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The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
factories – a system that the director of the Moscow Design Museum, Alexandra Sankova, considers to be a historical injustice.29 Anonymity was typical of industrial designers under state socialism. The names of decorative artists were usually known from exhibitions, but the marginal status of these artists in Soviet artistic communities diminished their social outreach and fame. My intention, however, is not to ‘restore justice’ through a ‘heroic’ approach to Soviet design by finding some unrecognised Soviet Raymond Loewy. Rather, I speak to the ongoing scholarly
beyond the optical. Soviet design of the 168 Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man 6.8 Inspection of metro cars, in How We Built the Metro. future would enter the realm of the supra-visual; articulating new forms of social life, it would articulate a new sensuality, engaging the haptic, visual-tactile sensorium. This, at least, was the vision of one of the pioneers of Soviet constructivism, Moisei Ginzburg, as elaborated in his treatise of 1934, Housing. Ginzburg criticized Western modernism because rather than doing away with ornament, it had merely
object which was by that point seen as either naively utopian or cynical.1 Meanwhile, the tendency towards studio craft and easel art forms among decorative artists grew completely apart from the goals of a changing Soviet economy. The KARPOVA 9781526139870 PRINT.indd 199 20/01/2020 11:10 200 Comradely objects comradely object lost its relevance even more with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and remains an incomplete project. This inquiry into the post-avant-garde biography of socialist objects presents an alternative to the two narratives of Soviet design
put it, but artistic image follows function.21 A particularly interesting instance of the post-Stalin reconsideration of realism was made by the art critic Aleksandr Chekalov at a lecture in the decorative-applied art section of the Moscow branch of the Artists’ Union in January 1959. Like Kagan, Chekalov belonged to a young generation of art critics (he was 31 at the time). His lecture, titled ‘Peculiarities of Reflecting Life in Artistic-Industrial Objects’, outlined the principles and objectives of emerging Soviet design. At the start, Chekalov proposed three
of expressive, modern electronic devices should always be balanced. After all, ‘what is most essential is integrity, interconnectedness and compositional unity. It is not even that important if these are achieved by contrast or by similarity.’2 This text illustrates remarkably Soviet design professionals’ recognition of the active role of objects in the home. Hitherto unknown objects that differed in their formal and functional qualities, in particular the ‘newcomers’ such as the TV set or vacuum cleaner, forced the inhabitants to think differently about their home
Man I depart from an established paradigm. For the most part, historians have considered collective spaces as the unique product of Soviet design. These include collective houses (dom-kommuny), as imagined by the constructivist OSA group and realized in buildings such as the Narkomfin block of apartments by Ginzburg and Milinis; workers’ clubs, such Melnikov’s Rusakov club;8 or the visionary architecture from the early 1920s, which remained on paper. Accordingly, Soviet designs were seen as designs for the collective, for the masses. Communist designs were, in fact
contemporary western European shift towards metadesign (the approach to each industrially produced object as ‘a part of the same combinatorial, commutative milieu’).9 Soviet designers reconceptualised consumer objects as tools, or props, of everyday activities. As Tom Cubbin demonstrated in his article on the Soviet design of domestic equipment,10 this conceptual move was inspired by the writings of the philosopher Karl Kantor, head of the laboratory of technical aesthetics at VNIITE. Kantor drew inspiration from a particular line of productivist thinking of the 1920s that
’s article. Towards more degrees of freedom In 1965 Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo SSSR introduced an editorial – clearly modelled on the British journal Design – which became a platform for expressing doubts about the principles of modern Soviet design and offering solutions. In the very first editorial, Mikhail Ladur openly lamented the loss of the ‘great mystery of art’ in pursuit of rationality by ‘the admirers of the aesthetics of numbers and compasses’.26 ‘Mystery’ was no longer rejected as being fake or fetishistic but was instead seen as necessary for art to remain
Ukrainian defence industry and Western sanctions on dual-use technology. Producing new advanced weapons systems has proved difficult, and the modernisation process has largely meant the upgrading of Soviet-designed equipment. Notwithstanding such questions, informed Russian and Western observers agree that there is good progress in modernising the Russian armed forces, albeit from a rather low level. The target for the modernisation of equipment appears to be within reach: in spring 2017 Putin indicated that the share of modern weapons and equipment across the armed