Art-Historical and Contextual Research of Ida Belyakova's

The Return Of The Communist Party Membership Card

Apart of the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience on Carthage’s Sam and Berry Shoen Collection of Soviet Art With Doctor Robin Holmes and Anna Polietaieva

BY JARED WERNER

Nov 20, 2024, 11:30 AM CST

Ida Solomonovna Belyakova, The Return Of The Communist Party Membership Card

Ida Belyakova was born in 1905 near the small Jewish town of Pochep In the Bryansk Oblast of Russia. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, most Jews living in the Russian Empire were only allowed to live in this region. Between 1881 and 1917, a wave of pogroms swept across Tsarist Russia. Pogrom is the Russian word meaning massacre or attack. With the support of the authorities and the police, the pogromists raped, killed, and robbed their victims with impunity. During the civil war that followed the October Revolution (between 1918 and 1920), tens of thousands of Jews were killed in pogroms in Ukraine and eastern Poland. The town of Pochep, where Ida grew up, was also subject to attack and looting during the Russian Civil War. Ida was a Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR and a graduate of the Moscow Art Institute. The Union of Artists pursued the following goals: Creating ideological, highly artistic works of art and promoting the construction of communism in the USSR. The task of the Union is to assist artists in creating highly artistic works of art and educating soviet people in the spirit of communist ideas. The Union works to improve its members' ideological and political level and professional skills, to popularize their creativity and finances creative activities." The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition. S.v. Artists Union of the USSR. This Union would fund and directly oversee the creative works, making it difficult, to say the least, for artists to create their work due to the high price of art supplies and strict oversight of subjects and styles within the Union of Artists. There were separate artistic councils that performed the function of censorship and did not allow the works of many artists, considering their work "ideologically harmful." The terms "put the film on the shelf" and "write on the table" appeared, idioms referring to artwork that was never shown to the public. Any reference to Western culture or criticism of the government was considered ideologically hostile.

Records of Ida's works started appearing in exhibitions in 1936, yet only four of her known works remain. Titles of her works Evening Sunday School, from 1958, and The Beginning of the Path, from 1959, only appear in Cyrillic records, but the location of these paintings, if they still exist, is unknown. A physical book that is not available digitally that I had accessed through a family friend who went looking into public records in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, tells us that "after her death, most of her carefully collected works were discarded and thrown out." Tatyana Khvostenko, Behind the Facade Of Proletarian Art. Information on these artists is minimal and censored, not just about Ida Belyakova but about all of the painters and paintings in this collection. We had to look deep into Russian web pages using a VPN to ping our IP address location into Eastern Europe to get much of this information. In 1989, her illustrations were published in a children's book that we believe wasn't influenced politically or overseen by the Union of Artists. Her later cartoonish, playful style differs highly from the socialist realism of The Return of the Communist Party Membership Card.

Ida Belyakova and her husband at the time Mikhail Belyakov

In 1946, the first All-Union Art Exhibition opened and ran in Moscow at the State-run Tretyakov Gallery. Over 500 artists from the Soviet Republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Turkmenistan Participated and Over 1400 works were exhibited. The All-Union Art Exhibition was considered the main event in artistic life during Soviet times, and Ida Belyakova's work was there. It was designed to shine a light on the artists from all of the diverse nations that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not just featuring Russian art. Works included painting, sculpture, graphics, and political posters. All works were approved by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR. Thousands of Soviet artists dreamed of becoming participants in the All-Union Exhibition.

Ida Belyakova was married to a military man. Few people knew that her husband, Mikhail Belyakov, was the brother of the famous Soviet Union hero, Alexander Belyakov. A Soviet flight navigator who, together with two other Soviet pilots, set a record for the longest uninterrupted flight in 1936 and made the first non-stop flight across the North Pole. Belyakov served as a lieutenant general of the Soviet Air Forces and met with President Gerald Ford at the White House on June 23, 1975, eight years after this painting was made. We can infer that they separated because evidence suggests that Mikhail remarried.

In The Return of the Communist Party Membership Card, Belyakova depicts two life-size figures using dark colors and deep shadows. The background suggests shelves of books and a possible red banner or tapestry. The viewer can infer that this is a type of administrative or government space. However, it takes on the power of metaphor since it has no explicit location or identification. Both men appear generally dressed for the period and are serious, if not sinister, in their gestures and facial expressions. The saturated color and the title of the painting draw the viewer's attention to the bright red of the cover of the Communist Party Membership Card. The card appears directly in the center and is the focal point of the painting based on its placement, the title, and the artist's color choices.

So what is this red book? In the Soviet Union, there were many more chances to make a successful career if a person was a member of the CPSU and not just a non-party citizen. To be accepted into the Communist Party of the USSR, it was first necessary to achieve enrollment as a candidate for membership in the CPSU. In this case, the citizen was issued a candidate card, an ID with a photograph and data on the candidate. The loss of a Party card threatened much more serious trouble than the loss of a passport.

Simply put, such a person's career immediately collapsed. Expulsion from the CPSU for any offenses was accompanied by the confiscation of this document and the catchphrase "put your party card on the table!" which can be found in fiction and films of the Soviet era. This was one of the most terrible things of that era, threatening the cessation of promotion and almost guaranteeing a "demotion." One common joke quite popular in the Soviet Union was, "Almighty God bestowed upon all human beings three traits: integrity, intelligence, and Party membership." The humor here is contained in the irony of the words: God, of course, did not bestow the card; the government did. By elevating the card to the status of divinity within a system where religion was restricted and oligarchic, the joke undermines its importance. This context of irony, ambivalence, and misdirection is a valuable lens for Belyakova's painting.

The returning or re-issuing of your Communist Party card can be seen as recognizing your reform as a person, a return of your state identity. The title could also be interpreted as having the opposite meaning of returning the card to the party. This would be considered highly treasonous and could result in sentencing to a prison camp. This ambiguity seems to be central to Belyakova's work. This possible workaround was the reason I was attracted to this work specifically. It raises many questions within my mind about censorship and what meanings could be hidden within the brushstrokes. If the return to the party is the case, why did the man leave it in the first place? Was he exiled from the party, or did he lose his card? Also, the fact that he felt obligated to re-register speaks to how vital possessing the card was. They wanted to show that a man was staying faithful to the Union. This propaganda shows the vitality of pledging your allegiance to the Communist Party so that you can be forgiven. It raises the question of why Belyakova felt this was what she wanted to depict. She could have shown a person receiving their card for the first time, which is a much more precise cut and unable to be interpreted ambiguously. However, she specifically wrote on the back of the painting возвращение Священний партбилета- The Return of the Party Card. She made a conscious choice to show that this man was either returning his card to the Communist Party or was being re-issued his card. This decision makes me question her motive. Could this be a subtle way to guarantee her work would not be destroyed while simultaneously hiding an ulterior motive right under the nose of the Ministry of Culture and high-ranking Soviet officials who approved this work to be commissioned? Could she have been speaking out against the government, which refused to help her family during the pogroms? Could she feel shackled by the limitations given to her as an artist? Was she risking her life, or was she faithful to the Union? It's up to you to interpret what you believe you see.

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