ARTICOLI / 2 / Gian Piero Piretto /
Religious iconoclasm was one of the main issues of the new born Soviet power. Church holydays, according to the Bolsheviks, were responsible for drunkenness and bad work. Visual culture was highly employed to fight superstition and promote atheism among the proletarians. Russian peasants were illiterate and extremely conservative. It was not easy to convince them to abandon old habits. Special newspapers and magazines were dedicated to this problem. Especially the illustrated «Bezbozhnik u stanka» (The godless in the factory) published fierce images stimulating hate against religion and its representatives. Churches were demolished or transformed into more politically correct worker clubs. Cinema also dedicated great attention to this process. Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiam or The Donbass Simphony (1931) showed how a church was dismantled and transformed into a youth club, but the highly innovative artifices and avant-garde sound and image relationship proposed by the director were not appreciated by the censors, and the film was not distributed. The same happened in 1937 with Sergei Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow. The ritual dismantling of a church by peasants who, because of the montage technique, turn into saints or prophets was condemned for excess of formalism and lack of political involvement. Soviet power was more interested in the result of actions than in the poetic description of the process. Mass illustrations were more effective and the great investment in propaganda posters and magazine covers continued throughout the years of the Soviet experience. The article investigates several examples of the creation of visual iconoclasm and how it ‘functioned’ among the new born proletarians.
