Viktor Pivovarov

“Stalin was god; there is no doubt about it. He was a personalization of god. My mum would take me to the 1st of May and October marches. We would go past the Mausoleum where the Leader was on display. Stalin’s personal cult was as big as Hitler’s. One can’t get his head around how things tend to repeat themselves.”

“Adults would buy children’s’ books for themselves. Such a phenomenon was present nowhere else. Why? Because in the Soviet Union a children’s’ book was one of the windows of freedom. Children’s books were mostly bought by the Russian intelligentsia who collected them. The libraries of these books were huge and the books were read to the children by the parents themselves. It is surprising that although the situation had changed, these books still cost a lot of money and many people keep collecting them.”

“One couldn’t say that we had exhibitions in apartments. But we visited apartments and studios. It was common practice. All of Moscow used to do it, including the intelligentsia: writers, lawyers, all those interested in art which could not be presented at public exhibitions. For us artists this rush was quite difficult. In the 1970s one could not even work in a studio because of the omnipresent visitors. We would therefore flee Moscow and hide in our cottages.”

“We use the word nation in our speech and it’s almost an abstraction for us. We imagine nation to be the people of a particular nationality, who are living somewhere in towns and villages. But at the time of the revolution I came to understand that a nation has a body. And this body was beautiful, all have experienced that. They didn’t think of it this way, but they noticed that people who had been alienated, evil, and in bad mood, were now suddenly nice and kind. This was a miraculous discovery.”

“In 1953 I was offered to hold an exhibition in the school building, and because I had no place to display my pitiful drawings, I didn’t have any better idea than to take down some Stalin’s portraits, rip them out and stuff them behind a cabinet, and insert my drawings into these frames. This was right after his death, and the regime was thus still quite cruel, tough and dangerous. Somebody discovered it and I suddenly began to feel as if everything around me in the school turned cold, all teachers and instructors as if were afraid of greeting me. Then I was called to the principal’s office, and it was evident that although the 21st Soviet Communist Party’s Congress had not yet been held, the people sensed that something had changed, but at the same time they were terribly afraid. So they somehow covered it, and I was given a warning and threatened with expulsion from the school, but they didn’t report it. It was a stupid prank, I had no idea what I was doing. All this bloodshed was as if veiled behind some curtain, some people did sense something, but children didn’t know anything at all.”

“A friend of mine, the great poet Genrih Sabgir, characterized our position in the following way: We are not dissidents, we lead a Bohemian life. This is a very fitting description, since we didn’t want to be associated with the regime in any way, but it was not a political war or political resistance. This was resistance on the level of consciousness, art, aesthetics. Why weren’t we doing it? Because we believed that the position of active political resistance has a negative influence on art itself, because it then turns into a kind of journalism. None of us wanted that, because for us, the level of perceiving art was much higher.”