Rapallo treaty was the conduit for Russian avant-garde influence on the West

Evidence

Weimar Germany was the main conduit through which the influence of the Russian avant garde reached the West. The treaty of Rapallo of April 1922 between the two pariahstates of the Versailles peace restored some of the strong links between Russia and Germany that had existed before the Revolution. These connections were cultural as well as economic and military. Kandinsky had been a central figure in the Expressionist Blaue Reiter group in Munich before the war. After the Rapallo thaw El Lissitzky, Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg and others visited Germany, spreading the influence of Constructivism westwards. It was its enthusiastic reception in Berlin which first brought Eisenstein’s Battleship Potem­ kin to international attention. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 246

Categorization

• XREF: Shows how a geopolitical treaty had aesthetic consequences — a causal-chain example that complicates any purely internalist account of modernism’s spread. Connects to the reader’s Marxist causal-interest.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 246