N 2007, the National Museum in Warsaw exhibited the part of its collec

Part I  ·  Moving People
of the 1970s. He also corresponded with a certain Volker Hamann who lived 
in West Berlin at the time and who illegally imported texts on mail art for 
the artist by leaving them in East Berlin with Robert Rehfeldt and Joseph 
Huber.
538
 Together with the couple Martina and Steffen Giersch, Joachim 
Stange, and the printer and artist Jürgen Gottschalk, Birger Jesch formed, in 
Dresden, a small local network of mail artists which quickly became a target 
of the Stasi and the subject of an investigation procedure initially called OV 
“Postkunst”
 (Postal art) and then OV “Feind” (Enemy).
In the summer of 1980, Birger Jesch began his first mail art project—
In-
ternational Contact with Mail Art in the Spirit of Peaceful Coexistence (sum-
mer 1980–February 1981)—which was also the first project publicly exhibit-
ed in the GDR. The subject of this project was the relationship with the first 
peace movements led by the church which, as we know, were the precursors 
to the 1989 pacifist revolution movements. The project involved sending an of-
ficial unused shooting target—industrially produced in the GDR—to some 
300 dispatchers around the world asking them to rework it.
Concerning the shooting target motif, one must mention here the cre-
ation of the International Artists’ Cooperation (IAC) in February 1972 by 
Klaus Groh, who had already worked in 1975 on an unused target made in 
West Germany to signify that poetry was a way of shooting and that the IAC 
was a sporting association. But this was not about initiating a project by send-
ing various identical objects—it was about an object of visual poetry.
Moreover, the target motif chosen by Birger Jesch transformed on the 
one hand the participating artists into pacifist marksmen of a kind and, on 
the other hand, the initiator of the project into a living target for the Stasi. 
Nonetheless, the mail artist received fifty objects back from twelve different 
countries in connection with this project. The documents and objects associ-
ated with this project are currently located at the mail art archives in Schwer-
in.
539
 Kornelia Röder, who is in charge of these archives, has devoted a few 
lines to this project in her 2006 doctoral dissertation “Topologie und Funk-
tionsweise des Netzwerks der Mail Art.”
540
 A few objects were also shown in 
538  Interview, by Robert Sobotta and transcribed by Lutz Wohlrabkrauss, ERBEN gallery in Dresden, 4 May 
2002.
539  See http://www.museum-schwerin.de/sammlungen/kupferstichkabinett/mail-art-archiv-3/.
540  Subsequently published as Kornelia Röder, 
Topologie und Funktionsweise des Netzwerks der Mail Art: Seine 
spezifische Bedeutung für Osteuropa von 1960 bis 1989 (Bremen: Salon Verlag, 2008).
1996 in the exhibition 
Osteuropa Mail Art im internationalen Netzwerk at 
the Schwerin Museum.
Not only did Birger Jesch initiate this project, he also contributed him-
self with the creation of a three-dimensional object, but without using as 
a theme the fact that he had been targeted by the Stasi. To do this, he in-
cluded in the shooting target a plastic toy that was made in East Germa-
ny—a miniature soldier of the National People’s Army in a crouching po-
sition and aiming with his gun, ready to shoot. All of this is surrounded by 
partitions with a text from 1979 by the East German author Dieter Schnei-
der: 
Leb wohl, altes Haus! (Farewell, old friend!). To the right of this is the 
cutting of a press photo showing the bust of a person wearing a microphone 
and censored by a black strip across the eyes. This pacifist work was part 
of the cultural context of the expatriation in 1976 of the author and singer 
Wolf Biermann, who sang, among other things, “Soldaten sehn sich alle glei-
ch—lebendig und als Leich” (Soldiers all look the same, alive and dead), but 
also of the political context of the introduction of military service lessons in 
school. The project also seemed to be a response to the double decision by 
NATO on 12 December 1979, which planned for the installation of missiles 
in Western Europe in response to the Soviet SS-20s in order to begin nego-
tiations and secure their removal within four years.
541
The object of the project that has been most talked about, described, and 
reproduced by researchers dedicated to mail art in the GDR is that of Fried-
rich Winnes. His appeal lay in his fairly simple work, using graphic methods 
borrowed from the press, combining black, white and red; and he shocked 
people with the contents of photos showing the portraits of twelve men in-
jured during the First World War.
Birger Jesch was aware of the link between the weak response to his proj-
ect and the scrutiny of his post by the Stasi. Following these communication 
difficulties, he wrote a letter asking the senders to explain their failure to re-
ply and to send the original post to the other participants. This action had a 
sort of snowball effect and it allows us today to show, in relation to this proj-
541  It must be noted here that the East German government, which was committed by the 1972 Basic Treaty 
with the FRG to a policy of détente and also to increasingly pronounced cultural exchanges with France—
which approved the installation of US missiles on West German territory—tried to stay outside of the So-
viet policy pursued against the United States.

262
263
2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene…
Part I  ·  Moving People
ect, how much post was intercepted by the Stasi. Birger Jesch thus suggested a 
choice between three responses: (a) I did not have the time (inclination), (b) I 
did not receive an invitation, and (c) I have sent you something.
Among the objects received, that of Klaus Groh demonstrated the diffi-
culty of sending objects. In the text accompanying his two-dimensional and 
purely graphic work, he stressed the fact that this was already the third piece 
he had sent.
In the documentation dated 14 February 1981, Birger Jesch commented: 
“Thanks to the jury competences of the postal and customs services, one can 
consider this exhibition as having already been checked and authorized.” 
This remark highlighted the fact that the mail artists were aware of the inev-
itable scrutiny of their post, without necessarily realizing the real extent of 
this surveillance and the methods of the Stasi. The project was framed not 
only by the documentation, but also by a touring exhibition showing all the 
objects that were sent back. These exhibitions took place on clerical prem-
ises in Dresden (February 1981, the Weinbergkirche), Radebeul, Meissen, 
Stralsund (13 November 1983), Greifswald (1983/84) and Rostock. On 15 
October 1981, following the exhibitions for the project, the Stasi launched 
the “Feind” procedure—initially called “Postkunst”—which had the prin-
ciple aim of breaking up the local network. The methods used consisted of 
confiscating post or refusing GDR entry visas to the invitees
542
 of the five 
Dresden friends who had become the Stasi’s target. Legal proceedings were 
also begun in 1982 against Birger Jesch and Steffen Giersch under the pre-
text of a customs offence, resulting in unequal fines of 500 marks for Jesch 
and 300 marks for Giersch.
543
 The closing report of the proceedings was sub-
mitted three years later, on 1 October 1984: the circle of artist friends was 
considered to have disbanded and mail art was seen as an ineffective oppo-
sitional method.
544
 The person most affected by the Stasi methods was the  
 
542 Manfred Rudolph, “Erfahrung bei der Realisierung von Massnahmen der Zersetzung zur wirksamen 
Bekämpfung/Zurückdrängung politischer Untergrundtätigkeit unter Einbeziehung von IM sowie staatli-
cher und gesellschaftlicher Kräfte,” unpublished memoirs (Potsdam, 1988). Quotation from Lutz Wohlr-
ab and Birger Jesch, “Feinde gibt es überall . . . Stasi und Mail Art in Dresden,” 
Horch und Guck 19 (1996): 
58–64.
543  Wohlrab, “Bitte sauber öffnen!”
544 Report from the 
Enemy proceedings. Quotation from: Heidrun Hannusch, “Wenn Pazifisten dem Frie-
densstaat gefährlich werden,” Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 30 March 1993, 13.
artist and printer Jürgen Gottschalk, who was sentenced on 23 July 1984 to 
two years and two months in prison and was finally expatriated at the end 
of April 1985.
545
In the GDR, mail art was an alternative form of art and communication 
that was born in the geopolitical and cultural interstice and aimed to trans-
gress this border zone or theoretically displace it. This zone, this interstice, 
served as a sort of niche enabling mail artists to develop their own artistic 
identity despite the control by the state. The concept of mail art was a trans-
national concept enabling artists to go beyond the geopolitical realities of Eu-
rope of the 1970s and 1980s. With the fall of the Wall, the interstice of geo-
political and cultural limits in the GDR disappeared and with it the source of 
motivation and of identity creation.
545  Jürgen Gottschalk, 
Druckstellen: die Zerstörung einer Künstler-Biographie durch die Stasi (Leipzig: Evange-
lische Verlagsanstalt, 2006).

264
265
Part I  ·  Moving People
3.  Part III: Gathering People
Part
iii
Gathering People

266
267
Part I  ·  Moving People
W
 
hen the French Marxist Roger Garaudy published his theory of “re-
alism without bounds” (
D’un réalisme sans rivages) in 1963, the Communist 
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) vociferously denounced him for revision-
ism and placed his heretical book on the blacklist.
546
 Even to the last days 
of the Soviet Union, conservative aestheticians and art functionaries con-
tinued to resist any attempt to revise the conception of socialist realism or 
to sanction an ecumenical concept of what they disparagingly called “real-
546  Roger Garaudy, 
D’un réalisme sans rivages: 
Picasso, Saint-John Perse, Kafka (Paris: Plon, 1963). The pres-
ent essay draws on material I have published elsewhere, including: Susan E. Reid, “Toward a New (Social-
ist) Realism: The Re-Engagement with Western Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw,” in 
Russian Art and 
the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, ed. Rosalind P. Blakes-
ley and Susan E. Reid (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 217–39; Susan E. Reid, “The 
Exhibition 
Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Style 
and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David 
Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101–32; Susan E. Reid, “The Soviet ‘Contemporary Style’: A Socialist Mod-
ernism,” in 
Different Modernisms, Different Avant-Gardes: Problems in Central and Eastern European Art 
After World War II, ed. Helme Sirje (Tallinn: KUMU Art Museum, 2009), 71–112; Susan E. Reid, “Mod-
ernizing Socialist Realism in the Khrushchev Thaw: The Struggle for a Contemporary Style in Soviet Art,” 
in 
Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly 
Jones (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 209–30.
Susan E. Reid
21
(Socialist) Realism Unbound:  
The Effects of International Encounters on 
Soviet Art Practice and Discourse in the 
Khrushchev Thaw

268
269
2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene…
Part I  ·  Moving People
ism as a rubber sack.”
547
 Yet already by 1963 the Soviet art establishment was 
split into conservative or hard line and reformist, liberalizing, or moderniz-
ing camps committed to a new, “contemporary style” of realism.
548
 A more 
radical fringe had also emerged. Condemned at the notorious Manège Af-
fair at the end of 1962, it formed the new margin of permitted Soviet art, 
coming to be known (in the West) as the nonconformist or underground art 
world.
549
 Indeed much of what Garaudy proposed was already under debate 
among reform-minded artists and critics in the Moscow art world since 1956. 
Against the jeremiads of the conservatives, modernizers sought a rejuvenat-
ed and elastically defined realism, a public art that could move and persuade 
and say something to contemporary people about the present day in a “con-
temporary” style. This article will consider the ways in which, beginning in 
the Khrushchev Thaw (c. 1953–62), the Soviet conception of socialist realism 
was challenged, fractured, and expanded thanks in part to encounters with 
art and artists of the “socialist countries” (
Sotsstran) and, more broadly, to in-
creased Soviet exposure to international socialist art, including that of post-
colonial countries.
Between 1947 and 1953 Soviet cultural policy had become more deeply 
xenophobic, nationalistic, and autarkic than ever. At home, the newly estab-
lished Academy of Arts along with the Arts Committee (which had overseen 
the purges in the art world during the Stalinist Terror) dogmatically insist-
ed upon the pedigree purity of a Russian canon—based on the model of the 
nineteenth-century Russian realism of the Peredvizhniki—as the patrilin-
eage of socialist realism, while “ethnically cleansing” alien influences. Mod-
ernism, identified with the West, had played a crucial constitutive and uni-
547 Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiskiy Gosudartsveiy Arkhiv Noveyshey Istorii, 
RGANI), f. 5, op. 36, d. 47, ll. 95–97; B. V. Vishniakov, “Ob odnoi kontseptsii iskusstva 1960–1980-kh go-
dov,” in 
Puti tvorchestva i kritika (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1990), 13; A. Metchenko, “Sotsialis-
ticheskii realizm. Rasshiriaiushchiesia vozmozhnosti i teoreticheskie spory,” 
Oktiabr’ 4 (1976): 182–83; re-
ferring to V. Ivashev, “Pocherki novoi epokhi,” 
Voprosy literatury 9 (1975).
548  Note the crucial distinction between reformism and revolution. Compare Stephen F. Cohen, “The Friends 
and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union,” in 
The Soviet Union Since Sta-
lin, ed. Stephen F. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Robert Sharlet (Bloomington: Indiana Universi-
ty Press, 1980), 11–12; M. R. Zezina, 
Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia i vlast’ v 1950-e-60-e gody 
(Moscow: Dialog MGU, 1999).
549  Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited,” 
Kritika: Explorations in 
Russian and Eurasian History 6:4 (Fall 2005): 673–716; “Drugoe iskusstvo”: Moskva 1956–76, 2 vols. 
(Moscow: Moskovskaia kollektsiia, 1991), vol. 1.
fying role as socialist realism’s “other” from the start. But with the onset of 
the Cold War, the conflict between the “Two Camps” of East and West, so-
cialism and capitalism, promulgated in 1947, found its cultural expression in 
the confrontation between realism and modernism. From the official Soviet 
perspective, modernism was the instrument of Western imperialism, and the 
art of socialist realism—healthy, progressive, and truthful—was irreconcil-
ably opposed to this decadent, bourgeois-imperialist, antihumanist “antiart.” 
Modernism was characterized by “its falseness, its belligerent antirealism, its 
hostility to objective knowledge and to the truthful portrayal of life in art.”
550
 
The standoff between the opposing powers and their ideologies required the 
absolute antithesis of their cultural manifestations; no possibility for com-
mon ground or—
horribile dictu!—convergence could be admitted.
In Central and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, cultural Sovietization at-
tempted to impose Soviet Russian models of socialist realism in the newly 
subordinated countries. As imperial powers have often discovered, a degree 
of hybridization was required in order to indigenize it in local cultures. Nev-
ertheless, the degree to which the subaltern cultures thereby exercised a recip-
rocal influence on the culture of the core was, at that time, limited.
551
 Assess-
ing the channels and direction of influence of 
political change in this period, 
Jacques Rupnik noted that Soviet adaptation to change initiated in Eastern 
Europe first came on the agenda in the Khrushchev era.
552
 To what extent 
does Rupnik’s assessment also apply to cultural change in the USSR, spe-
cifically visual art practice and policy? Were developments in the subaltern 
states of Central and Eastern Europe a catalyst and model for change in the 
Soviet art establishment, and, if so, what were the vectors of this communica-
tion (or as conservatives would see it, contamination)? We will consider here 
both the effects of encounters with art of socialist Europe, and also of wid-
550  Vladimir Kemenov, “Aspects of Two Cultures,” in 
Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing 
Ideas, ed. C. Harrison and P. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 647. First published in VOKS 
Bulletin by the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Moscow, 1947).
551  See Anders Aman, 
Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era: An aspect of Cold War 
History (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992); David Crowley, “Peoples Warsaw/Popular Warsaw,” Journal of De-
sign History 10:2 (1997): 203–24; Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, “Introduction: Style and Socialism,” 
in 
Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and 
David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 1–24.
552   Jacques Rupnik, “Soviet Adaptation to Change in Eastern Europe,” 
Journal of Communist Studies 2–3 
(1986): 251–62. 

270
271
2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene…
Part I  ·  Moving People
er exposure to European and world art. Often drawing on indigenous tradi-
tions that challenged the hegemony of European conventions of verisimili-
tude on which Russian realism was based, the art of the socialist world and 
postcolonial/revolutionary movements posed particular challenges to Sovi-
et orthodoxy.
Soviet cultural politics began to change already in the early 1950s, be-
fore the process of de-Stalinization got under way in the fraternal countries, 
just as the USSR initially led the way in de-Stalinization in other respects. 
While the CPSU continued to claim a guiding role in cultural as in politi-
cal matters, the regime’s renunciation of terror and coercion as means of gov-
erning both Soviet society and its satellites necessitated accommodation with 
pressures for change coming both from below and from its allies abroad (al-
though there were notable lapses: political violence was not renounced, for 
example, in Hungary in 1956).
In the international arena, by the mid-1950s the Cold War had entered a 
less tense phase. The principle of “Peaceful Coexistence” moderated the the-
sis of the “Two Camps,” “Socialism in one country” was abandoned, and the 
project of international socialism, under Soviet leadership, was resumed, along 
with efforts to expand Soviet influence in the postcolonial world. Autarchy 
gave way to the aspiration to world cultural leadership in line with the Soviet 
Union’s new geopolitical role.
553
 International diplomacy and exchange were 
reestablished, and although this has been described as a “cultural offensive” 
against the West, it was also a matter of readiness to learn, the better to com-
pete.
554
 Nikita Khrushchev, Party first secretary, traveled avidly and applied 
the lessons of foreign experience back home, rallying his country to “catch up 
with and overtake the West.” The realization that superpower status in the 
postwar world demanded cutting-edge science and technology made it nec-
essary to allow Soviet scientists access to the latest foreign research. In rela-
tion to culture, too, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg publicly expressed hope that it 
would be possible “to set against the climate of ‘Cold War’ the spirit of gen-
553  N. P. Zhilina, ed., 
Kul’turnaia zhizn’ v SSSR, 1951–1965. Khronika (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 302–305; I. 
Gerchuk, “Iskusstvo ‘ottepeli’. 1954–1964,” 
Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 8:1 (1996): 79.
554  Frederick C. Barghoorn, 
The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign 
Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: 
Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Walter L. Hixson, 
Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
uine cultural cooperation and honest competition.”
56
 Trade, tourism, scien-
tific and cultural exchange expanded, and cultural agreements were signed 
with the governments of capitalist countries including France, Great Brit-
ain, and the United States as well as with the Peoples’ Democracies of Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe.
The “fraternal” socialist countries represented an important resource in 
the push toward a new phase of technological modernization. While eco-
nomic cooperation was assured by the formation of Comecon, the principle 
that they should pool not only their scientific but also their 
cultural achieve-
ments (and make these available to support Soviet development) was encoded 
in the CPSU’s Third Party Program adopted in 1961.
The flow of information across borders increased enormously, as did pos-
sibilities to see foreign art and meet foreigners. As a result of foreign exchange 
agreements in the late 1950s, the Soviet public was increasingly exposed to ex-
hibitions of contemporary international art, from the capitalist West, from the 
Peoples’ Republics of Central and Eastern Europe, and also occasionally from 
Asia, Africa, and Latin America where the Soviet Union was extending its in-
terests. In addition to travel and international exhibitions and festivals, foreign 
publications served an important role as sources of information. While the 
USIA (United States Information Agency) magazine 
Amerika, for example, 
propagandized the “American way of life” and also the latest US art and cut-
ting-edge design, illustrated magazines from Eastern European countries were 
at least as influential, not least because they were more readily available at news-
stands. They found a receptive audience attracted by their “Western”-seeming 
contents and by their modern design. As Russian art historian Iurii Gerchuk 
recalled: “Every decorative-painterly cover of the journal 
Pol’sha (Poland) be-
hind a kiosk window seemed like a manifesto of new artistic possibilities. And 
for the ‘minders’ [of orthodoxy] the very word ‘
Pol’sha’ became an odious sym-
bol of ‘modernism’ infiltrating the country.”
555
 Other periodicals of particular 
cultural importance included the Polish 
Przekroj (Profile) and, for art special-
ists, the East German art history journal 
Bildende Kunst (Fine art).
While international cultural exchanges were recognized as a means to re-
duce international tension as well as to glean useful models for selective imi-
555  I. Gerchuk, “Iskusstvo ‘ottepeli’ v poiskakh stilia,” 
Tvorchestvo 6 (1991): 28.

272
273
2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene…