History Repeating Itself: Deineka’s ‘Future Pilots’ & the Ukraine Crisis
By Scarlett Ryder, Arts Editor
Ukrainian history has been dominated by contention surrounding its independence, and the last few months highlight that such anxieties are still very present. The current crisis involving Russia and Ukraine has been widely reported in mainstream media, but, in this article, the Bristorian evaluates how the message in Aleksandr Deineka’s ‘Future Pilots’ is still relevant to today’s territorial disputes.
Worldwide media has vehemently reported on the recent escalation in the Ukraine crisis and has largely criticised Russia for such aggression. Putin’s obsession with his own domestic popularity and making Russia a great superpower again has a total disregard for the chaos that will result from an invasion of Ukraine.
The historical timeline of Ukraine is a highly complicated one which has been marred by constant war over territorial disputes. Historian Ilya Prizel highlights how Ukraine’s long history of war and fluctuating borderlines has left Ukraine struggling for a cohesive national identity.[1]
Despite this, Ukraine’s millennium-long history is an impressive one characterised by grit and determination when facing invasion. It is easy to sympathise with Ukraine given their bad luck throughout history – bordering the Russian and Ottoman Empires for centuries and also Austria-Hungary in the First World War. Ukraine seems to have been used as a warzone, with little attention to the affected nationals from either East or Western powers.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Ukraine was fully part of the Russian Empire, but after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, Ukraine was declared independent in 1918. Such freedom proved to be short-lived when the Red Army annexed the Eastern part and Poland annexed the Western part. Ukraine was to be split like this until 1939.
Aleksandr Deineka’s painting Future Pilots, 1938, exemplifies an acute awareness of Soviet expansion with Ukraine as the ‘door’ to Europe. Three boys sit facing the sea, in which there are two seaplanes and one flying overhead. They gaze out to the ceaseless sea, whilst being protected by a wall in front of them. The wall is a barrier, the sea looks toward Western Europe and the headland on the right side of the composition is symbolic of the Ukrainian border in which the scene is set.
Aleksandr Deineka, Future Pilots, 1938.
The painting highlights the contemporary obsession with border control and territory expansion, of which Stalin was the main initiator. Soviet art in the 1930s was united by border symbolism and it was hoped in the Politburo that propaganda would inspire Soviet citizens to defend their homeland in the wake of Fascist aggression.
It was Ukraine that was seen as the most important border between East and West because, as the second-largest country in Europe, it was a strategic buffer between the USSR and its Western aggressors. Though Deineka captures the future pilots in an aspirational manner, there is an ominous aspect to the painting - it unwittingly foreshadows the bloodshed that would unfold in Ukraine in the Second World War.
The tragedy that ensued after Germany invaded and occupied Ukraine was total and horrific. The total Ukrainian death toll at the hands of the Nazi party is estimated anywhere between 1 and 5 million, a death toll that no one could have envisioned at the time. The heroism that governs Deineka’s Future Pilots can be seen, in hindsight, as blindingly naïve, but it also demonstrates the contemporary Russian mood to have been out of touch with the reality of Ukraine as a ‘buffer’. Whilst it protected much of the Soviet Union, the price paid by the Ukrainians seems to have been severely downplayed by Moscow at the time.
Today, it seems Putin shares a similar disregard for Ukrainian citizens with Stalin. Putin’s motives for wanting to absorb Ukraine into Russia are not crystal-cut, but they manifest as cold-blooded imperialism. It seems as if Ukraine itself has been overlooked and that this whole crisis has turned into a battle between East and West. Boris Johnson and Olaf Scholz’s recent diplomacy missions highlight that the West are very invested in the crisis, but I would question the extent to which their anxieties are for the people of Ukraine rather than with the considerable threat an invasion may have to Western Europe.
In the wake of last year’s Pro-Navalny protests (in which 14,000 people protested against the Kremlin), Putin is arguably trying to win back public support for his government.[2] According to Al Jazeera, when Putin annexed the Crimea in 2014, his approval rating shot up to 88 per cent and it is unsure whether the invasion of Ukraine will have the same effect.[3]
It seems that though the world has changed in practically every way since the First World War, from technology to democracy, the issues regarding Ukraine’s independence are still far from resolved. Deineka’s painting is a snapshot of what could have been, and regardless of the Allied victory in 1945, Ukraine never seems to win itself. The self-interest of the East and the West has made Ukraine’s modern history one of turmoil and nothing exemplifies this as much as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
It is time for Ukraine to be given autonomy, but at the present moment it seems highly unlikely given that this morning Russia began their full-scale invasion. It is impossible to predict what is to come in the next few weeks let alone years, but one certainty is that this crisis will unite the West for the first time since the Brexit fiasco. For now, the world watches on whilst life in Ukraine is about to get much, much worse.
Footnotes
[1] Ilya Prizel, Ukraine: The Search for a National Identity, ed. by Sharon L. Wolchik, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Zviglianich and Volodymyr Zviglyanich (United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p. 10
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56834655
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/21/the-devastating-human-economic-costs-of-crimeas-annexation