Shot in Yalta in 1986 by Sergei Soloviev, Assa is a cult film from the Perestroika period, as the USSR’s cultural policies began easing up in the late 80s. While purportedly portraying a detective story involving a mafia man representing the old oligarchy, his mistress and the young rocker she falls in love with, Soloviev was actually shooting a documentary about the underground rock scene in Leningrad. The plot was just a pretext for the concert scenes that brought groups like Kino, whose song “I Want Change!” – as sung by their lead singer Victor Tsoi – became the unofficial anthem of Perestroika.

In the heart of Dresden, Lenin marches towards a radiant future, followed on either side by two worker-fighters and a red flag. This huge monument was slightly raised, in order to be visible from afar, provide a welcoming place for mass rallies, and imprint its ideological strength on individuals’ minds. The rest of the square was laid out in relationship to the statue (note the mural in the background). One sign of the monument’s importance is that it was commissioned from a Soviet artist, while East German artists had to settle for smaller, less-ideologically important subjects (happy families, workers, union members etc.). These statues were located in city centers, along major arteries where official parades and high-ranking leaders’ cars would pass by, but also in the newly built residential neighborhoods. After the fall of the Communist regimes, Moscow, Budapest and Estonia created memorial parks with their toppled Socialist statues.

The Eastern-bloc countries always invested a lot in art education. Schools, conservatoires and academies depended on the State, which served a dual purpose: making sure that teachers toed the ideological line (teaching only Socialist realism and arts from earlier times) and proving Socialism’s superiority by making culture accessible to the masses and developing a home-grown artistic elite that could triumphinternationally. There were counter-performances, like the celebrated violoncellist Mstislav. Rostropovich, who became a symbol of the struggle for freedom and was forced into exile in 1974.

In the 1970s, international pressure led to certain Soviet dissidents including Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974), Leonid Plyushch and Vladimir Bukovski (1976) – being freed and allowed to leave. Until then, they had been interned, but some of their clandestine writing had been smuggled to the West (e.g. The Gulag Archipelago,1973). Once in the West, they wrote, founded journals and did public speaking(conferences, television). They informed the West about the reality of Soviet totalitarianism, inspiring some French anti-totalitarian “nouveaux philosophes,” like Bernard-Henri Levy and A. Glucksmann).  

With de-Stalinization (1956), an independent artistic milieu, open to international art and scornful of the ideology of Socialist Realism came into being, first in the USSR and then in the people’s republics. This liberalization ended abruptly in the 1960s, condemning the artists concerned to censorship (Milan Kundera), dissidence and prison (Vaclav Havel), or clandestine expression and shows in private homes (like the Polish conceptual artists). Whether by choice (Roman Polanski) or by force (P. Kohut), many went into exile in the West, where they could create and express themselves freely.

The play Audience (1975), distributed by samizdat, was a conversation between a dissident writer sentenced to manual labor in a brewery (as Havel had been), and an alcoholic brewer, whom life under Communist had reduced to despair. Dissident artists and intellectuals, portrayed by propaganda campaigns as bourgeois parasites, were cut off from the masses for many years. Censorship and repressionenlarged that gap greatly, forcing artists to withdraw into discreet, private places or to go into exile. Very few artists were in fact dissidents or openly dared to use art as a means of expressing their politicalactivism.

In the people’s republics, art was by definition state-sanctioned, an ideological weapon to defend Socialism within the framework of the Cold War. Art teachers were kept under strict control, as weremuseums and exhibits. Western avant-garde currents in art were rejected in favor of Socialist realism. Artists were enrolled in official organizations, without which it was impossible to display, perform or publish one’s work in public or, therefore, to earn a living from one’s art. In exchange for state support, artists like Bohumir Riha were obliged to defend their nation and its regime against dissident artists.

Vladimir Vyssotsky (1938-1980) was a famous Russian actor of both stage and screen. Despite the huge popular success of his songs, he was never officially recognized as a singer by the Soviet authorities. Vyssotski’s somewhat politicized songs, which described daily life, circulated under the table. His marriage to the French actress Marina Vlady allowed him to travel to the West, where he recorded. Refusing to move to the West, he defined himself as being in disagreement but not a dissident. He can be compared to the East German singer Wolf Biermann, who was deprived of his nationality and was forced into exile in 1976.