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• 1 media/Lunch Break in the Donbass (1934).jpg 2023-12-04T01:25:59+00:00 Soviet Socialist Realism through Lunch Break in the Donbass (1935) 36 Painted by Alexander Deyneka image_header 2024-07-01T20:38:04+00:00 1935

  About the Artist

  Alexander Deyneka was an affluent Soviet Socialist artist, historically respected as one of the major Russian modernist painters of the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kursk, Deyenka attended Kharkov Art College in Kharkiv, Ukraine, finding repeated success with his paintings at USSR-sponsored exhibitions. His paintings often focused on genres in labor and sports, and his later works expanded into depictions of significant Russian historical events, such as his Defense of Sevastopol (1942), which commemorates the siege of Sevastopol during World War II.

  A Selection of Deyneka's Sports Paintings

  Alexander Deyneka’s painting Lunch Break in the Donbass (1935) is a product of early Socialist Realism, an art style dominant throughout the Soviet Union and their allies to portray idealistic depictions of Soviet life and work, with little room for interpretation and opinion. Art that did not fit within the limited confines of what represented a utopian society was dismissed and otherwise censored from the public eye, as Socialist Realist art was the only state-supported genre as established by the First Congress of Soviet Writer in 1934. Artists became forced to limit creativity and focus on optimizing life under Soviet communism, with Deyneka focusing on leisure activities alongside labor, as an important piece of a happy, ideal Soviet life.
  
  This painting shows a group of naked men running out of a body of water, with a running train, presumably filled with coal, in the background. At first glance, these men are presumably on their lunch breaks playing a game of soccer in the fresh air surrounding their workplace. Through a Socialist Realist point of view, they are strong, happy workers enjoying their equal freedoms alongside one another before finishing up their days as proud, Soviet laborers. They are strong, blonde, with smiles on their faces and visibly enjoying their surroundings. Like many Socialist Realist paintings by Deyneka, the people depicted in similar environments as in Lunch Break in the Donbass fulfills the criteria of elevating the Soviet ideal, promoting an unrealistic standard of everyday Soviet life.
  Lunch Break in the Donbass is almost identical to Deyneka’s painting Running Girls (1941), where three strong, naked, blonde women are running with towels flowing behind them. In the distance, there are the same visuals of a coal-filled train running behind them passing the same building on the other side of the beach, promoting the communist propagandized ideals that women are just as valuable and capable as men (equality, woohoo!). Not only are these women depicted and promoted to be valuable laborers throughout Soviet propaganda, but through Deyneka’s art, they have the same hobbies and needs outside of work, capable of elegantly running in the water and built as athletic, idealistic Soviet women. Painted six years after the initial Lunch Break in the Donbass, Deyneka promotes a unique interpretation of Soviet life, where men and women alike can enjoy the beach together and are not confined to the western ideology that Soviet society is oppressive, unlikeable, and otherwise excludes room for freedom and leisure.
  
  A year before painting Lunch Break in the Donbass, Deyneka painted Goalkeeper (1934), where a goalkeeper flies towards a ball during a soccer game as two players look on to continue playing after an attempted goal. Once again, all three men are athletic and portrayed to have enough time and energy to enjoy games. Grouping these paintings together, one would conclude that Soviet life was full of opportunity to enjoy surrounding environments, with welcoming atmospheres to play, relax, and be free. In reality, Deyneka’s choice to highlight idealistic life outside of work not only falls in line with the need to promote life that did not exist for the average Soviet, but also distances the notion that Soviet life is a predominant cycle of waking up, working, and going back to sleep.

  Ukrainian Reality Within Donbas

  At the start of Soviet occupation, Ukraine's Donbas maintained incredible coal deposits, with 60 million reserves, and a majority of Donbas Ukrainians lived as coal miners and farming peasantry. By 1913, the Donbas region produced 87% of the Russian Empire's coal, with coal production increasing even after the Russian revolution of 1917 and the conclusion of WWI (Britannica). In order to maintain full access to this wealth, Stalin encouraged state-wide famines, including the Great Ukrainian Famine (Голомодор), which murdered millions of Ukrainians in favor of prioritizing exponentially increased industrialization, if they were not immediately sent to Siberia (Britannica). The collectivization of agriculture, where peasant farmers were forced to give up their food supplies in favor of the urban, industrial workers, murdered 10% of the Ukrainian population. Although disputed, this man-made famine enabled Stalin to commit genocide in favor of his Five-Year Plan and his prioritization of engulfing Ukraine and other neighboring states with exclusively Russian people and culture, maintaining a multi-generational stance on the hierarchy of Russia among their geographic neighbors (“Holodomor”). Booming industrialization within the Donbas attracted hundreds of thousands of Russian workers to settle, replacing the Ukrainians sent to Siberia and starving to death (Britannica). Stalin continued this by enacting a Russification policy that effectively constrained learning institutions from teaching in Ukrainian, limiting Ukrainian-written literature, and discouraging Ukrainian cultural norms. Deyneka paints coal-filled trains and terra-cones in the distance of both Lunch Break in the Donbass and Running Girls to highlight the perspective that Donbas region's significance lies in its usefulness to provide coal for the state. With this history in mind, one can conclude that Deyneka's idealized depictions of residents among the coal-fired Donbas are Russians who successfully found place and meaning as newcomers. Their joy and visible freedoms reflect Soviet success in cultivating the Donbas' coal in support of the intense uptick and expansion of Soviet industrialization.

  Conclusion

  Deyneka’s Lunch Break in the Donbass (1935), alongside his paintings Running Girls (1941) and Goalkeeper (1934) illustrate jovial, Soviet atmospheres aligned with Socialist Realism ideals of promoting a utopian, mythical society within Stalin’s authoritarian USSR. Ukrainians were systemically murdered for their place's wealth in coal, yet Deyneka and his peers chose to paint a world where these people thrived alongside Russian invaders, happily coexisting. Even when both Ukrainian and Russian laborers were starving under the pressure of agonizing labor, artists like Deyneka routinely glorified this life as a successful emancipation of the Russian proletariat, in line with Lenin’s socialist narratives regardless of the truth. By illuminating the ideal human body enjoying aspects of a full life throughout these three pieces, Deyneka successfully discovers an unknown world of Soviet laborers reaping the fruits of their success. He invents room within a world that is not there by crafting myths of happiness and enjoyment alongside his peers, who romanticize soviet labor, Soviet officials as the ideal way of life, and fruits of Soviet labor, such as Yuri Pimenov’s Increase the Productivity of Labour (1927), Ilya Mashov’s Soviet Bread (1936), and Deyneka’s The Stakhanovites (1937).
   

  Bibliography

  Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Donbas". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Dec. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/place/Donbas. Accessed 18 December 2023.
  Deyneka, Alexander. Goalkeeper. 1934.
  Deyneka, Alexander. Lunch Break on the Donbass. 1935.
  Deyneka, Alexander. Running Girls. 1941.
  “Holodomor.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Dec. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor.