The Springville Museum of Art’s (SMOA) permanent exhibit, “Soviet Stories – Layers of Reality” has, for years, displayed enticing Soviet propaganda as art. As such, the exhibit fails to warn of Marxism’s enormous scale of human death and suffering to the very youth who might soon be called to fight it, the their SMOA may be stealing their most potent weapon.

The SMOA was once a beacon of our Western heritage, not unlike the Booth Western Museum now offers, oh so beautifully, in Cartersville, Georgia.

But now, SMOA shows this clearly collectivist propaganda as art, not politics and not history. It celebrates tyranny, not freedom.

Ironically, under tyranny, culture is the first victim. Slaves dance to the tune of the tyrant, not Cole Porter, Bernstein, Monet, the Beatles, John Hafen or even Woody Allen. Fashion and style are khaki green with little red stars on the lapel, not florals or prints. Under this bondage, creative words of love, beauty and fealty are reserved for the state (please Google Yeonmi Park’s interview, “Escape from North Korea” on PragerU). SMOA art would die under the very lie that these paintings promote.

As such, we’re asking the SMOA to perform four doable actions:

1) Update the plaque on the right side of a picture glorifying Vladimir Lenin:

FROM: To Vladimir Lenin, children represented the future of the Soviet Union. He created the “Cult of Children” to ensure that children learned his ideals. Kids across the Soviet Union called him “Grandpa Lenin.” Though Lenin portrayed himself as a kindly grandfather, his policies resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

TO: To Vladimir Lenin, children represented the future of the Soviet Union. He created the “Cult of Children” to ensure that children learned his ideals. Kids across the Soviet Union called him “Grandpa Lenin.” Though Lenin portrayed himself as a kindly grandfather, he and his successor, Joseph Stalin, forced a famine onto the Ukrainian people that killed 5 to 7 million people, far more than Hitler’s Holocaust. Stalin’s policies killed 40 to 50 million. Lenin’s Marxism worldwide killed more than 100 million.

This plaque is wrong by a factor of 1,000.

2) List Marxism’s death count in the SMOA docent manual.

This way, docents can accurately answer any student questions.

• China: 82 million
• USSR: more than 21 million
• North Korea: 4.6 million
• Vietnam: 3.8 million
• Cambodia: 2.4 million
• Afghanistan: 1.5 million
• Yugoslavia: 1,172,000
• Laos: more than 1 million
• Germany: 815,000
• Mozambique: 729,000
• Ethiopia: 725,000
• Romania: 435,000
• Czechoslovakia: 262,082
• Venezuela: more than 252,000
• Poland: more than 235,000
• Hungary: 210,000
• Angola: 125,000
• Colombia: 105,419
• Albania: 100,000
• 120 million total deaths.

3) Make public all SMOA funding.

In particular, any moneys from Confucius Institute “classrooms” (its influence warned against by State Department Secretary Mike Pompeo and Education Secretary Betsy DeVoss in 2020) or Russian oligarchs should be clearly given to Utah parents and educators.

This action would dispel any suspicions of money motivation for the permanent Soviet exhibit.

The SMOA director, Rita Wright (an incredibly fine, capable, patriotic, knowledgeable leader), nails it:

“I was recently called by a university president and museum director that they want to bring more Russian art to Utah from a donor (I’m assuming an oligarch) and I have counseled them to do so very carefully and wisely as the Soviet pieces are very difficult to justify with our Utah, conservative and very religious audiences. Just the paperwork and contracts are very frightening as well, continuing a reign of control, ambiguity and veiled threats. Disregard for any property rights (land and objects of art and culture) is a huge challenge to western ideals of freedom and sovereignty. At any time they could request our paintings or their paintings with no notice, so I’m advising great care and caution before they proceed.”

4) Add two child-friendly, unedited photographs to each side of the “Soviet Stories” introduction — one of the Korean peninsula at night showing the illuminated South and pitch-black North, and another in which a tiny boat filled with Cuban refugees travels across shark-infested waters on a journey to Florida.

These photos with background details have been donated to the SMOA.

During the dedication of the Springville Museum of Art (SMOA), on July 5, 1937, David O. McKay named the SMOA “a sanctuary of beauty and a temple of contemplation.”

SMOA staff have a unique opportunity to instill in young minds the essence of beauty and the discernment of truth from good or evil. But David O. McKay also stated, in an official LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) statement:

“The position of this Church on the subject of Communism has never changed. We consider it the greatest satanical threat to peace, prosperity, and the spread of God’s work among men that exists on the face of the earth.”

Yet the SMOA is so enticed by the Soviet paintings’ undeniable beauty, that it has been promoting this Communism to our youth for years.

We’re not proposing the removal of any paintings. Students must learn to pull truth from fiction, but to do so, truth must be offered. It’s not.

We pray that Ukrainian bravery will halt Putin’s (an ex-KGB thug) invasion. But their bravery stems from an accurate knowledge of its horrific past, not a limp, feel-good “conversation.” For centuries, Ukrainians have felt the heavy Soviet boot on their neck and watched loved ones crushed into dust. Knowledge of that horrific brutality may be their most potent weapon.

Our children deserve the same.

We challenge SMOA to protect our precious Utah youth against the Marxist plague with these four easy, doable actions.

Dave McFarland is a software engineer who grew up in Provo and graduated from BYU. He lives and works in Georgia.