A Postcolonial Perspective on Aleksandr Deineka’s Donbas Images

Abstract

This article analyses both well-known and unfamiliar paintings, illustrations and mosaics depicting the Ukrainian Donbas region by the Socialist Realist artist Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969). Having been received, because of his modernism, rather sympathetically in the West, Deineka produced an array of Donbas images that can be employed as a starting point for analysing Soviet imperial ideology in art. The case of Deineka shows the extent of Soviet imperial and colonial strategies in regard to nations that were subjected to Moscow’s rule, and that even Deineka, who is considered as a critical Socialist Realist, was one of the most powerful ideologues of Soviet colonial imperialism.