ИСТИНА

On the 11th of October 1931 the government of the USSR declared the complete ban on private trade. Private stores were nationalised, entrepreneurs and traders of the NEP epoch were disenfranchised, banished to Siberia or imprisoned in camps. From that time on, and until the end of the 1980s, there existed only one legal form of private commerce. The so called “collective farm marketplace” was the space for small-scale retail trade. The given name was a peculiar Soviet euphemism as the goods on sale in the marketplace were not those grown by collective farms but those produced in private gardens of the farmers and the town dwellers who managed to get a bumper harvest at their “dachas”. For many Soviet people marketplaces became the only way to survive a total supply deficit. Understanding the situation, the state permitted their existence: they allowed for space in cities, built the pavilions, and established strict control. Instructions, regulations and limitations used to be paltry, but have intensified stepwise up to the prohibition in some years on the sale of flour or bread. Suits were filed for frivolous and sometimes absurd reasons. The Soviet media worked hard in creating propaganda to paint a negative image of the private trader: the idea that these people were thieves, profiteers and enemies of the Soviet system was spread in the society. In this kind of contradiction marketplaces existed in the Soviet Union for more than 50 years, which was reflected in language, literature and arts. Therefore, it is interesting to consider how the marketplace was depicted by the soviet and post soviet painters. The works of art are able to preserve the images of the past by giving the idea of different aspects of the marketplace functioning by providing us with the vivid images of its space, people’s behavior and other elements of the epoch’s everyday culture. It is worth mentioning that painting has the ability to capture visual information; more importantly, it can transplant people’s attitude to the depicted event, stereotypes, antagonisms, prejudices of the society. While researching the subject we studied about 130 paintings most of them not by well-known painters. These are so called “second-class paintings” usually created by provincial artists. The choice of the sources is not accidental as it is the mass production which gives the possibility to reveal not the personal vision of the object but common views and judgments of the society. It should be mentioned that there is still no careful inquiry devoted to the Soviet marketplace phenomenon and this is the first time that the analysis of the peculiarities of its existence and perception has been based on the visual sources. When studying the examples the first thing that captures your attention is the abundance of panoramic views. This approach to reflecting the reality allowed the painter to show the marketplace itself along with people moving in it chaotically like a bright impressionistic canvas distancing oneself from this occurrence and avoiding concentration on the details. One of the consequences of, or possibly the reasons for this approach, was the absence of the portraits of traders in the pictures. The Soviet Realism method required praising and glorifying the person portrayed: the image of “the Soviet private trader” could not exist. Another peculiarity of these representations was the absence of the procedure of purchase and sale. If you inspect the close-up images of the trader and the buyer in the picture they appear gossiping, flirting, discussing abstract topics not relating to the commodity. As a result the very function of the marketplace, its meaning and purpose became hidden and concealed. This approach correlated with the state’s approach to the matter: in all Soviet official documents the sale of agricultural production was called “exchange between city and village”. Private trade was considered to be “the remnant of the bourgeois past”. To avoid unwanted emphasis the artists referred to the depiction of a road: subjects like “The Way to the Marketplace”, “The Way from the Marketplace” are quite frequent. And the entire process of buying and selling is outside the picture, far away, beyond ones vision. The spectator notices only the preparation or the result of the case. In paintings which encompassed the concept of the marketplace area (mostly monoethnic) in its entirety, the canvas would reflect the festival atmosphere, depict the profusion of trade and the triumph of the Soviet mode of life. Nevertheless the profusion itself had quite a general outline. As a rule, neither the goods nor the counters were presented in close-up format. The marketplace still-life that was a very popular topic for the European arts was absent in the pictures of the Soviet painters. For them profusion was a general concept, they presented signs of it but not visual evidence. Statistical analysis of the paintings devoted to the Soviet marketplace indicates the boost in interest to the topic in the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s. The periods coincide with those when the Soviet State proclaimed the policy to “satisfy the vital needs of the Soviet people” and declared that it was not shameful to be well off. During the post Soviet period the marketplace topic has remained vital for many Russian painters. There are no more limitations, concealing or euphemisms that were common to Soviet period paintings. The process of portraying a business transaction is no longer the irresistible severity for the artists; new types of the market trader arise. However a still-existing double treatment of the marketplace is being fixed by the arts: one (new) depicts an emphasised dynamic and organic of people’s behaviour, its naturalness; the other (old) still captures the images of mostly elderly traders frozen in silence and demonstrating static, rigidity and unnaturalness.