Taking No Chances

The Communist Party Central Committee's arts-purger, Andrei Zhdanov, had not yet got around to the subject of painting, but artists could take a hint. On the heels of Zhdanov's blast against "bourgeois decadence" in Soviet music (TIME, Feb. 23), 25 members of the Union of Soviet Artists met in Moscow. Puckery, wavy-haired Union Chairman Alexander Mikhailovich Gerasimov read the party decree on music. The Moscow Bolshevik reported: "A lively discussion. Various painters pointed out that painters were plagued by the same disease as the composers. They spoke about the remnants of formalism, falsely understood novelty, and neglect of the best traditions of Russian classic painting."

The upshot: a resolution in which the painters accused themselves of possessing a "spirit of decadence and bourgeois estheticism." All promised to reform.

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