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Russian revolution

Independent, The (London), May 7, 2008 by Hannah Duguid

The Moscow Photobiennale features cutting-edge artists, but it's the Communist iconographers who are drawing the crowds. Hannah Duguid finds out why

When Joseph Stalin died in 1953, his body was embalmed and lay in state in Moscow, displayed in a crimson-lined coffin, surrounded by red roses. So many people came to see the spectacle of their dead leader that there was a stampede and hundreds were killed.

A photograph of Stalin lying in state is currently hanging in Moscow, at the Central Exhibition Hall, very close to the Kremlin. Alongside him, there are pictures of Nikita Krushchev, the leader who denounced him and had his body removed from the Lenin Mausoleum. Krushchev appears to be very much the political bon viveur, laughing as he conducts business on a steamboat, sitting within a circle of uniformed companions.

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The photographs are not critical of the leaders they represent, which is hardly surprising as they were taken by Dmitri Baltermants, who became the official Kremlin photographer in 1949 and photographed every General Secretary of the Communist party from Stalin until Gorbachev. He died in 1990.

What is surprising, however, is the way that the iconography of the Communist era has taken centre stage at the Moscow Photobiennale, and the fascination it evokes in admiring crowds.

Baltermants made his reputation during the Second World War when he photographed the Red Army. He covered the battle of Stalingrad and went with soldiers to Ukraine, Poland and Germany, until the Red Army reached Berlin in 1945. Most of Baltermants' pictures, however, were not published: many were censored, considered incompatible with the positive, morale-boosting image that Communist party leaders wanted their people to see.

His most famous photograph of this time, taken in 1942, is called Grief. Black clouds fill the sky above a barren field, littered with the bodies of dead men. Their women have just arrived and they are bent double with despair, crouched over their loved ones. It is a shattering scene, the aftermath of a Nazi massacre in the Crimean village of Kerch. It has all the pathos of Robert Capa's 1933 photograph of the death of a Loyalist soldier in Spain.

After the war the Communist party realised that Baltermants could be useful and employed him to take propaganda pictures. He was sent him all over the Soviet Union to photograph happy workers: robust women wearing headscarves and plump, smiling children. He shot the grand technology of new industries: the giant hydroelectric power station at Volga and the laying of thousands of miles of train tracks and power cables across the USSR.

The images celebrate the success of Communism. There are Olympic heroes - the silver medal-winning weightlifter Yuri Vlassov stands by his dumbbell; the world record-holding athlete Valery Brumel appears unassuming, an everyday hero in his neat suit, hat in hand.

Baltermants ventured to the outreaches of the USSR and captured the Eastern influences in Kyrgyzstan and Siberia. The harshness of life on the tundra is reflected in the weatherbeaten faces of old men and women, wrapped in thick coats made from matted animal fur. Scenes of this ancient way of living were taken around the same time as images of contemporary urban life in Moscow, where gargantuan skyscrapers, built by Stalin, dominate the skyline. There are scenes from the 1960s: street life, fashionably dressed young women and an image of an elegant display of hats in the window of a milliner's shop. And in all of the pictures, everyone appears to be happy; everything seems to be in good order. There is no hint, on the faces of either peasants or urbanites, that all is not well.

Baltermants' pictures were printed in Ogonyok magazine. During Soviet times, its propagandist images verged on the kitsch. In an exhibition in the Zurab Tsereteli gallery in central Moscow, there are a series of pictures from Ogonyok commissioned during the 1950s. Called Heroes of the Fifth Five Year Plan, the photographs are obviously staged and are all set in the workplace. In one, there is a soldier defending the far-flung borders of the USSR, the Soviet red star on his fur hat standing out amid the grey shades of his thick coat, machine gun and the dark leaves of the evergreen trees behind him. In other portraits, robust peasant girls milk cows and harvest apples, their male counterparts also a healthy shade of brown, with muscles that ripple beneath clean white shirts. Despite the exertion, no one has broken into a sweat. There is not a speck of dirt on the cheeks of either factory worker or farm girl. Everything is wonderful, which is why it appears so ridiculous.

In the same gallery, there is a story of life in the USSR that better reflects reality. It is called View from a Car and the photographs, from the 1950s, are by a young Soviet artist called Yevgeni Shcheglov. The pictures were taken discreetly while he was being driven through the streets of Moscow. They are unofficial photographs - what he was doing was strictly forbidden - and they were never exhibited during Soviet times; Shcheglov only showed them to his friends. They are not dramatic images; they show people going about their daily business, but without the gloss of propaganda. The streets look ordinary, they are not so many cars around and the USSR seems more downbeat than official pictures would have you believe. The view in the photographs includes the rear view mirror, steering wheel and windscreen of the car. The sense of being inside the car, looking out, gives the pictures a tension, a sense of discretion, like a CCTV camera. We can see them but they can't see us. This underlying atmosphere of fear and secrecy is more revealing of what daily life in the USSR must have been like - and the forced smiles of peasant workers now make more sense.

Russian revolution

Independent, The (London), May 7, 2008 by Hannah Duguid

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