request. Burov, it seems, has only recently escaped from
what he considered a bitter affliction due to the Department
of Proletarian Culture, who, in the beginning, for the

decoration of his trains, had delivered him bound hand
and foot to a number of Futurists. For that reason
he wanted us to see the "Lenin" first, in order that we might
compare it with the result of his emancipation, the "Red
Cossack," painted when the artists "had been brought under
proper control." The "Lenin" had been painted a year and a
half ago, when, as fading hoarding in the streets of Moscow
still testify, revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist
movement. Every carriage is decorated with most striking
but not very comprehensible pictures in the brightest colors,
and the proletariat was called upon to enjoy what the
pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to
understand. Its pictures are "art for art's sake," and cannot
have done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the
peasants and the workmen of the country towns who had the
luck to see them. The "Red Cossack" is quite different.
As Burov put it with deep satisfaction, "At first we were in the
artists' hands, and now the artists are in our hands," a sentence
suggesting the most horrible possibilities of official
art under socialism, although, of course, bad art flourishes
pretty well even under other systems.




I inquired exactly how Burov and his