The good, the bad and the ugly

Vladimir Putin notoriously declared the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century. However, as Revolution: Russian Art 1917–32 — an ambitious exhibition at the Royal Academy — helps to make clear, the true catastrophe had occurred 82 years earlier, in 1917.

Like many of the tragedies of human history, the Russian revolution was accompanied, at least in the early stages, by energy, hope and creativity as well as by murderous cruelty and messianic delusion. The greatest symbol of the last was Vladimir Tatlin’s huge projected ‘Monument to the Third International’ (1920), a sort of communist successor to Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’, much higher than the Eiffel Tower and intended to house an international government of the entire globe.

‘We are now experiencing an exceptional epoch,’ proclaimed the artist El Lissitzky. ‘A new, real and cosmic birth in the world within ourselves enters our consciousness.’