AKhR, Declaration. February 1928

This declaration set out the program of the Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR), a militant realist group that claimed to speak for “proletarian” culture in the late 1920s. Issued around the time of AKhR’s first all-Union convention, it insisted that Soviet art be documentary, legible, and socially useful, depicting the Red Army, labor, and everyday revolutionary life in forms accessible to mass audiences. It also captured a tightening cultural mood: the declaration condemned avant-garde “formalism” as a political failure rather than a stylistic experiment, foreshadowing the hardening line that soon crystallized as Socialist Realism.

Original Source: Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa et al. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), p. 356

The Great October Revolution, having emancipated the forces of the worker and peasant masses, has summoned artists to participate in the class struggle and Socialist construction in the ranks of the proletariat and toiling peasantry.

"Art belongs to the people. With its deepest roots it should penetrate into the very thick of the toiling masses. It should be understood by these masses and loved by them" (Lenin).

As artists of the Proletarian Revolution, we have the duty of transforming the authentic revolutionary reality into realistic forms comprehensible to the broad masses of the workers and of participating actively in Socialist construction by our socio-artistic work.

The tasks of artistically designing everyday life (architecture, clubs, leisure, mass celebrations) and also of artistically finishing articles of mass consumption (duplicating designs, textiles, ceramics, the processing of wood, metal, etc.) confront the artists of the Proletarian Revolution as urgent, present-day tasks.

The heroic class struggle, the great workdays of construction, should be the mainsprings of the content of our art. The subjects of our immediate work are not only the past and present of the struggle, but also the prospects created by the Proletarian Revolution. We consider this profound content invested in an artistically perfect, realistic form organically engendered by it--a sign of truth in a contemporary work of visual art.

In actively realizing the slogans of the cultural revolution on the visual arts front, in organizing the feelings, thoughts, and will of the toiling masses by our artistic and social work, we set as our primary objective: to assist the proletariat in the realization of its class objectives.

In national cultures, October is creating a diverse but united current of revolutionary, realistic art of all republics and autonomous provinces of the USSR This is also true of the art of revolutionary artists of other countries; and in setting as our task the development of keen artistic interaction between peoples liberated and those being liberated, we aspire to unite the revolutionary artists of all countries in a single organization--INTERNAKhR.

Proletarian culture is not something that has come out of the blue; it is not the invention of people who call themselves specialists in proletarian culture ... Proletarian culture should be the legitimate development of the reserves of knowledge that mankind produced under the yoke of capitalist society, landowner society, and bureaucratic society.

With these words of V. I. Lenin in mind, and on the basis of continuity and critical assimilation of world artistic culture, we will come to the creation of a proletarian art.

Advancing along this path, perfecting the forms of our language with persistent work and labor, we will come, by means of a new content, to the creation of a monumental style--the expression of our epoch, the style of heroic realism.

Art--to the masses.

Source: John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-garde: theory and criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 271-272.