“Shagi / Steps” the Journal of the SASH

SHAGI/STEPS 6(4)

Keywords: Khrushchev, the Thaw, art, avant-garde, cultural policy, masculinity, homosexuality, Jews, the Other, intersectionality

Abstract: On December 1, 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union, attended the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall where an art exhibition, Thirty Years of Moscow Artists’ Union, had just opened. On the second floor of the exhibition hall he also saw a smaller-scale exhibition of works by young avant-garde artists and did not enjoy it at all. The curses hurled by Khrushchev at the avant-garde artists, termed “the most direct and acute episode of confrontation between art and power of the Thaw period”, were recorded in the stenogram of his visit and in the memoirs of the artists. They have been studied from the perspective of intrigues within the Party apparatus, Khrushchev’s cultural policy, and the relationship between power and intelligentsia in the late Thaw period. The present paper examines Khrushchev’s rhetoric in a wider context, traces the transformation of his stormy reaction into a declaration of customary ideological tenets, and discovers the intersectionality of ethnicity, sexuality, and creativity during the rhetorical construction of spiritually alien Others, or even dangerous internal enemies. With alien figures of Jews and homosexuals occupying their due place as “symptoms” of the Thaw modernity, the leader of the state, in condemning “pederasts” and asserting that “normal manliness” was capable of creating “healthy art”, in his chaotic rhetorical way struggled with the post-Stalinist crisis of Soviet masculinity.

The article was written on the basis of the RANEPA state assignment research programme.

To cite this article: Zelenina, G. S. (2020). “This is perverted, this is not normal”: Rationalizing aesthetic shock in the Manezh on December 1, 1962. Shagi/Steps, 6(4), 52–70. (In Russian). DOI: 10.22394/2412-9410-2020-6-4-52-70.