Profit rather than politics: the production of Lenin monuments in Soviet Latvia

Abstract

The archived documents on outdoor sculpture commissions in Soviet Latvia reveal that the thesis of art having been colonized by the Communist party is too simplistic. Sculptors and architects had vested business interests in monument production. Until the mid-1950s, the cream of academically-educated Latvian sculptors was sidelined by Russians who mass-produced concrete replicas of statues portraying Lenin or Stalin. The majority of the works came through the mass production of works of visual propaganda in the Māksla art factory. Also, less-talented local sculptors were able to find a role satisfying the demand for cheap, decorative sculpture. Looking for ways to access this market, the local art elite invented aesthetic and semiotic arguments in support of the original, locallymade, Lenin sculptures that would be cast in permanent materials and could serve as the spatial organizers of new communist rituals in the urban environment for which they won municipal commissions resulting in the reconstruction of central squares in Latvian towns. What this means is that artists driven by their mercantile interests and not by ideology played an active part in elaborating the aesthetics of communist ideology, and therefore provided support for the dominant discourse of power relations.

The mass: A neglected plastic sign of sculpture

“…The Soviet government made possible the realization of his artistic ambitions in practice: the new urban design fostered production of large artwork while the function of political communication assigned to outdoor sculpture facilitated access to large financial resources. From mid-1960s to 1990 successfully Latvian sculptors and architects lobbied for state and municipal budgets (Kruk 2010) and accumulated a great technical and artistic experience of assembling large monuments from heavy solid bodies 4 . Browsing 10,000 photos of Lenin monuments collected by Dmitry Kudinov at leninstatues.ru one can easily find out that Latvian sculptures were the most interesting; their grandeur evokes more connotations because of the effective use of the mass as a plastic sign.…”