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But the Russian modernists' work was too new, and repressed too early, to have any lasting social effect. The big building projects (Tallin's steel Monument to the Third International, or Alexander Vesnin's Palace of Labor for Moscow) could not be put up in a shortage economy. The avantgarde, Lenin pithily remarked, had to "live on its enthusiasm"; the state had nothing to spare, and red triangles had nothing to say to half-literate machinists from Magnitogorsk. To Stalin, the modern artists were bourgeois formalists: tiny specks of free imagination on the illimitable eyeball of his power. One by one, they were wiped away. They lost their studios and their jobs; their work was censored and ridiculed. Some, like Mikhail Larionov and Goncharova, died paupers in the West; others were claimed by the Gulag; most survived in the Soviet Union, their careers shattered along with their hopes. What they left was the last subterranean art, which, fragmented and decimated, still displays its fragile triumph over Stalin and his heirs. Whether its message can possibly survive the greed of the Western art market, however, is another question.
—By Robert Hughes