GETTING FOGGY

At center stage in the courtyard of the Fogg Museum on Thursday night was an unlikely star: the sickle and hammer of the demised Soviet state. More than three feet high, the ice sculpture heralded the opening of the Harvard Art Museums' newest exhibit, suitably titled in appreciative language, "Building the Collective: Soviet Graphic Design 1917-1937."

Like fellow cultural elitists through out the University, we at Dartboard enjoy the sort of wine and cheese events that usually accompany the presentation of new exhibits. Fortunately, "Building the Collective" was substantive as well. (Cynical as we are here, we wouldn't dare suggest that some fine fellows and ladies in attendance often shirk the art in toto for the food.)

On the second floor of the Busch-Resinger Museum are a handful of aptly curated rooms housing selections from the collection of Merrill C. Berman '60, who himself must have an interesting tale to tell about the amalgamation of such an impressive display of early Soviet propaganda. Each gallery houses prints and posters--the cheap, bold media used alike by Moscow government bureaucrats, provincial factory managers, collective developers and tobacco manufacturing firms to push their (distinct) messages upon the population at large.

The revolutionary-themed room was perhaps the most intellectually stimulating. On one poster, the Whites who battled the communist Reds in the Civil War were portrayed as wine-swilling fat cats not dissimilar in manner to the depictions of their red-white-and-blue-hatted American counterparts on the congruent poster. Another work in the room focuses on conspiritorial links within the League of Nations between the capitalist nations to destroy the Soviet "threat." Yet a more extreme print reworks a Russian fairy tale about evil people (fat capitalists) attempting to uproot a turnip (a national symbol), whereupon the turnip rises to the occassion and blows the bastards out of the country.

Other parts of the exhibition focus on the developing Soviet economy, which looks so promising from the propaganda (and at the time seemed so fruitful from the input-intensive growth experienced by the Soviets early on), that we can understand how the revolution appealed to so many intellectuals who participated in Lenin's coup. The government's efforts to bring electricity to the whole of its parts certainly proved an inspiring theme for much of the Soviet propaganda. Other posters' promise of education--as well as the illustration of the illiterate as one blindly walking off of a cliff--show the importance of learning within the Soviet regime.

Still other posters are from the Soviet cultural archives, centering on the recreational lives of citizens. "Comrade! Drink the cocoa, our strength," urges one commodity advertisement. Another shows the virtues of the soccer-playing athlete. Another celebrates the participation of boys and girls in the communist youth groups. Another highlights the benefits to be gained from the use of chemicals in both growing vegetables and in winning wars. The likewise appealing promises of efficient transportation portray a nation dedicated to the democratic consumer-citizen.

Ahh, to go to the historical record would simply destroy the beautiful creation of the Soviet artists, not simply in their socialistic slogans but in their carefully cut woodblock prints of Lenin giving voice to the masses through radio, and of Russian people frolicking in the bounty of "freedom" and plenty. So let us leave it at that, the wonderfully appetitive imagery to be gained from a visit to the museum. Go enjoy the workers' paradise.