AkhRR

AkhRR (renamed the Association of Artists of the Revolution, AkhR, in 1928) was a group founded in 1922 in the Soviet capital that became the largest and most influential artistic organisation of the early Soviet period. Emerging soon after the Bolshevik takeover, it proclaimed a programme of "heroic realism": artists were to depict, in a documentary manner legible to the masses, the everyday life of workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers, as well as the events of the revolution and civil war. The association deliberately rejected avant-garde experiment and drew on the traditions of nineteenth-century realist genre painting, mounting large thematic exhibitions under the slogan of the "artistic-documentary" recording of the new age. Its members included Isaak Brodsky, Mitrofan Grekov, and other masters. Enjoying the support of the state and the army, AkhRR effectively prepared the ground for the official doctrine of Socialist Realism proclaimed in the early 1930s, after which all artistic groupings were forcibly dissolved and subordinated to a single creative union.