The Reverse Regional Effect of the All-Union Unification (On the Example of the East Siberian Regional Union of Soviet Artists)

The establishment of Soviet artists’ unions in remote parts of the country has not been fully studied, but it is of interest for understanding the processes of formation of national fine art. One of the most important documents for the Soviet cultural space of the 1930s was the resolution of April 23, 1932, of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations”. Its impact is of a prolonged nature: artistic associations, originally created in the form of regulated unions, still exist, already having the status of entities exempt from direct government control. The main object of this research is the organization that united the masters of fine arts of a vast territory — the East Siberian Regional Union of Soviet Artists. The source base of the research is archival documents that make it possible to reconstruct the process of uniting provincial artists into a single regular organization and to assess the decisions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks from the point of view of the development of the cultural space of the East Siberian Territory. Despite the regulatory actions common to the creation of such institutions, the process of organizing the association of Soviet artists in the peripheral parts of the country had a number of features that formed the final assessment of the outcome of the above-mentioned resolution. The article demonstrates that the geographic remoteness from the capital, the separation from the cultural centers, the harsh climatic conditions, the small population on a large territory, and technical communication difficulties had predetermined the specificity of the processes of Siberian social design, and the need for certain decisive actions and support from the authorities to create a viable association of fine art masters.

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