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‘A Beautiful Dream, Facing Both the Future and the Past’: Destalinization, Visual Culture and the Fortieth Anniversary of the October Revolution

Between 5 November 1957 and 16 March 1958, the new Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow (Manezh) hosted the All-Union Exhibition dedicated to the Great October Socialist Revolution. Coming as it did just over a year after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, this hugely significant exhibition offers a unique lens through which to examine the dynamics of early Destalinization and the artistic conceptualization of the October Revolution in this new post-Stalinist landscape. This article demonstrates that while the general appeals for greater party spirit in art were highly influential in shaping how the Revolution and Civil War were presented thematically, the period was impervious to concurrent calls for artists to grapple with some of the more conflicted aspects of the human condition, leading to depictions of these events that were romantic and often sentimental in tone. This was in stark contrast to works displayed that dealt with the Great Patriotic War, which at last started to address the far more problematic and conflicting legacies of victory in 1945. Consequently, at the All-Union Exhibition, visitors were presented with two very different visions of the Soviet Union’s foundational experiences, and at the root of this was the instability unleashed by Destalinization.