In 1920, on its third anniversary, the Soviet Union mounted a historical reenactment of a largely unnoticed military action, the Storming of the Winter Palace, on site in Petrograd.
Bolshevik theatrical specialists organized a public spectacle purportedly reenacting the seizure of the Winter Palace as a commemoration of the Bolshevik triumph in the October Revolution.
Tens of thousands of highly choreographed participant-observers performed a scripted sequence of events that had virtually no basis in primary source documentation. Nonetheless, the 1920 spectacle set the precedent for an emotionally moving, streamlined, and memorable heroic narrative that eclipsed the unremarkable experiences of the participants in the actual events of the Revolution three years prior (Arns, 2020, pp. 152-153). This narrative would be reenacted annually in Petrograd (soon to become Leningrad) and surrogate sites across the Soviet Union and abroad for decades to come (Fayet, 2017).Against the backdrop of Soviet propagandistic reenactment, this chapter puts forward a much less significant event in Soviet history as an artistic reinterpretation of reenactment strategies. In 1929, at age 50, the avant- garde artist Kazimir Malevich mounted a retrospective exhibition of his career at Moscow’s Tretiakov Gallery, the preeminent venue for Russian art in the young Soviet capital. Purportedly commemorating 30 years of artistic production, Malevich’s exhibition was only nominally retrospective: of the more than 50 objects on display, the artist had painted 40 in the previous 18 months, to most of which he assigned false date of more than a decade prior. This chapter considers the production and display of these works as a performative restaging of the artist’s career, reading Malevich’s artistic practice in 1928 and 1929 as a clandestine historical reenactment based on his deliberate obfuscation of historical accuracy within the exhibition context.
Both the Storming of the Winter Palace spectacle and Malevich’s retrospective exhibition functioned as performative practices that sought to restage history in the absence of evidence that would contradict their newly proposed narratives. However, they employed divergent methods.
During the Storming reenactment, actors performed to a massive audience of observersDOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-16 over a few hours, a span of relatively short temporal duration. By contrast, Malevich’s exhibition had no visible actions or actors, and its much smaller audience observed static objects that were on display for weeks, though each individual observer saw them over the course of a few minutes or hours.
Reenactment practices have long been used to lay claim on the past (Lutticken, 2005). In a similar vein, retrospective exhibitions, especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries, most often served to cultivate national histories (Gahtan and Pegazzano, 2018, p. 5). Both the Storming of the Winter Palace and Malevich’s exhibition participated, albeit at dramatically different scales, in the larger nation-building project of the young Soviet state. The Storming reenactment laid ownership on the conjured foundational moment of the Soviet nation, while Malevich, with his retrospective exhibition, laid claim to his own personal history as an extension of the history of the Russian avant-garde as a whole.