Decentering Russia: Art and Empire, 1900-1973

Abstract

This dissertation examines the representation and theorization of art historical and geographical peripheries in late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, from the last decades of tsarist rule through the Soviet Union’s ascent as a leader of global decolonializing movements (1900-1973). Previous scholarship on cultural practices in the Soviet Union’s northern, eastern, and southern border regions has tended to uncritically reproduce the regime’s Marxist, anti-colonialist position, in turn foregrounding its emancipatory rhetoric and occluding the imperialistic aspects of how it managed its peoples. Focusing on representations of imperial and Soviet borderlands, as well as the training of artists from these regions, I instead reveal the Soviet era to have been a continuation of, rather than rupture from, tsarist-era ideas about the cultural and political control of colonized peoples.

Drawing on archival research in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, this dissertation reveals new trajectories of art practice across a century shaped by economic and social upheaval, violently imposed national borders, and shifting approaches to art education and display. Chapter One focuses on Russian artist Konstantin Korovin’s (1861-1939) depictions of the empire’s borderlands for international exhibitions, revealing how and why the cultural, political, and intellectual distinctions between “peripheries” and “centers” emerged in the late Russian Empire. Chapter Two analyzes Suprematist artist Olga Rozanova’s (1886-1918) paintings, collages, and embroideries, demonstrating that the socioeconomic restructuring of peasant populations and craft workshops in Ukraine contributed to the emergence of avant-garde art practices, thus challenging the prevailing view of the canonical avant-garde as a metropolitan, Russia-centered movement. Chapter Three turns to artmaking in Soviet Kazakhstan from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s to consider the place of an imagined “East” in Soviet cultural politics. The case of Kazakh artist Abylkhan Kasteev (1904-1973) demonstrates that to be an artist from the “peripheries” was to contended with one’s alleged backwardness—an imposed identity that members of a younger, Cold War generation of Kazakh artists would agitate against by building their own south-tosouth connections with the decolonizing “Third World.”

By identifying how artists’ historical agency split along the lines of medium, particularly via critical distinctions of “craft” from “fine art,” these case studies form a basis for theorizing how the Soviet Union represented its “others” and thus reproduced itself. If postcolonial literature has often framed the “Orient” as a Western construction, the history narrated in this dissertation is an opportunity to re-examine such power relations in a modernizing yet non-capitalist and non-Western context. In treating borderlands as contested historical sites of representation and identity formation, this dissertation provides a foundation for further decolonial studies of art in these regions today, locating new centers in previous peripheries.