Search Results

“... In 1957, Boris Shragin, a young art historian, accompanied a group of foreigners on a visit to the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Arts. Gerasimov had made his name with fawning neoclassical portraits of Stalin and Voroshilov, and used his position to crush ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘formalist’ artists whose work strayed from the official aesthetic ...”

“... informers on the other.Given these prejudices, it’s lucky that it was not I but the fair-minded Benjamin Nathans who set out to write the history of Soviet dissidents. He likes them, but stays this side of idolatry. Their appeal as oddballs with strong, if not always logical, convictions and an instinctive resistance to authority is clear from his ...”