Culver City,
California
x
Maker: Aleksei Rezaev
Meat Grinder
Date Made: 1991-1992
Country: Soviet Union
Measurements: 59.5 cm x 90 cm; 23 7/16 in x 35 7/16 in
This painting portrays the Stalin-era as a meat grinder in which people's lives were ground up by a cold, cruel machine that could not be stopped. In this image, the simple object found in almost every Soviet household is transformed in the likeness of Stalin, his hands in place of the section that grips the table and his face in the porous part that excretes the ground meat. Instead of meat, skulls fit together to form Stalin’s face and litter the ground below the ominous machine. These remnants allude to the brutal purges that Stalin conducted throughout his rule, most notably in the late 1930s. Sitting in the pile at the top of the grinder, where the unprocessed meat would go, are the heads of various party members intermixed with the heads of other anonymous men and women all ready to be executed under Stalin’s orders. When seen from afar their silhouettes coalesce into a meat-like texture, the “Stalin” banners and streaks of red reminiscent of blood seeping from the raw flesh about to be ground. Amongst the stylized heads that appear at the top of the meat grinder one can discern many prominent historical figures; the face of the man furthest to the right resembles the features of Mikhail Borodin, a Comintern agent to China during Stalin’s reign until he was sent to the gulag in Siberia, condemned as an enemy of the state. The only man without a mustache bears a close facial similarity to the notorious head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, who worked closely with Stalin at the time of the infamous Moscow Trials until he was himself condemned to death in the winter of 1940. The other faces displayed in this work also presumably belong to important party members killed under Stalin.
Accession Number: 2009.053.072
Item Name: Painting
Credit Line: The Ferris Russian Collection, Donated by Tom and Jeri Ferris
Collection/Series: The Ferris Russian Collection, Donated by Tom and Jeri Ferris