Works > Portrait of 19 Million, 2011

“Portrait of 19 Million” is a participatory project based on an open call. Using artistic and sociological instruments, I turn to the lives of people who had been members of the Communist Party of the USSR. The mission of this project is to analyze the conditions of today’s society and to demonstrate its relations with the Soviet history.

Since mid1920s, membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had become more and more a fact of daily existence beyond politics. According to the official statistics, in the time of Perestroika 19 million people were members of the CPSU. This party was not a homogeneous group–neither socially, nor ideologically. So, who were those members of the party? What united or disconnected them? Who are they now?

The participants of the project were asked to submit a portrait (or a self-portrait) of any person who was a member of the CPSU by the beginning of Perestroika, notwithstanding age, occupation, or social status. These portraits could be executed in any medium or style, including painting, drawing, studio photograph, amateur photograph, cell phone photo, video, and so on. In addition to submitting a portrait, the participants were also asked to fill in a biographical questionnaire with the information about the sitter.

This project is a continuation of previous works by the artist, “Communist Party USA” and “American Cold War Veterans Association.”

Portrait of 19 Million Blog
Portrait of 19 Million by Yevgeniy Fiks
Conditions of Participation in English or Russian.
FAQ in English or Russian

Project coordinator:
Maria Chekhonadskikh

Project participants:
Natasha Akhmerova
Anonymous
Anush Avanesian
Timur Bakhishov
Igor Baskakov
Alena Boiko
Ivan Brazhkin
Petr Chekantsev
Valera and Natasha Cherkashin
Masha Chlenova
Irina Drozd
Leonid Drozner
Matt Ferranto
Aleksandr Fedorov
Elena Golub
Green
Nadezhda Gutova
Svetlana Hansemann
Lili Idov
Tatiana Istomina
Aissulu Kadyrzhanova
Yakov Kazhdan
Lucas Kelly
Olga Kisseleva
Yuriy Koval
Vladimir Kolesnikov
Margarita Kolomoitseva
Stanislav Konev
Yegor Koshelev
Yuliya Lanina
Lena von Lapschina
Ekaterina Lazareva
Learning Film Group (Ilya Budraitskis, Nikolay Oleynikov)
Nikolai Leontiev-Polyakov
Sasha Lerman
Georgiy Litichevskiy
Regina Maryanovska
Roman Mokrov
Viya Muragina
Raymond Nadeau
Anna Neizvestnova
Nikolai Onischenko
Larissa Polischuk-Rusina
Vladimir Potapov
Aleksandr Raevskiy and Ruksanda Stephanov
Ivan Razumov
Nadezhda Rogozhina
Nastya Ryabova
Oksana Salamatina
Maria Safronova
Maria Sevela
Sabina Shikhlinskaya
Igor Shuklin
Viktoria Shumskaya
Vlad Sofronov
Mark Stockton
Elena Tanaevskaya
Aleksandr Telegin
Marina Temkina
Sergei Tikhonkov
Igor Tishin
Alexey Vasiliev
Nikita Vishnevskiy
Pavel Voinitskiy
Yelena Vorobyeva
Julia Winter
Sergei Yaralov
Sergei Yerkov
Vlad Yurashko
Yulia Zadvornaya
Magda Zimbler
Yuriy Zimbler
Dmitriy Zudov