“The Red Guard”

Sculpture

Created at the State

Porcelain Factory

by sculptor

Vasily Kuznetsov.

1919

We can see the earliest so-called "agitporcelain”

work (porcelain works aimed at revolutionary

propaganda) of famous Soviet sculptor

Vasily Kuznetsov: he had already created a model

of the “Red Guard” in 1918. A young worker

with a rifle looks like those from documentary

photographs by Yakov Steinberg featuring the real

revolution fighters on the streets of Petrograd

(Petersburg was renamed into Petrograd during WWI).

Yakov Steinberg. Guards at the Smolny Palace, 1917.

Brilliant porcelain artist Vasily Kuznetsov headed the sculpture

studio at the Petrograd State Porcelain Factory in the 1920s.

His name went down in history as one of the creators of the iconic

plastic portraits of the first “red” revolutionary heroes.

Сollection custodian:

“‘Agitporcelain,’ as it was called later, was manufactured in the years following
the October revolution. Vivid sculptural illustrations of revolutionary events were
among the first hundred collection items acquired by the Museum of the Revolution
(now The State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia) immediately after its opening in 1924.”

The agitporcelain masterpieces made their appearance following Lenin's “Monumental

Propaganda Plan”. This one of a kind document was adopted by “the proletariat leader”

in 1918 for the purpose of ideological education of new generations through culture.

From then onward all Soviet painters, writers, filmmakers and other artists, picking up the motto

enthusiastically, started “mass production” of new ideological symbols for the young Soviet Republic.

reference:

One of the first points where the “Monumental Propaganda Plan” was

implemented was the State Porcelain Factory in Petrograd commissioned

with a series of sculpture portraits of great revolutionaries in 1918.

It should seem that explicit ideological pressure on “free” art should

fail immediately... Nevertheless, the new rebel heroics, the boiling

political life in Petrograd, mass demonstrations and ideological festivals –

everything served as a source of inspiration, and even the accelerating wheels

of the state bureaucracy added to the euphoria. Of course this trend had its

exceptions, but the unsurpassed craftsmanship and vivid imagery of agitprop

art have never ceased to amaze us.

Shop Storefront of the State Porcelain Factory. Petrograd, 1921

Photo by A. Popovsky