Several months after the October Revolution, Anatolii Lunacharskii, newly appointed as head of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, reported to a meeting of artists and sculptors:
I have just come from Vladimir Ilich (Lenin). Once again he has had one of those fortunate and profoundly exciting ideas with which he has so often shocked and delighted us. He intends to decorate Moscow’s squares with statues and monuments to the revolutionaries and the great fighters for socialism.
Lenin had told him that this plan for “monumental propaganda” was his long cherished idea. It was to be public art that wrote history onto urban space. The masses would see history as they moved through the city. The revolution entered the phenomenal world of the everyday. With materials in short supply, statues were hastily built out of plaster or cement, replacing monuments from the tsarist era that were just as hastily disassembled. At this point, time was of the essence, and history was being constructed. If the Bolshevik victory at Petrograd was to be more than an urban coup, it needed to assume the mantle of sovereign legitimacy presently claimed by the provisional government, established after the February Revolution and abdication of the tsar, and it is history that legitimizes political revolution.
Debates among the “futurists,” as Lenin called all of these experimental groups, were waged on numerous issues, but they share a general tendency in their move away from art particularly away from oil paintings and into “life,” the lived experience of the everyday. they understood their work not as documenting the revolution but as realizing it, serving (and also leading) the proletariat in the active building of a new society. Constructivists, suprematists, and others of the avant-garde turned to “production art,” applying their earlier formal and technical innovations to the designs of everyday objects and architectural spaces that the masses would produce and use. The avant-garde turned to commercial and useful forms such as fabric design, children’s books, journal covers, advertisements, theater sets, porcelain design, photo- and cine-montage. The UNOVIS group, which described themselves as collective creators of a “new utilitarian world of things,” was commissioned by the city of Vitebsk to apply suprematist design to signboards, street decorations, buildings, interior decors, trams, and even ration cards.