[Suprematism] will liberate all those engaged in creative activity and make the world into a true model of perfection.
—El Lissitzky, 1920

Whereas the realist artists and those following similar trends . . . were less willing to greet the Revolution than those following new trends, the latter—whose nonrepresentational methods were very suitable for artistic industry and ornament—proved to be powerless to give psychological expression to the new content of the Revolution. Hence we cannot boast that the Revolution—and, I repeat, in the first years when its effect was strongest and its manifestation most striking—created for itself a sufficiently expressive and artistic form.
—Anatolii Lunacharsky, 1922

The revolution is merciless not only toward those who lag behind it but also toward those who run ahead of it.
—N. V. Ustryalov, early 1920s

It is a melancholy fact of contemporary cultural life that the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia should still remain an object of piety and admiration among so many Western artists and intellectuals some seventy-five years after the immense destructive power of this fateful event was let loose upon the world. True, the apologists for the Stalinist phase of the revolution, though only the other day they commanded a large and vocal following in many quarters of our cultural life, have for the most part fallen silent about its imaginary achievements, and the end of the Cold War has rendered the defense of Soviet Communism in any of its manifestations more or less