Artists of Semipalatinsk in the Second Half of the 1930s: Expectations and Reality

The present work aims to analyze the activities of the artists of Semipalatinsk at the initial stage of the formation of the East Kazakhstan branch of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan. The materials deposited in the Central State Archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan, in the Archive of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan were used as sources for the study. The minutes of artists' meetings of 1937-9, the correspondence of artists with the Secretariat of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan, the 1937 charter of the Union of Soviet Artists of Kazakhstan, lists of artists from Semipalatinsk and others were analyzed. In July 1933, at the initiative of L.I. Mirzoyan, first secretary of the Kazakhstan Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Organizational Bureau of the Union of Soviet Artists of Kazakhstan was created. By this time, Semipalatinsk - the administrative center of the region - had a small but active group of artists: I.G. Ivachev (1893-1955), O.D. Beloslyudova-Zhilinskaya (1893-1940), I.V. Shashin (1916-?). At the stage of the formation of the branch, the creators had to face a whole range of administrative and financial problems: by 1939, the issue of setting an art studio remained unsolved, the process of joining the union was slow, there was a constant lack of materials. The opening of the East Kazakhstan Branch of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan, which became one of the eight branches of the republic, was announced in August 1939. I.G. Ivachev became an authorized representative of the branch. Among the urgent issues on the agenda was the creation of standard contracts for the execution of single orders. Since the second half of the 1930s, a wide range of artists of Semipalatinsk was under the control of the Department of Arts and in parallel was supervised by the Organizational Bureau of the Union of Artists headed by V.N. Sladkov. These trends put the creative activities of the artists of Semipalatinsk, as well as of the whole republic, under the control of the state. The growing ideological burden and control over the activities of the branch on the part of state bodies also pushed the artists towards ideological and creative conformism in exchange for obtaining privileges and using the union's defense mechanisms.

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