Now I know why Nikita Khrushchev went berserk and smashed a "Modern Art" exhibition........ Well actually the artist, Neizvestny, seems to have been right in that one.

Fighting fear with art in Russia

By Jill Dougherty
CNN Moscow Bureau Chief

Standing in his New York City studio before a rough-hewn, life-size crucifix, Ernst Neizvestny takes a long drag from his cigarette. The body of Jesus stares down at him. Neizvestny stares back, then chips away some more at the statue's marble legs.

Long before they destroyed his works, declared him a non-artist and finally drove him from Russia, Neizvestny knew he was on a collision course. In 1962, at an exhibition of modern art in Moscow, the sculptor stood nose to nose with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The show, Khrushchev said, was "dog manure."

The only politically accepted art was socialist realism: happy peasants, Lenin leading the way to communism, the triumph of the collective over the individual.

"I told him he didn't understand a thing about art," Neizvestny recalls, "that he was ridiculous. A KGB official told me I had no right to talk to Khrushchev like that. 'You'll get a chance to talk in a uranium mine,' he told me."

But the artist kept talking. Khrushchev finally told him: "There are two forces inside you, an angel and a devil. If the angel wins we will help you. If the devil wins, we will destroy you."

Neizvestny wasn't destroyed, but his Moscow studio and 250 works of art were. After 67 fruitless attempts to get an exit visa, he finally was allowed to leave Russia for the United States in 1976.

The artist still finds much of his inspiration in religious imagery. In the 1970s the Soviet government banned him from traveling abroad because of it.

Two decades later, the Soviet Union is gone and, with it, the official art form of socialist realism. Yet it's in those crumbling symbols that a younger generation of Russian artists is finding food for artistic thought.

Last March, debate was raging: Should the embalmed body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin be removed from its granite mausoleum on Red Square and buried once and for all?

That's when two Moscow artists got their inspiration. Bake a life-size cake of Lenin -- and eat it. The art show was part funeral, part celebration. Visitors to the Dar art gallery crowded in, gently slicing off pieces of Lenin's arms and legs -- even his partly bald head.

"Each person who came to our show reacted differently," says artist Yuri Shabelnikov. "Some joked about it. Some were indignant. Some just started eating."

The gallery owner, Sergei Tarabarov, says he, along with most Russians, was brought up with the name of Lenin.

"Whether we liked him or not, Lenin was our most seminal figure -- politically and philosophically -- a kind of gigantic cultural symbol," Tarabarov says.

But when the Soviet Union died, he says, Lenin almost overnight became an afterthought. That shift created an "inner conflict" for Russians. And so the artists said: "Let them eat cake!"

Some Communist members of Parliament ordered the prosecutor's office to launch a criminal investigation. But it was dropped. No longer are artists threatened, as was Neizvestny, with being sent to a uranium mine. Shabelnikov and his partner were worried, but they didn't think they'd be sent to prison.

"There's fear," Shabelnikov says, "but you have to fight it. You have to do something about it. And you have to do it through art."

The truth of that can be found in a famous Moscow cemetery. It's the grave of Nikita Khrushchev. Before he died in 1971, he commissioned a Russian sculptor to carve his tombstone. That sculptor: Ernst Neizvestny, the same artist Khrushchev had denounced just nine years before.