On the day after Putin’s re-selection, here is an incredible satiric revue of Russia’s line of Tsars and Tsarinas, Revolutionaries and Reactionary apparatchiks, Stalin and Putin …
Anne Bobroff-Hajal is an American artist with a Ph.D. in Russian history. She paints detailed yet whimsical representations about power, greed, grief and fury through the lens of a woeful Russian heritage. Her mixed media polyptychs about Russia are influenced by icons, graphic novels, animation storyboards and political cartoons. A monumental 14-foot-wide multi-panel artwork Darling Godsonny: Ivan the Terrible Advises the Infant Stalin is currently on display at the Wende Museum in Culver City, CA; it contains over a thousand portraits of Russians, ranging from serfs to princes and Soviet nomenclatura (Communist party elites) to gulag inmates, each painted using tiny brushes and a magnifying glass. Their stories are narrated in song by satirical characters.
Her tour de force, meanwhile, Playground of the Autocrats, covers 500 years of Russian autocracy, spanning ideological and dynastic changes. It is the focal point for the conversation that follows below. And the timing couldn’t be better (or, at the same time, more depressing), what with the reelection of Vladimir Putin over the weekend.
What is your relationship to Russia and the Soviet Union?
My Russian immigrant grandfather Boris (Bornett) Bobroff—who died before I was born—was an ingenious early 20th-century inventor. And he made a mysterious voyage from the U.S. back to then-Bolshevik Russia in 1919–1920. No one in my family knew exactly what he did there. Then I was in college and Ph.D. grad school during the anti-Vietnam war and other leftist movements. We were all interested in revolutionary movements, including Russian ones trying to transform repressive Tsarist autocracy into a truly just society (my friends and I were emphatically never pro-USSR or pro-Soviet Communism). My dissertation became the book Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars (recommended on the Library of Congress website among best to read during the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution).
My year of research in the USSR was one of the most extraordinary times of my life. I directly experienced working within the crazy Soviet bureaucracy; being bugged, followed, minded; the warmth of many Soviet people; the exciting research I was able to do there.
How has your conflict with Russian autocracy influenced your work?
It’s at the heart of almost everything I did in grad school, and much of what I’ve done since. I’m deeply interested in seeking the underlying causes for why an anti-Tsarist-autocracy movement of thousands of deeply dedicated people ended with most of them dead, and Stalinist autocracy in power.
Playground of the Autocrats is a cinemascope presentation of Russia’s dystopia. How did this come about?
I’m a historian whose native language is art. I love stories told in many pictures and fewer words. I’m influenced by art animation of the type I was seeing in NYC in the 1990s (often at SVA); by satirical late 19th/early 20th-century European/Russian/American political cartoons, by graphic novels and even illustrated children’s books.
I originally conceived Playground of the Autocrats as a series of satirical short animated films about Russian history. I wrote original lyrics to a Russian folk tune to be sung by autocratic flying godparents (Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great), sung by each as a blessing to the swaddled, mustached infant Stalin. All this later became the basis for my still painting/collages.
Did you have the germ of the idea before, during or after your Ph.D. studies?
I had grown up painting and drawing, always planning to be an artist—before I suddenly decided to go to history grad school. I felt torn for most of my time in grad school: It seemed I had to choose between the planet of image-makers and the planet of historians, jettisoning half my self into the void between them.
After completing my Ph.D., I left academia and for decades searched (while raising my children) for a way of uniting the two parts of myself. I took many, many wrong turns into playwriting, screenwriting and animation, which ended in a couple of bouts of clinical depression. Finally, I decided to create Playground of the Autocrats in a medium as easy to me as breathing: painting, which I had rejected for years as inadequate.
I passionately believe that art provides tools that can bring radically new perspectives to history. Filling an empty canvas necessitates thinking spatially; I’m very interested in “spatial history,” relating human actions to specific geographies. Art’s capacity to portray emotions means that, for example, I can take a dull academic diagram of social structure and paint it full of people, emotions, action, color. Also in art, you can shift on a vast scale, from an individual person to a map of the world—and everything in between, all within a glance.
Your technique is just as interesting—indeed, extraordinary—as your content. What is the process of creating satire on such a grand graphic scale?
I began Playground of the Autocrats with a series of smaller triptychs which developed my process and ideas.
It took me four years to complete the 14’ x 6’ Darling Godsonny Stalin (DGS), including a lot of both historical and visual research.
In order to go through all the work of producing this art, I have to find a way to laugh while dealing seriously with mass repressions, terror, and murders by autocrats of their own people. That’s where the satire comes in. I can’t really get down to work until I figure out a way to have fun with terrifying subjects, while still fully addressing the terror and why it happens repeatedly.
Viewers need respite within this art as much as I do. So in my painting, they can look at something joyous before returning to horror.
My original goal for DGS was to show the parallels between how Ivan the Terrible and Stalin consolidated power through almost identical terrors: Stalin’s purges and Ivan’s 16th-century Oprichnina. I wanted to portray the double role of terror and its inverse: every dedicated person eliminated during the terror left open a job that an often less-qualified person could move up to. Such people were so grateful to rise higher than they ever expected that they became loyal to the death to Stalin and what they assumed was a benefit from Communism. Because Stalin labeled those purged “enemies of the people,” the arrivistes felt no guilt about replacing them.
To paint anything, I need to understand it fully, visually as well as intellectually. When I began DGS, I assumed I’d paint Russian social structure in the typical pyramid made up of horizontal layers for each class, commonly used for every country in the world.
But as I familiarized myself with the new research about Tsarist class structure, I discovered it revealed that Russian social structure (beginning centuries ago with the rise of Muscovy) was made up of vertical patronage clans, where the autocrat at the top doled out patronage to top princes (Boyars), who in turn passed some down to their own less-powerful clan clients, who themselves passed down a portion to their clan clients, and so on. Those lowest supported the weight of everyone above them because that was their only access to crumbs of wealth getting passed down.
So I needed to invent a way of painting vertical clans instead of horizontal classes, with poorer nobles at the bottom shading into wealthier ones above them, and the boyars at the top. I used color to differentiate among clans.
Next, I had to create Panel 2’s Bolshevik social structure. (I had decided to plunge into painting Panel 1 without knowing what I’d do in the following panels.) Astoundingly, after a six-month-long long struggle to find enough material about Soviet social structure to paint it, I discovered a UCLA Soviet historian, Arch Getty, who was about to have a book published about his research on Bolshevik clans! I wrote to him, and he kindly sent me a manuscript copy, which I read with great excitement.
Here was the research I needed to be able to paint Panel 2! Bolshevik patronage clans were almost a direct copy of the Tsarist clans, with a few modifications! So Panel 2 became Bolshevik vertical clans that were nearly identical to Tsarist ones, with a few changes such as no longer being family based.
My artistic process: I create sketches in an insanely complex digital process in my computer (where each of hundreds of people, and often various body parts, are on separate virtual layers). Then I transfer the completed sketches to canvas. This process takes as long as the painting itself does. Much of that time is spent searching for online models for the extreme poses my people are in—poses no live model could hold beyond a split second.
Tell me about the reaction to your work.
I’ve been thrilled by the reaction to DGS. Most recently, at the Wende, it’s been so popular that the curator held over its exhibition for an additional five months.
I’ve engaged with viewers of all ages, from adults of many different backgrounds, through university students and day camp kids, all of whom become excited about the characters and people. They crouch down to study lower sections; talk with other viewers, point to specific painted people they’re interested in.
Over the last year, I’ve developed a new way of interacting with groups of viewers. I ask each to choose any two people in the entire piece who appeal to them, observing what actions their two people are taking, where they are in the hierarchy, whether they’re traceable over two or more panels of the polyptych, etc. Building up and out from these individual observations and wonderful questions, we have a terrific group conversation, often ending with discussing why this vertical patronage structure is so profoundly rooted in Russia.
Russian oppositionist artists who I met in Russia (pre-Ukraine invasion) weren’t happy with my portrayal of the continuity of their country’s centuries-old autocracy. They believed that they could create something radically new in Russia: a truly democratic society, so they didn’t want to hear about holdovers from tsarism. I completely understood how they felt. But I believe that without understanding the phenomenally strong forces of continuity, oppositionists will never be able to interrupt those forces. (The power of continuity is alive and well in the U.S., too; e.g., as we keep creating new iterations of slavery via sharecropping, Jim Crowe, redlining, mass incarceration.)
How did you feel when Glasnost and Perestroika rose to the surface? Did you believe Russia could really change its Soviet trajectory?
In the 1990s, I tried to hold out some hope, but I strongly suspected that autocracy would reconstitute itself, just as it had after the 17th-century Time of Troubles and the 1917 Revolution. And in fact, a continuation of the patronage clan structure formed immediately after the fall of the USSR. The oligarchs we’ve heard about since the 1990s are the new name for the same boyars and nomenklatura of earlier Russian/Soviet autocracies.
Westerners look at Putin, and assume he could choose to transform centuries-old vertical-power institutions into democratic ones. They see his invasion of Ukraine as a result of a lunatic’s dream of reconstituting the Russian Empire. But when we label dictators “insane,” we do it at our own peril, because, since we can’t understand insanity, it’s pointless to try to understand the deep causes for Russian autocratic society today.
It’s crucial to look at how entire societies are organized, not only the person at the top, to understand Russia (or any other country) in a serious way. That’s why I paint all these three-inch-high people, to portray a social structure built of many, many individuals.
Do you think Putinism is here to stay, and will only spread, as it seems may happen with Ukraine?
I hope that Ukraine will eventually win this horrific, unconscionable war.
Sadly, I think Russian autocracy will likely stay. Russia’s entire society, for many centuries, has developed as a way to concentrate wealth and power in Moscow. Geographers call Russia the topographically least defensible country on Earth. So Russia has developed an entire society formed like a military chain of command—in other words, an autocracy.
Can art like yours (and others who satirize tyranny) alter the world in any way? Or are we headed toward the abyss?
I’ve asked myself that question all my adult life. It’s why I stopped doing art for years and went to history grad school. I thought studying social change in academia could alter the world more than art could. Today, I feel that a single artist can’t change the world. But maybe art designed to engage all kinds of viewers in a deeper understanding of autocracy—and other political systems—can make a small contribution, if many, many other people are working toward a similar goal.
What is next in your satiric arsenal?
For the past four, going on five years, I’ve been working on a 16-foot-wide polyptych titled Peter the Great’s Grand Embassy Through Europe: Peter Consoles the Infant Stalin. What’s exciting about this one is that it opens up all of Europe, along with Russia, for satire. It also allows viewers to very clearly see some of the many geographic assets in Europe that Russia didn’t (not only climate), helping us understand why Europe and the U.S. developed pluralistic systems while Russia remained autocratic.