LONDON — How the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in Russia affected the development of modern art and culture in Ukraine was the focus of the exhibit “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s.” On display here last fall, it included 65 artworks, mostly on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema of Ukraine in Kyiv.
The heart of the exhibit shows how an “outpouring of cultural activities and a flourishing of the arts” took place in the wake of the Bolshevik’s victory in 1917. Under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, workers and peasants fought to free themselves from centuries of oppression under the Russian Empire of the czars.
Because of the crushing of their national rights, many of Ukraine’s artists lived abroad. One of the artists on display is Mykhailo Boichuk, who returned to Ukraine in 1917 after the victorious Russian Revolution freed the country from czarist bondage.
He became a professor at the newly established Ukrainian State Academy of Arts. It was the first-ever art institution in modern Ukraine. Renamed the Kyiv State Art Institute in 1924, it became a leading art school. Boichuk was the founder of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine in 1925 and drew in other artists committed to expanding Ukrainian culture and supporting the Bolshevik Revolution.
The exhibit features works by Jewish artists centered in Kyiv. Many of them were part of the newly organized Kultur Lige promoting Jewish culture. An especially powerful work is “Jewish Pogrom” by Manuil Shekhtman, done in 1926. It reflects the history of organized assaults and murders carried out both under the czars and by reactionary forces fighting to prevent workers and peasants from taking power after the 1917 revolution.
Sarah Shor, who escaped a pogrom in northern Ukraine, joined the Kultur Lige’s art section in 1919 in Kyiv. Her two works, “Sunrise” and “Horse Riders,” capture “the optimism of the new age, while reworking Jewish artistic traditions,” the exhibitors explain.
Much of the material written about the exhibit fails to present the historical truth about the role of the Bolshevik Party in Russia and its central leader, V.I. Lenin. The Bolsheviks led the fight for liberation of Ukraine and other nations oppressed by the czarist empire. Lenin insisted the revolution had to support national self-determination for Ukraine and uphold cultural expression based on the Ukrainian language.
This explosion of Ukrainian culture was a central target of the counterrevolution against Lenin’s course championed by Joseph Stalin starting in the mid-1920s. The Stalinist regime carried out “purges of the Ukrainian intelligentsia,” the exhibitors point out, including murdering leading figures like Boichuk, who was accused of “bourgeois nationalism.”
Stalinist counterrevolution
Manuscripts, books and artwork were destroyed. Murals were painted over or scraped off the walls. “Socialist Realism” was imposed on artists, and the few paintings from this era are displayed to show the Stalinists’ corruption of art.
The independence won by Ukraine after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 engendered an explosion of interest in literature and art from the 1920s and early ’30s. An art academy in Kyiv was named after Boichuk in 1991. This facility was severely damaged by Russian bombing last March.
The works exhibited here by survivors of the Stalinist repression are an exceptional tribute to what the Russian Revolution opened up for the people and artists of Ukraine.