Studies for intended murals in the USSR pavilion at 1937 World Fair in Paris go on display in the UK for the first time

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Three paintings of proud Russians marching with unrestrained joy during what was the height of Joseph Stalin’s purges have travelled to the UK for the first time.

The paintings by the leading Soviet realist Aleksandr Deineka have been lent to Tate Modern by the state art gallery in Perm, eastern Russia, for a London show exploring the visual history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century.



Almost all the objects in the show come from the remarkable collection of the late graphic designer David King, a prolific collector of Soviet-era posters, paintings, photographs, books and ephemera.

Tate Modern acquired the collection and is putting more than 250 items from it on display to mark the centenary of the October Revolution.

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But the Perm loans add to the story. The Deineka paintings were studies for intended murals in the USSR pavilion at the 1937 World Fair in Paris.

“Everyone is happy, it is all sunny, it is all progress and industrialisation in the new society,” said co-curator Natalia Sidlina. “It was the image the Soviet Union was keen to project abroad but the reality was very grim indeed.”

The paintings are a mix of the imaginary and the real. Some of the people marching are identifiable and include Alexey Stakhanov, leader of the Stakhanovite movement of workers and a man who set astonishing records for the amount of coal he mined; the heroic test pilot Valery Chkalov; and Maria and Evdokia Vinogradova, hailed for their textile output.

In the background is the spectacular and unrealised Palace of the Soviets, a building that was planned to be the tallest in the world, with a statue of Vladimir Lenin on top.

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The pavilion was designed to showcase the magnificent success of Stalin’s USSR, and people were fascinated. The USSR pavilion had 2 million visitors, far more than any other pavilion including Spain’s, which was exhibiting Picasso’s Guernica. It also won more prizes than any other country.

The terrible irony was that, at the same time, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were being murdered in Stalin’s purges.

In another room at Tate Modern is a large display cabinet containing mugshots of political prisoners, many arrested and executed in the 1936-38 Moscow Trials, which were show trials against “Trotskyists”.

They include two of Lenin’s closest allies, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, as well as ordinary people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Schoolchildren in front of a wall of Soviet Union propaganda posters at the Red Star Over Russia exhibition. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Reuters

The photographs, from KGB files, were obtained by King in the 1990s after Boris Yeltsin opened up some of the archives.

King ultimately assembled a world-class Russian and Soviet collection with more than 250,000 items.

Sidlina recalled being sent by Tate to take a look at the collection. “I said I have about two days and David started laughing.”

She entered his Islington home and it was everywhere. “There was not a single couch or armchair in the entire flat, every single square inch was covered in shelving which David had built himself.”

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King’s collecting addiction began when, as art editor of the Sunday Times, he was dispatched to Moscow in 1970 to find photographs of Leon Trotsky. It was a hopeless task but he spent the next decades successfully scouring the world for unknown images of Trotsky.

He always wanted his collection to be made public and it was acquired by Tate in 2016, shortly before King died aged 73 in May 2016.

The highlights of his collection are on display in the new exhibition. They include many posters celebrating Lenin and Stalin, including one made for the comparatively tiny Moksha ethnic group, people who number only a few thousand who have a language which is, for unknown reasons, very similar to Basque.

Other posters have stirring and alarming messages such as: “Emancipated Woman: Build Socialism!” and “Don’t Chatter! Gossiping Borders on Treason.”

A particularly rare exhibit is Lenin’s poster proclaiming in 1917 the overthrow of the provisional government, one of just a few hundred which were pinned up around Petrograd declaring the Bolsheviks victorious.

• Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55 is at Tate Modern, 8 November 2017-18 February 2018.