Obviously Tsvetkov’s painting has the feeling of an academic mural but I was surprised to find how many paintings in the

Obviously, Tsvetkov’s painting has the feeling of an academic mural, but I was surprised to find how many paintings in the show are domestic in nature Socialist Realism was not exclusively a public art form. The black man who witnesses the runner’s triumph is Paul Robeson. A picture without such sinister undertones is Viktor Tsvetkov’s The Finish (1947). Vasili drank himself to death later on, perhaps a good way to go under his father’s regime, better anyway than starving to death or being shot.

The dictator’s son Vasili Stalin may be seen in the audience of Vladimir Bogomazov’s Training for the Olympics of 1954. His snow scene The Artist’s Dacha (1954) is untroubled, a canvas of purely painterly instinct.A favourite Stalinist topic was sport. Pure little landscapes of some beauty come from Mikhail Barancheyev. This ought to be a sunny picture, and indeed it represents sunshine, but I find something a little threatening in it, as though war were just around the corner.

Novodevichy was a riverside place where Muscovites gathered on their day off. Could there be a socialist realist painting that had no ideological topic, that was, say, a pure landscape? Ivan Kolin’s Sunday, Novodevichy of 1955 might be put in such a category. It is clear that Stalin’s art was one of subject matter: workers, peasants, factories, heroes. And were there not artists who had not been trained in state academies, ie amateurs?Aesthetic questions follow these historical puzzles. One would expect state art to be at its most official in Moscow and in the other regional capitals, but perhaps to have more freedom in the remoter provinces. After all, the USSR was an immense area in which more than 100 different languages were spoken. Perhaps the nature of socialist realist art changes not only with the course of history but with the facts of geography.