Pre-revolutionary Russian modernists embraced Bolshevism as the political twin of their aesthetic radicalism.

Evidence

Popova, Exter, Rosanova, Rodchenko, Larionov. But these artists occupied a small and isolated Bohème; their Dada-like cabarets and extravagant dress (Mayakovsky favoured a bright yellow blouse) flaunted their defiance of the bourgeois world. Camilla Gray com­ ments: ‘In their antics and public clowning, one can detect an intuitive, naive attempt to restore the artist’s place in ordinary life, to allow him to become, as they themselves so profoundly felt the need to be, an active citizen.’ The opportunity to reunite art and life came after the Revolution of October 1917. Most of the pre-revolutionary Modernists enthusiastically identified with the Bolshevik régime. Malevich claimed that ‘Cubism and Futurism were the revolutionary forms in art foreshadowing the revolution in political and economic life of 1917.’ And now the two revolutions, aesthetic and political, would be united by the sublation of art in a transformed social life. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 242