Aleksandr Gerasimov (1881-1963) ended the decade with his pocket full and his nerves jangling. Once a founding member of AKhRR (1927-1932), and chairman of MOSSKh (Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists) from 1937-1939, Gerasimov found himself presiding over an organization seething with the anxieties of the purges. Artist denounced artist to save their own skin.

His own radical past was dredged up when AKhRR was proclaimed a Trotskyite-Bukharinite organization; and he showed enough spine to speak up for Juvenal Slavinskii when that arts organizer was tried and executed in 1936. Yet he presided over the union during years when its ranks lost many to the purges, and must have signed onto many of those sordid arrests. Perhaps h...