SOVIET UNION – 'FIVE YEAR PLAN IN ACTION!' The Reconstruction of the Ukraine, a Propaganda Exhibition.

A visually stunning exhibition, and a remarkable survival, promoting the ‘success’ of the implementation of the Fourth Five Year Plan, 1945-1950. The panels celebrate the Industrial Reconstruction in the Donetsk Basin (Donbass) of the Ukraine, an industrial heartland that had been devastated by the Second World War.

18 large folding display boards, composed of 66 thick card panels (each c.600 x 1800 mm. and smaller), hinged with linen, decorated with mounted photographs, embossed paper, hand-stencilled lettering in Russian and freehand text in Hebrew (extremities lightly rubbed). [No place, but probably Moscow: no date, but probably 1947.]

The panels work in a thematic manner, beginning chronologically with the liberation of the Donbass with the Red Army in 1943 after the German army’s capitulation at Stalingrad. The region received a large part of the Fourth Plan's capital expenditure which was directed towards Ukrainian regeneration. Alongside the showcased industrial themes of mining and engineering, the panels also celebrate the rebuilding of the region and its civilised nature through the depiction of civil architecture and images of the workers' families, wholesomely involved in recreational activities such as swimming, playing football and music.

The multi-media panels are an intriguing mixture of Constructivism, Soviet Realism and Socialist Classicism. The use of photomontage and geometric shapes, distinct motifs of Constructivist Art, as well as textured girders and other industrial elements is widespread, but by the time these panels were composed, such an overt use of Constructivist Art would have been dangerous to use. As early as 1934, Soviet Realism, and then later Socialist Classicism, had become state artistic policy as guided by Stalin, and the panels appeal to these sensibilities with the use of lace in domestic settings, and doric and ionic pillars appear in the architectural scenes.

At some point the exhibition must have travelled to Palestine, as Hebrew translation for most of the titles and captions appears in white lettering throughout. Even before the establishment of the Mandate, some Jews in Palestine were politically inclined towards communism and socialism, and with the large growth of Jewish immigration into Palestine in the 1920s from Russia and Eastern Europe, many of whom were politically literate in left-wing thought, the development of kibbutzim and the trades union movement flourished. By the late 1940s, Palestine was experiencing its own revolution against British capitalist imperial rule, and perhaps this exhibition was sent to Palestine at that time to exploit Jewish left-wing sentiment and anti-British feeling.

The propaganda value in Palestine of celebrating the revitalisation of the Ukraine, where perhaps 2 million Jews had lost their lives during the war and Nazi occupation, would not have been lost on the Soviets. Indeed, at the United Nations debate on the partition of Palestine in May 1947, the USSR shocked both the British and Arab delegates by stating that Western Europe's failure to guarantee rights of Jews was the reason behind their present aspiration to found their own state. In the UN vote, the entire Soviet bloc – excepting Yugoslavia who abstained – voted for partition. This is turn led to an upswing in support for Israeli Communist Party, which gained 3.5% of the votes in Israeli’s first general election, and four seats in the Knesset, in 1949. This was to be the Communist’s high-water mark in Israeli political history.

It is ironic that this exhibition, celebrating the glory of the Soviet-era in the Ukraine, fails to mention either the hundreds of thousands of ‘bourgeois nationalists’ that were transported to the camps in Siberia in the name of ideology, nor the million victims of the 1946-1947 famine caused by agricultural collectivisation demanded by the Fourth Five Year Plan. Simultaneously, the thinly-veiled anti-Semitic ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ drive was destroying the few fragments of Jewish cultural institutions that had survived the Holocaust.