“Soviet Crafts in Ancient Times and Today,” an exhibition recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum, has been touring the country for the past eight months as part of the U.S.-Soviet Cultural Exchange Program. Its purpose, according to an “Address to Visitors” by Aleksei Kosygin distributed at the entrance, is to “show how different cultures develop and enrich each other in our country, how carefully artistic traditions are preserved and promoted, how the present-day arts are encouraged. . . .”
Flashback: Sometime during the mid-Fifties, the Soviet Union presented its first postwar trade show, a conglomeration of paintings, tractors and other miscellany set out in the New York Coliseum and predictably publicized as exemplifying the enormous strides toward industrialization accomplished under socialism. At the press opening, the Soviet-supplied guide proudly explained that the furniture on display was factory-made for the average citizen; every worker could buy it. My husband, a newspaperman, is a skeptic; he also possesses some expertise in cabinetmaking. He therefore got down on his hands and knees ignoring the snide remarks of some of his colleagues to examine the furniture closely. Sure enough, on the underside of every table, chair, desk and sofa were telltale hammer and chisel marks proving that they had been painstakingly cut out and put together by hand, probably just for this exhibition. Far from being mass-produced, each piece, as an American pr man would have loudly boasted but which the Russian guide hotly denied, was “a product of old-world craftsmanship”; it could hardly have adorned the home of an average worker —not even a Stakhanovite.
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