The Emergence of the Union of Artists in Sverdlovsk in 1932 (to the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the Creative Organization)

2022 marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the professional Creative Union of Soviet Artists (currently its successor, the Union of Artists of Russia). The study object of this article is the formation of the creative organization of artists in Sverdlovsk. The research task is to examine a set of ideological, social, cultural, and organizational events that accompanied the formation of the union at an early stage, before and after its establishment. Currently there are no historical and art works on the designated topic. The source and information basis for the article is new sources related to the object of research. In 1983, the Sverdlovsk Region State Archive conducted expert evaluation of the document fund of the Sverdlovsk branch of the Union of Soviet Artists in which some of the materials of the fund were destroyed for reasons that are not entirely clear. The inventory was thoroughly revised: the available meeting minutes, accounting reports, and work plans of the creative organization for 1932–1934 were liquidated. Thus, to date, the direct factual sources containing information about the first years of the creative organization of artists in Sverdlovsk are almost completely lost, with the exception of a few documents of 1934. This narrows our current understanding based on authentic historical data and not on assumptions about what was happening in the union and around it in the first year of its existence. Nevertheless, due to the presence of other, additional sources of the 1930s, there is some direct and indirect evidence of the historical course of events around the formation of the Ural artists’ creative organization. The information gleaned from the totality of these materials has formed the basis of the substantive part of this article. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the course of historical events around the foundation and the first activities of the branch of the Union of Soviet Artists in Sverdlovsk.