Socialist realism is our everything: How Nikita Khrushchev dispersed an exhibition of avant-garde artists. Before and after the defeat: how Khrushchev insulted artists at an exhibition in the Manege Khrushchev at an exhibition in the Manege 1962

On December 1, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev visited an exhibition of avant-garde artists from the New Reality studio in Manege, dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR.

This is how Leonid Rabichev recalled this event, three decades later, in the story “Manege 1962, before and after...”.
“Nikita Sergeevich stood in the middle of the hall, almost entirely covered with paintings by Eli Belyutin’s students. I carefully followed the facial expressions of Nikita Sergeevich’s face - it was like the face of a child, or a common man, then it broke into a smile, then suddenly it showed resentment, then it became cruel, deliberately rude, deep folds either cut through the forehead, then disappeared, the eyes narrowed and widened.

Each of us saw three or four screaming leaders and heard what they were shouting. One heard Shelepin, the other Mazurov, Furtseva. I personally stood next to Suslov and Ilyichev. Members of the government with excited and angry faces, some turning pale, others blushing, shouted in unison: “Arrest them! Destroy! Shoot!".

Next to me, Suslov with raised fists shouted: “Strangle them!” Something happened that cannot be described in words. The situation was so opposite to what was expected and so paradoxical and unpredictable that at the first moment I was confused, I could not understand that this was addressed to us, to me in particular.

Meanwhile, Nikita Sergeevich raised his hand, and everyone fell silent. In the silence that followed, he said: “Mr. Belyutin! Come to me!” Pale, but not yet broken, Eli Mikhailovich approached Khrushchev. “Who are the parents?” - asked Khrushchev. “My father,” replied Eli Mikhailovich, “is a famous public figure.” There was something mystical in this answer. There were public figures in other countries, but our parents could have been workers and peasants - that’s good! Employees, scientists and people in creative professions are worse, but also possible. Maybe Khrushchev considered only himself a famous public figure? He was somewhat taken aback, did not elaborate and asked: “What is this?” (They meant our paintings.) Eli Mikhailovich answered - I don’t remember exactly how, what the words were, but according to the meaning - he began to talk about the content, what the works were about - a house in Ulyanovsk, a portrait, a landscape, the Volga. But someone again shouted: “Pederasts!”, someone: “We must arrest them!” Shit!". And Khrushchev said: “Shit!” And everyone started shouting again, and again Nikita Sergeevich raised his hand, and everyone fell silent, and he said: “Mr. Belyutin! You wanted to communicate with capitalists, we provide you with this opportunity. Foreign passports have already been issued for all of you, in twenty-four hours you will all be taken to the border and expelled from the Motherland.”

- What are you doing, Nikita Sergeevich? - everyone around shouted. - They should not be released abroad! They need to be arrested! And suddenly someone drew attention to the long-haired, bearded artist in a red sweater, to the now deceased, kind and talented Alyosha Kolli, and shouted: “Here is a living pederast!” Both members of the government and members of the ideological commission all extended their fingers, surrounded him, shouting: “Here is a living pederast!”

Khrushchev approached the first painting hanging to the left of the door and asked: “Who is the author?”

The next picture showed a young man in a somewhat transformed form.

Boris Zhutovsky approached.

- Who are the parents? - asked Khrushchev.

“Employees,” Boris Zhutovsky seems to have answered.

- Employees? This is good. What is this? (About the picture.)

“This is my self-portrait,” Boris answered.

- How could you, such a handsome young man, write such shit?

Boris Zhutovsky shrugged, I mean, he wrote.

“For two years for logging,” Khrushchev ordered someone.

“Workers are good,” said Nikita Sergeevich, “I was a worker too.” What is this?

“Cosmonauts,” answered Shorts.

- What kind of astronauts are these? I know everyone personally. None of them are gay, they are ordinary people. Shit.

Nikita Sergeevich, obviously by association, turned to Furtseva and said that every evening he turns on the radio, and all jazz and jazz, and not a single choir, not a single Russian folk song.

“We, Nikita Sergeevich, will correct the situation,” Furtseva said. For the next two months, to change all programs, Russian folk songs were performed from morning to evening.

- Why did you bring me here? - he turned to Ilyichev. - Why didn’t you figure this out yourself?

— The issue has received international publicity, people write about them abroad, we don’t know what to do with them.

“All members of the party should be expelled from the party,” said Khrushchev, “all members of the union should be expelled from the union,” and headed for the exit.

Vera Ivanovna Preobrazhenskaya said: “Well, okay, you are all homosexuals, but who am I?” We stood in the square and wondered what would happen to us? How many hours are left? What to believe? Will they be expelled from the country? Will they be arrested? Will they send you to logging? Will they be fired from work, expelled from the union? After all, it was not just anyone, but the head of state who said all this. What's right?

As a result of the events at the exhibition, the next day a devastating report was published in the Pravda newspaper, which served as the beginning of a campaign against formalism and abstractionism in the USSR. Khrushchev demanded that all participants in the exhibition be expelled from the Union of Artists and the CPSU, but it turned out that practically no one was a member of the CPSU, nor the Union of Artists, or any of the participants in the exhibition.

News

Visit to the exhibition N.S. Khrushchev

The exhibition was visited by the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev. He sharply criticized their work, using obscene language. As a result of the events at the exhibition, a campaign against formalism and abstractionism was launched in the press.

Khrushchev walked around the hall three times, then asked questions to the artists. Mikhail Suslov drew Khrushchev’s attention to some details of the paintings, after which Khrushchev began to be indignant:

“What are these faces? Don't you know how to draw? My grandson can draw even better! ...What is this? Are you guys or damned homosexuals, how can you write like that? Do you have a conscience?

Khrushchev was especially indignant at the work of artists Yu. Sooster, V. Yankilevsky and B. Zhutovsky. Khrushchev demanded a ban on the activities of the exhibits:

“Very general and unclear. This is what, Belyutin, I tell you as Chairman of the Council of Ministers: the Soviet people do not need all this. You see, I'm telling you this! ... Ban! Ban everything! Stop this nonsense! I command! I speak! And keep track of everything! And on radio, and on television, and in the press, root out all fans of this!”

Contrary to some reports that appeared in the Western press, Khrushchev did not tear down the paintings from the walls. However, after viewing the exhibition, he stated that the Soviet people did not need all this.

Literature

Gerchuk Yu. Hemorrhage in the Moscow Union of Artists, or Khrushchev in the Manege on December 1, 1962. - M.: New Literary Review, 2008

Sculptor Ernst Neizvestny

Unwittingly, Unknown became the central figure of this historical scandal. Neizvestny joined Eliya Bilyutin's studio, which formed the backbone of the exhibition, temporarily - first for a small exhibition at Taganka, and then at the Manege.

Khrushchev always struck me as a living person... Misguided, illiterate, cunning, the whole package. But alive, who could change his mind, who could react to something

Boris Zhutovsky

By the way, in addition to the “Belyutinites”, who, according to art critics, cannot be called masters of the first rank, such outstanding artists as Vladimir Yankilevsky and Yuri Sobolev exhibited their works.

Ernst Neizvestny was older than the other participants, and also fought. It so happened that later, for many, he became exactly the sculptor whom Khrushchev called him names. Neizvestny himself, by the way, did not like to remember the scandal. But still, in various interviews he sometimes spoke about this event. “We, the artists, were lined up on the top platform in front of the stairs. But even there we could hear the screams of Nikita Sergeevich, who entered the building with his retinue. When he caught up with us and asked who was in charge, for some reason Ilyichev pointed in my direction. And Khrushchev attacked me with all his might,” the sculptor later recalled.

According to Neizvestny, when Khrushchev approached his work, a “real sabbath” began: “Khrushchev shouted like crazy that I was eating up the people’s money.” The unknown person tried to explain to the Secretary General that he was not a professional and did not understand art. “Everyone around was shaking with fear,” the sculptor recalls. “And Khrushchev, having calmed down, extended his hand to me in farewell: “I like people like that.” There is an angel and a devil within you. Keep in mind, if the devil wins, we will destroy you!” The most paradoxical and incredible result of this scandal was probably the fact that it was Ernst Neizvestny who later erected the famous black and white monument on Khrushchev’s grave.

Artist Boris Zhutovsky

Another artist who was sharply criticized by the head of state was Boris Zhutovsky - Khrushchev demanded that he be sent to logging. Later, on the air of Echo of Moscow, he recalled about the head of state: “He always gave me the impression of a living person. In relation to all the other people I have ever encountered from the country’s leadership, he seemed to me to be a living person. Misguided, illiterate, cunning, the whole set. But alive, who could change his mind, who could react to something."

Zhutovsky said that he communicated with Khrushchev when he was already living at his dacha after his resignation. And allegedly the former general secretary apologized to him, saying: “Don’t be angry with me, don’t hold a grudge. I don’t remember how I got to the Manezh. Someone took me there. I shouldn’t have gone there. I the head of the party. And someone brought me in. And we were walking downstairs, and suddenly one of the great artists said to me: “They don’t have Stalin.” And then people started shouting at you. took advantage."

Artist Leonid Rabichev

According to the recollections of exhibition participant Leonid Rabichev, the Secretary General, surrounded by his entourage, appeared in the Manege at about half past nine in the morning. First, the head of state went to look at the works of monumentalists, including Grekov and Deineka. Then Khrushchev ended up in the Falk and Shterenberg halls, where, according to eyewitnesses, he no longer liked it. Later he went to the halls of the “Belyutin people”.

Rabichev writes that the artists, who were excitedly waiting for Khrushchev, decided to install a chair in the center of the hall - they assumed that the head of state would want to communicate: “He will listen, and we will take turns telling him what and how we did,” quotes one of the participants Rabichev. He admits that, like other artists, he was very nervous. And when the Secretary General climbed the stairs, everyone began to applaud.

However, addressing the participants, Khrushchev seemed to say: “So you are the ones who do the daub, well, now I’ll look at your daub.”

I carefully followed the facial expressions of Nikita Sergeevich - it was like the face of a child, or a commoner. It was clear that he painfully wanted to understand what kind of pictures these were, what kind of people were in front of him, so as not to get into trouble, not to become a victim of their deception

Leonid Rabichev

artist, participant of the exhibition in Manege

Thirteen artists stood by their paintings and listened to the name-calling of the head of state. Rabichev recalls that the government members accompanying him began shouting at the same time. There were shouts of “Arrest them! Destroy! Shoot!". Next to Rabichev stood Suslov, who raised his fists and shouted “Strangle them!” “Something happened that cannot be described in words,” the artist recalls.

Studio head Eli Belyutin and party member Leonid Ilyichev

The offer to participate in the exhibition “XXX Years of the Moscow Moscow Union of Artists” came to Eli Belyutin and his students quite unexpectedly. Shortly before the Manege, they organized their own small exhibition at Taganka, which was joined by other authors who were not formally part of this circle.

The resonance turned out to be O more than the “Belyutinites” expected - foreign journalists visited the exhibition, and articles immediately appeared in the Western press about Soviet avant-garde artists who break all the canons. Literally a few days later, one of the high-ranking party functionaries - Secretary of the Central Committee Leonid Ilyichev suggested Belyutin to exhibit these works in the Manege.

Ilyichev, by the way, was a great connoisseur of art. Khrushchev’s son Sergei Nikitich later recalled that on the walls of Ilyichev’s apartment “there were canvases not only in the style of socialist realism, but also paintings executed in a much freer manner, even to the point of outright abstractions.”

So, it was thanks to Ilyichev and his personal persistence that the works of Bilyutin’s students appeared in the Manege. After Ilyichev’s personal call to Belyutin, employees arrived from the Central Committee, who packed and took the works to the Manezh - where the paintings occupied several halls on the top floor of the exhibition space.

On September 28, 1953, Nikita Khrushchev was elected first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. The initiator of the Thaw, Nikita Sergeevich was also the most ardent critic of contemporary art. Life recalls what kind of exhibitions and how the Soviet government crushed it, starting with humiliations in 1962 and ending with bulldozers in 1974.

Culture shock

In December 1962, the head of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev, upon contact with modern art, was offended in the best of feelings and poured out his anger in the ways available to him - by swearing at the artists and spitting with relish at the painting of Leonid Mechnikov, upon looking at which his patience apparently snapped.

The 1962 exhibition in the Moscow Manege was the first exhibition of Soviet avant-garde artists, more precisely abstractionists, which was held by the New Reality studio, headed by Eliy Belyutin. The “new reality” is a unique Soviet phenomenon that could only come to fruition thanks to the so-called thaw. The reason for the exhibition was chosen quite decently - the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR. But Khrushchev turned out to be unprepared for the perception of abstract art.

This is pederasty! Why are pederasts 10 years old, and this should be the order?<...>Does it evoke any feeling? I want to spit! These are the feelings it evokes

By the way, the picture that Khrushchev spat on was subsequently groomed and cherished by Leonid Mechnikov - he circled the place of the spit and took the audience to see it. It also became the highlight of the reconstruction of the exhibition “New Reality” in 2012 in the same Manege.

Few of the artists survived - one of them, Pavel Nikonov, gained worldwide fame and became a People's Artist of the Russian Federation. Just like the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who recently left the world, who received, if not a spit from Khrushchev, but an honorable reprimand for his “factory of freaks.” Ironically, it was Neizvestny who made the monument to Khrushchev on his grave at the Novodevichy cemetery.

Another exhibition of “New Reality”, but not in the Manege, but at the MMOMA Museum of Contemporary Art, will open on October 19, 2016. There will be several paintings from that devastating exhibition, however, as Olga Uskova, the main collector of works of this movement and the head of the Foundation for Russian Abstract Art, says, their task is to talk about the artistic phenomenon, and not to reconstruct the 1962 exhibition, in which Khrushchev’s spit was not so already a significant event.

Twenty staunch avant-garde artists and the shortest exhibitions

Also in 1962, Khrushchev said:

We evaluate that the position (in art. - Note Life) we have good. But there is also a lot of garbage. It needs to be cleaned.

And they started cleaning. However, according to researchers of the avant-garde movement of those years, if the entire party apparatus believed that these paintings were so bad and harmful, they would have been destroyed and their authors imprisoned. Nevertheless, not a single one of the defeated artists was deprived of their freedom; Khrushchev’s order to expel them from the CPSU could not be implemented, since none of them were members of the party. Somehow they were able to continue their work and even teach (the same head of “New Reality” Eli Belyutin), and their works were even periodically taken to international exhibitions from the USSR.

In the late 1960s, already under Brezhnev, the so-called twenty artists began to form in Moscow, the main one of whom was the leader of domestic nonconformism, Oscar Rabin.

On January 22, 1967, together with the Lianozovites (a group of artists) and collector Alexander Glezer, he organized the first of the shortest exhibitions in their history at the Druzhba cultural center. Two hours after the opening, KGB officers came and ordered the disgrace to be closed.

In the same months, the artists attempted a number of exhibitions, and one turned out shorter than the other - the exhibition of Eduard Zyuzin in the Aelita cafe lasted three hours, the exhibition at the Institute of International Relations - forty-five minutes, and Oleg Tselkov in the House of Architects - fifteen minutes.

Bulldozer exhibition

In the fall of 1974, another significant event occurred in the informal art community. On the outskirts of the Soviet capital, in Bitsevsky Park, the same Rabin with the already formed “twenty” decides to hold an exhibition in the open air - a sort of vernissage. It was attended by journalists from foreign news agencies, diplomats, as well as another group of painters who came to support their colleagues. Not far from the intersection, artists hung their paintings on makeshift stands.

The scope of the exhibition was small - a few dozen works and participants, but the reaction of the authorities was not long in coming. About half an hour after the start of the exhibition, bulldozers and dump trucks arrived at the exhibition site, and about a hundred plainclothes policemen arrived, who began to crush and break paintings, beat and arrest artists, spectators and foreign journalists.

The event caused a resonance at the world level. After publications in foreign media, the authorities decided to rehabilitate themselves by allowing the G20 artists to hold the same exhibition in Izmailovo two weeks later. It did not last, however, much longer - about four hours, and the work was not of the same level (the destroyed and confiscated works could not be returned from the first vernissage). But later the artists remembered these four hours in Izmailovo as “half a day of freedom.”

Avant-gardists and hippies in "Beekeeping"

And yet, it was then that the ice began to break. A year later, in September 1975, the first truly free (because it was allowed) exhibition of avant-garde art took place in the VDNH "Beekeeping" pavilion. It went down in history as an “exhibition in Beekeeping.” It was organized by artists Vladimir Nemukhin, Dmitry Plavinsky, and curated by Eduard Drobitsky. In addition to the “twenty” in Beekeeping, Pyotr Belenok, Nikolai Vechmotov, Anatoly Zverev, Vyacheslav Kalinin and other.

Several hundred works, from paintings to hippie performances, were exhibited at the exhibition, which lasted only a week, but opened the door to new Soviet art.

The current sectologist, and then an 18-year-old hippie, Alexander Dvorkin, in his book of memoirs “Teachers and Lessons” recalls this exhibition:

To admire the “almost forbidden” works of fans of abstract art, surrealism and other non-conformism, people lined up in a kilometer-long line, along which mounted police rode sullenly. A total of 522 works were presented under the arches of the pavilion. The group "Hair", of course, did not stand aside either - the "Hippie Flag" they made, measuring one and a half by two and a half meters, attracted everyone's attention. The collective authors were succinctly listed as Limey, Mango, Ophelia, Shaman, Shmel, Chicago. We will not reveal the secret completely, but among these pseudonyms there was one who bore the name Alexander Dvorkin.

Organized Freedom

After the resounding success of the exhibition at Beekeeping, the authorities allowed the “twenty” to have their own premises and exhibition area. In the fall of 1976, in the newly opened premises of the City Committee of Graphic Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, an exhibition of eight luminaries of the movement was opened - Otari Kandaurov, Dmitry Plavinsky, Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Nemukhin, Dmitry Plavinsky, Nikolai Vechtomov, Alexander Kharitonov and Vladimir Kalinin. Since then, the “twenty” settled in the city committee of graphic artists and stayed there until their last exhibition in 1991.

One of the leaders of Soviet unofficial art, artist Eliy Belyutin, whose works were criticized by Nikita Khrushchev at the 1962 exhibition at the Manege, died at the age of 87 in Moscow.

On December 1, 1962, an exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR (MOSH) was to open in the Moscow Manege. Part of the exhibition's works was presented by the exhibition "New Reality" - a movement of artists organized in the late 1940s by the painter Eliy Belyutin, continuing the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. Belyutin studied with Aristarkh Lentulov, Pavel Kuznetsov and Lev Bruni.

The art of the “New Reality” was based on the “theory of contact” - the desire of a person through art to restore a sense of internal balance, disturbed by the influence of the surrounding world, with the help of the ability to generalize natural forms, preserving them in abstraction. In the early 1960s, the studio united about 600 Belyutins.

In November 1962, the first exhibition of the studio was organized on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street. 63 artists of the “New Reality” took part in the exhibition together with Ernst Neizvestny. The head of the Union of Polish Artists, Professor Raymond Zemsky, and a group of critics managed to come specially from Warsaw to its opening. The Ministry of Culture gave permission for the presence of foreign correspondents, and the next day for a press conference. A TV report about the opening day was broadcast at Eurovision. At the end of the press conference, the artists were asked, without explanation, to take their works home.

On November 30, the head of the Department of Culture of the Central Committee, Dmitry Polikarpov, addressed Professor Eliy Belyutin and, on behalf of the newly created Ideological Commission, asked to restore the Tagansky exhibition in its entirety in a specially prepared room on the second floor of the Manege.

The exhibition, completed overnight, received Furtseva’s approval along with the kindest parting words; the works were taken from the authors’ apartments by Manege employees and delivered by transport from the Ministry of Culture.

On the morning of December 1, Khrushchev appeared on the threshold of the Manege. At first, Khrushchev began to look at the exhibition quite calmly. Over the long years of being in power, he got used to visiting exhibitions, got used to the way works were arranged according to a once-worked-out scheme. This time the exhibition was different. The talk was about the history of Moscow painting, and among the old paintings were those that Khrushchev himself had banned back in the 1930s. He might not have paid any attention to them if the secretary of the Union of Soviet Artists, Vladimir Serov, known for his series of paintings about Lenin, had not started talking about the paintings of Robert Falk, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Drevin, calling them daubs for which museums pay huge amounts of money workers. At the same time, Serov operated with astronomical prices at the old exchange rate (a monetary reform had recently passed).

Khrushchev began to lose control of himself. Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee on ideological issues, who was present at the exhibition, immediately began to develop the theme of daub, “monsters that artists deliberately draw,” what the Soviet people need and do not need.

Khrushchev walked three times around the large hall, where the works of 60 artists from the New Reality group were presented. He then quickly moved from one picture to another, then returned back. He paused at the portrait of Alexei Rossal’s girlfriend: “What is this? Why is one eye missing? She’s some kind of morphine addict!”

Next, Khrushchev quickly moved on to Lucian Gribkov’s large composition “1917.” “What kind of disgrace is this, what kind of freaks? Where is the author?” “How could you imagine the revolution like that? What kind of thing is this? Don’t you know how to draw? My grandson can draw even better.” He swore at almost all the paintings, pointing his finger and uttering the already familiar, endlessly repeated set of curses.

The next day, December 2, 1962, immediately after the publication of the Pravda newspaper with an accusatory government communiqué, crowds of Muscovites rushed to the Manege to see the reason for the “highest rage,” but did not find a trace of the exhibition located on the second floor. The paintings of Falk, Drevin, Tatlin and others, which were cursed by Khrushchev, were removed from the exhibition on the first floor.

Khrushchev himself was not happy with his actions. The handshake of reconciliation took place in the Kremlin on December 31, 1963, where Eliy Belyutin was invited to celebrate the New Year. The artist had a short conversation with Khrushchev, who wished him and “his comrades” successful work for the future and “more understandable” painting.

In 1964, “New Reality” began to work in Abramtsevo, through which about 600 artists passed, including from the original art centers of Russia: Palekh, Kholuy, Gus-Khrustalny, Dulev, Dmitrov, Sergiev Posad, Yegoryevsk.

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