by Anne Williamson

"So that the prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese wall. So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood be shed anymore, we killed and killed."

Andrew Sinyavsky,
in his pseudonymous essay "On Socialist Realism."

Soviet photography from the 1920s and 1930s speaks not as it was intended - to the building of a brave new world of Communism. Instead, utopia having been betrayed long before it was ever found, the era's images give ironic testimony to history's most colossal mistake and longest-running lie. Within the compelling contrivances of Soviet photography can be found the seeds of the true crisis now confronting the Russian people. That crisis is not political, nor is it economic. The crisis is spiritual.

The doctrine of socialist realism, which demanded that the artist portray "the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development," was, in fact, a manifesto that turned constructivist Vladimir Tatlin's slogan "Art into Life" on its head. The creative ferment of the 1920s, then experimental artistic movements such as futurism, acmeism, suprematism, and constructivism flourished, was crushed by the state's denunciation of "formalism". This category included all that was nonconformist, unpredictable, individual, and, consequently, subjective in the arts. Stalin called artists "engineers of men's souls." The task of art became the portrayal of the power of the state as the greatest good. To accomplish that task, art was to pass over disagreeable reality and portray not what was, but what ought to be.

As a collection of seemingly guileless documents, photography escaped the obvious triteness that the new doctrine imposed on the other arts (most laughably in cinema and literature, whose toilers mercilessly ground out heroic tales of struggling tractor drivers, committed factory workers, and threatened potato harvests). Left to the censorship of editors, Soviet photographers got away with more artistic "formalism" than their comrades working in other media, but their avant-garde images still concealed great tragedies. Ironically, it was Lenin himself who saved photography from the worst ravages of the new artistic creed.

"It's a funny story," says Russian photographer Boris Savelev. "In conversation with a fellow early revolutionary, Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin supposedly said, 'A photograph is a document. That is why photography has never been considered real art.' Nowadays no one remembers what was really said, but in the '20s the movie people claimed Lenin had said that "of all the arts, cinema is the most important. Photographers did not come up with a similar line, so they lost their moment. That's partly why state allocations were invested in the movie business, which became a huge propaganda machine. People were forced to see certain films, since cinema was considered a real art. Photography was left under the control of newspaper editors. Their instinct for survival was so developed, of course, that the state hardly needed to intervene." Well into the '80s, Soviet photographers were not allowed to shoot on the street without permission, and editors continued their careful vetting of submitted work. Photography was considered so far beyond the purview of art that the state made no effort to preserve negatives or prints.

Savelev maintains that neglect was not the only threat to these photographs. "Pictures are documents," he says, "and the Bolsheviks always did their best to get rid of documents. The only people who were allowed to keep their negatives were official photographers who served Stalin - men who took, so to speak, court photographs. Anyone who took pictures without the special permission of his editor or his organization was considered a spy and arrested. In that area a man might covet a particular assignment - or he might fancy a colleague's wife or admire his apartment. Well, he'd just turn in his fellow photographer, telling the KGB that this man had this or that sort of negative at his apartment. The KGB would search the apartment, find those negatives, and take him away. It was a real nightmare, but my guess is that those negatives were developed and are now in a special archive somewhere waiting for their time. At least, that is my hope."

But if Soviet citizens were not exposed to endless manipulation through photography (as they were through cinema, literature, sculpture, painting, and poster art), how can it be said that within photography can be found the very seeds of Russia's spiritual crisis? The answer lies in what Mr. Shickler, a twenty-year veteran of collecting, describes as "the most important photo-journal of the twentieth century."

Published in four languages (English, French, German, and Russian) between 1930 and 1941, the magazine was produced by the Soviet state, which spared no expense on it. With constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, the father of Soviet photography, as the artistic editor, the journal published what was - from a purely aesthetic point of view - some of the most brilliant photography ever produced. The work of such prominent photographers and artists as El Lissitzky, Max Alpert, Boris Ignatovich - as well as other masters still unknown in the West - ranks with the most potent imagery of the century, even though it served an ignoble cause.

Max Alpert shot his famous 1930 photo essay, "Giant and Builder", for USSR in Construction. His pictures trace the communist dream in the history of Victor Kalmykov, an illiterate mason Alpert tracked over a period of years. The essay follows his arrival in Magnitogorsk at a work camp known as Steel City, his learning to read, his marriage, elevation to a managerial post, and, finally, his entrance into the communist party. "There's just one shot Alpert missed," one Muscovite wit commented, "Kalmykov's arrival in the Gulag". It's not an unfair punch line in light of the fact that in the late 1930s, every top-level party figure or factory executive who had ever worked in Steel City, with one exception, was arrested and shot.

USSR in Construction chronicled all the great tasks of Stalin's first five-year plans, from the building of the steel foundries at Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Turkestan-Siberian railway, the Dneprostroy Dam, the White Sea and the Fergana canals, and the Moscow subway to the consolidation of collective farms. The resulting boldly realized propaganda was meant for foreign consumption. Few Soviet citizens were even aware of the journal's existence. If they saw it, they might have noticed that the stylish pictures completely ignored the genocide and the mass exploitation.

As the first great media manipulation of our century, USSR in Construction forever altered our relationship with the photographic image. In the 1930s the average man approached photography with a certain innocence, viewing it first, as did Lenin, as a document. Looking at the sometimes powerful work of war photographer Galina Sanko, meant to glorify the victorious Red Army, little do we suspect that she always traveled with a German corpse, arranging him this way or that way to suit her composition. We don't question why Lenin stands alone at the first May Day parade in Red Square unless we have an earlier print of the same photograph in which Trotsky stood beside him. One may well wonder how it is that Margaret Bourke-White chronicled so vividly the appalling working conditions, the child and forced labor of Magnitogorsk in 1930-31, while Rodchenko, encountering similar conditions at the construction of the White Sea Canal, was able to exclaim, "I was seized with enthusiasm… I began to take pictures without any thought of formalism…." Actually, his motives are more easily understood when one recalls his words in 1928 after he was accused of formalism. "Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exit…only as long as there are people who love deception and beautiful lies. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art as against opium. Photograph and be photographed!" Such is the essence of Soviet photography. Such is the Soviet era's cynicism.

Cynicism suffuses what remains of Soviet life even now. One former Soviet's comment that he had seen two great performances in his life – "Pele playing soccer in the World Cup and Gorbachev at the 1988 Communist Party Congress" – pretty much sums up the average citizen's attitude toward national politics. In fact, politics is consistently referred to as "theatre", and Westerners are sneered at for being so easily beguiled throughout the era of perestroika.

The artists of the Soviet Union wanted to change their country through art and design, creating not just a style but a rational man and a humane society that would provide for all equally. But in today's Moscow, the first thing a visitor notices is the utter lack of design, of even rational engineering. Everything from cars to luggage carts is constructed of steel three times the necessary weight - all of which serves to underscore how heavy, how cumbersome life there has become. As for the new Soviet man, indeed he exists, in quantity. Unfortunately, by observable definition he's a dead drunk. The slightest sobriety only allows him to pursue more efficiently his true avocation - thievery. Thousands of homeless children wander Moscow's streets, along with thousands of refugees from violence in the outlying republics, while pensioners stay home bundled up in bed to save on heating and food costs. Western humanitarian aid can best be obtained on the black market.

Still, it is in the very contrivances of Soviet photography that the Westerner may best grasp the enormity of the state's betrayal, for it is these very images - icons of an era - that document the deceit. So stage - managed were those images that the state found it possible to incorporate the creative work of Sergey Eisenstein into documentary footage.

In 1939 Eisenstein began work on a film about the Fergana Canal, a feat of engineering that cost 200,000 Soviet lives to complete. To elude the censors, he set his gruesome story in the past: a fourteenth-century emir, under siege by Tamerlane, is forced to use the blood of his captives to mix the mortar needed to repair a breach in the city wall. In the end, he loses to Tamerlane, and his cruelty is surpassed by that of the conqueror, who uses bodies covered with clay to rebuild the city tower. Since so many died in the building of the canal, one needn't question Eisenstein's true metaphor (though he claimed Tamerlane was a stand-in for Hitler) or why the film was never produced. The story's denouement is that Eisenstein's test shots were incorporated into an official documentary film about the building of the canal.

For those living among the tattered remnants of empire and communist internationalism, there is no shining city on the hill - only the recently exposed history of communism's true legacy: millions upon millions of death, the rape of their own treasury at the hands of endless, faceless apparatchiks. That the majority of the most talented members of three generations collaborated in such monumental waste, mendacity, and stupidity, along with the once enthusiastic but now passive masses, is the reality slowly being absorbed by the Russians. And so it is that this nation of fervent believers, to whom a mystical spirituality was attributed, and who themselves believed they had been entrusted with a great and holy mission, find themselves suddenly without a soul.