For a lover of Soviet avant-garde art, In The Eye Of The Storm: Modernism in Ukraine 1900-1930 is a tipping moment of a few realisations, that started around the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. The exciting and pioneering art coming out of Soviet Empire in the 1920s and 1930s has been Russified for a century. Since the 1960s and the alleviation of the Cold War, there has been a narrative — exemplified by studies such as Camilla Gray’s The Great Russian Experiment in Art: Russian Art 1863-1922 — that the important artists coming from the Soviet Union were Russian or of Russian ethnicity. The Russian avant-garde’s status has been solidified in the cultural climate of the 1960s and 70s in the West, and when the left clashed with the ancien regime. Soviet art presented a thrilling lesson on how artists can engage in politics, and the ways in which it can be wrong. But perhaps there should be another lesson being learned: on how imperialism works within culture.

Russian control over Soviet satellite countries did not end in 1991, and this stronghold extended well into art, and art as a part of a separate Ukrainian cultural identity is something Russia strove to obliterate. Despite the international support since 2022 being on the side of Ukraine, the West has still been facilitating Putin’s Russia and its cultural hegemony for years.

In a fascinating account, the show’s curator Konstantin Akinsha begins his story with how he tried to put on a show of the Ukrainian ‘executed Renaissance’ (that means killed in Stalinist purges) since 2018. By early 2022 — sure that the war was merely weeks away — Akinsha began trying to organise an exhibition that would physically remove the works from endangered buildings, chiefly Kyiv National Art Museum. With support from Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza — the dynastic Swiss art collector — the location was secured and works were shipped out of the war zone without insurance using trucks owned by an Austrian transport company which had, by chance, still not left Ukraine. Purportedly, the works left amongst exploding missiles. The first show, in Madrid, was a success before travelling to Vienna, Brussels and — now — London.

The Royal Academy exhibition doesn’t claim that all of the artists presented at the show were ‘ethnic Ukrainians’, but they definitely weren’t ‘Russian’ either. Kazymyr Malevich (known in art history frequently under his Russified surname Casimir) was ethically Polish, born and living in Kyiv for most of his life. Alexandra Exter and El Lissitzky, both Jews, spent their youth and formative artistic years in Kyiv. David and Volodymyr Burliuk — the former often considered ‘fathers of Russian Futurism’ — spent most of their lives around Kharkov and Odessa. Volodymyr’s haunting image of a Ukrainian peasant woman opens the exhibition, combining strictly modern canon of Henri Matisse, with pointy, vibrating brushstrokes and the patriotic subject — a peasant woman becoming a Soviet citizen.

Ukraine had a long history of oppression and foreign domination, chiefly by Poland and Russia. World War I and the fall of many empires across Europe, including Russian, rendered Ukraine caught in the middle. Ukrainian artists saw the 1917 October Revolution as their chance. Between 1917 and 1919 many independent communist republics were proclaimed. However, civil war brought great chaos, with six different armies operating on its territory. Soviet Ukraine was proclaimed in 1921 and enjoyed less than ten years of development, before Stalin introduced his terror, culminating in the Holodomor famine in the early 1930s.

On top of asserting Ukraine’s influence over Soviet art history, the show incidentally discusses the ethnic complexities of the melting pot that was Soviet Ukraine. As a territorial part of The Pale of Settlement (which allowed residency of Jews within the Russian Empire), it was long subject to Jewish pogroms. In late 1917 Ukrainian Central Rada issued laws on the protection of minorities regarding language and cultural expression. Thanks to that Kyiv became a center for Jewish artists, with El Lissitzky and Alexandra Exter enjoying several prolific years there. Exter held a studio in Kyiv, demonstrating the latest developments in European art and teaching stage design. Among her students was Anatol Petrytskiy, whose particularly beautiful and versatile projects explored Orthodox religion, Constructivism as well as Ukrainian folk art.

Many artists felt a deep affinity with folk culture and wanted to build upon it. Ivan Padalka in his Photographer (1926) depicts a group of peasants posing for a photo, a technique evocative of Lyubok folk illustration, building a bridge between the old and the new. Sharpening the Saws (1927) by Oleksandr Bohomazov, conversely uses a futuristic approach to colours and an ultra-modern take on realism, contrasting the painting’s subject.

While they still could, Ukrainian artists engaged in a cultural revival, bringing the changing modern life to traditional arts. They didn’t shy away from showing the extent of antisemitism (Jewish Pogrom (1926) by Manuil Shekhtman, documenting the war of independence) as well as the disadvantaged, such as The Disabled (1926) by Anatol Petrytskiy, painted in strikingly realist manner, yet eschewing the grotesque of Neue Sachlichkeit. Similarly, At the Table (1926) depicts a very simple scene: the back head of a woman, sat at the table. But nothing is ordinary here: chiefly the distorted proportions, the radiator behind the table (a Communist modernity) is enormous, the table conspicuous in its emptiness, only a tiny saltshaker on display. In the Shooting Gallery by Semen Yoffe (1932) is in turn a very mysterious scene with two communist women, one ideal modern Soviet pioneer, the other dressed in mysterious black holding a target, in a metaphorical illustration of the long-term results of the revolution.

By the 1930s the policy of ukrainizatsiia had been curtailed amongst purges. Many of the artists presented were already dead. Their public murals were painted over, canvases hidden in repositories. Shedding new light on this, the exhibition contributes to more sophisticated narrative on European identity, which used to be much more international and complex than it is today. Most importantly, the exhibition is a much needed reminder to the World that the war against Ukraine continues — after two and a half years — and how, despite that, Ukraine continues, with its people telling their true histories.