Mosaic (Kazakhstan)

In  a majestic building of the Academy of Sciences in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a colossal mosaic of Vladimir Lenin has been under wraps for nearly three decades. It was designed by local artists in the 1980s to overlook the building’s main assembly hall, but after Kazakhstan gained its independence in 1991, the ideological nature of the mural was seen as so taboo that it was hastily covered by wooden planking. After years in obscurity it was nearly forgotten, until the author of this submission petitioned the administrators of the building to reveal the mosaic once again. In the fall of 2018, the mosaic’s designer, Vladimir Tverdokhlebov, was able to see his mosaic for the first time in years. He had thought it was an object lost forever. 

Tverdokhlebov was one of the most successful artists in Soviet Kazakhstan to work in a field known as “monumental art.” Specialized artists, known as “monumentalists,” were trained at Soviet art schools to master a wide variety of media, from mosaics to bas-relief sculptures to stained glass windows. The height of their movement was from circa 1965-1985, when the simplicity of post-Stalin Soviet modernist architecture was often balanced with decorative compositions. They could be found in village schools and urban factories, on Houses of Culture and apartment blocks. In Kazakhstan, hundreds of these works of art were installed; throughout the Soviet Union, thousands. Indeed, in the 20th century, more mosaics were made in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world. 

Some of the best monumental artists came from the Vera Mukhina School in Leningrad, where Tverdokhlebov graduated in 1969. A group of Mukhina graduates were dispatched to distant Alma-Ata in the Kazakh SSR to help decorate a new history museum that was being installed in a decommissioned cathedral; Tverdokhlebov, working on the exhibition design, fell in love with Kazakh culture, and not long after fell in love with a local Kazakh woman as well. Though he had grown up in Russia, he put down roots in Alma-Ata and has lived there ever since. 

The artist was hired to be a resident monumentalist at the Oner Art Combine, where mosaics and other artworks were manufactured en masse. Most mosaics that Tverdokhlebov worked on were made with smalti, a kind of opaque glass, but he had long been interested in a rare style known in Russian as Florentiyskaya mozaika, the “Florentine mosaic.” Better known internationally by its Italian name, pietra dura, the medium eschews small smalti tesserae in favor of larger blocks of polished stone. Tverdokhlebov, hired to design a series of objects for the local Academy of Sciences, was finally able to design a Florentine mosaic with the profile of Lenin, working with a team of colleagues from the combine: Boris Anisimov, Aleksandr Obedin, and Aleksandr Zinenko.

Tverdokhlebov still recalls visiting the plant where raw ore was trucked in from the quarries of the Tian Shan mountains. He chose the proper stones to match the colors in his design, and they were cut and polished to the artist’s specifications. When finally assembled and installed at the Academy, the mosaic would weigh two tons.

It was probably the mosaic’s size that ultimately saved it from destruction - it was simply easier to cover it up than to have it removed. After Tverdokhlebov first told me about the work, I was surprised to hear that it had survived; I decided to petition the current owners of the building to return it to the public. Their position was understandable — having a massive Lenin head look down on their conferences was undeniably poor optics — but we agreed that the mosaic could now be covered with a curtain, so that tourists and visitors could at least peek at the mural if interested.

When the board came down, there was silence in the room. The artist approached the mosaic, and touched the polished stones that he had assembled as a younger man. The mosaic was in perfect condition. Everything was in its place.    

As an object, the mosaic is a useful demonstration of how art media like mosaics, and more specifically pietra dura, were introduced to the periphery from cultural centers like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Vladimir Sergeevich's own assignment from St. Petersburg to Alma-Ata is also an illustration of this movement.  

Furthermore, this story and artifact not only tells us something interesting about the Soviet past, but it also reveals contemporary attitudes toward that Soviet past, as well — how the mosaic was covered up for so many years because it was seen as obsolete, but is now receiving a reappraisal by people who are willing to look past its ideological content and appreciate its artistic and material value.

Dennis Keen is an American researcher living in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he documents Soviet monumental art for a project called Monumental Almaty.