So, the artistic bounty of this period wasn’t enough to avert that disaster, and I suppose, in some ways, it might have (must have, actually) even contributed to it. Did it soften up the reading classes for the Bolsheviks? Cause an impatience for change that led to a too-convulsive revolution? Was all of this excellent art made by, and for, the bourgeoisie enabling and cloaking czarist excesses all along, and was this part of the reason the Stalinists turned so violently against humanist virtues?
