It was a bizarre moment. I was visiting New York’s Museum of Modern Art for the first time, revelling in Duchamp and Brancusi, Cezanne and Schwitters. Then I came across a room that felt like a pious shrine, a white reliquary containing models of unbuilt architecture, posters for a failed utopia. This was MoMA’s homage to the art of the Russian revolution. Why did it seem so strange? Because here we were on West 53rd street, in the heart of capitalist Manhattan.

It struck me as intellectually lazy for this museum, so remote from everything the Russian revolution stood for, to apolitically celebrate its art, as if constructivism and suprematism were just cool aesthetic discoveries rather than utopian projects from an age of struggle and violence.



The grand galleries of Burlington House in London seem an equally incongrous setting for such relics, but that’s where Tatlin, El Lissitzky and co are about to be venerated in the Royal Academy’s blockbuster Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932. The title of this exhibition that starts the centenary of 1917 goes right for the commercial jugular – every young idealist in the country will be clamouring for a ticket.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black Square by Malevich (1915). Photograph: Foxtrot Films

If the Royal Academy wanted to be honest they might have called it something more like “Black Square: The Russian Tragedy 1917-1932”. The way we glibly admire Russian art from the age of Lenin sentimentalises one of the most murderous chapters in human history. If the Royal Academy put on a huge exhibition of art from Hitler’s Germany there would rightly be an outcry. Yet the art of the Russian revolution is just as mired in the mass slaughters of the 20th century.

The Bolshevik party took power in October 1917 in a coup that replaced a previous democratic revolution with a totalitarian one. From the beginning, and increasingly as they fought a savage civil war against their opponents, Lenin’s Bolsheviks used torture, surveillance and executions to build a one-party state. Rural society was destroyed by the Bolshevik campaign against “kulaks”, meaning so-called capitalist peasants – a war on an unreal social enemy that anticipated nazism by demonising an entire category of people. As agriculture collapsed, as a result first of civil war then forcible collectivisation, millions died in famines in 1921-22 and again in 1932-33.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The ideal out of the real’ ... Tatlin with an assistant, in front of his design for the never-built Monument to the Third International, Petrograd. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

To see Lenin’s revolution through rosy specacles as a Good Thing, a “utopian” dream that only went wrong because the wicked Stalin spoiled it all, is to believe in fairy tales. Yet catastrophic as it was, artists sought to provide this revolution with bold modernist propaganda.



The avant garde in Russian art predates 1917. In 1915, Malevich painted his Black Square, a masterpiece that takes the idea of abstract art to its pure monochrome conclusion. Tatlin, influenced by Picasso’s cubist assemblages, was already producing Counter Reliefs, abstract constructions that could occupy a corner like a floating city of driftwood.

As the revolution began imposing its ideology, these two great artists gave birth to movements that both claimed to express a utopian vision of a revolutionary future: suprematism, which maps world history and the cosmos as a science fiction geometry of pure forms, and constructivism, which builds the ideal out of the real. The resulting art is undoubtedly some of the most powerful of the 20th century, yet I find the way it is usually exhibited ultimately repellent in its denial of history and glossing-over of violence.

If you think I am exaggerating, consider El Lissitzky’s famous 1919 poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. You don’t need any knowledge of modern art to understand it – a sharp red triangle is being driven into a black mass like a stake into Dracula’s heart. Visual genius, yes, but what is its real historical significance?

It is a very explicit propaganda image that urges support for the Bolshevik army in the civil war that lasted from 1917 to 1922. This war eventually secured Lenin’s new state, but at a human cost almost without historical precedent: between 7m and 12m people died. Extreme methods were used by both sides not just in battle but to subdue civilians. The Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police that still has offspring in Russia today, played a crucial part. The red wedge really was red – with blood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest El Lissitzky’s 1919 poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Photograph: Peter Cox/Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Nauseatingly, we forget that reality when we celebrate El Lissitzky’s poster in an apolitical way or, even worse, admire it as radical chic without asking any questions about what it really represents. It is a call to merciless violence. Did Billy Bragg and Paul Weller worry about that when they borrowed its cool title for a 1980s effort to make pop music political? Nah, they didn’t give it a thought.

We will never stop looking at the art of the Russian avant garde, nor should we. Yet we need to place it in its true context. It is a lazy, immoral lie to keep pretending there was anything glorious about the brutal experiment Lenin imposed on Russia – or anything innocent about its all-too-brilliant propaganda art. Perhaps the Royal Academy is about to open that very show, but its shallow title seems all too happy to cash in on revolutionary chic. No doubt the Morning Star’s art critic will be there in a flash. Me, I will be remembering the kulaks.