Staging for the End of History: Avant-garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in Eastern Europe

Abstract

The rediscovery in Constructivist and Suprematist art and design of the 1920s in the late 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a kind of international front connecting East and West through exhibitions, publications, and even forgeries. In the Western context, the embrace of the Soviet avant-garde has often been characterized as a process of depoliticisation, not least by commentators who longed for its radical elixir. But what of the parallel phenomenon in Eastern and Central Europe? The 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967 was, for instance, a pretext for a deep and often expert archaeology of the Soviet avant-garde. Kazimir Malevich’s writing was published in translation in Prague and an agitprop train was placed on the streets by the Warsaw Opera House. This chapter explores the motivations for the rediscovery of the Soviet avant-garde by artists, historians, and architects who were living as citizens of Moscow’s ‘satellite’ states. It also reflects on the ways in which the historic Soviet avant-garde provided resources for a critique of communist rule, particularly in its years of stagnancy. In the 1980s Hungarian designers László Rajk and Gábor Bachman reworked Soviet constructivism in their ‘deconstructivist’ schemes, samizdat publications and films. As the authors of the scenography of the public ceremony which accompanied the reburial of the remains of Prime Minister Imre Nagy in Budapest in June 1989, they projected shadows of the Soviet avant-garde onto a historic event which precipitated the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe.