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

XVII. Assessment

The mastery of the poster is not assessed according to the degree of purely tech-

nical perfection of its execution. Carrying out the aesthetic assessment of the 

poster, people usually compare it with works of easel art, entirely forgetting that 

the poster is not self-suff icient in value, like a painting, that its function is social-

utilitarian and that in the final reckoning the goal, for the sake of which the poster 

was created, determines its social meaning and its production aim. This role of 

the poster, utterly distinct from easel art, is usually forgotten by the aesthete-

appraisers and even the master. Posters collected in an exhibition, in an album, 

or in a book may be interesting from the viewpoint of their form. However, they 

are posters, which have already lost immediate social-topical meaning. Just as 

dishes, furniture, suits, toys and the like, collected in the art museum, lose their 

original sense and become, owing to the loss of their immediate social function, 

purely aesthetic things, so it is for posters which, reproduced in books or journals, 

change the quality of their psychological eff ect. 

In reproduced form and in an environment not suitable for the poster, 

the center of attention stops at its visual form. This is why reproduction 

posters may appear more perfect, but they lose that which is demand-

ed for their specific conditions of perception and that has the greatest 

impact. This example once again draws together the poster not with 

the painting (which in reproduction loses significantly less than any 

utilitarian object), but with the material objects of common use. 

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The artist-easel painters of both the “right” and “left” camps forget the signifi-

cance of the poster’s social role. Their habit to look at a thing from the viewpoint 

of its self-suff icient form, entirely justified in easel art, they transfer to poster pro-

duction, of an utterly non-easel type. The realist poster, excellently done from 

the viewpoint of drawing, perspective construction and so forth, more often than 

not turns out to be unfit for impact. The constructive poster of the contemporary 

“left” master is frequently visually appealing, but often does not take into account 

the environment and place for which it was meant, thus creating a false eff ect.

The poster master should not be a constructivist, expressionist, realist, that is, an 

easel painter of this or that type, but a PRODUCTIONIST.

Therefore the aesthetic approach to the poster, as well as the “constructivist,” in 

the sense of a special “style,” will be false, as it is false in the application to the 

manufacturing of, for example, automobile tires. 

XVIII. Production

THE ART OF THE POSTER IS PRODUCTIONAL BY ITS STRUCTURE, SOCIAL BY ITS 

FUNCTION AND AGITATIONAL BY ITS IDEOLOGY.

In counterbalance to the commercial poster, cultivated by the bourgeoisie, 

the proletariat develops the form of the ideological poster—political and revo-

lutionary. 

The process of the production of the poster is collective. In it, as in the production 

of objects of mass consumption, quite a number of people participate—from the 

inventor of its form to the machinist, who stands at the printing press. Although 

the inventor of the poster strives for the originality of its form, bearing in mind 

first of all the social function of the poster, he strives not towards the subjectiviza-

tion of form, but towards its objective accessibility. In the forms of the well-made 

poster the subjective world of the author is not reflected (as in the easel painting), 

but, on the contrary, the inventive, constructive and textual side of a given poster 

speaks to that social environment that gave birth to it. 

THE POSTER IS NOT AN ART OF EXPRESSION BUT “INFECTION.”

It is interesting to mention also the psychological aspect of the perception of the 

poster by the viewer: the viewer usually is not interested in the name of the author 

of the poster, whereas, contemplating an easel painting, he endeavors above all 

to establish its author. Not without reason an entire science of attributions arose 

and an entire practical art of “connoisseurship,” occupied with the definition of 

the authorship of paintings. We can be sure that when it comes to the poster, 

such theoretical and practical disciplines will never arise, as they cannot arise 

about the determination of authorship for things of practical common use. 

THE HISTORY OF THE POSTER IS MAINLY AN ANONYMOUS HISTORY.

1. In 

the 

magazines 

Das Plakat and Die Reklam it is possible to find examples of German advertisements which use 

this method.

2.  Muscovites will remember the time (before the war), when I. Grabar’ was almost accused of being an “enemy of 

the fatherland” for his undertaking, after the death of Tretyakov, the rehanging of the pictures in the Tretyakov 

Gallery.

3.  There is an error in the typesetting of this segment of the original publication, which includes repetition of text 

and a nonsensical fragment. The roots that Tarabukin provides here are in French [Trans.]. 

4. A 

lubok (plural lubki) is an inexpensive popular woodcut. Associated with folk traditions, lubki were the vehicle for 

diverse types of imagery, including political commentary and propaganda [Trans.].

5.  According to the report of V. Polonskii in his article about the poster, printed in the journal 

Pechat’ i revoliutsii.

Originally published in Russian as Nikolai Tarabukin, “Izobretatel’nost’ v placate,” 

Iskusstva dnia (Moscow: Vseoros-

siiskii proletkul’t, 1925): 9–23. For a German translation see 

Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. 

Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 398–415; 

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), 430–31.

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

On the Reorganization of the Artistic 

Faculties of VKhUTEMAS

1926

D35

Boris Arvatov 

In Narkompros at the present time, Glavnauk

1

 and Okhobro

2

 are working out 

the question concerning the reorganization of the production departments of 

VKhUTEMAS, which are in a lamentable condition in terms of programs, teach-

ing resources and technical equipment. Any reorganization must eliminate the 

stated defects. It needs to bring closer the artistic-industrial departments of

the institution with the demands of production in terms of output quality, in terms 

of identifying qualified labor forces, and in terms of building material culture—in 

the first place, housing, clothing and so forth for the working class (beginning, for 

now, with the palaces of labor, clubs, etc.).  

To date, the production departments of VKhUTEMAS have been neglected as an 

aesthetic “luxury”; funding was laughably small; the organizational leadership 

was careless and unsystematic, despite the fact that within these departments 

new revolutionary values emerged, but, unfortunately, they emerged in an indi-

vidual manner dependent upon the initiative and abilities of individual workers, 

and therefore little came of this. 

The contemplated changes boil down to the following: increased funding, plan-

ning for instruction and production, the connection of the institution with produc-

tion and with primary and secondary schools, technical equipment, selection of 

strictly technical workers in order to establish the contact of art with production—

this contact not being mechanical but organizational. 

These proposals seem rational to the highest degree, if only old aesthetic senti-

ment was not hiding behind the new form in this blurry project.

The organizers and leaders of the proposed lower education assign excessively 

low value to higher education when applied to artistic-industrial education in gen-

eral for the following reasons: due to the fact that current production could not 

be reconstructed at a large scale, but it does not minimize the need of artists, 

especially artists of a well-established type, for example masters of technique 

and draftsmen. They believe that attention must be directed to placing into pro-

duction graduates from the primary and secondary learning institutions and to 

prepare students of higher education institutions to become instructors. 

While there is no denying that the industrial demand for immediate reinforcement 

with traditional “applied” artists must be satisfied and that suff iciently qualified 

instructors should consequently be graduated, we must protest in the most de-

cisive manner against using higher education institutions for an applied working 

role, even if it qualitatively strengthens this role. 

The fact is that the entire Narkompros project is constructed on a characteristic 

bourgeois conception of art—including so-called productive art. This conception 

recognizes a self-suff icient “aesthetic” function for art, which requires it as a tech-

nical supplement for work in industry.

Meanwhile, art is a profession, as it is inseparably tied—in the process of cre-

ation—with some kind or another goal-oriented social activity. Art itself contains 

nothing except for pure form; therefore, the social meaning of art is clarified by 

the purpose of this formal creation, its aim, its social application, its methods. 

The so-called “decorative” function of applied art is an expression of this or that 

social goal: the class identification of a thing in the “classic” bourgeois art of the 

nineteenth century; the traditional symbolism of the appearance of a thing in 

moribund styles (i.e., stylization); ideological association (for example, empire 

and others); finally, the individualistic expression of the thing in the revolt against 

philistinism (modernism, etc.). The current applied art tendencies take into ac-

count all four methods “to decorate” a thing. Yet the matter at hand is not to 

decorate but to reconstruct. The working class needs neither demonstration, nor 

tradition, nor ideology, nor the impressionist expression of the thing. It needs 

reform, not of form but of art as a functional thing in society. 

If the higher education institute is required by force of circumstance to gradu-

ate educators, they should create appropriate sections in the departments. 

Yet only full and general transformation of VKhUTEMAS into a polytechnic can 

produce revolutionary masters of production. In other words, it is necessary for 

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VKhUTEMAS to graduate the same engineers as other higher education institutes 

do, plus high artistic-production qualification. Graduates of VKhUTEMAS must 

be able to work in industry, irrespective of their abilities as artists. Not a single 

trust may manage without constructor-engineers, but technical colleges do not 

off er such training, except for machine constructors and constructor-builders. 

Engineer-technologists, engineer-mechanics, engineer-chemists within industry 

barely learn how to build industrial products, especially useable ones. 

Quality production, standards, models, projects, competitions and inventions 

that expand the market—these are the professions and no others that should be 

the goal for VKhUTEMAS. 

This is why the division of departments according to materials should be recon-

sidered. It needs to be oriented towards technical endeavors (chemists, builders 

and so forth) and not towards materials, which fall into handicraft specialties and 

thus is so-called applied art. 

VKhUTEMAS can either be a creative technical college in the literal sense (even if 

this requires an increase in the number of course years) or get stuck in the new 

decorative arts. The government has suff icient funds for a single learning institu-

tion, if it can show significant results after its reorganization. 

1.

Glavnauk is the acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie nauchnymi, nauchno-khudozhestvennymi i muzeinymi

uchrezhdenii mi (The Chief Administration for Scientific, Scientific-Artistic and Museum Institutions), the branch 

of Narkompros with oversight of scientific research and propaganda for science and culture in the Russian Soviet 

Republic [Trans.]. 

2. Okhobro is the acronym for Otdel khudozhestvennogo obrazovaniia (Department of Artistic Education), the

branch of Narkompros that provided oversight to art education [Trans.]. 

Originally published in Russian as Boris Arvatov, “O reorganizatsii khudozhestvennykh fakul’tetov VKhUTEMAS,” 

Zhizn’ iskusstva 29 (July 20, 1926): 17. 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), 154–55.

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

The Struggle for Viability 

1927

D36

Aleksandr Bogdanov 

Our theory does not yet enable us to solve the question about the fundamen-

tal irrecoverability or eliminability of senile deterioration and “natural” death. In-

stead, it outlines a path for systematic research of the question of how to struggle 

against this process in practice, i.e. methods of slowing and weakening it. This 

means increasing the length of life in general, strengthening its intensity and mak-

ing it more harmonious in those stages where such decline becomes apparent . . .

We have observed that a quantitative degree of viability already plays an impor-

tant role among the crucial moments of old age. In particular, the cessation of 

growth and accumulation of vital activities guarantees the ascendance of sys-

temic contradictions, since the expenditure produced by them is no longer cov-

ered by an abundance of resources. This presents a clear organizational analogy 

with society, especially a capitalist society, in which inner contradictions develop. 

While society can grow and widen its field of production and exchange—by tak-

ing over new markets and increasing the capacities of old ones—all these contra-

dictions of anarchic competition with its crises, exploitation and class struggle, 

do not completely undermine its vitality. Their “minuses” are compensated by 

the “pluses” of economic achievements. Yet with the exhaustion of these pos-

sibilities, the further growth of contradictions unavoidably leads to the complete 

collapse of a given social formation. Of course, the essential diff erence between 

the fate of individuals and that of the “cells” of society—businesses, farms, or 

at least individuals—is that they can survive the crush of one of their forms and 

regroup into another one. In contrast, the cells of an individual organism are en-

tirely unable to do this due to their broad diff erentiation and simultaneously their 

immeasurably narrower life base . . . 

. . . Let us suppose we have two such cells, A and B, with diff erent genetic pasts, 

which led to their relative maladjustment. There is every reason to expect that 

their vital inadequacies do not match—one has one type, the other has another. 

Both merge into one: the shortcomings of one are covered by the other and vice 

versa. The new cell already possesses all the primary elements of viability char-

acteristic to its given species; it means that it is capable of staring a new line of 

generations. Using a crude comparison, it is as if we had a blind person and a 

limbless person which beyond supporting each other, fuse into a single creature 

with the legs of the blind and the eyes of the limbless.

Before us is the embodiment of the greatest organizational principle, which im-

mediately reveals its omnipotence: the old and dying become young and life-

giving. All the dialectic triads of Hegel and his followers, both old and new, are 

nothing before this living, creative and organizational dialectics! 

A question thus unintentionally arises: in what way could an unfortunate age-

weakened cell turn out to be more ingenious than all the Hegels of the world? 

After stubbornly struggling in the past for an independent existence, how could 

it come to the brave, revolutionary rejection of its individuality, to the fusion of its 

life with another, with the life of a more or less strange and alien being? . . . 

Let us examine, from an organizational viewpoint, what this copulation can and 

must give to the viability of single cell organisms. 

Firstly, we evidently see a qualitative increase of viability: the sum of life form 

elements grows by merging, therefore, so does the sum of those activities that 

it opposes to the environment. Thus, after copulation the new cell of doubled 

mass and volume is much “stronger” than either of the original two cells when in 

conflict with a possible enemy. For example, if a small amount of toxic substance 

enters the cell, its chances of being poisoned are lower. The same applies to the 

toxins accumulated in both cells before copulation, because they diff er for each: 

being distributed in the doubled mass, they appear to be half as concentrated, 

which should decrease their eff ect in half. 

Secondly, there is a structural rise of viability of a so-called “qualitative” character: 

the variety of elements and combinations increases as the two sides complement 

each other mutually and the life of the whole becomes richer.

This is obvious in itself, however it is diff icult to illustrate with the little we know 

about the physiological organization of protozoa. Yet it is easy to clarify by anal-

ogy with the crossbreeding in higher animals—after all, the fusion of sexual cells 

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is also an example of copulation. Thus, for instance, a mule has the height and 

strength of its horse mother combined with the endurance and nervous stability 

of its donkey father.

Yet all of this characterizes the results of copulation only statistically. What is 

much more important is the dynamic rise in viability that results from this. Life as 

a struggle and development takes place upon a wider base and draws from richer 

material, becoming at the same time more “plastic” or malleable in its variations 

and its changeable relations to the environment. It makes more significant and 

more complex achievements attainable . . . 

All of this is important to us because it characterizes blood as the truly universal 

tissue, in which there is something from every other tissue, and which, in turn, 

structurally impacts all other tissues. If various qualities that are useful for an 

organism may be transmitted by blood, even by means of another link—germ 

plasma—then it is natural to conclude that even more qualities may be transmit-

ted by it directly, when the blood is transferred from one organism to another. 

That means that blood exchange and transfusion in general may play a role in the 

struggle for viability through the application of an integral-conjugation method, 

though not as complete and radical as natural copulation and conjugation . . . 

Many years ago, I began to research into the general regularity of all sorts of or-

ganizational processes, which become the main pursuit of my life. In particular, 

the comparison of diff erent types of living combinations led me to the idea that 

“conjugation” is also possible in higher organisms, not just sexual but of another 

kind—“conjugation” for the increase in individual viability, particularly in the form 

of the exchange of the universal tissue of organisms, blood . . .

For nineteen years, I have attempted to attract the interest and attention of scien-

tists, who have technical means of research at their disposal, to the possibilities 

and potentials of “physiological collectivism” contained in the blood exchange 

method. I hope that this will now finally succeed. 

Aleksander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was, for his time, a virtually exemplary Russian intel-

lectual with a corresponding breadth of multi-disciplinary interests. Born Aleksander Alek-

sandrovich Bogdanov on August 10, 1873 in Sokolka, in the Grodno administrative district, 

he studied natural sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology) in Moscow and 

medicine in Kharkiv, became involved with revolutionary left-wing circles, took up the con-

cerns of the simple worker, was exiled, got to know the most important political figures 

of his age, from Anatolii Lunacharskii to Lev Trotsky and from Maxim Gorky to Lenin, and 

played a significant role in the first Russian revolution of 1905.

From 1894 he dealt with questions of political economy and natural philosophy in 

lectures and publications and under various pseudonyms, such as Maksimov, Rjadovoj, 

Verner and above all his wife’s paternal maiden name, Bogdanov. He published the Rus-

sian translation of Marx’s

 Kapital, wrote two science-fiction novels—Krasnaia zvezda [The 

Red Star, 1908] and 

Inzhener Menni [Engineer Menni, 1912]—and then finally developed 

“tectology,” a monistic organizational theory which aimed at nothing less than bringing 

everything into relation with everything else.

Tectology, derived from the Greek 

tekton (constructor), was an attempt to establish a 

universally valid organizational structure for all things, organic and inorganic, as well as all 

phenomena in the material and immaterial world. Bogdanov understood “organization” as 

an open-ended process that was common to all of life’s various manifestations and capable 

of mediating between ideas and experiences as well as things and people. His aim was to 

produce a system of rules that would bring about the greatest possible degree of organiza-

tion for every thing and idea in every process and discipline—whether it be a balanced state 

of health or a just society.

In 1909 and 1911 Bogdanov, together with Gorky and Lunacharskii, organized political 

schools to train proletarian propagandists on Capri and in Bologna, and formed the group 

Forwards (Vpered’) with them. After the revolution of 1917 he became one of the founding 

members of the socialist (later communist) Academy of Sciences, taught at Moscow Uni-

versity and was a vocal critic of Taylorism. Bogdanov provided the theoretical basis for the 

mass movement of the Proletkul’t (acronym for “Proletarian Culture”), which declared that 

lasting political and economic change would depend on the cultural education of the pro-

letariat. An old argument with Lenin, who accused Bogdanov of machismo and idealism 

and published a rebuttal of his philosophy entitled 

Materializm i empiriokriticizm [Material-

ism and Empirio-Criticism, 1909], was a contributing factor in the Proletkul’t organization 

being brought under Party control in 1920, at which point Bogdanov turned to the creation 

of “physiological collectivism.”

In 1926 he established the world’s first Institute for Blood Transfusions in Moscow, 

where he took up the “struggle for vitality” by means of circular blood transfusions. Over 

a period of two years he successfully carried out eleven transfusions on himself in the firm 

belief that the constant addition of new elements would contribute to the stability of his 

organism. Here it was important that donors and recipients be of diff erent ages. Older 

organisms, according to Bogdanov, were immune to certain illnesses, while younger or-

ganisms still possessed elements that had already died out in older specimens. Thus both 

organisms were to complement each other; “uneven manifestations of deficiency and sur-

plus will be balanced out, the living milieu made more harmonious, by the admixture of 

blood types” (

Bor’ba za zhiznesposonost [The Struggle for Vitality, 1927]). A year after the 

foundation of the Institute for Blood Transfusions it still seemed as though Bogdanov’s 

hopes might be fulfilled. By October 1927 his institute had carried out 213 transfusions on 

158 patients. The circular technique he developed was disseminated by the foundation of 

transfusion centers in every republic of the Soviet Union. On April 7, 1928 though, Bogda-

nov—to his colleagues’ surprise—died from the shock of his own twelfth blood transfusion.

— MV

Originally published in Russian as Aleksandr Bogdanov, 

Bor’ba za zhiznesposobnost (Moscow, 1927). For a German 

translation see 

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

Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 482–83 (introductory note), 525–605.

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

meister.

The notes have 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), 

482–83.

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