Le Bolchevique

By 1918 Repin was in his seventies and, without quite meaning to, living abroad. His house at Kuokkala stood a short way up the coast from Petrograd, but when Finland broke from Russia after the revolution the new border ran between them and closed. Repin refused to cross back into Bolshevik hands. From that side he painted this. A Red Army soldier grins as he tears into a hunk of bread, and if you follow his legs down they end not in boots but in the hairy shanks and hooves of a goat, the old shorthand for the devil. The bread, the picture's full title tells us, has been taken from a child. Repin had spent his life as Russia's great realist, painting barge-haulers and revolutionaries with real sympathy. He never crossed back. He died at Kuokkala in 1930, still on the far side of the border he had refused to recross.