On September 24, 2024, Michael Kunichika, director of the Center of Humanistic Inquiry and chair of Russian at Amherst College, spoke on “The Prehistoric Front of the Cold War: Soviet Debates on the Origins of Art and the Human,” which is the first lecture in the series “Overcoming Bipolarity: New Approaches to the Cold War.” This series is co-sponsored by Princeton’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies along with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Princeton University Humanities Council.

Michael Brinley, an assistant professor in the History Department, introduced the series with a quote from Secretary-General António Guterres: “For all its perils, the Cold War had rules. There were hot lines, red lines and guard rails. It can feel as though we don't have that today…. We are in a purgatory of polarity. And in this purgatory, more and more countries are filling the spaces of geopolitical divides, doing whatever they want with no accountability.” He elaborated that the goal of the series is to question how the “present informs our evolving understanding of a recent past” while dispelling Guterres’ nostalgia toward the Cold War. Michael Kunichika’s lecture approached this theme within the context of archaeological debates on art and prehistory.

Kunichika began with two photographs that he viewed as representative of the focus of his presentation: one of bird figurines dating back to 20,000 B.C. unearthed in Buret', Siberia, during the 1930s and the other of human figurines excavated near Malta. Both photographs are from a catalog from an exhibition at the Hermitage in 1974: “The Dawn of Art.” The catalog appeared in English and Russian, which Kunichika attributes to the Soviet desire to compete with and contribute to the study of world prehistory.

Archaeological discoveries in Russia, though, predate the unearthing of the bird figurines. The first finds were in the 1870s and discoveries persisted thereafter. Kunichika maintains that the discoveries served to “expand the very geography of an emerging cartography of prehistory and to require an expanded chronology in which to think the story of the human.” As Kunichika notes, the discoveries prompted debates through which “the deep past comes to the fore of the cultural imagination and compels a reckoning within socialism about its own cultural and philosophical status.” In addition to the “urgent question” of the future of the Soviet project itself, this “fascination with prehistoric archaeology and deep times sparked debates about the origins of art, language, and of society.”

The Soviet Union began constructing a narrative where the impetus of art was within its borders. Kunichika presented maps of different archaeological sites, portraying the Soviet Union as a “conglomeration of a variety of antiquities,” as an example of this. Following the 1923 discovery of the Kostenki Venus figurines in Soviet Ukraine, leading French prehistorian Salomon Reinach posited that art may have its roots in the south of Russia. Then, the Buret' finds “elevated the entire region into an epicenter of paleolithic discovery.” The study of prehistory was indeed expanding beyond the Franco Cantabrian region. Soviet-era historians, in fact, argued that the study of prehistory was more productive when focused within the borders of the Soviet Union.

Over the next two decades, more Venus figurines were discovered, and by this time, Soviet encyclopedias were boasting that the USSR had the most prehistoric Venus forms. Kunichika describes this as a “source of pride” for the Soviet Union. Although true, Kunichika observes that the discoveries came with the apprehension that no parietal art, such as cave paintings, had been found. Instead, all the discoveries were mobiliary, or small statutory, reviving the Renaissance-era debate over whether sculptures or paintings emerged first and heating the competition between the USSR and the West.

By 1959, though, the USSR discovered cave paintings in the Kapova Cave, now called Shulgan-Tash. Some Western historians characterized them as an extension of European cave painting, upsetting Soviet historians. Kunichika marked this as another debate over how art emerges: “the Migrationist vs. Immobilist Debate.” While Western prehistorians often subscribed to migrationism, whereby cave paintings in the Ural Mountains meant that people had moved there from the Franco Cantabrian region, Soviet scholars contended that art could emerge without migration.

Kunichika qualified this theme of controversy between the West and the USSR by noting that “the front of the Cold War” was also one of collaboration. For instance, Soviet prehistorian Zoya Abramova gave a series of lectures in the West; the works of Soviet and Western scholars were featured alongside each other in anthologies; and works were translated and disseminated. Even Soviet journals contained both sides of the debate surrounding prehistory. According to Kunichika, it is these “broad networks that often break down any sort of idea of a kind of Iron Curtain, at least at the level of the transmission of various topics.”

At this point, Kunichika again turns to a discussion of debates. While the West promulgated “bourgeois interpretations” of prehistory, Soviet scholars distanced themselves from the West, linking communist ideals of labor with prehistoric art. In fact, Soviet scholarship in the 1930s was characterized by “particular vision of trying to locate hunting and labor as the central process out of which art emerges.” According to Kunichika, “one of the central aims of Soviet prehistory is really to continually disrupt and deny this sense of a kind of easy continuity between the deep past and the present.”

From this observation arises another question: “how do you even tell the story of the origins of art?” In the 1960s, the Soviet argument was rooted in Leninist labor ideals, whereby the constant battle of hunters with nature forced them to think in images to improve their cognitive abilities. This “gradualist” perspective dominates Soviet prehistory, prompting scholars such as Abram Stoliar to engage in debates over how we arrived at “depictive activity.” Here, the two conflicting sides were the idealist position, arguing that art is a “projection of mind onto matter,” and the gradualist position, maintaining “there is some interaction between the material conditions of the stone itself and the viewer, out of which a kind of image slowly emerges.”

Kunichika notes that the apparent suddenness of the discoveries transferred to the perception of how the art itself was produced. Soviet prehistorians, conversely, wanted to “recuperate this idea that, instead, it was actually processual.” The creation of prehistoric art, in the Soviet view, “belonged to a sequence of evolutionary steps, and that you have to read objects not as a kind of sudden emergence but really as what Stoliar will call a kind of echo of thousands of previous steps so that an object is not a point of origin but really the culmination of a variety of processes.” Stoliar’s arguments were highly contested, as there was no empirical evidence to support this idea of a “sequence.” Ultimately, though, the Soviet desire “to think beyond idealist accounts of the emergence of image making” is what made it “compatible with a range of Western prehistorians.” According to Kunichika, from this emerged the perspective that the human, like art, is “the product of a series of transformations and image making itself is a product of thousands of thousands of moments of transformations.”

            By the end of his lecture, Kunichika had painted a comprehensive picture of the evolution of debates between Soviet and Western scholars on the origins of art. He discussed not only the contentions but also the agreements, arguing that the Cold War was not always “bipolar.” He found the Soviet study of prehistory was “incredibly interested in dynamic processes, evolutionary processes, and one in which all objects are bound within the sort of continuity of time." As such, according to Kunichika, Soviet prehistory can be credited with transforming the question of art’s origins into a question of process and culmination.