<SUMMARY>
Lenin used to refer to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the party of the future, the party of innovators. Its all-embracing activities are marked with the ability to see keenly all that is new and progressive and to support and establish such new developments in everyday life. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is genuinely a party of the people, all its activities serving the best interests of the nation. That is why the decision to call the 26th Congress of the CPSU filled all the Soviet people with a formidable charge of creative energy. Workers and collective farmers, builders and scientists, miners and steel-makers, people of various trades and professions belonging to different age groups and a wide range of nationalities all were swept by a common desire to mark the highest forum of the Communist withnew achievements and feats of labour.
The masters of Soviet fine arts had begun their preparations for the progress report to the CPSU Congress long before its opening date. The crowning event in reviewing their creativity record was the "We Are Building Communism" All-Union Art Exhibition that opened in the Central Exhibition Hall in Moscov in February 1981, on the eve of the Congress.
The exhibition was co-sponsored by the Artists' Union and the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, the decision to the effect having been taken in 1979. Painters and graphic artists, sculptors, poster and bool designers, theatre and cinema artists, masters of decorative and monumental arts, in fact all the members of the seventeen-thousand-strong Artists' Union helped the future exposition to take shape and get well underway.
Urged on by the desire to embrace more fully the life of the Soviet Union, the artists travelled far and wide over its expanses mainly seeking topical matter that would allow them to create works of art dedicated to and inspired by modern times and our contemporaries. Those trips gave them much food for thought and immense amounts of material for inferences and collations.
Such creative search was constantly expanding in scope in the years preceding the 26th CPSU Congress The creative pursuits of the artists drew them to ever new regions of the country, and the Baikal-Amur trunk line, the Atommash (Atomic Engineering Plant) construction site, the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydro-Power Station, the most important construction projects in Siberia, in the Far East and Central Asia became the venues of their everyday artistic inspiration.
Artists, individually and in whole teams, had personal and collective retrospect exhibitions organized in hundreds of towns, villages and factory estates here. In the pre-Congress period the number of exhibitions increased sharply all over the country. They were held at recreation centres and in the trailers of the construction workers, in schools and rest rooms. These art exhibitions were the result of the singleness of purpose of thousands of masters of the fine arts; they were indicative of the artists' political and creative activity and became an effective tool in helping to form the aesthetic ideals of the public at large and contributed, in no small measure, to the education of the working people, stimulated the development of the personality of the Soviet citizen of our epoch.
As a preparatory stage for the We Are Building Communism All-Union Exhibition, throughout 1979-80, area art displays were arranged in Moscow, Leningrad, Tiumen, Syktyvkar, Riazan, Barnaul, Chita, Makhachkala, Briansk, and Kazan. These exhibitions became important events in the artistic life of many thousands of Russia's artists.
The 6th Art Exhibition Soviet Russia opened in Moscow on the eve of the 63th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Its layout displayed pieces of art selected as the best from those on view at the art exhibitions of the Russian Federation, mentioned above.
Exhibitions of the most significant art works by local talent were also organized in all the constituent Republics of the Soviet Union and everywhere these became displays of inspired and fruitful artistic endeavours. The painters of the Ukraine dedicated their canvases and prints to the iron and steel workers, to the machine and tool builders, to those who work on the country's farms. During the 10th Five-Year Plan period bonds between the artists of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and the fishermen of the Baltic Sea grew tighter, while the masters of the fine arts of Kazakhstan enhanced their friendship with those who distinguished themselves in making real the virgin land reclamation project. On their canvases and prints the painters and engravers of Turkmenia commemorated the conquest of the desert by Soviet people. In the Caucasus a group of leading Georgian artists set up their easels at the iron and steel plant at Rustavi. New works of art portraying Soviet factory and farm workers were created by the artists of Byelorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Tadjikistan.
The confluence of streamlets brings forth the appearance of mighty full-flowing rivers. So. the best pieces of art displayed at the exhibitions in the constituent Republics of the Soviet Union produced the main art show of the country - the All-Union Art Exhibition We Are Building Communism. Workers, farmers, teachers, athletes, old men and women, youths and children live in its exhibits a full-blooded, convincing and true life. The artists saw and commemorated them in varios situations, presented them in various states of mind and soul, but each and everyone of these characters is, to use a figure of speech, a plenipotentiary representative of our people in whose imae the individual and the unique has been caught by the artist along with the traits typical of and held in common by all the Soviet people of our epoch.
Gallery "We are Building Communism">>>>
