The Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection holds many Soviet propaganda textiles, one being T-2102.017). Titled Symbols of Industry, T-2102.017 is roller-printed, plain-woven cotton by Darya Nikolajewna Preobrazhenskaya (1908-1972). After studying at Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school, Preobrazhenskaya worked as a textile designer in the Great Manufacturer of Ivanovo (1929-1931) and then with the Trechgornaya factory in Moscow, founded in 1799.[i] Embodying Russian Constructivism (1913-1949), the last and most influential modern art period to flourish in Russia in the 20th century, this mass-produced dress fabric is composed of several tones such as light and dark blues and browns on a grayish-white ground. As the work is reminiscent of the atmosphere of mobilization sparked by the intense activity of the nation responding to the October 1917 regime change and the establishment of the first Communist state in history, T-2102.017 pulsates with nationalism.[ii]
Caught between Russian Constructivism and thematic propaganda, T-2102.017 carries a complex history. T-2102.017 recalls the acute vigor of the rapidly transforming Soviet Union during the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as the garment industry’s stylistic shift from Constructivism to thematic propaganda. Printed with an abstract and stylistically austere pattern, T-2102.017 includes symbols like smokestacks, saw blades, and plows. The visually punchy and dynamically charged arrangement is jumbled together to promote Joseph Stalin’s (1878-1953) First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) and methods for industrialization. The First Five-Year Plan introduced a continuous working week, lower wages, and harsh penalties in response to the nation being 100 years behind the capitalist West.[iii]
Russian Constructivism promoted production that would create social change and inspire Soviets to rebuild the society in a utopian model.[iv] Reflecting industrialization and urban space, Constructivism celebrated the modern man as well as the speed and ferocity of new machines. Developing after World War I (1914-1918) as the Bolsheviks came to power, Constructivism was popular when Russia’s economy suffered a catastrophe at the beginning of the 1920s. Creativity was a tool for reinvention. The shifts under Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) brought about by the Bolshevists immediately after the October Revolution (1917) included the declaration of land as social property. This fact enabled peasants to seize the land of the nobility, marking the end of the Romanov dynasty (1613-1917) and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. Minimalistic and devoted to modernity, Constructivist themes are typically experimental and rarely emotional.
A radical group of printed Constructivist textiles was designed for the First State Textile Factory in Moscow in 1923. These textiles consisted of brightly colored, interlocking flat motifs such as arrangements of circles, squares, stripes, chevrons and grids. Such Constructivist designs are like those of Italian Futurism (1916-1919), which glorified industrialization and illuminated the demonstration of dynamism. Unfortunately, the masses did not respond positively to these rarefied depictions. Soviet authorities became suspicious of abstraction due to the Paris Exposition (1889), which highlighted similarities between Russian Constructivism and Cubism’s perceived capitalist aesthetics.[v] As the Bolshevik regime grew hostile to revolutionary art, this style of geometrical non-objective art, which made use of bold lettering, stark planes of color and diagonal elements, ceased by the mid-1920s.
Soviet designers and students of the late 1920s began promoting thematic graphics to edify, refashion, and support the proletariat in becoming idealistic Soviets. Energetic patterns—from images of rowers and skaters to parades and marching figures, arranged in tight-knit, rhythmic sequences —played a central role in Soviet propaganda, which supported socialist ideas. The designs of this topical trend peaked in popularity from 1927 to 1931, developing into a movement shortly after the authorities and masses rejected the congruous fabrics of Constructivism.
Industrialization was central to early Soviet visual propaganda, reflecting the First Five-Year Plan period.[vi] Mills and shops operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With this, workers who exceeded unrealistically high production norms received “Hero of Labor” medals, privileges such as higher pay and access to better housing. In a 1930 thematic design by Sergei Petrovich Burylin (1879-1942), the activity of a factory is signaled by a smokestack blowing smoke at the exterior of a building. Including recognizable architectural forms, Burylin transformed structures into an abstract pattern of repeating shapes in alternating colors of orange, lavender, and black on a creme ground. Produced in factories in and around Moscow and Ivanovo and sold in some of the most remote corners of the republic, thematic designs, skillfully interwoven into a textile’s general composition and printed on inexpensive cotton cloth, linked the socio-political with the artistic, utilizing a pre-approved list of subjects.
T-2102.017 likely originates from Alexander Medvedev’s muslin cotton fabric, Plows, produced at Worker F. Zinovyev Factory in Moscow. Although Medvedev, a representative of the imperial-era textile design school with hands-on experience in traditional patterns, created the design around 1930, it was rejected several times by the Soviet Artistic Council until Preobrazhenskaya reworked it. According to the Ivanovo Textile Museum, Medvedev, who employed simple pattern schemes and favored elaborate rendering of patterns and backgrounds, drew inspiration from a 1920s event in which giant foreign-built airships emerged among Soviet skies. As flights of dirigible aerostats bewildered contemporaries with their size, journalists followed the largest: Graf Zeppelin. In 1928, the German airship flew across the Atlantic Ocean. In the following year, it made several stops around the globe, including one in Moscow, leading Ivanovo textile designers to commemorate the occasion on fabric.
Although thematic textile aesthetics appear to be driven by designers, the Soviet Artistic Council almost always controlled the trends. The Soviet Artistic Council was also responsible for the historic culling of designs deemed inappropriate, and this circumstance impacted both production and consumer access. Around the time of the Five-Year Plan period, little fabric, especially those with non-representational designs, was produced for purposes other than for clothing.
While T-2102.017 yields insight into the daily lives of Soviets, exposing the challenges and experiences of those living in a modernizing communist society, the fragment also speaks to the authorities’ reliance on propaganda to advance the nation. Illuminating Stalin’s goals for industrial production and calling upon the instance in which the First Five-Year Plan more than doubled Soviet production in heavy industry (including the production of steel), T-2102.017 is an ideal example of industry being depicted not merely for visual appeal but also for propagandistic purposes.
Notes
[i] Zaletova, Lidya, Franco Panzini et al, and Atti Fabio Ciofi degli. “Textiles and Soviet Fashion in the Twenties.” Essay. In Revolutionary Costume: Soviet Clothing and Textiles of the 1920s, 3–14. Rizzoli, 1989.
[ii] Rossman, Jeffrey J., and Jeffrey J. Rossman. “The Workers Mobilize.” Essay. In Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor, 27–33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
[iii] Allee, Jessica. “Selling the Farm: Textile Design in Early Soviet Society.” Red Wedge. Red Wedge, March 6, 2015. http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/essays/selling-the-farm-textile-design-in-early-soviet-society.
[iv] Jackson, Lesley, and Lesley Jackson. “Proto-Modernism, Modernism, and Moderne.” Essay. In Twentieth-Century Pattern Design: Textile and Wallpaper Pioneers, 34–65. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
[v] “Bark Wendy Constructivist Costume Textile and Theatrical Design 1917-1934.” Scribd. Scribd. Accessed June 25, 2021. https://www.scribd.com/document/148828440/Bark-Wendy-Constructivist-Costume-Textile-and-Theatrical-Design-1917-1934.
[vi] Kachurin, Pamela Jill. Soviet Textiles: Designing the Modern Utopia: Selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection. 1st ed. Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2006.