Lenin - The reimagining of a Russian revolutionary
(16 Aug 2019) LEAD IN
The former Communist dictator and revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin was the architect of the Soviet Union.
Now an exhibition in Russia shows how local artists are grappling with his legacy of political repression and mass killings.
STORY-LINE:
In Russia there are few faces better known than that of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - or Lenin.
But for all that familiarity, few Russians have seen Lenin like this.
Here at this exhibition in Yekaterinburg, Lenin's face - once depicted throughout the former Soviet Union as part of a cult of personality - is being re-imagined.
There's Lenin as Pharaoh, Lenin as the French Sun King, and even Lenin as a craggy-faced part of the landscape.
In this work, the former Marxist revolutionary is re-imagined as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator.
Sergey Martynaov of Yekaterinburg's Antimuseum of Computers and Games explains the how the image came about:
Our Lenin is a cyber-Lenin, he says.
The idea is about combining history and technology. Lenin is still not buried - he is in a mausoleum. So we explored ideas of eternal life and biotechnology in our work by representing Lenin as a cyber-machine, a kind of Terminator, one who's still alive and will stay alive.
For this exhibition, which is being shown at the Museum of Soviet Life in Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.5 million people east of the Urals, artists were given free rein.
They were invited to explore Lenin's legacy from many perspectives.
The final products are an invitation to locals to reflect.
Such personalities as Vladimir Ilyich, who changed the course of history, they have very strong energy. Such personalities will not be forgotten, and will attract attention for many many years, says Martynaov.
In her work, artist Irina Podkorytova reflects on the Soviet cult of personality that sprung up during Lenin's life and endured well after his death.
With this bust, she draws a comparison with the myths surrounding the French Sun King, Louis XIV.
The bust stands aside two small bottles of French perfume.
He is a dictator who tore Russia apart, millions and millions of people were killed, millions left their motherland, and all his French perfumes in the form of (nice stories about) Lenin in Gorki, Lenin with children, Lenin with peasants, that will not be able to drown out that bad smell from his deeds. He is a dictator, this is our history, that's how it is, Podkorytova says.
Here in his workshop, Yekaterinburg artist Ivan Mikheev is tackling the subject using a new medium for him.
Mikheev's signature style is post-apocalyptic, or gothic.
But in this work, he depicts the former Soviet leader as a craggy rock face - a part of the landscape of Russia's 20th century history.
Lenin here is a part of history, and in this case, in this work as part of nature already, in which we live taking it for granted, not even thinking this is that very man who laid a powerful foundation for our lives, he explains.
Artist Anastasia Postnikova focuses on how traces of the former Soviet Union that Lenin helped to build are still felt today.
Her Lenin bust sits behind barbed wire.
She is using the work to make a comment on her childhood, spent in a closed city in Russia's Sverdlovsk region, 70 kilometres north of Yekaterinburg.
For some of the other 12 artists who've made contributions, the preoccupation is how much things have changed since Lenin's time.
Marina Kozlachkova is using Lenin's bust as a canvas to paint in her favourite colours - green and orange.
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Mr.LENIN russian communist MONUMENT silver edition @ Goose Lake town aka Gusinoozersk
Vladimir Lenin | Wikipedia audio article
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Vladimir Lenin
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
=======
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism.
Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Encouraging insurrection during Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he later campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the market-oriented New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations secured independence after 1917, but three re-united with Russia through the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin died at his dacha in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive individual, Lenin is viewed by supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, while critics on both the left and right emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings.
Lenin - The reimagining of a Russian revolutionary
(16 Aug 2019) LEAD IN
The former Communist dictator and revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin was the architect of the Soviet Union.
Now an exhibition in Russia shows how local artists are grappling with his legacy of political repression and mass killings.
STORY-LINE:
In Russia there are few faces better known than that of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - or Lenin.
But for all that familiarity, few Russians have seen Lenin like this.
Here at this exhibition in Yekaterinburg, Lenin's face - once depicted throughout the former Soviet Union as part of a cult of personality - is being re-imagined.
There's Lenin as Pharaoh, Lenin as the French Sun King, and even Lenin as a craggy-faced part of the landscape.
In this work, the former Marxist revolutionary is re-imagined as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator.
Sergey Martynaov of Yekaterinburg's Antimuseum of Computers and Games explains the how the image came about:
Our Lenin is a cyber-Lenin, he says.
The idea is about combining history and technology. Lenin is still not buried - he is in a mausoleum. So we explored ideas of eternal life and biotechnology in our work by representing Lenin as a cyber-machine, a kind of Terminator, one who's still alive and will stay alive.
For this exhibition, which is being shown at the Museum of Soviet Life in Yekaterinburg, a city of 1.5 million people east of the Urals, artists were given free rein.
They were invited to explore Lenin's legacy from many perspectives.
The final products are an invitation to locals to reflect.
Such personalities as Vladimir Ilyich, who changed the course of history, they have very strong energy. Such personalities will not be forgotten, and will attract attention for many many years, says Martynaov.
In her work, artist Irina Podkorytova reflects on the Soviet cult of personality that sprung up during Lenin's life and endured well after his death.
With this bust, she draws a comparison with the myths surrounding the French Sun King, Louis XIV.
The bust stands aside two small bottles of French perfume.
He is a dictator who tore Russia apart, millions and millions of people were killed, millions left their motherland, and all his French perfumes in the form of (nice stories about) Lenin in Gorki, Lenin with children, Lenin with peasants, that will not be able to drown out that bad smell from his deeds. He is a dictator, this is our history, that's how it is, Podkorytova says.
Here in his workshop, Yekaterinburg artist Ivan Mikheev is tackling the subject using a new medium for him.
Mikheev's signature style is post-apocalyptic, or gothic.
But in this work, he depicts the former Soviet leader as a craggy rock face - a part of the landscape of Russia's 20th century history.
Lenin here is a part of history, and in this case, in this work as part of nature already, in which we live taking it for granted, not even thinking this is that very man who laid a powerful foundation for our lives, he explains.
Artist Anastasia Postnikova focuses on how traces of the former Soviet Union that Lenin helped to build are still felt today.
Her Lenin bust sits behind barbed wire.
She is using the work to make a comment on her childhood, spent in a closed city in Russia's Sverdlovsk region, 70 kilometres north of Yekaterinburg.
For some of the other 12 artists who've made contributions, the preoccupation is how much things have changed since Lenin's time.
Marina Kozlachkova is using Lenin's bust as a canvas to paint in her favourite colours - green and orange.
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