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The Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism:

Eugenics and Images of the New Person
in the 1920s-1940s
Pat Simpson Dr Senior Lecturer in History of Fine Art & Visual
a
Culture
a
Department of Art & Arts Therapies, Faculty of Art & Design,
University of Hertfordshire
Published online: 18 May 2015.

To cite this article: Pat Simpson Dr Senior Lecturer in History of Fine Art & Visual Culture (2004) The
Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism: Eugenics and Images of the New Person in the 1920s-1940s, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5:1, 113-137, DOI: 10.1080/14434318.2004.11432735

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2004.11432735

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 The Nude in Soviet Socialist Realism:
Eugenics and Images of the New
Person in the 1920s-I940s
PAT SIMPSON
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This paper explores the apparent ethical parameters for the legitimation of the
nude in Soviet Socialist Realist art during the 1930s-40s. The approach is
speculative since the nude seems to have raised ethical and bioethical issues
concerning the disclosure of, and extent of state control over, the gendered body,
that were not, and perhaps could not, be addressed explicitly by contemporary
Soviet critics. The argument identifies two main factors for the legitimation of
nudes as being: a perceived lack of eroticism and a distance from "fascist"
eugenical concerns. These factors, I suggest, had ideological roots in aspects of
Soviet eugenic discourse that appeared to become embedded in the construct of
the New Person itself during the 1920s-30s. I take as my starting point, two
seemingly legitimate manifestations of support for the nude, offered in 1944 by
leading Socialist Realist artists Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) and Aleksandr
Deineka (1899-1969), both of whom, apparently, had personal links to Soviet
eugenics discourse of the 1920s.
In attempting to contextualise these manifestations, I then consider other
seemingly legitimate uses of the nude in Soviet art from the late 1920s to the
1940s. What emerges, I suggest, is a significant difference between the levels of
acceptability of the nude in painting and sculpture, in that the legitimated
sculptures were never installed in public spaces. In explaining this disparity I
conclude that, while Soviet eugenics discourse implicitly provided the means to
define politically correct nudes as possessing the requisite characteristics, it was
no longer available as an explicit mode of explanation in the 1930s. Thus,
representations of the nude seemed to depend overtly for legitimacy on being
located in narrative contexts where the nudity might be seen as logical and

113
 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

necessary. Otherwise, it might breach the public decorum enforced by the state
moral codes, and might also open Soviet cultural politics to analogy with those of
Nazi Germany. In such circumstances, Socialist Realist painting, as a narrative
and self-contextualising art form, seemed more capable of fulfilling the explicit
requirements than sculptures, which depended for their context upon urban
public spaces where nudity was always inappropriate.
Stalinist art was produced under conditions that were very different from those
of the West. The state was the only market and the Communist Party the
patriarchal arbiter of ethical content. Soviet ethics were essentially deontological
and utilitarian, in the sense that the individual citizen's pursuit of "duty"-
defined by Party propaganda, delimited by state legislation and understood as
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morally good-was framed in terms of benefit to the collective and the state. The
moral and the political were ideologically inseparable and subject to contingent
shifts of definition that artists and, indeed, all citizens needed to keep track of to
ensure that they were operating in relation to the most current and authoritative
construct of "duty." From 1934 onwards, the central imperative of Socialist
Realist cultural production was to give optimistic embodiments to the Bolshevik
ideal of the New Soviet Person, as unambiguous moral and physical aspirational
models for the masses, images of the dutiful body.
This ideal had an important bioethical dimension relating to the extent of
state control exerted on the bodies and reproductive capacities of the Soviet
citizen. The New Person was, in effect, an eugenic ideal of a renovated
population that was believed to be engineerable through state policies on
hygiene, health and fitness, by legislation against prostitution, abortion and
divorce, by hormone-based drug therapies, as well as by voluntary self-
development. Implicitly, images of the New Person-in art, literature, cinema
and the news media-also indicated the physical, political, and moral
characteristics that might be desirable in marital partners, for the procreation of
the new genus of homo soveticus. By contrast with the promotion of the Aryan
eugenic ideal in Nazi art, however, Socialist Realist propaganda on the New
Person strictly eschewed explicit engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and
breeding potential.! This was in keeping with the public morality legislated by
the state in the 1930s, which forbade discourse on sexuality, and prohibited
representations of women as sex objects, as distractions from "duty," and, in the
latter case, as contravening the party line on women's equality.
Perhaps as a corollary to this, and again, in contrast to Nazi art, the nude was
not a theorised component of Socialist Realist representations of the New
Person. When the Nazi architect, Albert Speer, entered Kiev with the invading
German army he was surprised that the statues of sportsmen in the stadium were

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 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

represented clothed rather than nude, as was common in Germany.z Few nudes
existed, however, within the Soviet canon of public or potentially public art,
suggesting that Party censors were ambivalent about the legitimacy of
representing the New Person in the nude. The nude, it seems was too ambiguous
to be regarded unequivocally as a good or a "right" prompt to correct action-
seen as doing one's duty as a citizen, with regard to the ultimate goal of"building
commumsm. . "
Clearly, there was a big difference between the nature and modes of
articulation of Nazi and Soviet eugenics. There is a sense in which Soviet
abolition of eugenics as a named discipline-area in the 1930s emphasised this
distinction, demarcating the ideological separation between the USSR and the
rising, hostile power of fascism in Germany. In referring to Soviet eugenics of the
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1920s-30s, I follow the example set by the extensive research into the history of
Soviet medicine conducted by Mark Adams, in using the term "eugenics" more
broadly than is customary in contemporary parlance.3 While eugenics is now
associated exclusively with projects, particularly in Nazi Germany, for species
improvement based on selective breeding within the parameters of what is now
considered to be genetic science, the founding discourse, especially in Russia and
the Soviet Union ranged further than this. Such discourse often blurred the
boundaries between eugenics-seen as based on biology and "nature"-and
euthenics-understood as the pursuit of improving human well being by purely
"nurturing," environmental means. This tendency seems to have been most
marked among the European political left, which, although adamant in its refusal
of neo-Malthusian ideas of population control, was sometimes attracted, via the
pro-Darwinian nature of Marx's writings, towards evolutionary theories of a
genetically improved working class. 4 Hence, as I will discuss, the post-1917
establishment of eugenics societies and institutes in Russia, in conjunction with
the application of environmental, public health policies, a relationship explained
by the Health Commissar N A Semashko thus:

Only at the communist stage will it become possible to bring health to

society as a whole. Hygiene, the study of the health of man and society, will
be converted into eugenics, the science of making the human race healthy.
In matters of health, eugenics will place the interests of the whole society, of
the collective, first, above the interests of individual persons. s

Hence also, the focus of debate within health-related research institutions

during the 1920s, on what should constitute a socially beneficial Soviet or
"socialist eugenics," that could stand opposed to the racism and class

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

discrimination embedded in "bourgeois" or "right-wing eugenics" favoured, for

instance, by the Nazi party in Germany.6
Outside the USSR, open debates on the viability of a "socialist eugenics"
continued through to the outbreak of war. In 1939, for instance, H J Muller, an
American geneticist who had worked in the USSR between 1934 and 1936 at
the Institute of Genetics in Moscow, was still asserting a construct of"Bolshevik
eugenics" that he had developed from the work of Soviet geneticists A S
Serebrovsky and N I Vavilov. 7 Within the USSR, although explicit debate on
"eugenics" per se was taboo after the end of the 1920s, the discourse continued.
Muller's theorisation, outlined in the book Out of the Night (1936) and unwisely
sent to Stalin for personal approval, was clearly too "biological" to be publicly
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acceptable in that context. Despite Muller's espousal of environmental change as

a precondition for genetic change and his rejection of bourgeois eugenic ideas
on race and class as signifiers of genetic quality, his suggestions for the artificial
insemination of women with sperm from party-approved donors was apparently
too inhuman even for Stalin.s
Nevertheless, as I shall argue, even in the 1930s, biological and environmental
discourses on the improvement of the Soviet population were never quite
separated, but rather, implicitly conjoined in the pursuit of engineering the New
Soviet Person. This ideal, after all, was not simply of a person who was the same
as other people elsewhere but cocooned in a better environment. New Soviet
Person was to be a superior genus of humankind.
The trajectory of discourse that I have called "Soviet eugenics"- to demarcate
it from the. more biologically orientated eugenics of Nazi Germany and
elsewhere-shared with the latter a belief that the key to genetic improvement
lay in the control of women's sexuality and the processes of maternity. Indeed the
eradication of prostitution in the USSR, a goal that the Commissariat for Health
(NarKomZdrav) pursued and claimed to have achieved in the 1920s, was hailed in
1935 within the British Eugenics Society, as "one of the signs of an eugenic ideal
in sexual relations." 9 In the Soviet context such measures were overtly pursued in
the name of improving standards of public health and reducing infant mortality,
yet the inclination towards Lamarckism favoured by the Communist Party
offered the implicit possibility that environmentally caused changes in health,
strength and adherence to party dicta, might be genetically inheritable. Within a
pro-Lamarckian purview, a similar possibility seems to have underpinned state
promotion of physical culture (fizkul'tura)-in which Deineka participated-and
also state support for the use of endocrine and hormone therapies as a means to
improve health, dynamism, and possibly, sexual potencylo - with which
Mukhina was intimately familiar.

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 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

In 1944, as Soviet troops advanced and occupying German forces retreated, the
prominent Soviet sculptor, Vera Mukhina, published an article effectively
suggesting the introduction of the nude into Soviet monumental sculpture, as one
possible means of creating symbolic "images" capable of expressing Soviet
victory.!! During the same year, the equally prominent painter, Aleksandr
Deineka, produced the painting After the Battle (fig.1), in which Soviet confidence
in victory was seemingly represented by images of nude, healthy, muscular, young
soldiers relaxing in the shower-as if after a football match. At 170 x 233cm, it
was not exactly a monumental painting, but it was still big enough to be read in
contemporary Socialist Realist terms as offering a serious political message.
All Socialist Realist art was supposed to carry a message, whatever its size or
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theme. It was supposed to represent "reality in its revolutionary development," a

phrase coined in 1934 by the Party's cultural watchdog, Andrei Zhdanov, to
emphasise the need to produce images of life as it might be and not as it actually
was.12 Central to this mode of representation was the depiction of New Soviet
Person-a new, future genus of humanity, renovated through socialism to the

Figure 1. Aleksandr Deineka, After the Battle, 1944, oil on canvas, 170 x 233cm, Deineka Picture
Gallery, Kursk (current image, M. Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin, Oxford: Phaidon, 1990)
ill.113, p.155). Copyright permission and photo applied for.

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

peak of political, moral and physical perfection.t3 In Socialist Realist art, life-class
studies enabled artists to produce convincing, physical representations of the sorts
of bodies that the masses should aspire to-bodies that exuded the beauty of
ideological oneness with the current concerns of the Party.t4 Monumental or
large-scale art works were understood to offer the highest exemplars of
embodied New Persons, raised up into symbolic signifiers of Soviet identity in
relation to the most significant contemporary themes.ts Thus, Mukhina's article
and Deineka's painting seem to assert that the nude had a legitimate place in the
most important area of art practice-monumental art- in relation to the most
important theme of the day-Soviet victory.
These assertions were neither acclaimed nor denounced by Party critics. Both
artists continued to be treated as exemplary patriots. Mukhina, a leading light of
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the "Women Against Fascism" movement, travelled abroad 1945-6, giving

speeches in Paris, Finland, the Baltics, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the Balkans.
Meanwhile Deineka was taken to Berlin May-August 1945 to record the
devastation of the German capital.t6 To be allowed abroad at this time signified
their supreme trustworthiness and artistic credibility. It would seem, therefore,
that they were operating acceptably within a contemporary framework of
ambivalence towards the nude as a means to represent the New Person. This
ambivalence was expressed in the 1930s, on the one hand, by the existence of a
few nudes within the canon of public or potentially public art, and on the other
hand, by the low profile and lack of specific discussion afforded these works, by
contrast with the overwhelmingly high profile and value given to clothed images
of the New Person. This emphasis was underscored by the exclusively clothed
nature of the figurative works that were awarded the first Stalin Prizes in 1941.17
During the 1930s, one of the main factors militating against the legitimacy of the
nude was that the strain of prudery and anti-eroticism, apparently inherent in
Bolshevism even before the Revolution, became increasingly dominant in Party
ideology. The model for the New Person, partly adopted by the Bolsheviks from the
nineteenth-century radical writers Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Aleksandr
Dobroliubov,ts was a male-centred and ascetic construct, in which sexuality was
regarded as a distraction, for both men and women, from the pursuit of Party aims
and political action.1 9 Immediately after the Revolution, however, there was explicit
discourse on sexuality and sexual difference, partly fostered by the activities of
Aleksandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaia in forming the
women's section of the Party (Zhenotdel') in order to address the "woman question."
Divorce and abortion were legalised, and in the early 1920s there were campaigns
on sex education, and debate on "free love" (viewed by the Party as a manifestation
ofbourgeois ideology).2o Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1922-although

118
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

consistently regarded as a curable disorder of the hormones. 21 Issues of sexuality also

entered into the discourse of a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, psychology
and educational theory, where theorists such as LevVygotskii made use ofFreud.22
After 1930 the range and explicitness of such discourse was closed down. The
Zhenotdel' was abolished and the "woman question" declared to be resolved by
simply asserting women to have become equal to men. Freudian theory was
denounced as "bourgeois idealism." Sex education in schools was banned and
theorisations of the New Person in all disciplines reverted to an apparently
gender-neutral model.At the SovietWriters'Union Congress of1934, where the
parameters of Socialist Realism were laid down, suggestions by Bukharin for a
new Soviet eroticism were ignored.23
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Meanwhile the legislation of the 1930s systematically revoked the liberalisations

of the 1920s, with bans on abortion, divorce and homosexuality.24 Particularly
Figure 2. JozefThorak, Kameradschaft (Comrade-
ship), 1937, bronze, h.6.7m, (and Richard Knecht,
Mannliche Torso (Male Torso), 1937) Grosse Deutsche
Kunstausstellung, Haus der Deutsche Kunst,
Munich 1937. Photo: akg-images, London.
after pornography was outlawed in
1934, Party censorship became very
strict concerning body imagery
perceived as erotic.2s In this context
the nude had potential not only to
offend against public morality as
maintained by the Party, but also to
prompt erotic responses that would
distract attention from the intended
message about "duty," and, in the
case of female nudes, conflict with
official discourse on women's
equality with men, that veiled over
the patriarchal controls exerted by
Soviet society over women's lives
and bodies.
Another possible factor working
against the use of the nude to
represent the New Person, was its
potential to be read as signifying
fascist tendencies, by analogy with
the emphasis given by Nazi art to
the nude as expressing the Aryan
eugenic ideal, as exemplified in
Thorak's sculpture Comradeship 1937
(fig.2), or Adolf Ziegler's painting,

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

Female Nude (undated, after 1939, fig.3). For Nazi artists as, indeed for Soviet
artists, the physiological ideal was based on the Classical nude as theorised by
Winkelmann and Hegel, Nazi discourse, however, had a different approach to
gendered images. Thorak's male nudes, in which homoeroticism, while implicit,
was far from the politics that positioned homosexuality as "degenerate", were
designed to represent masculine virtues of power, strength and comradeship. The
exposure of the whole body was used to exemplify the Aryan paradigm of
perfection. This was also the case with female nudes, often theorised as a
particular physiological type, with small pointy breasts and long legs recognised as
a measure of racial superiority and sexual desirability. Depictions of female nudes,
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Figure 3. Adolf Ziegler, Female Nude, (after 1939), oil on canvas, 105 x 80cm.
Property of the Federal Republic of Germany. Photo: akg-images, London/
Eric Lessing.

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 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

especially by Hitler's favourite artist, Ziegler, were often undeniably erotic. This
seemed acceptable since women were to some extent positioned quite openly as
breeding stock, and such images could be seen as models of desirability to educate
the male gaze and manipulate sexual consumption.26
During the "Cultural Revolution" in the USSR 1927-1933, debates on the
need to define "socialist" or "left" eugenics as different from the "right-wing"
eugenics espoused by the Nazi Party and other representatives of capitalist
culture, prompted a shift from official Soviet support for eugenics, to official
repudiation of eugenics as "fascist racism."2 7 This redefinition of eugenics to
denote only the fascist model constituted the end of explicit Soviet discourse on
eugenics and created conditions in which it became increasingly dangerous to be
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accused of unpatriotic, eugenical sympathies. In 1930, the Russian Eugenics

Society and its journal were closed down, as was the eugenics section of the N K
Kol'tsov Institute of Experimental Biology in Moscow, while Kol'tsov himself
was denounced in Pravda, 11 January 1930 for his "fascist" eugenic beliefs.
Kol'tsov did not lose his research institute however, and, by 1933, had restarted
eugenic/ genetics research. Activities previously falling under the heading of
eugenics were retitled "medical genetics," for example, G Levit's Institute, a centre
for eugenic research 1933-37, was renamed the Maxim Gorky Institute for
Medical Genetics in 1935. This renaming of the discipline has been seen by M B
Adams as a means to stave off potentially life-threatening accusations of fascism. 28
In the context of the Party purges 1937-9, Soviet denunciations of eugenics
rose to a hysterical and murderous level. Levit was denounced for fascist
sympathies in November 1936, his institute was closed in 1937 and he was
probably shot in May 1938. Kol'tsov, accused of"anti-Darwinism" in 1937 and
defeated by Lysenko in the election to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1938,
was denounced for his "fascist" beliefs in 1939, dismissed from his institute and
died of a heart attack in 1940. 29 Thus, arguably, for the nude to be perceived as
legitimate at all, it would have to meet two main criteria. It must not be available
to interpretation as linked to "fascist" eugenical ideas, or as having erotic content.
The importance of a perceived lack of eroticism in evaluating the legitimacy
of the nude in the 1930s, is underscored by favourable criticisms of works by
Deineka and Aleksandr Gerasimov. Deineka's painting A Mother 1932, was
admired for the way in which "biology" was mediated by "elevated social
consciousness,"30 while Gerasimov's series A Russian Communal Bath 1938-40s
(fig.4), produced for private study rather than public consumption, was
commended by General Voroshilov for its lack of sexuality.3t The truth of the
comment is dubious-given the copious amounts of sensually painted female
flesh and forms corresponding closely to the traditional, Russian, patriarchal

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

stereotype of female desirability, "big tits and half a pood [ie. about 8 kilos] of
ass."32 Nevertheless it exemplifies how the identification of nudes as "good," and
thus politically correct and moral, had to be linguistically framed to deny erotic
content. This legitimising language was arguably formed by the asexual and
apparently gender-neutral nature ofBolshevik discourse on the New Person.
This discourse involved a concept of the body as a physical and physiological
structure that could be materially "engineered."33 This eugenic goal had been
fostered by novelist Maxim Gorky and cultural theorist Anatoly Lunacharsky, 34
among others, both before and after the Revolution, and actively pursued by the
Commissariat for Health (NarKomZdrav) after its foundation in 1918. In the
1920s, this pursuit of engineering the New Person had several facets. One of
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these was explicit support for eugenics-related research and discourse within the
new state, and also for creating contacts with international debates on eugenics.

Figure 4. Aleksandr Gerasimov, Russian Communal Bath (study), 1940s, oil on canvas, 79 x 86cm, Ray
E and Susan Johnson Collection. Photo:The Museum of Russian Art, Bloomington, Minnesota, USA

122
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

The USSR was a member of the World League for Sexual Reform until 1932,
indeed Moscow was due to host the annual conference in 1931 but deferred
until 1932 and then cancelled. 35
There was little support for the "negative" eugenics favoured by the European
and American right wing and espoused by the Nazi Party. This was, perhaps,
because the inherent racism and assumptions of the genetic inferiority and
degeneracy of the working classes were incompatible with Bolshevik ideas of
internationalism, equality and "dictatorship of the proletariat," and also because
policies of sterilisation were likely to reduce the low Soviet birth rate even further.
Instead, theorists and researchers mainly looked to forms of"positive" eugenics.
These not only included theories of selective breeding, but also crypto-genetic and
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non-genetic theories such as Lamarckism-regarding the inheritability of acquired

characteristics - and "social hygiene"- a mechanistic notion that environmental
change would automatically improve the physical quality of the population. 36
N A Semashko, Commissar for Health in the 1920s, favoured a particular
brand of social hygienism which, while it shared Havelock Ellis' focus on the
primacy of the sanitisation of motherhood, lacked Ellis' emphasis on negative
eugenics and was more closely linked to ideas on public health policy promoted
by Friedrich Erismann in Russia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuryY Practical measures taken by the Commissariat to initiate the
engineering of the New Person included the promotion of physical culture
(jizkul'tura), as a duty to be undertaken by all citizens. As Chairman of the
Supreme Council for Physical Education 1923-1930, Semashko had a powerful
influence on the pursuit of this policy, for which, in 1926, he devised the
exhausting propaganda slogan "Fizkul'tura 24 hours a day!"3B
The Commissariat's verbal propaganda for fizkul'tura stressed the importance
to health of the contact of the body with sun, air and water thus:

The People's Commissariat of Health of the various republics regard

physical culture as a systematic and all-round development of the human
body in the interests of labour and defence. Rationally organised physical
culture combines physical exercise with an extensive use of the sun, air and
water for the purposes of hardening the organism, and with a rational
regimen of hygienic habits at home.39

Such dutiful exposure to the elements was framed as an anti-libidinous

activity. Within the Party fizku'ltura was regarded not only as healthy and
emancipating, particularly for women in Lenin's view, but also as a means to
prevent masturbation, premarital sex and prostitution. 40

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

Mter 1931, when Semashko was no longer Commissar for Health, the mech-
anistic ideas of social hygiene regarding the engineering of the New Person were
denounced and replaced with a more voluntaristic approach that stressed the
responsibility of the individual to engage correctly with the environment.41 Towards
the late 1930s, Lamarckism, initially championed in 1928 by Anatoly Lunacharsky
in his role as Commissar for Enlightenment, 42 gained Party support, resulting in the
triumph of Lysenkoism over genetics. 43 Nevertheless, throughout the 1930s and
early 1940s, the emphasis on exposure of the body to sun, air and water remained
within Party promotion of fizkul'tura and sport as the moral duty of the good
citizen, a form of self-engineering to be undertaken for the national good. 44
Aleksandr Deineka was prominent in his engagement with the theme of open-
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air fizkul'tura in the 1930s-40s. Some of his works incorporated nudes and show
adjustments of subject matter after 1932 that can be related to the cultural shifts

Figure 5. Aleksandr Deineka, Playing Ball, 1932, oil on canvas, 123 x 129cm,
Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow. V P Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (A/hom), (Moscow:
Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo, 1972) plate 46.

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 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

away from explicit discourse on sexuality and eugenics. Morning Exercises 1932, for
instance, represents a supine couple doing physical jerks on a blanket, the man
clothed in shorts and singlet, the woman, nude. An abandoned child's toy is shown
at the edge of the blanket as if to signifY the marital and therefore moral basis of
this scene. Playing Ball (fig.5), also 1932, features images of three nude women in a
vague sylvan setting, bearing some resemblance to the "naked round dance of
women" indulged in by both left and right-wing German nudists and replicated
in Wilhelm Krege's film T#ge zu Kraft und Schonheit, 1925.45 The purchase of this
work by the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, suggests a certain contemporary legiti-
macy for such references which was not available, even then, for Morning Exercises,
a work that was not purchased by the state.
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After 1932, elements such as mixed sexes, combinations of nude and clothed
figures, or arcadian neo-classical settings do not recur in Deineka's represen-
tations of the nude. The nudity became strictly single-sex and mostly tied to
themes, such as opportunistic sea or river bathing, in which the absence of
clothing might be seen to have a certain narrative logic, and in which the
representations of genitalia were carefully blurred. Lunchbreak in the Donbas 1935
(fig.6) was one such painting. It offered a large-scale (200 x 249cm) re-working
of a small painting Midday 1932 (58.5 x 80cm), substituting male for female
workers. The cult of Stakhanovism began at the end of August 1935, so the work

Figure 6. Aleksandr Deineka, Lunchbreak in the Donbas, 1935, oil on canvas, 200 x 249cm, Museum
of Latvian and Russian Art, Riga. V P Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (Alborn), (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1972) plate 15.

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEAlAND JOURNAl OF ART

presented a timely and patriotic celebration of the health and vitality of

Stakhanovite workers taking a voluntarily vigorous break, amid the process of
overfulfilling their production norms. 46
Semashko's exhortations and Deineka's responses, contained a level of
potential linkage with the eugenical concerns of the German left, which shared
with the right-wing a belief in the benefits of exposing the nude body to sun, air
and water, although for the left this was perceived to be both a means to improve
the health of the working classes, and also an expression of liberation from
bourgeois values. 47. 48 Nudism, however, did not seem to feature explicitly as a
positive value in Semashko's social hygienist policies, despite his contact with the
German left. 49 Moreover, nudism did not appear to feature much in early Soviet
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Revolutionary culture. In Moscow during 1923, some women stripped off to

signifY revolutionary liberation within demonstrations in favour of"free love"
and against the traditional family, that were staged by the short-lived "Down with
shame" movement. Apart from these instances, however, nudist manifestations
seem unrecorded.SO
This lack of explicit contextual parallels linking nudism and representation of
the nude ideal body, might have been an advantage after 1930, in maintaining a
distance between Soviet representations of the nude and the nudist aspect of
German rightwing eugenics, which, despite initial resistance from the Nazi party,
maintained a fairly high profile in Nazi culture.sl The distance could be further
emphasised by the provision of practical contexts for the nudity, as long as
decorum was preserved by representing only single sex nudity with understated
genitalia. In such circumstances it appeared that the nude, while not perceived as
good per se or as necessarily the best representation of the New Person's
physiology, might be seen as a legitimate vehicle to represent something
politically correct and relevant, and thus moral and good, relating to fizkul'tura-
such as the confidence in the victory and safety of the nation, apparently
expressed by Deineka's After the Battle 1944.
That the revelation of the New Person's physique was important, was
underscored by a favourable critique ofVera Mukhina's famous monumental
sculpture The Industrial Hi0rker and the Collective Farm Girl (fig. 7) 1937:

The working clothing of the young man allows his powerful torso to be
given almost naked; the sarafan fitting closely round the figure of the girl
makes the construction of her figure apparent. 52

Party ambivalence to the legitimacy of the nude in the 1930s, however, seemed
more extreme with regard to public sculpture than it was towards painting. This is

126
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM
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Figure 7. Vera Mukhina, The Industrial vrmrker and the Collective Farm Girl, 1937, stainless steel on
wooden framework, height- 24m (made for the Soviet Pavilion, Paris Exhibition 1937) Moscow.
Photo: Novosti Photo Library, London.

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

perhaps understandable given a context in which even clothed sculpture could be

perceived as pornographic. On August 10 1937, for example, the Karelian Party
ObKom Secretary was denounced to Zhdanov, on the grounds of negligence in
allowing the installation of a statue of Kirov represented with one hand in his
pocket, which gave the impression of male genitals. In this case the complaint was
ignored. Nevertheless, the incident exemplifies the potential difficulties that might
arise from the public installation of a nude sculpture. 53
A curious situation seemed to prevail, in which works based on or containing
nudes-such as Aleksandr Matveev's October, 1927 and Young Girl, 1937-might
occasionally be shown in exhibitions as plaster models, passing thence into the
possession of the state without being cast or installed in a public space. Matveev's
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plaster model for the monumental sculpture October, 1927, for example, was
awarded a prize by the Council of People's Commissars, SovNarKom, at the
exhibition 10 Years of Soviet Power in 1927 but was not cast or installed outside
the Oktiabrsky Theatre Leningrad until 1968.54 Matveev's decorative nude
sculpture, Young Girl 1937, was accessioned by the State Russian Museum,
Leningrad, but only cast in 1959 and installed in the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow,
in 1960.55
Vera Mukhina's decorative sculpture Bread 1939 (fig.8), suffered a similar fate.
Bread followed the canonical connection between women and agriculture, set up
during the collectivisation poster campaigns of the early 1930s and given its
highest form in Mukhina's monumental sculpture The Industrial Worker and the
Collective Farm Girl1937.56 In Bread, however, she used nude and semi-nude
figures of girls, with understated genitalia and nipples, to symbolise the present
and future fecundity and productivity of the Soviet motherland. Bread was one of
a series of patriotic, thematic sculptures, apparently commissioned for the new
Moskvoretsky Bridge over the Moscow River.57 This was a prestigious and high
profile location close to Red Square. The whole bridge project was part of
Stalin's grandiose plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, a plan cut short by the
Soviet involvement in World War II. The bridge was built, but the installation of
the sculptures was delayed-permanently. Bread was never installed and the
bronze version was not cast until 1957.58
There were some practical, contextual factors that may have delayed
production until the work was inappropriate to the ever-shifting demands of the
Party. Documents in the archive of the Committee for Art Affairs, for instance,
indicate that disorganisation, delays and poor quality in the industrial production
of sculpture were endemic problems during 1938 that were not improved by the
purge of the state-commissioning agency VseKoKhudozhnik in the late 1930s, or
by the onset of war. 59 Machine's son, moreover, has asserted that there was also a

128
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIAliST REAliSM

financial problem stemming from the entire budget having been spent on the
construction of the bridge. 60
Yet, there also remains the apparently unvoiced ethical/ aesthetic question of
the extent of the work's legitimacy. By comparison with the paintings that were
apparently legitimated in this period, there seems to have been less scope for
sculpture, usually located in urban settings, to create or be seen in a narrative
context in which nudity might be presented as materially logical or plausible.
Bread 5 tenuous link with the legitimate painterly theme of opportunistic, rural
skinny-dipping, provided by the destined location on a river bridge, would have
been undermined by the very public, urban nature of the actual site, in central
Moscow, under the walls of the Kremlin, where skinny-dipping was more likely
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to be an offence than an option.

Figure 8. VI Mukhina, Khleb (Corn/Bread), 1939, bronze (cast 1957), 164 x

158cm, Photo:Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

Theoretically, however, it seemed legitimate. In 1939 the plaster version was

shown at the exhibition Industry of Socialism where it won a prize. The sculpture
was shown in a separate sub-section of the exhibition, located in a pavilion in
Gorky Park and dedicated to the "food industry." Susan E Reid notes that the
works in this pavilion seemed to give "more play to aesthetic pleasure and
stylistic diversity," which she links to an observable but temporary shift in
approved criticism to denounce "naturalism" and photographic detail and
applaud aesthetic qualities. 61
Perhaps the combination of the prize for Bread and the apparent shift of critical
values encouraged the publication of Mukhina's article in 1944. Her advocacy of
the nude was, nevertheless, expressed obliquely. There was no mention of sexuality,
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only of the body as a formal structure. The argument noted the possibility that
drapery was expendable in cases where it was unnecessary to the structure and
symbolic, expressive power of figurative sculpture. Mukhina, like Hegel, considered
that modern dress was unsuited to the revelation of the idealised body, but, by
avoiding the topic of sexuality, unlike Hegel or Winckelmann, she allowed for a
theoretical possibility of doing away with drapery altogether. 62
Mukhina's approach to the body as an asexual structure, corresponded closely
with the general line of Soviet eugenics discourse on the New Person as
engineerable mechanism, with which Deineka seems to have engaged. This is not
to deny the complex array of other factors that may also have inclined Mukhina
to this approach, including her own commitment to relating sculpture to
architecture and possible familiarity with the arguments of Winkelmann. 63
Nevertheless, Mukhina was personally connected to a specific aspect of Soviet
eugenics discourse through her husband, Dr A A Zamkov.
Zamkov, was an endocrinologist. Within Soviet medical and biological circles
in the 1920s-30s, endocrinology and the study of hormones seem to have been
regarded as the potential means to resolve a wide range of perceived human
problems including lack of vitality, physical disease, mental illness and
homosexuality, as well as issues concerning livestock breeding. 64 In the late 1920s
Zamkov worked at N K Kol'tsov's Moscow Eugenics Institute. 65 Kol'tsov became
both a family friend and subject for a sculptural bust by Mukhina in 1929, which
her biographer, Voronov has asserted to express Mukhina's view of him as an
embodiment of the New Person.66 Whatever Mukhina may have thought of
Kol'tsov, it is certainly true that through him and through Zamkov she had access
to elements of eugenics discourse largely related to the medicalisation of
women's bodies and a concommittant de-sexualisation and de-eroticisation of
these bodies. She was even commissioned, in 1932, for decorative bas-reliefs
entitled Bath Time in the Nursery School and First Steps, in the Commissariat for

130
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

Health's Museum for the Protection of Maternity and Childhood.67

NarKomZdrav was committed to raising the falling birth rate and improving
the health and survival rate of infants, on the one hand, by campaigning against
prostitution and abortion, and on the other hand, by campaigning for care of
pregnancy and birth by doctors, rather than by traditional midwives. 68 In
educational poster campaigns, the sexyI erotic woman tended to be positioned as
prostitute/ carrier of disease, whereas the good (married) mother was imaged as
unsexily pure. The healthy, pure mother was one who put her body in the care of
the state and the medical profession, and had her babies in the clinical conditions
of the new state maternity homes, as a matter of duty.69
For Dr Zamkov, the pregnant women in these maternity homes became
human factories. From the endocrines in their urine he developed and manufac-
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tured an apparent wonder drug-Gravidan-which, from 1934 to 1938, was used

quite widely as a vitality and performance enhancer for both men and women,
including Mukhina herself, Maxim Gorky and members of the PolitburoJO This
medical "therapy" was not enforced but available over the counter, as well as from
Zamkov himself. Its endorsement by the Party suggested that it was to be
perceived as an element of state health policy-understood as focused on
engineering the New Person through institutions and self-development-that
offered a morally correct, temporary means to achieve voluntarily the levels of
productivity expected of the New Person.
The patriarchal medical discourse that encompassed Zamkov's "Gravidano-
therapy," located the patriotic female body as a dutiful mechanism for the
production and development of the New Person. This body was not erotic, because
it was pure and ideologically correct and (voluntarily) subject to state regulation.
Such a perspective could offer some theoretical legitimacy for Mukhina's artistic
disclosure of the ideal female body relative to the patriotic theme of Bread. It would
have been unethical, however, for a Soviet critic to articulate this perspective. It was
too close to international eugenics discourse on the need to control women's
bodies and reproduction for the sake of improving the population, and
correspondingly too far from official propaganda on women's emancipation.
Such contradictions within Soviet ideology between values operating at
different levels of explicitness added significantly, I suggest, to the ambivalence of
critics and censors towards nude representations of the New Person. Viewed from
a Soviet ethical standpoint, the nude was problematical and ambiguous even
when used in works that were demonstrably patriotic and party-minded. In the
ideological and political context of the 1930s-40s the nude could not be
regarded as good in itself, or as necessarily the best representation of the New
Person. While the New Person was a physical ideal, and importance was attached

131
 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

to the revelation of the ideal physique as a prompt to "duty," total disclosure of

the New Person's body ran counter to the model of public morality and
decorum fostered and enforced by the Party. Moreover, to invest the nude with
special significance with regard to the New Person, would be to emulate too
closely the Nazi emphasis on nudity in art and physical culture as models and
means to attain the Aryan eugenic ideal.
The main parameters for legitimating representations of the nude thus seem to
have been lack of eroticism and perceived distance from "fascist" eugenics. I have
argued that the theoretical means to make such identifications of lack and
distance lay in aspects of Soviet eugenics discourse embedded in the construct of
the New Person itself during the 1920s-30s. Within this discourse the New
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Person, as an engineerable-and in the 1930s ostensibly self-engineerable-

gender-neutral mechanism, could not be regarded as erotic because it was
politically and morally good (and therefore, by definition, not erotic). To some
extent, the distance from fascist eugenics was guaranteed by the differences
between the eugenic approaches favoured by the Soviets and the Nazis. One
notable exception to this was the concern with controlling women's bodies and
reproduction that was standard to most eugenic theories. This element of
similarity was masked, however, by the enormous volume of overt propaganda on
the emancipation and equality of Soviet women-concepts that were largely
anathema to right-wing eugenics.
So, in these respects, the politically correct nude was theoretically possible.
Soviet eugenics, however, was no longer officially available as an explanatory
discourse in the 1930s-40s. Images, which disclosed the nude, healthy body of
the New Person for public consumption, could thus only be legitimate if they
could provide a logical narrative context for the nudity--something that painting
could do and public sculpture could not.

Dr Pat Simpson, Senior Lecturer in History of Fine Art & Visual Culture, Department of
Art & Arts Therapies, Faculty ofArt & Design, University of Herifordshire

NOTES
This paper derives from a larger research project, "Sex and Socialist Realism: Stalinist Visual
Constructs of New Soviet Woman 1934-1953," the initial phase of which was supported by a
Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts from the British Arts and Humanities Research
Board, February 2002-January 2003.

Werner Rittich, Deutschlands IM?rden seit 1933 (Die Kunst: no date) and Paul Schultze-
Naumburg, Nordische Schonheit. Ihr Wunschbild im Leben und in der Kunst (Munich and Berlin:
1937) exemplify explicit Nazi discourse on the ideal nude body in art: A. Richardson, "The

132
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

Nazification ofWomen in Art," The Nazification ifArt: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in
the Third Reich, ed. B. Taylor and W van der Will (Winchester: Winchester Press, 1990) 62-73;
B. Hinz, "Foreword," Art of the Third Reich (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) no page nos; B. Hinz,
'"Degenerate' and 'Authentic' Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich," Art and Power:
Europe Under the Dictators, ed. D. Ades et al. (London: Thames and Hudson/Hayward Gallery,
1996) 330-3; B. Nicolai, "Techtonic Sculpture. Autonomous and Political Sculpture in
Germany," Art and Power 334-7.
2 A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Sphere, 1978) 329 cited in I. Golomstock, Totalitarian
Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic if China (London:
Collins Harvill, 1990) 264-5.
3 M.B. Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine," Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. S.
G. Solomon and J. Hutchinson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) 200-201.
4 D.Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1970) 256.
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5 N.A. Semashko, Nauka o zdorov'e (Moscow: Obshchestva sotsial'naia gigiena (1922) 1926) 53-4.
6 See for example: B. M. Zavadovsky, "The 'Physical' and the 'Biological' in the Process of Organic
Evolution;' Science at the Crossroads (London: Second International Conference on the History of
Science, 1931) 46.1-12 (1931) 7; D. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," journal if the History if Ideas
45.1 (October-December 1984) 564;Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 214.
7 Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 217; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left" 583.
8 Ibid 575-6, 578-9.
9 Dr Stella Churchill cited in "Eugenics, Socialism and Capitalism. Debate at Members'
Meeting, Tuesday 18 June," Eugenics Review 27 (1935-6) 116.
10 A. E. Gaissinovitch, "The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922-
1929," (Genetika, 4. 6 Oune 1968): 158-175) trans. M. B. Adams, journal if the History if Biology
13.1 (Spring 1980) 00022-3; F. L Bernstein, '"What Everyone Should Know About Sex':
Gender, Sexual Enlightenment and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia 1918-
1931 ,"unpublished Ph.D dissertation (Columbia University: UMI Dissertation Services, 1998)
7,35,65-93.
11 The article's title was "Theme and Image in Monumental Sculpture": V. Mukhina, "Tema i
obraz v monumental'noi skul'pture," Sovetskoe iskusstvo 2 (14 November 1944) 2.
12 A. A. Zhdanov (Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU), "Soviet Literature-The
Richest in Ideas: The Most Advanced Literature," Soviet Writers' Congress 1934. The Debate on
Socialist Realism and Modernism: Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and Others, ed. H. G. Scott
(London; Martin Lawrence, 1935) facsimile reprint (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977) 21.
13 P. Simpson, "On the Margins of Discourse? Visions of New Socialist Woman in Soviet Art
1949-50," Art History 21.2 Oune 1998) 250-51.
14 M. Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London:Yale UP, 1998) 138.
15 Mukhina, "Theme and Image" 2; N. V. Voronov, Vera Mukhina (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1989) 141, 264; V. P. Sysoev, Aleksandr Deineka (Albom) (Moscow: Izobrazitel'noe
iskusstvo, 1972) 29. This assumption goes back to the very early days of the Revolution: V.
Friche, "V poshkakh novoi krasoty," Tvorchestvo 1-2 (1918) 5.
16 Voronov, Mukhina 57; Sysoev, Deineka 48.
17 Among these works were: Vera Mukhina, The Industrial Worker and the Collective Farm Girl,
193 7, 24m, stainless steel on wooden framework, (former) Exhibition of Economic
Achievements, Moscow; Nikolai Tomskii, Monument to Kirov, 1935, bronze and granite (cast

133
 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAl OF ART

and installed in Kirov Square, Leningrad 1938); V. Ingal and V. Bogoliubov, Monument to
Odzhonikidze, 1939, painted plaster, Industry of Socialism exhibition, Frunze Embankment,
Moscow; Aleksandr Gerasimov, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, 1938, ol c, 300 x 390cm,
Tretiakov Gallery Moscow ; Boris Ioganson, In an Old Urals Factory, 1937, ole, 280 x 320cm,
Tretiakov Gallery; Mikhail Nesterov, Portrait of the Academician I.P Pavlov, 1935, ole, 81 x
121cm, Tretiakov Gallery; Sergei Merkurov, Figure of I. V. Stalin, Mechanisation Square, All-
Union Agricultural Exhibition, Moscow, 1938, concrete, h. 30m (destroyed); Vasili Efanov, An
Unforgettable Meeting, 1938, ole, 270 x 391cm, Tretiakov Gallery; N. Samokish, The Red Army
Crossing the Sivash, 1932, ol c, 32 x 21 em, Simferopol Art Museum; M. Manizer, Monument to
Lenin, Ulianovsk, 1940; S. Kagabadze, Monument to Stalin, Tblisi; E Fedorovskii, Theatrical decor
for Prince Igor, 1934; Martiros Saryan, theatrical decor for A. Spendiarov's opera, A/mast; Iraklii
Toidze, illustrations for Shota Rustavelli.
18 The model favoured by Lenin and others seems to have been based to some extent on
Rakhmetov, the ascetic hero of Chernyshevsky's novel Hlhat Is To Be Done?: E.A. Wood, The
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Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1997) 24-6; T. Clark, "The 'New Man's' Body: A Motif in Early Soviet Culture," Art r!f the
Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992, ed. M. Cullerne
Bown and B. Taylor (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1993) 40.
19 I. Kon, "Sexuality and Politics in Russia 1700-2000" in EX. Eder, L. Hall and G. Hekma,
Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999) 204,206,208-
9;Wood,The Baba 24-5.
20 "Pervonachal'noe nakoplenie burzhuaznoi ideologii (Ot nashego ekaterinoslavskogo
korrespondenta)," Pravda (5 August 1923) 2; A. Kollontai, "Make Way for the Winged Eros: A
Letter to Working Youth," (Molodaiia gvardiia, 3, 1923) Selected Writings r!fAlexandra Kollontai, ed.
A. Holt (London: Alison and Busby, 1977) 276-92; M. and A. Stern, Sex in the Soviet Union,
trans. M. E. Heine, (London: W H. Allen, 1981) 25-6.
21 A. S. Solovtsova and N. E Orlov, "Gomoseksualizm i reaktsiia dr-a Manoilova," Klinicheskaia
meditsina 5.9 (1927) 541-7; Bernstein, "'What Everyone Should Know About Sex"' 101.
22 I. Kon, "Sexuality and Culture," Sex and Russian Society, ed. I. Kon and J. Riordan (London:
Pluto Press, 1993) 23.
23 N. Bukharin, "Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the USSR," Soviet Writers'
Congress, 255.
24 M. and A. Stern, Sex 41, 112, 123; I. Kon, "Sexuality and Culture" 23-4; K. Mehnert, The
Anatomy of Soviet Man, trans. M. Rosenbaum (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, (1958)
1961) 40-41.
25 For example, works by the painters Vasili Yakovlev and Solomon Nikritin were heavily
criticised for alleged pornography: M. Cullerne Bown, Art Under Stalin (Oxford: Phaidon,
1991) 113.
26 Richardson, "Nazification ofWomen" 62-73,77.
27 A. S. Serebrovskii, "V internatsional'nyi geneticheskii congress," Vestnik komunisticheskoi
akademii 23 (1927): 226; Gaissinovitch, "The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with
Lamarckism 1922-29" 0043;Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair 120-21.
28 Adams, "Eugenics as a Social Medicine" 218-19; M. B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia," The Well-
Born Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia, ed. M.B. Adams (Oxford and
New York: Oxford UP, 1990) 191,196-7. In 1933 the Communist Academy also denounced

134
 NUDE IN SOVIET SOCIALIST REALISM

eugenics, but as "Menshevising idealism": D. Joravsky, "Soviet Marxism and Biology Before
Lysenko," Journal of the History ofldeas 20.1 (October-December 1959) 103.
29 M. B. Adams, "Eugenics in Russia" 191, 196-8; M. B. Adams, "The Soviet Nature-Nurture
Debate," Science and the Social Order, ed. L. R. Graham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990)
103, 105-7; Ia.A Iakovlev, "0 darvinizme I nekotorykh antidarvinistakh," Pravda (12 April
1937): 2-3 published simultaneously in Sotsialisticheskoe zemledelie (12 April 1937) 2-3;
Academicians A. N. Bakh, B. A. Keller, Professor Kh. S. Koshtoiants, Candidates of biological
science A. Shcherbakov, R. Dozortseva, E. Polikarpova, N. Nuzhdin, S. Kraevoi and K.
Kosikov, "Lzheuchenym ne mesto v akademii nauk;' Pravda (11 January 1939) 4;V.V. Babkov,
"N. K. Kol'tsov I bor'ba za avtonomiu nauki i poiski podderzhki vlasti," Voprosy istorii
estestvoznaniia i tekhniki 3 (1989) 3-19.
30 A. Shcheketov, Iskusstvo 4 (1933): 121, cited in M. Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting
170. A Mother was acquired by the Tretiakov Gallery in 1934: X. Antonova, ed, The Tretyakov
Gallery Moscow: Painting, Graphic Art, Sculpture (Leningrad: Aurora, 1983) 345.
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31 M. Cullerne Bown, "Alekandr Gerasimov," Art of the Soviets 132.

32 M. and A. Stern, Sex 65.
33 Clark, "The 'New Man's' Body" 36-8.
34 See for example: E. Borisov, "Pisatel' i khudozhniki: A.M. Gor'kii na iubileinykh vystavkakh,"
Sovetskoe iskusstvo 33 (20 July 1933): 1; A. V. Lunacharskii, Vospitanie novogo cheloveka
(Leningrad: Priboi, 1928) 26.
35 R. Dose, "The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible Approaches," Sexual Cultures
in Europe 242-3, 246.
36 Gaissinovitch, "Origins of Soviet Genetics" 0001-0051; Adams, "Eugenics as a Social
Medicine in Revolutionary Russia" 213-14.
37 H. Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (London: Constable and Co, (1912) 1927) 1-48; Adams,
"Eugenics in Russia"158.A concise definition of what Semashko understood by the discipline
is contained in N. A. Semashko, "Friedrich Erismann. The Dawn of Russian Hygiene and
Public Health," (trans. H. E. Sigerist from Sovetskoe zdravookhranenie 4 (1944): 26-32) Bulletin of
the History of Medicine 20.1 (June 1946) 6.
38 N. A. Semashko, Puti razvitiia sovetskii fizkul'tury (Moscow: Fizkul'turizdat, 1926) 14; P. Arnaud
and J. Riordan, Sport and International Politics: The Impact of Fascism and Communism on Sport
(London: E and N. Spon, 1998) 189;). Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society:The Development of Sport
and Physical Culture in Russia and the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 90.
39 N. A. Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR (London:Victor Gollancz, 1934) 60.
40 Zetkin noted that Lenin was in favour of.fizku'ltura as a means to distract young people's
minds from sex: C. Zetkin, Vospominaniia o Vladimire Iliche Lenine, Part 2 (Moscow:
Gospolitizdat, 1955) 85. See also: N. I Podvoiskii, Rabotnitsa i fizichestkaia kul'tura (Moscow:
Molodaia Gvardiia, 1938) 3; N.l. Podvoiskii, "Lenin I fizicheskoe vospitanie," Krasnyi sport 4
(21 January 1948): 3-4; Semashko, Nauka o zdorove 30-31; Semashko, Puti razvitiia sovetskii
fizkul'tury 57; J. Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society 98; F. Bernstein, "Envisioning Health in
Revolutionary Russia: The Politics of Gender in Sexual Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s,"
The Russian Review 57 (April 1998) 199.
41 Clark, "The 'New Man's' Body' 42,45-6.
42 In 1928 Lunacharsky wrote a very sympathetic script for a film about Kammerer (a German
Lamarckian biologist, infamous for falsifying results from experiments on the midwife toad)

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 AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF ART

entitled Salamander: A. V Lunacharskii, "Kak vosnik stsenarii 'Salamandriia'," Sovetskii ekran 1

(1929): 4. At the time of Kammerer's denunciation in the West, the Soviet Academy offered
him a laboratory in Moscow to continue his experiments, but he declined: D.Joravsky, "Soviet
Marxism and Biology Before Lysenko" 92, 98.
43 Ibid 103-4; D. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left" 579; M.B.Adams, "Eugenics in Russia" 198.
44 For repeated references to the healthiness of fizkulturnik's suntanned bodies in 1944, see for
example: "Za dal'neishii rost fizkul'tury," Krasnyi sport 29 (18 July 1944): 1; A.Vit, "Vsesoiuznyi
den' fizkul'turnika," Pravda (17 July 1944) 4.
45 W van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition
of German Culture to National Socialism," Nazification ofArt 34-36,39.
46 M. Heller and A. N ekrich, Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR from 1917 to the Present
(London: Hutchinson, 1985) 282, 284-5.
47 van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic" 30-43.
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48 Ibid 31-4,43.
49 In 1925 Semashko was senior Russian editor for three editions of a Russian/German medical
journal, Russko-nemetskii meditsinskii zhurnal, and a regular contributor to Deutsche medizinische
Wochenschr!ft 1923-5: S. G. Solomon, "Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health 1921-1930,"
Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, 179.
50 R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989, 133; M. and A. Stern, Sex 23-5.
51 van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic" 42-3.
52 Iskusstvo, 4 (1937) 121 cited in Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting 176.
53 J. Plamper, "Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s," The Russian
Review 60 (October 2001) 535.
54 0. Sopotsinsky, Art in the Soviet Union: Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, (Leningrad: Aurora,
(1977) 1978) 440.
55 Antonova, Tretiakov Gallery, 370.
56 V. E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley:
California UP, 1999) 79,101-110.
57 There were apparently six compositions commissioned for the (still empty) plinths on the
bridge: Revolution, Socialist Construction, Flame of the Revolution, Hymn of the Internationale,
Fertility and Bread: Voronov, Mukhina, 180, 187. Despite claims made in 1938, that Mukhina
was currently working on the sculptures for the newly completed bridge, there seems to be no
evidence in the records of the Committee for Art Affairs (RGALI) that they were
commissioned in 1938 and Bread is always dated as 1939: M. Zolotarev, "Desiat' mostov,"
Arkhitekurnaia gazeta 13 (3 March 1938) 3; Engineer V.M. Vakhurin, "Arkhitektura novykh
mostov moskvy," Stroitel'stvo moskvy 9-10 (1938) 13.
58 Voronov, Mukhina 187. The Russian Museum, Leningrad acquired the full size plaster version:
Ibid 194-5. The 1957 cast was acquired from the artist's family by the Tretiakov Gallery,
Moscow in 1960: Antonova, Tretiakov Gallery 370.
59 "Predsedateliu vsesoiuznogo komiteta po delam iskusstv, Tov. Nazarov," 28 March, 1938, 1-2,
RGALI f. 962, op.3, ed.khr 387, 2 January-25 December 1938; "Stenogramma soveshchanniia
u predsedatel'ia komitet po voprosu itogov obsledovaniia 'VseKoKhudozhnika'," RGALI
f.962, op.3, ed.khr 441,22 July 1938, 1-37.
60 Voronov, Mukhina 187.

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61 S. E. Reid, "Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition
1935-41," The Russian Review 60 (April 2001) 174-5, 178-84;Voronov, Mukhina 180; I.
Grigor' ev, "Industriia sotsializma;' Pravda (19 March 1939) 11; A. Zotov, "Proeky stat'i Zotova
'Khudozhestvennaia vystavka industrii sotsializma'," RGALI f.962, op.6, ed.khr 624.
62 Mukhina, "Theme and image" 2; G. W F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) vol.t, 165-6; vol.2, 742-9,757.
63 V I. Mukhina, "Pis'mo v redaktsiiu," Arkhitekturnaia gazeta (28 February1938) 4. See also the
writings of David Arkin a contemporary architectural critic who presented a very similar
structural approach to monumental sculpture, with specific reference to Winckelmann: D.
Arkin, "Ledu" (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux) (Obrazy skul'ptury, 1961) Obraz arkhitectury I obrazy
skul'ptury, ed. D.A.Arkina (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1990) 87.
64 Professor VA. Oppel', "Endokrinologiia kak osnova sovremennoi meditsiny," Leningradskii
meditsinskii zhurnal 3 (1926): 3-18; A. S. Solovtsova and N. F. Orlov, "Gomoseksualizm" 541-7;
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Proceedings of the XVth International Physiological Congress, Leningrad-Moscow, 9-16

August 1935, Fiziologicheskii zhurnal SSSR imeni I.M. Sechenova, 31.5-6: 193-214.
65 E. Naiman, "Injecting Communism: A. A. Zamkov, Soviet Endocrinology and the Stalinist
Body," Rethinking Socialism, workshop (April 27 2001) http:/ /www.virginia.edu/-crees/
naiman%20paper.pdf, 21/06/02, 8, 10, 12, 14.
66 Voronov, Mukhina 313.
67 The museum was located at no. 20 Kropotkin (now Prechistenka) Street, Moscow but the
reliefs were destroyed in 1955: F. W Halle, TMlmen in Soviet Russia, trans. M. Green (London:
Routledge, (1932) 1933) 159-60; E. M. Konius, Puti razvitiia sovetskoi okhrany materinstva I
mladchestva (1917-1940) (Moscow: Tsentr. In-t usovershenstvovanniia vrachei, 1954) cited by
G. Doy, Seeing and Consciousness: TMlmen, Class and Representation (Oxford and Washington DC:
Berg, 1995) 133-4;Voronov,Mukhina 37,106.
68 Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR 80-83,93-5, 104-114.
69 Bernstein, "Envisioning Health in Revolutionary Russia" 197-8, 200-3, 207, 209-11.
70 A. A. Zamkov, "Gravidanoterapiia kak metod nespetsificheskoi terapii," Biulleten'
gosudarstvennogo nauchno-isledovatel'skogo instituta urogravidanoterapii 1 (1934) 1-13; Naiman,
"Injecting Communism" 44. During the purge of the medical profession following the death
of Gorky - allegedly murdered by his doctors - Zamkov was denounced as a 'sharlatan' in
1938: M.P. Konchalovskii, "Nevezhestvo iii sharlatanstvo?" Meditsinskii rabotnik 7 (15 February
1938) 2. Zamkov lost his institute and suffered a serious heart attack from which he never
recovered, and died in 1942: Naiman, "Injecting Communism" 37-44.

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