Gorbachev and Glasnost in Art

In light of the Reagan conference, I am again brought back to this image of Soviet Sots-art. Professor Brown gave a very illuminating talk entitled “Gorbachev, Perestroika, and the End of the Cold War” and it made me think about how Glasnost tied into the Soviet post-modern art movement. Glasnost was the mission of Gorbachev to make the traditionally secretive and opaque Soviet government more transparent, opening a dialogue between the people and the formerly domineering Communist party. Glasnost was also Gorbachev’s brainchild as, as Professor Brown alluded to the staunch opposition his ideology would have been to members of the Politburo. Essentially, what came out of Glasnost and Perestroika was Gorbachev recognizing a need to reform the Soviet economy, which was lagging behind, through a reform of the party itself. Indeed, I feel it would be safe to assume that Gorbachev could be considered the great reformer of Communist Russia, doing his best to break down the established wall between the East and the West. But how does this new ideology effect the art movement of the Soviet Union?

As I mentioned earlier, I am forced to turn back to this piece of art which epitomizes the art movement of the 1980s in Russia, this influx of pop art. This rise of the Soviet non-conformist movement does line up very well with what Professor Brown said on Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. Pop art was not a Russian style of art; it originated in the West and simply was given a socialist spin once it came to Russia, hence the Sots-art moniker. Yet, it did adopt a more politicized style in the Soviet Union, in my own opinion. Thus, art becomes a prime example of Glasnost ideology in the sense that Sots-art overcoming the Socialist Realism style marks a cultural transparency, one that Stalin sought to crush by imposing the Socialist Realism style as the art style of the Party. It also can mark cultural diffusion between the East and the West, also another idea that Stalin did not approve of. However, I don’t believe the non-conformist art movement was completely altruistic in it aims to overcome the divide between the East and the West. As I mentioned earlier, Glasnost was set into place by Gorbachev to address the serious need for economic reform in an economy that was sputtering at best. Thus, I certainly think there was a sense of economic motivation in the non-conformist art movement, because on a global stage Socialist Realism (and I would say Realism in general) had lost out to the post-modern art movements of the West. Therefore, maybe the Sots-art came more out of a need to keep up economically due to the fact that Socialist Realism did not carry the same weight internationally as it did domestically in Russia. I had often found myself pondering this East-West divide in art after the various articles we’ve read, and specifically the ones about economically motivated art in the popular biennials. And I found this claim I have made to perfect to overlook, because there are a great many factors that can attribute to the movements seen in art, the economy being one of them.