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This painting features a trash can filled with a cracked bust of Stalin, a book entitled Stalin, and a pair of handcuffs. On the floor next to the trash can is a book entitled Lenin, as well as a smoldering pipe lit by a red ember that emitts a stream of black smoke. This late work from 1994 seems to definitively reckon with the heritage of Soviet Communism.
Alexei Rezaev, To the Scrapheap of History, 1994
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The painting depicts Stalin scrawling text on an image of a line of Soviet soldiers. The soldier in front is in mid-salute and has a target superimposed over his face. The text reads (in Russian), “There are people, there are problems. Without people, there are no problems,” a quote from the 1987 novel Children of the Arbat by Anatoly Rybakov. When asked about the attribution of this quotation to Stalin in his novel, Rybakov responded, “This was a Stalinist principle. I only shortened and articulated it. That is the right of an artist.” In the bottom righthand corner is written, “From 1937–1939, 40,000 upper staff members of the Red Army were targeted,” referencing the years of Stalin’s purges. Alexei Rezaev, Untitled, 1994
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