On 15 September a group of artists made an attempt to hold an open-air exhibition of their works, on the open space between Profsoyuznaya Street and Ostrovityanova Street.
This was preceded by a statement from the artists to the Moscow Soviet, announcing their intention of holding the exhibition, and by discussions with officials of the Moscow Soviet and the Moscow Section of the Artists’ Union, which ended indecisively, with no refusal and no permission being given.
At noon the 24 artists began to exhibit their works in the presence of a considerable number of spectators (including foreign journalists and diplomats), a few policemen in uniform, who were reasonably polite in telling those assembled to disperse, and a large group of men in civilian clothes who proceeded to break up the exhibition.
The pretext given for breaking up the exhibition was an announcement to the effect that a Sunday work-team was about to arrive to landscape the area. And indeed, some time after the dispersal had begun a lorry drew up carrying a small number of saplings, and the pictures taken from the artists were thrown onto the lorry. (The vacant lot was actually landscaped only two weeks later, after a fuss had been made about the exhibition in the foreign press and after a number of curious journalists had visited the scene.)
The exhibition was broken up by force: both ‘manual’ (people were beaten and had their arms twisted; pictures and cameras were confiscated), and ‘mechanical’ (bulldozers and vehicles spraying water were used). According to witnesses, six pictures were destroyed and about 20 damaged.
Five of those who took part in the exhibition (Oscar Rabin, his son Alexander Rabin-Kropivnitsky, Evgeny Rukhin, Nadezhda Elskaya and the photographer Vladimir Sychev) were taken to a police station, where they were tried on the following day. O. Rabin and E. Rukhin were fined; the rest were sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment each. N. Elskaya was released on the same day as sentence was pronounced, A. Rabin and V. Sychev two days later, on 18 September.
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On 18-19 September, on the initiative of the Moscow Soviet, fresh discussions took place about arranging an exhibition, in which N. Ya. Sychev, Secretary of the Moscow Soviet Executive Committee, took part.
As a result of these discussions, an exhibition took place on 29 September in Izmailovsky Park; about 200 pictures by 65 artists were exhibited. Among the artists who took part were several members of the Moscow section of the Artists’ Union, although the union leadership had summoned them and warned them they would be expelled from the union if they participated.
The TASS news agency, in a statement for abroad, and N. Ya. Sychev, at a press conference in the House of Journalists, maintained that a Sunday work-project had been dispersed by hooligans and rejected the ‘inventions’ of the foreign press about the breaking up of an exhibition, the use of vehicles against some artists, the confiscation of their pictures, ‘and other such fabrications’.
There are samizdat copies in existence of statements sent by the artists to the Moscow Soviet concerning the organization of the exhibition, and to the Council of Ministers and the Party Politburo about the breaking-up of the exhibition; there is also Nikolai Bokov’s article “Two Days in September”, devoted to the breaking-up of the first exhibition and to the exhibition which took place in Izmailovsky Park.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 