Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dedicated to "unofficial" Russian art, the critic Igor Golomshtok lamented, "We know little more about Malevich's last paintings than about Andrei Rublev," the legendary Russian artist who died in the 15th century. For most artists in the Soviet Union today, Malevich is the rodonachalnik, the "founding father" of modern art: the man around whom its history needs to be rewritten...
...clincher is the Soviet Union's shortage of hard currency, combined with the Western art-dealing system's devouring search for new product. At last, modern art has a real party use: it brings in sterling, dollars and marks. Scores of Western dealers are swarming over the Moscow studios. They buy through the Ministry of Culture, which generally keeps 40% of the purchase price and passes on 10% to 15% to the artist in hard currency, which can be spent only outside the U.S.S.R., and the rest in rubles. Payment is always slow, and then there...
...another sense, all Soviet cinema has become sexy, a novel commodity on the global culture market. Little Vera opens this month in the U.S., after playing the New Directors/New Films series at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in tandem with Boris Frumin's The Errors of Youth, shot in 1978 but just completed this year. Eleven Soviet filmmakers are touring the U.S. with Glasnost Film Festival, whose 22 documentaries include robust exposes on Chernobyl, the Armenian revolt and the war in Afghanistan...
...movie, Mirror for Heroes, a modern time traveler finds himself condemned to relive endlessly one day in the Stalinist past. Such periodicals as Ogonyok and Moscow News churn out article after article attacking Stalin or rehabilitating his victims; even Leon Trotsky, Stalin's archenemy, can be portrayed with some sympathy. Excerpts from Let History Judge, a scathing work that historian Roy Medvedev published in the West in 1971, have begun appearing in the Soviet press, and the entire book is scheduled for publication late this year. The book argues that the Gulag's supposed labor camps were often really death...
Against all odds, belief has been preserved through ancient rites and modern- day courage. Russian Orthodoxy and, even more, Judaism still suffer serious limitations. Nonetheless, as glasnost penetrates everyday life, believers are starting to enjoy wider freedoms than at any other time since the atheistic persecutions were launched during the 1920s...