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To cite this article: Pat Simpson Dr Senior Lecturer in History of Fine Art & Visual Culture (2004) The
Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism: Eugenics and Images of the New Person in the 1920s-1940s, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5:1, 113-137, DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2004.11432735
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The Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism:
Eugenics and Images of the New
Person in the 1920s-I940s
PAT SIMPSON
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This paper explores the apparent ethical parameters for the legitimation of the
nude in Soviet Socialist Realist art during the 1930s-40s. The approach is
speculative since the nude seems to have raised ethical and bioethical issues
concerning the disclosure of, and extent of state control over, the gendered body,
that were not, and perhaps could not, be addressed explicitly by contemporary
Soviet critics. The argument identifies two main factors for the legitimation of
nudes as being: a perceived lack of eroticism and a distance from "fascist"
eugenical concerns. These factors, I suggest, had ideological roots in aspects of
Soviet eugenic discourse that appeared to become embedded in the construct of
the New Person itself during the 1920s-30s. I take as my starting point, two
seemingly legitimate manifestations of support for the nude, offered in 1944 by
leading Socialist Realist artists Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) and Aleksandr
Deineka (1899-1969), both of whom, apparently, had personal links to Soviet
eugenics discourse of the 1920s.
In attempting to contextualise these manifestations, I then consider other
seemingly legitimate uses of the nude in Soviet art from the late 1920s to the
1940s. What emerges, I suggest, is a significant difference between the levels of
acceptability of the nude in painting and sculpture, in that the legitimated
sculptures were never installed in public spaces. In explaining this disparity I
conclude that, while Soviet eugenics discourse implicitly provided the means to
define politically correct nudes as possessing the requisite characteristics, it was
no longer available as an explicit mode of explanation in the 1930s. Thus,
representations of the nude seemed to depend overtly for legitimacy on being
located in narrative contexts where the nudity might be seen as logical and
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
necessary. Otherwise, it might breach the public decorum enforced by the state
moral codes, and might also open Soviet cultural politics to analogy with those of
Nazi Germany. In such circumstances, Socialist Realist painting, as a narrative
and self-contextualising art form, seemed more capable of fulfilling the explicit
requirements than sculptures, which depended for their context upon urban
public spaces where nudity was always inappropriate.
Stalinist art was produced under conditions that were very different from those
of the West. The state was the only market and the Communist Party the
patriarchal arbiter of ethical content. Soviet ethics were essentially deontological
and utilitarian, in the sense that the individual citizen's pursuit of "duty"-
defined by Party propaganda, delimited by state legislation and understood as
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morally good-was framed in terms of benefit to the collective and the state. The
moral and the political were ideologically inseparable and subject to contingent
shifts of definition that artists and, indeed, all citizens needed to keep track of to
ensure that they were operating in relation to the most current and authoritative
construct of "duty." From 1934 onwards, the central imperative of Socialist
Realist cultural production was to give optimistic embodiments to the Bolshevik
ideal of the New Soviet Person, as unambiguous moral and physical aspirational
models for the masses, images of the dutiful body.
This ideal had an important bioethical dimension relating to the extent of
state control exerted on the bodies and reproductive capacities of the Soviet
citizen. The New Person was, in effect, an eugenic ideal of a renovated
population that was believed to be engineerable through state policies on
hygiene, health and fitness, by legislation against prostitution, abortion and
divorce, by hormone-based drug therapies, as well as by voluntary self-
development. Implicitly, images of the New Person-in art, literature, cinema
and the news media-also indicated the physical, political, and moral
characteristics that might be desirable in marital partners, for the procreation of
the new genus of homo soveticus. By contrast with the promotion of the Aryan
eugenic ideal in Nazi art, however, Socialist Realist propaganda on the New
Person strictly eschewed explicit engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and
breeding potential.! This was in keeping with the public morality legislated by
the state in the 1930s, which forbade discourse on sexuality, and prohibited
representations of women as sex objects, as distractions from "duty," and, in the
latter case, as contravening the party line on women's equality.
Perhaps as a corollary to this, and again, in contrast to Nazi art, the nude was
not a theorised component of Socialist Realist representations of the New
Person. When the Nazi architect, Albert Speer, entered Kiev with the invading
German army he was surprised that the statues of sportsmen in the stadium were
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
represented clothed rather than nude, as was common in Germany.z Few nudes
existed, however, within the Soviet canon of public or potentially public art,
suggesting that Party censors were ambivalent about the legitimacy of
representing the New Person in the nude. The nude, it seems was too ambiguous
to be regarded unequivocally as a good or a "right" prompt to correct action-
seen as doing one's duty as a citizen, with regard to the ultimate goal of"building
commumsm. . "
Clearly, there was a big difference between the nature and modes of
articulation of Nazi and Soviet eugenics. There is a sense in which Soviet
abolition of eugenics as a named discipline-area in the 1930s emphasised this
distinction, demarcating the ideological separation between the USSR and the
rising, hostile power of fascism in Germany. In referring to Soviet eugenics of the
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1920s-30s, I follow the example set by the extensive research into the history of
Soviet medicine conducted by Mark Adams, in using the term "eugenics" more
broadly than is customary in contemporary parlance.3 While eugenics is now
associated exclusively with projects, particularly in Nazi Germany, for species
improvement based on selective breeding within the parameters of what is now
considered to be genetic science, the founding discourse, especially in Russia and
the Soviet Union ranged further than this. Such discourse often blurred the
boundaries between eugenics-seen as based on biology and "nature"-and
euthenics-understood as the pursuit of improving human well being by purely
"nurturing," environmental means. This tendency seems to have been most
marked among the European political left, which, although adamant in its refusal
of neo-Malthusian ideas of population control, was sometimes attracted, via the
pro-Darwinian nature of Marx's writings, towards evolutionary theories of a
genetically improved working class. 4 Hence, as I will discuss, the post-1917
establishment of eugenics societies and institutes in Russia, in conjunction with
the application of environmental, public health policies, a relationship explained
by the Health Commissar N A Semashko thus:
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
In 1944, as Soviet troops advanced and occupying German forces retreated, the
prominent Soviet sculptor, Vera Mukhina, published an article effectively
suggesting the introduction of the nude into Soviet monumental sculpture, as one
possible means of creating symbolic "images" capable of expressing Soviet
victory.!! During the same year, the equally prominent painter, Aleksandr
Deineka, produced the painting After the Battle (fig.1), in which Soviet confidence
in victory was seemingly represented by images of nude, healthy, muscular, young
soldiers relaxing in the shower-as if after a football match. At 170 x 233cm, it
was not exactly a monumental painting, but it was still big enough to be read in
contemporary Socialist Realist terms as offering a serious political message.
All Socialist Realist art was supposed to carry a message, whatever its size or
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Figure 1. Aleksandr Deineka, After the Battle, 1944, oil on canvas, 170 x 233cm, Deineka Picture
Gallery, Kursk (current image, M. Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin, Oxford: Phaidon, 1990)
ill.113, p.155). Copyright permission and photo applied for.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
peak of political, moral and physical perfection.t3 In Socialist Realist art, life-class
studies enabled artists to produce convincing, physical representations of the sorts
of bodies that the masses should aspire to-bodies that exuded the beauty of
ideological oneness with the current concerns of the Party.t4 Monumental or
large-scale art works were understood to offer the highest exemplars of
embodied New Persons, raised up into symbolic signifiers of Soviet identity in
relation to the most significant contemporary themes.ts Thus, Mukhina's article
and Deineka's painting seem to assert that the nude had a legitimate place in the
most important area of art practice-monumental art- in relation to the most
important theme of the day-Soviet victory.
These assertions were neither acclaimed nor denounced by Party critics. Both
artists continued to be treated as exemplary patriots. Mukhina, a leading light of
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
Female Nude (undated, after 1939, fig.3). For Nazi artists as, indeed for Soviet
artists, the physiological ideal was based on the Classical nude as theorised by
Winkelmann and Hegel, Nazi discourse, however, had a different approach to
gendered images. Thorak's male nudes, in which homoeroticism, while implicit,
was far from the politics that positioned homosexuality as "degenerate", were
designed to represent masculine virtues of power, strength and comradeship. The
exposure of the whole body was used to exemplify the Aryan paradigm of
perfection. This was also the case with female nudes, often theorised as a
particular physiological type, with small pointy breasts and long legs recognised as
a measure of racial superiority and sexual desirability. Depictions of female nudes,
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Figure 3. Adolf Ziegler, Female Nude, (after 1939), oil on canvas, 105 x 80cm.
Property of the Federal Republic of Germany. Photo: akg-images, London/
Eric Lessing.
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
especially by Hitler's favourite artist, Ziegler, were often undeniably erotic. This
seemed acceptable since women were to some extent positioned quite openly as
breeding stock, and such images could be seen as models of desirability to educate
the male gaze and manipulate sexual consumption.26
During the "Cultural Revolution" in the USSR 1927-1933, debates on the
need to define "socialist" or "left" eugenics as different from the "right-wing"
eugenics espoused by the Nazi Party and other representatives of capitalist
culture, prompted a shift from official Soviet support for eugenics, to official
repudiation of eugenics as "fascist racism."2 7 This redefinition of eugenics to
denote only the fascist model constituted the end of explicit Soviet discourse on
eugenics and created conditions in which it became increasingly dangerous to be
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
stereotype of female desirability, "big tits and half a pood [ie. about 8 kilos] of
ass."32 Nevertheless it exemplifies how the identification of nudes as "good," and
thus politically correct and moral, had to be linguistically framed to deny erotic
content. This legitimising language was arguably formed by the asexual and
apparently gender-neutral nature ofBolshevik discourse on the New Person.
This discourse involved a concept of the body as a physical and physiological
structure that could be materially "engineered."33 This eugenic goal had been
fostered by novelist Maxim Gorky and cultural theorist Anatoly Lunacharsky, 34
among others, both before and after the Revolution, and actively pursued by the
Commissariat for Health (NarKomZdrav) after its foundation in 1918. In the
1920s, this pursuit of engineering the New Person had several facets. One of
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these was explicit support for eugenics-related research and discourse within the
new state, and also for creating contacts with international debates on eugenics.
Figure 4. Aleksandr Gerasimov, Russian Communal Bath (study), 1940s, oil on canvas, 79 x 86cm, Ray
E and Susan Johnson Collection. Photo:The Museum of Russian Art, Bloomington, Minnesota, USA
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
The USSR was a member of the World League for Sexual Reform until 1932,
indeed Moscow was due to host the annual conference in 1931 but deferred
until 1932 and then cancelled. 35
There was little support for the "negative" eugenics favoured by the European
and American right wing and espoused by the Nazi Party. This was, perhaps,
because the inherent racism and assumptions of the genetic inferiority and
degeneracy of the working classes were incompatible with Bolshevik ideas of
internationalism, equality and "dictatorship of the proletariat," and also because
policies of sterilisation were likely to reduce the low Soviet birth rate even further.
Instead, theorists and researchers mainly looked to forms of"positive" eugenics.
These not only included theories of selective breeding, but also crypto-genetic and
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
Mter 1931, when Semashko was no longer Commissar for Health, the mech-
anistic ideas of social hygiene regarding the engineering of the New Person were
denounced and replaced with a more voluntaristic approach that stressed the
responsibility of the individual to engage correctly with the environment.41 Towards
the late 1930s, Lamarckism, initially championed in 1928 by Anatoly Lunacharsky
in his role as Commissar for Enlightenment, 42 gained Party support, resulting in the
triumph of Lysenkoism over genetics. 43 Nevertheless, throughout the 1930s and
early 1940s, the emphasis on exposure of the body to sun, air and water remained
within Party promotion of fizkul'tura and sport as the moral duty of the good
citizen, a form of self-engineering to be undertaken for the national good. 44
Aleksandr Deineka was prominent in his engagement with the theme of open-
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air fizkul'tura in the 1930s-40s. Some of his works incorporated nudes and show
adjustments of subject matter after 1932 that can be related to the cultural shifts
Figure 5. Aleksandr Deineka, Playing Ball, 1932, oil on canvas, 123 x 129cm,
Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. V P Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (A/hom), (Moscow:
Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1972) plate 46.
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
away from explicit discourse on sexuality and eugenics. Morning Exercises 1932, for
instance, represents a supine couple doing physical jerks on a blanket, the man
clothed in shorts and singlet, the woman, nude. An abandoned child's toy is shown
at the edge of the blanket as if to signifY the marital and therefore moral basis of
this scene. Playing Ball (fig.5), also 1932, features images of three nude women in a
vague sylvan setting, bearing some resemblance to the "naked round dance of
women" indulged in by both left and right-wing German nudists and replicated
in Wilhelm Krege's film T#ge zu Kraft und Schonheit, 1925.45 The purchase of this
work by the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, suggests a certain contemporary legiti-
macy for such references which was not available, even then, for Morning Exercises,
a work that was not purchased by the state.
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After 1932, elements such as mixed sexes, combinations of nude and clothed
figures, or arcadian neo-classical settings do not recur in Deineka's represen-
tations of the nude. The nudity became strictly single-sex and mostly tied to
themes, such as opportunistic sea or river bathing, in which the absence of
clothing might be seen to have a certain narrative logic, and in which the
representations of genitalia were carefully blurred. Lunchbreak in the Donbas 1935
(fig.6) was one such painting. It offered a large-scale (200 x 249cm) re-working
of a small painting Midday 1932 (58.5 x 80cm), substituting male for female
workers. The cult of Stakhanovism began at the end of August 1935, so the work
Figure 6. Aleksandr Deineka, Lunchbreak in the Donbas, 1935, oil on canvas, 200 x 249cm, Museum
of Latvian and Russian Art, Riga. V P Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (Alborn), (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1972) plate 15.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEAlAND JOURNAl OF ART
The working clothing of the young man allows his powerful torso to be
given almost naked; the sarafan fitting closely round the figure of the girl
makes the construction of her figure apparent. 52
Party ambivalence to the legitimacy of the nude in the 1930s, however, seemed
more extreme with regard to public sculpture than it was towards painting. This is
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
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Figure 7. Vera Mukhina, The Industrial vrmrker and the Collective Farm Girl, 1937, stainless steel on
wooden framework, height- 24m (made for the Soviet Pavilion, Paris Exhibition 1937) Moscow.
Photo: Novosti Photo Library, London.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
plaster model for the monumental sculpture October, 1927, for example, was
awarded a prize by the Council of People's Commissars, SovNarKom, at the
exhibition 10 Years of Soviet Power in 1927 but was not cast or installed outside
the Oktiabrsky Theatre Leningrad until 1968.54 Matveev's decorative nude
sculpture, Young Girl 1937, was accessioned by the State Russian Museum,
Leningrad, but only cast in 1959 and installed in the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow,
in 1960.55
Vera Mukhina's decorative sculpture Bread 1939 (fig.8), suffered a similar fate.
Bread followed the canonical connection between women and agriculture, set up
during the collectivisation poster campaigns of the early 1930s and given its
highest form in Mukhina's monumental sculpture The Industrial Worker and the
Collective Farm Girl1937.56 In Bread, however, she used nude and semi-nude
figures of girls, with understated genitalia and nipples, to symbolise the present
and future fecundity and productivity of the Soviet motherland. Bread was one of
a series of patriotic, thematic sculptures, apparently commissioned for the new
Moskvoretsky Bridge over the Moscow River.57 This was a prestigious and high
profile location close to Red Square. The whole bridge project was part of
Stalin's grandiose plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, a plan cut short by the
Soviet involvement in World War II. The bridge was built, but the installation of
the sculptures was delayed-permanently. Bread was never installed and the
bronze version was not cast until 1957.58
There were some practical, contextual factors that may have delayed
production until the work was inappropriate to the ever-shifting demands of the
Party. Documents in the archive of the Committee for Art Affairs, for instance,
indicate that disorganisation, delays and poor quality in the industrial production
of sculpture were endemic problems during 1938 that were not improved by the
purge of the state-commissioning agency VseKoKhudozhnik in the late 1930s, or
by the onset of war. 59 Machine's son, moreover, has asserted that there was also a
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIAliST REAliSM
financial problem stemming from the entire budget having been spent on the
construction of the bridge. 60
Yet, there also remains the apparently unvoiced ethical/ aesthetic question of
the extent of the work's legitimacy. By comparison with the paintings that were
apparently legitimated in this period, there seems to have been less scope for
sculpture, usually located in urban settings, to create or be seen in a narrative
context in which nudity might be presented as materially logical or plausible.
Bread 5 tenuous link with the legitimate painterly theme of opportunistic, rural
skinny-dipping, provided by the destined location on a river bridge, would have
been undermined by the very public, urban nature of the actual site, in central
Moscow, under the walls of the Kremlin, where skinny-dipping was more likely
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
only of the body as a formal structure. The argument noted the possibility that
drapery was expendable in cases where it was unnecessary to the structure and
symbolic, expressive power of figurative sculpture. Mukhina, like Hegel, considered
that modern dress was unsuited to the revelation of the idealised body, but, by
avoiding the topic of sexuality, unlike Hegel or Winckelmann, she allowed for a
theoretical possibility of doing away with drapery altogether. 62
Mukhina's approach to the body as an asexual structure, corresponded closely
with the general line of Soviet eugenics discourse on the New Person as
engineerable mechanism, with which Deineka seems to have engaged. This is not
to deny the complex array of other factors that may also have inclined Mukhina
to this approach, including her own commitment to relating sculpture to
architecture and possible familiarity with the arguments of Winkelmann. 63
Nevertheless, Mukhina was personally connected to a specific aspect of Soviet
eugenics discourse through her husband, Dr A A Zamkov.
Zamkov, was an endocrinologist. Within Soviet medical and biological circles
in the 1920s-30s, endocrinology and the study of hormones seem to have been
regarded as the potential means to resolve a wide range of perceived human
problems including lack of vitality, physical disease, mental illness and
homosexuality, as well as issues concerning livestock breeding. 64 In the late 1920s
Zamkov worked at N K Kol'tsov's Moscow Eugenics Institute. 65 Kol'tsov became
both a family friend and subject for a sculptural bust by Mukhina in 1929, which
her biographer, Voronov has asserted to express Mukhina's view of him as an
embodiment of the New Person.66 Whatever Mukhina may have thought of
Kol'tsov, it is certainly true that through him and through Zamkov she had access
to elements of eugenics discourse largely related to the medicalisation of
women's bodies and a concommittant de-sexualisation and de-eroticisation of
these bodies. She was even commissioned, in 1932, for decorative bas-reliefs
entitled Bath Time in the Nursery School and First Steps, in the Commissariat for
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
Dr Pat Simpson, Senior Lecturer in History of Fine Art & Visual Culture, Department of
Art & Arts Therapies, Faculty ofArt & Design, University of Herifordshire
NOTES
This paper derives from a larger research project, "Sex and Socialist Realism: Stalinist Visual
Constructs of New Soviet Woman 1934-1953," the initial phase of which was supported by a
Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts from the British Arts and Humanities Research
Board, February 2002-January 2003.
Werner Rittich, Deutschlands IM?rden seit 1933 (Die Kunst: no date) and Paul Schultze-
Naumburg, Nordische Schonheit. Ihr Wunschbild im Leben und in der Kunst (Munich and Berlin:
1937) exemplify explicit Nazi discourse on the ideal nude body in art: A. Richardson, "The
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
Nazification ofWomen in Art," The Nazification ifArt: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in
the Third Reich, ed. B. Taylor and W van der Will (Winchester: Winchester Press, 1990) 62-73;
B. Hinz, "Foreword," Art of the Third Reich (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) no page nos; B. Hinz,
'"Degenerate' and 'Authentic' Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich," Art and Power:
Europe Under the Dictators, ed. D. Ades et al. (London: Thames and Hudson/Hayward Gallery,
1996) 330-3; B. Nicolai, "Techtonic Sculpture. Autonomous and Political Sculpture in
Germany," Art and Power 334-7.
2 A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Sphere, 1978) 329 cited in I. Golomstock, Totalitarian
Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic if China (London:
Collins Harvill, 1990) 264-5.
3 M.B. Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine," Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. S.
G. Solomon and J. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) 200-201.
4 D.Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1970) 256.
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5 N.A. Semashko, Nauka o zdorov'e (Moscow: Obshchestva sotsial'naia gigiena (1922) 1926) 53-4.
6 See for example: B. M. Zavadovsky, "The 'Physical' and the 'Biological' in the Process of Organic
Evolution;' Science at the Crossroads (London: Second International Conference on the History of
Science, 1931) 46.1-12 (1931) 7; D. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," journal if the History if Ideas
45.1 (October-December 1984) 564;Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 214.
7 Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 217; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left" 583.
8 Ibid 575-6, 578-9.
9 Dr Stella Churchill cited in "Eugenics, Socialism and Capitalism. Debate at Members'
Meeting, Tuesday 18 June," Eugenics Review 27 (1935-6) 116.
10 A. E. Gaissinovitch, "The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922-
1929," (Genetika, 4. 6 Oune 1968): 158-175) trans. M. B. Adams, journal if the History if Biology
13.1 (Spring 1980) 00022-3; F. L Bernstein, '"What Everyone Should Know About Sex':
Gender, Sexual Enlightenment and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia 1918-
1931 ,"unpublished Ph.D dissertation (Columbia University: UMI Dissertation Services, 1998)
7,35,65-93.
11 The article's title was "Theme and Image in Monumental Sculpture": V. Mukhina, "Tema i
obraz v monumental'noi skul'pture," Sovetskoe iskusstvo 2 (14 November 1944) 2.
12 A. A. Zhdanov (Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU), "Soviet Literature-The
Richest in Ideas: The Most Advanced Literature," Soviet Writers' Congress 1934. The Debate on
Socialist Realism and Modernism: Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and Others, ed. H. G. Scott
(London; Martin Lawrence, 1935) facsimile reprint (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 21.
13 P. Simpson, "On the Margins of Discourse? Visions of New Socialist Woman in Soviet Art
1949-50," Art History 21.2 Oune 1998) 250-51.
14 M. Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London:Yale UP, 1998) 138.
15 Mukhina, "Theme and Image" 2; N. V. Voronov, Vera Mukhina (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1989) 141, 264; V. P. Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (Albom) (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1972) 29. This assumption goes back to the very early days of the Revolution: V.
Friche, "V poshkakh novoi krasoty," Tvorchestvo 1-2 (1918) 5.
16 Voronov, Mukhina 57; Sysoev, Deineka 48.
17 Among these works were: Vera Mukhina, The Industrial Worker and the Collective Farm Girl,
193 7, 24m, stainless steel on wooden framework, (former) Exhibition of Economic
Achievements, Moscow; Nikolai Tomskii, Monument to Kirov, 1935, bronze and granite (cast
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAl OF ART
and installed in Kirov Square, Leningrad 1938); V. Ingal and V. Bogoliubov, Monument to
Odzhonikidze, 1939, painted plaster, Industry of Socialism exhibition, Frunze Embankment,
Moscow; Aleksandr Gerasimov, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, 1938, ol c, 300 x 390cm,
Tretiakov Gallery Moscow ; Boris Ioganson, In an Old Urals Factory, 1937, ole, 280 x 320cm,
Tretiakov Gallery; Mikhail Nesterov, Portrait of the Academician I.P Pavlov, 1935, ole, 81 x
121cm, Tretiakov Gallery; Sergei Merkurov, Figure of I. V. Stalin, Mechanisation Square, All-
Union Agricultural Exhibition, Moscow, 1938, concrete, h. 30m (destroyed); Vasili Efanov, An
Unforgettable Meeting, 1938, ole, 270 x 391cm, Tretiakov Gallery; N. Samokish, The Red Army
Crossing the Sivash, 1932, ol c, 32 x 21 em, Simferopol Art Museum; M. Manizer, Monument to
Lenin, Ulianovsk, 1940; S. Kagabadze, Monument to Stalin, Tblisi; E Fedorovskii, Theatrical decor
for Prince Igor, 1934; Martiros Saryan, theatrical decor for A. Spendiarov's opera, A/mast; Iraklii
Toidze, illustrations for Shota Rustavelli.
18 The model favoured by Lenin and others seems to have been based to some extent on
Rakhmetov, the ascetic hero of Chernyshevsky's novel Hlhat Is To Be Done?: E.A. Wood, The
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Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1997) 24-6; T. Clark, "The 'New Man's' Body: A Motif in Early Soviet Culture," Art r!f the
Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992, ed. M. Cullerne
Bown and B. Taylor (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1993) 40.
19 I. Kon, "Sexuality and Politics in Russia 1700-2000" in EX. Eder, L. Hall and G. Hekma,
Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999) 204,206,208-
9;Wood,The Baba 24-5.
20 "Pervonachal'noe nakoplenie burzhuaznoi ideologii (Ot nashego ekaterinoslavskogo
korrespondenta)," Pravda (5 August 1923) 2; A. Kollontai, "Make Way for the Winged Eros: A
Letter to Working Youth," (Molodaiia gvardiia, 3, 1923) Selected Writings r!fAlexandra Kollontai, ed.
A. Holt (London: Alison and Busby, 1977) 276-92; M. and A. Stern, Sex in the Soviet Union,
trans. M. E. Heine, (London: W H. Allen, 1981) 25-6.
21 A. S. Solovtsova and N. E Orlov, "Gomoseksualizm i reaktsiia dr-a Manoilova," Klinicheskaia
meditsina 5.9 (1927) 541-7; Bernstein, "'What Everyone Should Know About Sex"' 101.
22 I. Kon, "Sexuality and Culture," Sex and Russian Society, ed. I. Kon and J. Riordan (London:
Pluto Press, 1993) 23.
23 N. Bukharin, "Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR," Soviet Writers'
Congress, 255.
24 M. and A. Stern, Sex 41, 112, 123; I. Kon, "Sexuality and Culture" 23-4; K. Mehnert, The
Anatomy of Soviet Man, trans. M. Rosenbaum (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, (1958)
1961) 40-41.
25 For example, works by the painters Vasili Yakovlev and Solomon Nikritin were heavily
criticised for alleged pornography: M. Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin (Oxford: Phaidon,
1991) 113.
26 Richardson, "Nazification ofWomen" 62-73,77.
27 A. S. Serebrovskii, "V internatsional'nyi geneticheskii congress," Vestnik komunisticheskoi
akademii 23 (1927): 226; Gaissinovitch, "The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with
Lamarckism 1922-29" 0043;Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair 120-21.
28 Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 218-19; M. B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia," The Well-
Born Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, ed. M.B. Adams (Oxford and
New York: Oxford UP, 1990) 191,196-7. In 1933 the Communist Academy also denounced
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
eugenics, but as "Menshevising idealism": D. Joravsky, "Soviet Marxism and Biology Before
Lysenko," Journal of the History ofldeas 20.1 (October-December 1959) 103.
29 M. B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia" 191, 196-8; M. B. Adams, "The Soviet Nature-Nurture
Debate," Science and the Social Order, ed. L. R. Graham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990)
103, 105-7; Ia.A Iakovlev, "0 darvinizme I nekotorykh antidarvinistakh," Pravda (12 April
1937): 2-3 published simultaneously in Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie (12 April 1937) 2-3;
Academicians A. N. Bakh, B. A. Keller, Professor Kh. S. Koshtoiants, Candidates of biological
science A. Shcherbakov, R. Dozortseva, E. Polikarpova, N. Nuzhdin, S. Kraevoi and K.
Kosikov, "Lzheuchenym ne mesto v akademii nauk;' Pravda (11 January 1939) 4;V.V. Babkov,
"N. K. Kol'tsov I bor'ba za avtonomiu nauki i poiski podderzhki vlasti," Voprosy istorii
estestvoznaniia i tekhniki 3 (1989) 3-19.
30 A. Shcheketov, Iskusstvo 4 (1933): 121, cited in M. Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting
170. A Mother was acquired by the Tretiakov Gallery in 1934: X. Antonova, ed, The Tretyakov
Gallery Moscow: Painting, Graphic Art, Sculpture (Leningrad: Aurora, 1983) 345.
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AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART
48 Ibid 31-4,43.
49 In 1925 Semashko was senior Russian editor for three editions of a Russian/German medical
journal, Russko-nemetskii meditsinskii zhurnal, and a regular contributor to Deutsche medizinische
Wochenschr!ft 1923-5: S. G. Solomon, "Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health 1921-1930,"
Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, 179.
50 R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989, 133; M. and A. Stern, Sex 23-5.
51 van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic" 42-3.
52 Iskusstvo, 4 (1937) 121 cited in Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting 176.
53 J. Plamper, "Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s," The Russian
Review 60 (October 2001) 535.
54 0. Sopotsinsky, Art in the Soviet Union: Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, (Leningrad: Aurora,
(1977) 1978) 440.
55 Antonova, Tretiakov Gallery, 370.
56 V. E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley:
California UP, 1999) 79,101-110.
57 There were apparently six compositions commissioned for the (still empty) plinths on the
bridge: Revolution, Socialist Construction, Flame of the Revolution, Hymn of the Internationale,
Fertility and Bread: Voronov, Mukhina, 180, 187. Despite claims made in 1938, that Mukhina
was currently working on the sculptures for the newly completed bridge, there seems to be no
evidence in the records of the Committee for Art Affairs (RGALI) that they were
commissioned in 1938 and Bread is always dated as 1939: M. Zolotarev, "Desiat' mostov,"
Arkhitekurnaia gazeta 13 (3 March 1938) 3; Engineer V.M. Vakhurin, "Arkhitektura novykh
mostov moskvy," Stroitel'stvo moskvy 9-10 (1938) 13.
58 Voronov, Mukhina 187. The Russian Museum, Leningrad acquired the full size plaster version:
Ibid 194-5. The 1957 cast was acquired from the artist's family by the Tretiakov Gallery,
Moscow in 1960: Antonova, Tretiakov Gallery 370.
59 "Predsedateliu vsesoiuznogo komiteta po delam iskusstv, Tov. Nazarov," 28 March, 1938, 1-2,
RGALI f. 962, op.3, ed.khr 387, 2 January-25 December 1938; "Stenogramma soveshchanniia
u predsedatel'ia komitet po voprosu itogov obsledovaniia 'VseKoKhudozhnika'," RGALI
f.962, op.3, ed.khr 441,22 July 1938, 1-37.
60 Voronov, Mukhina 187.
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NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
61 S. E. Reid, "Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition
1935-41," The Russian Review 60 (April 2001) 174-5, 178-84;Voronov, Mukhina 180; I.
Grigor' ev, "Industriia sotsializma;' Pravda (19 March 1939) 11; A. Zotov, "Proeky stat'i Zotova
'Khudozhestvennaia vystavka industrii sotsializma'," RGALI f.962, op.6, ed.khr 624.
62 Mukhina, "Theme and image" 2; G. W F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) vol.t, 165-6; vol.2, 742-9,757.
63 V I. Mukhina, "Pis'mo v redaktsiiu," Arkhitekturnaia gazeta (28 February1938) 4. See also the
writings of David Arkin a contemporary architectural critic who presented a very similar
structural approach to monumental sculpture, with specific reference to Winckelmann: D.
Arkin, "Ledu" (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux) (Obrazy skul'ptury, 1961) Obraz arkhitectury I obrazy
skul'ptury, ed. D.A.Arkina (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990) 87.
64 Professor VA. Oppel', "Endokrinologiia kak osnova sovremennoi meditsiny," Leningradskii
meditsinskii zhurnal 3 (1926): 3-18; A. S. Solovtsova and N. F. Orlov, "Gomoseksualizm" 541-7;
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