May Day (2)
Friday, May 1st, 1925.
In Leningrad, red cloth had been hung between the buildings along every street since before dawn. The factories and ration shops were all shuttered, and even the government offices stood empty.
On this utopian day when no one reported for work, the people poured into the streets in their brown coats. Children and old folk alike wore the same brown coats, and in their hands they carried solid red flags where the sickle of the peasant crossed the hammer of the worker.
May Day—Pervomay.
The international workers’ holiday born from the aftermath of the great Chicago strike rallies of the nineteenth century. In the days of the Tsar it had been called the Workers’ Easter; after the Revolution it became the Day of the International.
Ordinary Soviet people simply called it Pervomay, the First of May—much the same way we call the First of March Independence Movement Day.
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Union, had always held this day sacred. In 1896, while still in detention, he had drafted a manifesto titled “May Day, the Workers’ Holiday.” In 1901 he returned to the theme of the Workers’ Easter in the pages of Iskra.
And when at last he had defeated the Tsar, Lenin declared May 1st a public holiday under the 1918 Labor Code. From that year forward, every corner of the Union emptied into the streets each May Day to bless the workers’ festival.
Until now it had been nothing more to me than a faded photograph. To see it living and moving before my eyes—how could I not be moved?
Thousands upon thousands of flags streamed in the same direction, and tens of thousands of mouths burst open with shouts of greeting for May Day.
“Whoa…”
Gailis stood awestruck before the red tide that filled Nevsky Prospect.
“Even in Riga it was never like this… The Union really is something else. Incredible…!”
“Hmph. Country bumpkin.”
“Are you looking down on me and Yasha just because we came from far away?”
“…I was only talking about you, Gailis.”
Kuzmin jerked his head away. In truth, though, neither he nor I looked any less dazzled than Gailis. We simply stood there with our mouths open, drinking in the red wave.
— Dong… dong… dong…
Nine strokes of the bell from the Kazan Cathedral set the red tide in motion. It began on Nevsky Prospect and rolled toward the Winter Palace, where the Leningrad government offices now stood.
We were one thread of that current ourselves—dressed not in brown coats but in cadet uniforms, marching in formation toward the square. An upperclassman at the head of the column waved a red flag; the rest of us cadets followed in a long, orderly line.
“Man, just looking around is fun enough on its own.”
Gailis craned his neck left and right.
“Yasha, look at that! What an incredible display!”
Where his gaze had landed rose a structure three times the height of a man. Built of red plywood and wire, it was covered with large photographic prints arranged in a thoroughly avant-garde pattern.
“Workers’ faces, factory smokestacks, crowds looking up at the sky, the shadows of people walking the street… It’s weird. Just looks like a pile of strange pictures.”
Gailis tilted his head.
“What’s so strange about it?”
“Well, the angle’s nothing like the way we usually look at things.”
He cocked his head further and kept talking.
“That one’s shot from ground level of a worker climbing a ladder. That one just shows ordinary people walking down the street… Wait a second—that one’s taken from the sky! I thought those were people, but they’re shadows! They shot from above so the shadows look as big as real people!”
Gailis bounced on his heels in open astonishment.
“Why would anyone take a picture like that?”
“Tsk… country bumpkin.”
Kuzmin shook his head at him, yet a faint smile tugged at the corner of his usually stern mouth.
“The horizontal viewpoint we’ve always used to look at things is just an old pictorial convention.”
“Pictorial convention…?”
“A set of agreed-upon ways of representing three-dimensional reality on a flat surface like a canvas.”
For centuries painters had drawn trees from that conventional eye-level; photographers, following the painters, had long looked at their subjects the same way. Box cameras with the lens fixed at navel height only locked the habit in more firmly.
“But Alexander Rodchenko, the man who took those pictures, was different. He saw the convention as a kind of ‘visual authority’ and insisted we had to break free of it. Just then portable cameras like the Leica appeared, letting a photographer leave the fixed position and move the viewpoint freely. Every piece on that display was made that way.”
Rodchenko regarded these bold shifts of perspective—these new ways of shocking the eye—as more than a question of where one stood to look at a subject. They were a question of the very mode of thought that decided how we perceive and judge the world. His theory deeply impressed Vladimir Tatlin, the godfather of Constructivism, and the Bolshevik government itself.
Before long Rodchenko became secretary of the Moscow Artists’ Union, founded the fine-arts department of the People’s Commissariat of Education, and helped establish both the Institute of Artistic Culture and RABIS, the art workers’ trade union—revitalizing Russian art on every front.
“….”
When I finished the explanation and looked at them, both Gailis and Kuzmin were staring straight at me.
“Yasha… before you entered the school, did you work in the arts or something?”
“…Ah.”
“…That isn’t the sort of thing a cadet would normally know.”
Kuzmin added the words in a low voice. It sounded less like a rebuke than a note of genuine admiration.
“…Not really. It was just written that way in Pravda.”
A thin excuse. But I could hardly say, “Actually I was born in the late twentieth century and I study Soviet history.”
“Is that so? See, people really do get smarter when they read the newspaper a lot…!”
Gailis slapped his knee.
“…Of course they do. No better teachers than books and newspapers.”
I seized on Gailis’s words at once. Using Pravda as a convenient cover was handy enough, but in any case the cradle of information in this age was not the internet—it was the official press like Pravda.
“…Does Pravda really print things like that…?”
Kuzmin eyed me with open suspicion. Fortunately he did not press further. Instead he looked up at the photographs once more and murmured,
“Yasha… can art really change people’s eyes?”
“Hm?”
He still had not taken his gaze from the pictures.
“Can art truly change the way people see?”
It sounded like a non sequitur, yet the voice was more serious than his usual bluntness, so I answered in kind.
“…It can.”
“How can you be sure?”
“We’ve got a perfect example right here. Gailis just changed.”
“Huh…? Me?”
Kuzmin turned to look at him. I glanced back and forth between Gailis and Rodchenko’s work and went on.
“When he first saw those pieces, Gailis called them a pile of strange pictures. He was probably wondering why anyone would shoot them so weirdly.”
“I didn’t think it was that bad…”
“But he doesn’t think that now. He even read the meaning packed into a single angle. Same photographs—yet the Gailis of a few minutes ago and the Gailis of right now are seeing two completely different things.”
“….”
“That’s change. The world stays the same; when the eyes that look at it change, the world itself looks changed.”
Art changes people’s eyes, and the changed eyes change the world. And the principle is not limited to art. Sharp-minded Kuzmin had surely grasped the larger meaning.
“Yasha, for you…”
Kuzmin closed his mouth. His face was the face of a man turning something over carefully. Then, suddenly, he gave a short laugh.
“A post as Party secretary would suit you better than political commissar.”
“…What?”
When I asked again he only shrugged.
“Don’t overthink it. I just mean you’re too good to waste as a mere political commissar.”
“In other words, Yasha is that amazing, right?”
Gailis’s banter drew another faint smile and a nod from Kuzmin. I ought to have smiled with them, yet I could not quite manage it.
After all… the General Secretary of the Union happened to be my father.
“Anyway, enjoy today properly. You’ll never see anything like this again.”
The 1920s were regarded as the golden age of Soviet May Day. In those years the holiday was called the special festival of the working class, set against the masked balls of the bourgeoisie that had once marked Easter. The authorities had even entrusted the design of the celebrations to private hands, and the results spoke for themselves.
The propaganda of men such as the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Constructivist master Alexander Rodchenko, and Vsevolod Meyerhold—who had forged his own theory of biomechanics—gave birth to an entirely new artistic current: Russian Avant-Garde. Under the glory of being the vanguard of world revolution, May Day only grew more meaningful with every year that passed.
…Until Stalin proclaimed “socialism in one country” and put an end to the dream of world revolution.