe him continuing to try to con-

form to the demands that would allow him back into 

the fold. He went against his own usual method of 

working, which involved making sketches in nature 

and then painting in his studio, to instead attempt to 

paint from nature—in other words, he attempted to 

fundamentally transform his own method. The paint-

ing was well-received by critics, but he considered it 

a failure. “There is neither conviction nor simplicity 

in this picture,” he wrote, “and it’s too bad, because 

the theme is a good one. But I failed to find some-

thing important and essential. And the color is some-

how harsh . . . the picture did not succeed.”

23

 These 

plaintive words, in which he internalizes the usual 

criticism against him even in an instance when the 

critics themselves did not make it, off er a melancholy 

conclusion to this story of the dramatically shifting 

course of the history of Soviet art. 

Coda: The Thaw and the Cold War

Although the exhibition ends with the 1952 Kolk-

hoz Electric Station, painted in the moment of 

High Stalinism one year before Stalin’s death in 

1953, Deineka’s story thankfully does not. By 1956 

Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw was well underway, and 

Deineka was slowly being rehabilitated. In 1957 he 

was nominated for the title of People’s Artist of the 

Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, and he was given 

a solo exhibition—his first since 1936—with over 

270 works. Reviews of his exhibition were numer-

ous and uniformly positive: he was again anointed 

as one of the most important Soviet artists. He oc-

cupied a particular place in the Soviet imaginary 

during the Thaw as the artist who best mirrored the 

Soviet state’s fantasy of itself: the critic Nataliia So-

kolova, writing in 

Trudiashchikhsia SSSR

, entitled 

her review “The Artist of Modernity” (also the title 

of the review of his exhibition in 

Literaturnaia gaze-

ta

 [Literary Newspaper]) and claimed that “It is as 

if the artist is saying with his works, How beautiful 

and harmonious is the Soviet person!” The univalent 

positive criticism of Deineka’s 1957 exhibition sug-

gests that a decision had been made to “package” 

Deineka as an exemplary modern, Soviet artist. The 

fall of 1956 was a jittery time for Soviet authorities: 

anxiety followed the Hungarian uprising and the 

revelations of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” reveal-

ing Stalin’s crimes, and within the art establishment 

in particular, the successful Picasso exhibition that 

had taken place in Moscow in the fall of 1956 led 

to a worry about the young Soviet artists who had 

responded so positively to it.

24

 Deineka’s 1957 exhi-

bition would help to defuse the unrest, at least in 

the art world. The repeated declaration of his “mo-

dernity” was a form of ideological cooptation: if 

Deineka represented contemporaneity, it was less 

threatening than Picasso, who represented the dec-

adent West in the context of the Cold War. “Pack-

aged” or not, however, the exhibition inaugurated 

Deineka’s return to the top of the Soviet art world: 

he would go on to hold many more exhibitions, gar-

ner many more prizes and honors, and travel abroad 

several times before his death in 1969. The positive 

response to his exhibition indicated that audiences 

once again were in a position to understand his goal 

of evoking the “beautiful and harmonious Soviet 

person,” however much that person, and Deineka’s 

fantasy of it, might have changed since the earliest 

moments of the Revolution.

1.  Letter from Henri Matisse, published in 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo, February 11, 

1934; cited in “Khronika zhizni Aleksandra Deineki. Opyt rekonstruktsii,” 

in 

Deineka. Zhivopis’ (Moscow: Interros, 2010), under 1934, 67. 

2.  Vladimir Sysoev, ed., 

A. Deineka, Zhizn’, iskusstvo, vremia (Leningrad: 

1974), 48. 

3.  See for example Osip Brik, “From Picture to Calico-Print,” in 

Art in Theory 

1900–1990,  ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 

1992), 324–28 (originally published in 

Lef 6 [1924]).

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4.  David Aranovich, “Sovremmenye khudozhestvennye gruppirovki,” 

Kras-

naia nov’ 6 (1925).

5. 

Bezbozhnik u stanka 10 (1928). 

6.  Aleksandr Deineka, in a lecture given about his work at the Club of Mas-

ters of the Arts, Moscow, January 29, 1933, cited in Boris Nikiforov, 

A. 

Deineka (Moscow: Izogiz, 1937), 42. 

7. 

Iskusstvo v massy 2, 1930, cited in V. Kostin, OST (Obshchestvo stankov-

istov) (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1976), 137.

8.  Deineka, lecture at the Club of Masters of the Arts 1933, cited in Nikifo-

rov, 66 (see note 6).

9.  For a discussion of RAPKh’s treatment of Deineka, see Vladimir Sysoev, 

Aleksandr Deineka, vol. 1 (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1989) 85. 

10. On the 

15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR exhibitions, see Masha Chlenova, 

“On Display: Transformations of the Avant-Garde in Soviet Public Cul-

ture, 1928–33” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010). 

11.  Boris Efimov, “Reshenie temy,” 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo (June 14, 1933).

12.  See the critics S. Semenov and O. Bubnova, writing in 1933, cited in the 

Khronika, 63.

13.  Matthew Cullerne Bown, 

Art under Stalin (New York: Holmes and Meier, 

1991), 119.

14.  Susan Reid discusses the significance of the premium placed on oil 

painting under socialist realism in her essays “All Stalin’s Women: 

Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s,” 

Slavic Review 57 (1998): 

133–73, and “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The 

Industry of So-

cialism Art Exhibition, 1935–41,” The Russian Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (April 

2001): 153–84.

15.  On Liusia Vtorova and her relationship to Deineka see Christina Kiaer, 

“The Swimming Vtorova Sisters: The Representation and Experience of 

Soviet Sport in the 1930s,” in 

Euphoria and Exhaustion: Modern Sport in 

Soviet Culture and Society, ed. Sandra Budy, Nikolaus Katzer, Alexandra 

Köhring and Manfred Zeller (Frankfurt am Main: Campus-Verlag, 2010), 

89–109. The photographs of Liusia Vtorova reproduced here, with per-

mission, are taken from the photo album of her sister Evgeniia Vtorova, 

another champion Soviet swimmer. 

16.  On Deineka’s trip to the United States, see Christina Kiaer, “Modern So-

viet Art Meets America, 1935,” in 

Totalitarian Art and Modernity, co-ed. 

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg, 241–82 (Århus, Denmark: 

Århus University Press, 2010).

17.  Archive of the Moscow Artists’ Union (MOSSKh), Russian State Archive 

of Literature and Art (RGALI), f. 2943, op

. 1, d. 41, 35.

18.  RGALI, f. 990, op. 2, d. 10, 23–24, cited in the Khronika, 1936, 104.

19.  On the purges in the art world, see Matthew Cullerne Bown, 

Socialist 

Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 201–3. 

20.  Klucis and Freiburg were both victims of the persecution of Latvian na-

tionals. 

21.  This reading of the painting in terms of military defense is off ered by 

Mike O’Mahoney, 

Sport in the USSR: Physical Culture-Visual Culture 

(London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 122–24.

22.  Aleksandr Zotov and Petr Sysoev, “Vstupitel’naia stat’ia,” 

Industriia sotsi-

alizma (Moscow, 1940), 18.

23.  Aleksandr Deineka,“Iz moei rabochei praktiki” [1961], reprinted in Vladi-

mir Petrovich Sysoev, 

Aleksandr Deineka, vol. 2 (Moscow: Izobrazitelnoe 

iskusstvo, 1989), 63.

24.  On the anxiety of the Soviet art authorities during the Thaw, see Susan E. 

Reid, “Masters of the Earth: Gender and Destalinisation in Soviet Reform-

ist Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw,” 

Gender & History vol. 11, no. 2 (July 

1999), 276–312.

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