Poster "Educate the children to work"

A Kyrgyz boy, unmistakable for he wears a kolpak (a black and white felt hat usually donned by Kyrgyz men), rides a hammer and whips his mount with the help of a cob of wheat. Bearing the slogan "Educate the children to work", this image and the symbols mobilized embody the two forms of labour which underpin the economy of the USSR and conjure up the "alliance of workers and peasants" that Lenin so longed for. The poster was made in 1979 for the annual competition of the Union of Artists of Kyrgyzstan by a Russian artist from Frunze, Mikhail Tomilov (1939-), whose fame, until the 2010s, relied on his scathing caricatures.

Mikhail Tomilov had an original background. Born in Novosibirsk, he moved to Frunze, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, with his parents in the mid-1960s and entered the decorative and applied arts section of Frunze’s Fine Arts School. After being trained in bone carving, he quickly switched to humorous drawing and submitted his first caricatures to the kyrgyz-language satirical magazine Chalkan. He participated in all local and pan-Soviet competitions and won several prestigious prizes. He was awarded the bronze medals “VDNKh - USSR – 1977” and “For Contribution to Peace” at the 4th International Exhibition "Satire in the Struggle for Peace" in Moscow in 1983. In 1992, he received the 1st Asanbek Turumbekov Prize for the development of satire in Kyrgyz art. Nonetheless, he testified to the severe constraints artists were facing, both in the Kyrgyzstan and USSR Artist’s Unions, and the difficulty of gaining recognition from his peers.

This sketch (an original gouache on wood) has actually never been published, since it was not selected in the competition it was submitted for. It uses the aesthetic canons of Soviet avant-garde screen printing of the 1920s and 1930s: the three colours and the schematization of the shapes reference the series destined to children illustrating Mayakosvkii's poems (see their reprint by Art-Volkhonka in its collection « detyam budushchego », Moscow). These aesthetic codes coexist with a Central Asian motif so that the educational message conveyed reached out to rural Kyrgyz ayl families. The slogan’s imperative form, which suggests the existence of a degree of permissiveness, a lack of oversight, and points to the alleged idleness of the ayl society, lends itself to a double reading. It can be seen as an expression of the Soviet civilizing message, which is not devoid of a colonial streak and which accurately fits in the Brezhnevian era in Kyrgyzstan (Moritz, Cahiers du Monde russe, 2013). During this period, the Soviet project of social modernization, embodied in the 1920s campaigns for literacy, emancipation of women and the condemnation of presumably backward mores, continued. It concerned housing and eating habits and aimed at russification.

But this painting may also be interpreted differently. The sense of freedom evoked by the child's bare feet and mischievous smile, which contrasts with the poster’s formal conformism and slogan, may be read as if the protagonist was thumbing his nose at the predominant values of the time. If we compare this sketch with the author's other works, we cannot but highlight the humor and irony in this poster, which are so characteristic of late socialism. Might we, actually, by means of the brush of the artist, skilled in the use of political symbols, peep into Frunze urban society’s awareness of the gap that separates it from the Kyrgyz people of the ayl and of the constraint that the cult of work and discipline exerts on them? A hypothesis which can be confirmed by the author’s closeness to Kyrgyz society, whose language, customs and countryside he knows.

Isabelle Ohayon is Associate Research Professor at French National Centre for Scientific research (CNRS), Centre for the study of Russia, Caucasus and Eastern Europe (CERCEC). She specializes in the history of colonial and Soviet Central Asia. Her research interests include pastoral societies of Kazakhstan and Kirghizstan, socialist agriculture and Stalin mass repression, and currently consumption and ritual economy during the late soviet period.