Art in the service of the Russian Revolution

Dr Natalia Murray, co-curator of the RA's ‘Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32’, explores how visual art was used to propagate revolutionary and communist ideas in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 aimed to destroy the old bourgeois society and build a new, homogenous socialist state. Overnight becoming the ruling party in Russia, the Bolsheviks aimed to use the power of mass propaganda to establish their founding mythology and disseminate their ideas to an overwhelmingly rural and illiterate population. The leader of the new Bolshevik state, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed that culture should support political needs, which effectively meant that all culture was now viewed as propaganda. The Bolshevik regime also believed that culture should not be for a privileged minority, but should be of mass appeal, promoting a so-called “proletarian” art.