entitled ‘‘Public Censure of Photojournalist Lang-
man’’ in the magazineProletarskoye Foto(Proletar-
ian Photo), which provided the details of court
proceedings against Octoberist photographer Elizar
Langman. In addition to a public censure of Lang-
man, the court recommended ‘‘political education’’
so that photojournalists might promote socialist
labor in their work; as well, photojournalists were
to be more closely monitored in how they benefited
from their photography. Nonconforming artists
would be branded ‘‘enemies of the people,’’ which
included the pre-revolution intelligentsia and pros-
perous peasants (kulaks).
Photographers were subjected to public censure
for acts such as taking ‘‘a formalist approach’’ to
their work and failing to give proper ‘‘considera-
tion for its political significance’’ (Bendavid-Val
1996, 40). Explorations of form were deemed a
repudiation of content, and in the view of some
proponents of socialist art the battle against for-
malism took on the character of a class struggle
waged at the level of ideology. Formalism, in re-
nouncing representational content, was said to play
a reactionary class role, indicative of a declining
period of late bourgeois society. Failing to give
proper consideration for ‘‘political significance’’
included when photographers’ work ‘‘did not pro-
vide a complete depiction of the activities of our
socialist industrial complexes; atypical individual
aspects of the construction were provided, [and/
or] illustrations of people heroically building the
socialist complex were lacking’’ (quoted in Bend-
avid-Val, 1999, 40). Increasing suspicions about
capitalist proclivities amongst photographers were
behind court proposals that photojournalists ‘‘turn
in their negatives to publishing house archives for
the purpose of thwarting their commercial aspira-
tions’’ (quoted in Bendavid-Val, 1999, 40). In 1933,
a law was passed requiring a permit to photograph
privately in public in Moscow, allowing authorities
to control photographers’ activities, and unsanc-
tioned photographers were restricted to such public
events as sports matches, parades, and official
functions. During this period numerous artistic
organizations were closed and the realism of the
ROPF approach emerged as the preferred model.
Changes emerged not only with regard to form
but also in terms of content. By the early 1930s
photos depicting heroes who were ready to make
great personal sacrifices for economic or military
advancement became favored. This provided the
Soviet regime with exemplars of loyalty that the
population should emulate. Images of heroic work-
ers such as Angelina Praskovya Nikitchina, a
skilled Ukrainian tractor driver and the miner
Alexei Stakhanov, both photographed by Yevgeny
Khaldei, and the miner Nikita Izotov, photo-
graphed by Mark Markov-Grinberg, were wide-
spread, appearing in newspapers and calendars.
Towards the end of the first Five-Year Plan and
with the institution of the Second Five-Year Plan,
an even more significant symbolic shift occurs. In
the earlier period, images of workers are imbued
with the force of the industrial achievements of the
emerging Soviet society. Later however, the images
of workers would be replaced by the universal
symbol of Soviet progress embodied in the figures
of Stalin, and less centrally, Lenin. These develop-
ments became the cliche ́d face of Socialist Realism
for the rest of the century.
In 1934, at the First All-Union Congress of So-
viet Authors, the official Party representatives,
including Nikolai Bukharin, Andrei Zhdanov,
and Maxim Gorky, decreed Socialist Realism to
be the only acceptable form of art. Despite the
growing government interference and censorship
through the early 1930s, until this point debates
about photographic methods could occur as long
as the discussion remained nonpolitical. The artis-
tic discussion that occurred in the early 1930s was
fully brought to an end, however, with the terror
that encompassed Soviet life beginning in 1937.
By 1937, suggestive of the repression that had
descended upon Soviet society and closed off artis-
tic liberty, Mezhericher had been branded a Trot-
skyist saboteur and arrested as an ‘‘enemy of the
people.’’ Newspaper accounts of Mezhericher’s fall
suggest the conditions under which Soviet pho-
tographers and editors had to work:The saboteur content of Mezhericher’s numerous arti-
cle’s and speeches, though cunningly hidden behind the
screen of hurrah-revolutionary phrases, now leaves no
doubt about their counter-revolutionary sense. This must
be explained to the broad masses of photo workers.
(quoted in Bendavid-Val, 1999, 64)
Another article cast suspicion on the exhibitions
Mezhericher organized in other countries:Toward who or what did Mezhericher orient photo-
graphs as he selected them for the presentation of the
Soviet Union abroad? From piles of pictures showing the
struggle of collective farmers Mezhericher selected and
displayed a casual picture of goslings just because a
gosling in the photograph seemed stirring....Such distor-
tions have been employed by the Trotskyist saboteur
Mezhericher in his own interests.
(quoted in Bendavid-Val, 1999, 64)SOCIALIST PHOTOGRAPHY