Rivera Biography: Revolutionary Celebration in Soviet Union

Due to his world-wide fame as a Communist artist, Rivera was invited to participate in the 1927 Soviet Union's tenth anniversary of their October Revolution. Diego saw this as his chance to make a second sea escape across the same wide ocean, only this time he was heading east instead of west. The marriage to Lupe was over.

Rivera spent eight months in Russia seemingly unaware of the fear driven Communist power. He sketched over three hundred drawings of the workers' May Day parade. His watercolors are filled with a feeling of lighthearted gaiety completely belying the reality of Stalin's bludgeoning of his Marxist ideals. He tried to paint murals but was completely stymied by the insistence of his comrade assistants that the themes had to be decided by committee. That should have waved a red flag in his face as big as the ones he was painting in all those proletarian marches. He seems to have fallen out of favor with Stalin and in the dark of night, May 2, 1928, the commissar of education came to him and warned him to leave the country at once to avoid arrest. He left swiftly with no good bye to his mistress.

Diego's mural art was changed after Moscow. He blamed the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union on Stalin, not on a failure of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. He never acknowledged the brutality of Lenin in the first war years. He was so far away, living upon a much larger globe than the one upon which we live today. Perhaps, Russia wasn't close enough for him to see it, to believe it. But his art does not lie. It's as if he turned off the light in his paintings. His Communist propaganda art that followed is unimaginably dead. Rivera was blinded forever to the horrific realities of Communism in practice. But he refused to let go of his belief that Marxist ideals could still, some how, save the Mexican Revolution from its own corrupt betrayal of its own people.

Was Diego Rivera really a Communist? Let's answer it this way: If Stalin would have been a Mexican, Rivera would not have been a Communist.

Next: Frida Kahlo