Greatest Russian symbolist poet, Aleksandr Blok, writes The Twelve, the ultimate poem of the revolution, applauds Communist takeover

Avant-garde artists publish Realistic Manifesto; endorse new artistic directions

Officials increasingly hostile toward avant-garde art

Constructivist sculptors (and brothers) Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner leave Russia, experiment with space, form, create dynamic works, revolutionize modern sculpture

Painter Marc Chagall leaves Russia for Paris, becomes major success, draws on cubism, Russian folk art; forerunner of surrealism

Ministry of Culture takes over Russian art, mandates standards of Socialist Realism in creative arts

Dmitri Shostakovich, first musical child of revolution, composes First Symphony

Sergei Eisenstein releases film Battleship Potemkin, winning international acclaim, developed montage editing technique montage

Leading originator of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky, living in Paris, paints Movement, features irregular shapes

Boris Pasternak wins Nobel Prize in Literature for novel Doctor Zhivago, influenced by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy; insights into Communist society prompt authorities to force him to refuse prize

To encourage anti-Stalin sentiment, Premier Nikita Khrushchev personally allows publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a devastating account of Soviet concentration camps

After The Gulag Archipelago published abroad, Solzhenitsyn is deported; wins Nobel Prize in Literature, 1974; today, admired, leading Russian intellectual

General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev /id/A0821290 allows greater intellectual freedom, glasnost

Russian Orthodox Church bestows sainthood on Czar Nicholas and 1,000 others killed by Communists