Staging for the End of History: Avant−garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe

This long essay published in an anthology of new research on Socialist internationalism explores the reception of the Soviet avant-garde in the People’s Republics of Eastern Europe from the late 1960s onwards. This paper was first presented at the ‘The Afterlives of Constructivism’ conference at Princeton University and ‘Exploring the Second World’ workshop, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam 2014. After being peer reviewed, the essay will appear in print in 2017. Crowley develops an original argument to show how Soviet revolutionary art, architecture and design were employed by critics of Soviet authority, not least in 1989, the year which witnessed the rapid collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Soviet history provided blueprints for revolutionary culture as well as material to be ironized. Crowley’s research into Polish, Czech and Hungarian sources combined archival research (for instance, into the archives of the Galeria Wspolczesna in ISPAN, Warsaw) and interviews (with Laszlo Rajk, samizdat publisher and artist in Budapest, and Stanislav Kolibal, artist in Prague). As a result, Crowley has discovered entire episodes in the history of the reception of Soviet culture which have been overlooked in current scholarship – such as reconstruction of Tatlin’s Tower (aka The Monument to the Third International) in Poland in 1967