The exhibition of the Engels Museum of Local Lore includes an issue of the newspaper

“Trudovaya Pravda” from January 17, 1929, devoted to the results of the Second Republican Exhibition held in the city of Pokrovsk (Engels) in 1929.

The article “On the Art Exhibition” from this issue criticized and severely condemned the artist Yakov Yakovlevich Weber, who devoted his creative life to the genre of landscape. The painter was reproached for his philistine psychology, for the pathos of quiet and peaceful life, incompatibility with the dynamic rhythms of the modern era. His traditionalism, devoid of any social background and lacking in reflection of fateful historical changes, were among the rebukes against the artist. For his devotion to the landscape genre, Yakov Weber was labeled a “painter of a bygone era”, whose paintings are full of “individual experiences” reflecting “the coziness of a bourgeois idyll”. The authors of the article were outraged that “in his settlements the German peasants never plow”. Some accusations reached the point of absurdity. For example, the critics saw a suspicious ambiguity in the fact that the painting “The Flood” did not accurately show whether the event took place in the period before the October revolution or in “the Soviet 1926”.

This scathing article showed that from the late 1920s Soviet art was gradually but surely becoming the obsequious servant of the political system. Under the new conditions, freedom of creativity, often perceived as an anti-Soviet, harmful remnant of the past, was put on the back burner. The new time dictated new conditions, when the artist is only the executor of the social mandate, which clearly condemned the past and glorifies modernity. The academic artist Yakov Weber could neither understand nor accept this atmosphere of the times. In 1937, Weber was accused of anti-Soviet activity, repressed and sent into exile in Kazakhstan. In 1941, at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War, after the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the resettlement of Germans living in the Volga region” was issued on August 28, 1941, the Autonomous Republic of Volga Germans was abolished. Up to half a million Soviet Germans were deported between September and October 1941. Yakov Weber’s family was among them.