Obituary: Igor Golomstock

An experiment with Moscow schoolchildren in the mid 1960s inspired art historian Igor Golomstock to see links between the socialist realist art of Stalinist Russia and that of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Maoist China.

It was a debate considered taboo in his native Russia, but led to his most famous book, Totalitarian Art (1990), the first serious study of artistic parallels between opposing regimes. Some 25 years earlier Igor Golomstock, who has died aged 88, discovered an illicit copy of a German art journal from the era of the Nazi-Soviet pact and noted a striking similarity between these art forms. He showed the illustrations to children at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art and asked them to name the artists. They easily rattled off the most prominent names of the Stalin period. Then he asked them to look at a portrait of Hitler within a painting of a German family listening to a wireless. They were stunned at the similarity of styles. Unsurprisingly Golomstock had to leave the museum shortly after, but it was enough to awaken in him the awareness of such polemic parallels. As he wrote in the preface to his book: “It arose from an intuitive sense of the strange closeness between two artistic systems that were – ideologically hostile to one another.”

Golomstock argued that totalitarian art was less an artistic genre than a propaganda tool with its own aesthetic and ideology. Its political inspiration may have differed but its so-called realism betrayed the same objectives; industrious families, idealistic soldiers and compassionate leaders.

Golomstock was born in the old Russian city of Tver, then Kalinin. His mother, Mary Smuilovna Golomstock, hailed from a Siberian Jewish family and trained as a neuropathologist. His engineer father Naum Yakovlevich Kodzhak was arrested in 1934 during Stalin’s first wave of terror, allegedly for “anti-Soviet propaganda” but in reality for belonging to a well-off Crimean-Karaite family. Golomstock then assumed his mother’s name. After his father’s arrest his mother remarried Yosif Lvovich Taubkin, a Party functionary. But the marriage failed and Mary left Moscow to work for two years as a doctor at the notorious Kolyma labour camp. She reasoned it was good money and a chance to retain her Moscow resident permit. So in the summer of 1939 Mary and the 10- year-old Igor set off for Vladivostock accompanied by her reconciled second husband. They remained there until 1943, but life in a labour camp run by the Soviet secret police traumatised Igor. The family returned to Moscow when Igor was 15 and he became a self- confessed “foul-mouthed barely educated child.”