Art: Red Realism

In heavy silence, thousands of East Berliners last week shuffled through their city's Pergamon Museum, on Museum Island. On view, guarded by alert People's Police, were 95 paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by modern and "prerevolutionary" Russian artists, the first big exhibit of Russian art to travel outside the U.S.S.R. since the war.

Only one picture was designed to remind Germans of Big Brother's big fist. Its title: The End. Subject: Hitler in his last moments in his crumbling Berlin bunker, a drooling, raving maniac surrounded by besotted generals. The rest of the exhibit was...

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